About Deron
Bio
I’ve spent my career building media and cultural platforms designed to help people thrive? I’m best known for helping expand TED Talks globally, putting together 100+ partnerships that grew TED's formats and reach to 1B/year. I also co-created, with June Cohen, Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman and Meditative Story with Arianna Huffington, and served as PBS’s lead architect of the public-private partnership that launched PBS KIDS Sprout, now Universal Kids.
My newest endeavor, Project VELUM, explores a hypothesis I’ve been obsessed with over the last 18 months: that the new generation of immersive entertainment experiences —created as ticketed spectacles for awe and engagement—may also be generating measurable physiological benefits for audiences. These experiences don’t just touch us emotionally — they’re changing what’s happening in our bodies, moment by moment. And through physiological measurements, it's now possible to see those shifts in the nervous system, as they happen.
VELUM is setting out to pioneer a new category of immersive entertainment that can meet a rapidly-growing demand for "felt sense" experiences capable of regulating the nervous system. Our research methodology will measure whether an experience creates a biologically benefit shift toward nervous system balance. But the part that is really interesting to me is this: we don’t just look at the experience as a whole to measure autonomic shift, we decode the pattern and map — on a “scene-by-scene” basis — the creative decisions that shape nervous system state. We call this the "regulatory grammar" of immersive storytelling.
Where this leads is actually quite powerful. If VELUM can scientifically validate that certain multi-sensory entertainment experiences can regulate the nervous system—that proof is very valuable. Because when immersive entertainment doubles as biologically restorative spaces, it opens the door for entertainment companies to capture a meaningful share of this $6.8T wellness economy.
With the support of a terrific scientific advisory board and institutional research partner, we hope to have our first pilot underway later this summer/early fall. Ultimately our plan is to pioneer a new category of certified ‘neuro-integrated entertainment’ in which emotional impact and nervous system benefit are designed to coexist.