Personal Growth Book Launches w/ Gary Wolf & June Cohen

With so much advice about how to sleep, eat, work, connect, and feel better, how can we determine what genuinely improves our lives?

Join Gary Wolf, cofounder of the Quantified Self movement, and June Cohen, co-creator of TED Talks, for a conversation celebrating their new books, The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe and The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices—and the New Science Bringing Them Back.

Wolf explores how careful observation and personal data can help us answer questions about our own health and daily lives. Cohen examines the ancient practices that helped humans flourish for millennia—and the emerging science revealing why they still matter.

Together, these longtime friends will explore what technology can teach us, what older traditions can help us recover, and how to cut through competing claims to discover what truly works for us. The result is a practical and thought-provoking conversation about paying closer attention, making more deliberate choices, and learning to live better.

About the authors:

Gary Wolf is cofounder of the Quantified Self movement and author of The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe. A former WIRED editor and Knight Fellow at Stanford University, he has spent decades exploring how people can learn from their own experiences, observations, and data. His influential TED Talk has been viewed over one million times.

June Cohen is an award-winning media innovator and co-creator of TED Talks, Masters of Scale, and Meditative Story. During 11 years at TED, she co-hosted its flagship conference, worked closely with hundreds of leading thinkers and speakers, and launched TED Talks online. Her work has earned more than 100 industry honors, including a Peabody.

About the books:

The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe

The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe is a groundbreaking guide to scientific reasoning at the scale of a single life. Based on nearly two decades of work in the Quantified Self community, it distills the techniques of empirical observation into practical patterns anyone can use. With chapters on pain, mood, sleep, digestion, heart rate, hormones, and more, The Quantified Self proves that science is for everybody by showing how to make discoveries about your own life from your own data.

Science journalist Gary Wolf cofounded Quantified Self in 2008 and has spent the years since helping people develop and present their self-research projects. With his colleagues in the Personal Science Research Group—a collaboration that brings together engineering, health care, patient advocacy, and data science—Wolf has shaped the evidence from thousands of small experiments into a step-by-step method that takes just a few minutes each day.

A mathematician uncovers the hidden sleep problem behind his brain fog. A mother spots a blood-glucose pattern in her five-year-old that points to trouble at school. A teenager decides for herself whether hormonal birth control is helping her acne. Dozens of first-person stories ground the book’s techniques in a real-world context while offering an inspiring look at the creativity, courage, humor, and ingenuity of personal science practice around the world.

There is no single protocol that works for everyone. The Quantified Self offers something seismic—an individualized approach that teaches readers how to bring a scientific mindset to their questions about mind, body, work, and life.

The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices—and the New Science Bringing Them Back

What if the most powerful solutions for the crises of modern life are actually found . . . in our past?

We see it in headlines, in trendlines, in our own lives: We’ve never been more anxious, more divided, or more lost.

The problem isn’t that we lack solutions. It’s that we abandoned the ones that actually worked.

For thousands of years, across every culture on earth, humans built sophisticated “wisdom systems” to meet our deepest needs—rooted in physical challenge, sensory immersion, communal ritual, and belonging. But in our pursuit of progress, we dismantled them.

In The Great Remembering, June Cohen—co-creator of TED Talks and Masters of Scale—time travels across cultures, continents, and centuries to investigate what we left behind: Wisdom systems for communal awe and communal grief. Practices like the sauna, the festival, the epic physical challenge.

What cutting-edge neuroscience, cell biology, and psychology are now confirming is as surprising as it is obvious: These practices weren’t primitive. They were sophisticated solutions to the oldest human problems. And the science is finally proving why they worked.

The mental health crisis. The climate crisis. The crisis of social division. The rise of AI challenging our way of life. At every rupture like this, humans have looked to the past to find their way forward.

The answers are already there. We just need to remember.