Popular TED Talks

TED was founded in February 1984 in Monterey, California, by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks, as a one-off conference about Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It lost money. It did not run again for six years. When Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation acquired it in 2001, the standard talk length was fifteen minutes, but fifteen, Anderson noticed, was being interpreted by speakers as “twenty or twenty-five.” So he tightened it to eighteen. There was no neuroscience behind the choice — that came later, when Texas Christian University’s Paul King attached the talks to his research on cognitive backlog, the idea that information acts like weight and at some point you drop everything. Eighteen minutes was a stage rule before it was a theory of attention.

What the constraint produced is a literary form. The TED talk is short enough that a single anecdote can be the spine and the conclusion is reachable from the opening; long enough that a sentence like “on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own” can land, breathe, and be paid off. Six of these talks broke out of the conference and into the wider internet — each one a rehearsed eighteen-minute object that has been watched, by now, by audiences larger than most countries.

Sir Ken Robinson walked onto the TED2006 stage and opened with three jokes about being in education — the kind of work that gets the blood to run from a stranger’s face at a dinner party. By the third minute the audience understood that the humorist’s setup was a cover for a thesis: that public education systems came into being in the nineteenth century to meet the needs of industrialism, that they were designed around an idea of intelligence inherited from universities about to wonder who else might also have one, and that the consequence has been to educate children out of their creative capacities. He held the room with comic timing and then closed it with the story of Jillian Lynne, a fidgety eight-year-old whose mother was told by a doctor in 1930s London, after the doctor turned on a radio and stepped outside the room to watch her dance, “Mrs Lynne, Jillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” She became the choreographer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera. Robinson’s deadpan: Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor — a Harvard brain scientist whose laboratory mapped the microcircuitry of postmortem schizophrenic brains — got onto her cardiovascular exercise machine and noticed that her hands looked like primitive claws. A blood vessel in her left hemisphere had ruptured. Over the next four hours, the left brain’s commentary track — the inner voice that says I am, I am, I am — went silent in stages, and the right brain’s perception of the body as a boundary dissolved into “atoms and molecules of the wall.” She could not tell where her arm ended. She could not read her own business card. She experienced what she would later refuse to call anything but Nirvana.

She gave the TED talk in February 2008. She walked onstage carrying a real human brain in a glass box, with the spinal cord still attached. The talk was eighteen minutes. It was the first TED talk to go genuinely viral on the open internet. Within six weeks she was on TIME’s 100 Most Influential. Her book sat on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty-three weeks. None of this is the most interesting fact about the talk. The most interesting fact is that the four-hour stroke happened to a person whose entire professional preparation had been the description of brains in this exact state — and her response, in the moment the right arm went limp, was “Wow, this is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

Hans Rosling — the Swedish physician and global-health statistician who turned data visualization into a public theatre — gave a series of TED talks over the 2000s, all of them oriented around the same provocation: people in rich countries hold a mental model of the world that is twenty or forty years out of date. The magic washing machine talk, from TEDWomen 2010, is the most personal of them. It opens in a Swedish kitchen in the late 1940s. His mother is loading the family’s first washing machine. His grandmother — who had heated water with firewood and hand-washed laundry for seven children — is there to push the button. “To my grandmother, the washing machine was America.”

The talk’s arithmetic is straightforward. Seven billion people on the planet. Two billion above the “air line” — flying machines, cars, household appliances. Two billion above the “wash line” but below the air line. Three billion below the wash line. The richest one-seventh of the population uses half of all global energy. The hardcore environmental student who refuses a car still hand-washes nothing. The talk’s emotional payoff is the answer Rosling’s mother gave him when she explained the machine to him, age four: “We have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” What you get out of the machine is books.

Brené Brown is the only speaker in this collection whose famous talk was not at an official TED conference. She gave The Power of Vulnerability at TEDxHouston in June 2010 — a regional event in front of about five hundred people. She has said in interviews that she woke up the next morning convinced she had ruined her life. She had stood onstage and disclosed, to a room of strangers, a personal breakdown she had not yet fully reckoned with privately. She was worried that a thousand people might watch the video. Sixty-three million people have now watched the talk.

It is a six-year research project compressed into twenty minutes. The discovery in the middle of it — that the variable separating people who feel a strong sense of love and belonging from those who don’t is the belief that they are worthy of it — is the kind of finding that sounds, on a slide, like a self-help platitude. What makes the talk durable is that the researcher delivering it does not want it to be true. “My very mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting.” She calls this her breakdown. Her therapist calls it a spiritual awakening. She prefers her own word.

The standard advice when you receive a Nigerian-prince spam email is to delete it. James Veitch’s project, beginning around 2013, was the opposite: to reply to as many of them as possible, in the most relentlessly cooperative manner possible, and to refuse to break character. He was not exposing scams. He was running them in reverse — taking the spammer’s three hours away from a vulnerable elderly target by keeping him on the hook with elaborate jokes about gold shipments, gummy lizards, and the recently deceased Nelson Mandela.

The TED talk, from 2015, is nine minutes long and is, more than anything else in this collection, a stand-up routine — the kind of bit you laugh out loud at on a third viewing. The structural payoff is that Solomon, the Nigerian “businessman” Veitch is corresponding with, eventually uses the gummy-bear-and-jelly-bean code that Veitch has invented to make the email exchange “secure” — meaning the scammer, having committed to closing the deal, now has to write the sentence “Send one thousand five hundred pounds via a giant gummy lizard.”

Tim Urban writes the blog Wait But Why — the long-form, stick-figure-diagram, AI-and-Mars-and-procrastination essays that became a kind of internet genre of one. His TED talk, in 2016, is itself a worked example of the topic. The procrastinator, he tells the audience, has a brain that contains three characters: the Rational Decision Maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey, and the Panic Monster. The Monkey grabs the wheel whenever there’s a Wikipedia page about the Tonya Harding scandal still unread, or anything on the refrigerator’s lower shelf. The Panic Monster wakes up only when a deadline is close enough to threaten public embarrassment, and the Monkey, who is otherwise fearless, is terrified of him.

The diagrams are the talk. They are also why the talk worked: a fifty-million-view explanation of a cognitive failure mode, delivered by a person whose admitted credentials are I wrote a ninety-page senior thesis in seventy-two hours by pulling two all-nighters. The serious move arrives in the last three minutes, when Urban introduces the second kind of procrastination — the kind without deadlines, where the Panic Monster doesn’t show up at all. The Monkey wins, indefinitely, and the years go by, and people email him later to say they have spent decades not chasing the thing they meant to chase.

Six talks, eighteen minutes each, given in front of audiences ranging from five hundred people in a Houston regional venue to a few hundred at a Monterey conference center, recorded on what at the time were ordinary cameras, uploaded to YouTube and the TED website over the course of a decade, and now collectively viewed by something on the order of three hundred million people — more, in aggregate, than the population of the United States. The eighteen-minute rule was a stage manager’s pragmatism, not a theory of attention. The viral talks did not have the same shape. Robinson made the audience laugh and then handed them an argument about industrial education; Taylor brought a real brain onstage and described what it felt like to lose her own; Rosling told the story of his grandmother pushing a button in a Swedish kitchen; Brown disclosed a private breakdown to five hundred strangers and then watched the recording reach sixty-three million; Veitch refused to delete a spam email and built a comedy routine on the refusal; Urban drew stick figures of his own cognitive failure modes and named them. What the six have in common is that each one produced at least one sentence the viewer would still be able to quote five years after the watch — and that the sentence, in every case, turned out to be older than the talk that delivered it.