What is a great TED Talk?
What are the elements of a great TED Talk?
What makes a TED.com talk?
(Laughter)
If you're thinking about that you'd like some of the talks from your event
to make it to TED.com,
what are some of the filters that we look at
to come to that decision?
Fortunately, they're really the same,
what makes a great TED Talk makes a great TED.com talk.
But I want to talk through that with you in a way you can think about both
as you're booking speakers and working with them.
The first thing to thing we think makes a great TED Talk
is "Tell us something new."
Many of us at TED come from journalistic backgrounds
and you can almost think about TED as a biannual magazine on stage.
We really think about what is new out there.
What are the new, different ideas we haven't heard of before?
Sometimes is the topic.
There are speakers at TEDGlobal this year,
who are here claiming that plants have brains.
I haven't heard that before.
That's a really interesting perspective.
Sometimes is a really new angle on an old topic.
For example, about climate change.
We had Al Gore four years ago, that was a really definitive talk
that climate change is a fact, it's a problem.
To talk about climate change, you need a new angle.
Think about having a material scientist,
or a photographer who photographs icebergs.
Someone telling the story in a new way.
We think about this for TED.com: is this new, fresh and relevant?
One of the great, amazing things for us
in working with the TEDx community
is that you know your communities and there are so many stories,
ideas, issues and people that are local to you
that could be presented and brought to an international audience
in ways we've never heard of before.
You're the eyes and ears in your own regional areas,
and we're so excited about bringing those new ideas in.
The second thing to think about
is evoking contagious emotions.
One of the things we consider for talks on TED
is "Are these talks spreading?"
Are people sharing them with each other?
Do they have a viral nature?
When you think about viral videos online,
obviously people first think of kitty videos, and pranks,
that you want to share because they surprise you or make you laugh.
But there are other kinds of contagious emotions.
People want to share something when it is emotional.
When something brings a lump to their throat,
or kind of brings butterflies to their stomachs,
they want someone next to them to share it.
But they also share things that teach them something new.
If you get an aha! moment from a talk, you want to share it, let others know.
Or if you've learned something important, that feels urgent,
you want to pass that on.
Not every talk needs to inspire
this incredible desire to be shared with somebody else,
but many of the great talks do.
The next thing to think about is to tell a story.
This is so fundamental to every great TED Talk.
It's not just relaying facts, it's not just a lecture.
A great speaker takes you on a journey,
they tell you a story, they pull you along with them.
It doesn't matter whether it's about bacteria or architecture,
fish or climate change.
You're pulled in and you go along with them.
That doesn't mean that every person has to describe their talk as a journey,
but it should take you somewhere.
Part of telling you a great story is being personal.
A great story tells you something about the speaker.
It doesn't need to be confessional, you don't want to know everything.
But you want to feel them inside the story.
A great talk that has a personal story at the center.
That personal story could be about their passion for certain kinds of fish,
or something from their childhood that brought them to an insight later on.
But the personal story, I think, is how we relate to an individual TED Talk.
We may not know anything about the subject matter,
or we may not even think we care about it,
but we can relate to that personal storytelling.
You can also think about it as a personal story with an idea inside,
or an idea that has a personal part at the center.
This is an odd thing to say...
My sister-in-law is a rabbi,
and she says she uses TED Talks all the time for "sermon fodder."
And she believes every TED Talk is kind of a secular sermon.
It's kind of teaching you something, it's giving you a lesson.
It's giving you a way to think about your own life and journey.
That's very subtle, I don't tell any of the speakers that,
it's not part of our speaker prep,
but it's an interesting lens on what makes a great talk.
One more thing about the personal.
You want to guard against people going too far in that direction
and just a quick example.
One of the trends we have to fight at TED
is every speaker wanting to replicate Jill Bolte Taylor's talk.
Bolte Taylor was the neuroscientist who observed a stroke from the inside out.
Incredible talk, our most popular of all time.
But it's very unique,
and people sort of misinterpret what was great in that talk.
It's great because it has science combined with emotion,
draws in your left and right brain.
It's an incredible story.
She shows a human brain, she almost cries.
It's an incredible journey,
but often people will interpret that
as just the part about her crying at the end.
They'll forget about all the other pieces that went into it along the way.
Guard against that.
(Laughter)
The next piece is don't lose the audience.
I've found this image by searching for the word "'chase" on Flickr.
But my idea is often times, speakers who are such experts
in their own area,
will kind of race ahead of the audience.
Many of the speakers that we bring are experts in their own field
and are used to addressing people in their own field.
Scientists that talk to scientists, businesses to businesses audiences.
Architects and artists are sometimes the biggest culprits.
They all use the jargon of their own field
and that's incredibly alienating to the audience.
One of the things you want to talk through with the speakers
is this idea that they are speaking to a general intelligent audience.
That's something you can help them with.
When you're inside your field, you don't know what your jargon is.
You don't know words like "postmodernist structure"
is not really accessible to the average audience.
That's something you can help your speakers with, reviewing their talks,
helping them understand.
"I went to college and I don't understand that word."
Or "I'm tracking with you, but you really lost me there.
Can we think of another way of explaining that?"
That will be really helpful to them.
Often times we'll see talks that are such interesting topics
but they are just addressed in a way that the general audience can't follow.
It's just too specific for us to use.
The next thing is start strong.
For us, this has to do both with editing and also with the talk.
On TED.com, we think you all know,
or maybe some of you might not,
we edit, of course, all the talks that go on to TED.com
No talk was as perfect on the stage as it was when we put it online.
We really work to bring the speakers' best selves out,
while staying extremely true to what they actually delivered.
But we edit out their "umms,"
if they trip or spill water on themselves.
All these things have happened and won't appear on TED.com.
What we also do, and it's really important in TED Talks' success,
is we edit the very beginning.
We don't begin with the opening remarks, the "hello," "Thank you for having me."
Or even their opening jokes, people like to have one.
But their opening joke distracts.
We edit the talk so that it begins right where it takes off.
We do that online because people online are very vulnerable to distraction.
We all know this.
You start watching a video,
and at the beginning there's a host's introduction,
something slow, and you don't mean to, but you just got distracted.
You start an email, or a web search, and you're just gone.
So we start our talks that way and we edit them that way,
but it's good to keep it in mind for the talk itself,
when you're hearing the person rehearse.
We've had speakers at TED who wanted to read two paragraphs out of a letter
at the beginning of their talk.
Or start with something that really doesn't grab us,
but two minutes in, they get really interesting.
It's just something for you to think about as you're helping the speakers,
to start on something really compelling and interesting.
Another thing to think about is focus.
18 minutes is a very short period of time, as you know.
And there are talks even shorter.
There is time for one idea.
Only one idea.
And it's so hard for most speakers, and I'm guilty of the same thing.
They want to tell everything.
Or they want to have multiple ideas
and get them all in 18 minutes.
And they do that either by rushing through things or leaving things out,
or simply just by not quite making sense.
Or not fulfilling the potential of the talk.
The more you can focus in, the better.
This one is particularly for TEDx talks coming onto TED.com
In curating most of your events you always want a mix
of local and global ideas.
One of the things with many of the TEDx talks we've looked at
is that they can often be very local
without addressing the audience in a way that can be expanded beyond that.
And we have this issue at TED as well as we work with speakers.
I think that many of your events will have local talks
that are really interesting to the people in the room,
to the local community.
But those talks aren't quite appropriate for TED.com.
For the ones we'd use, we want to be able to extract wider.
If it's a local idea, have it presented in a way
that a wider audience can see relevance.
Part of the things that go into that is being aware of regional knowledge.
If you're talking about something local, if there is an issue in Houston
or a new building going up in Sao Paulo,
everyone in the room might know that this is happening,
but just helping the speaker give a sentence of context
about what it is they're talking about
will help the talk transcend the room
and move into and be applicable to the wider world.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be covering certain local ideas,
but should think about it with an eye towards the people who aren't in the room.
And this is something we've really had to train ourselves on in TED.
We are not addressing a thousand fairly wealthy people
in a room in California anymore.
We're just not. We're addressing the world.
And that really shifts how we think about the program.
Our obligation to be broad, our obligation to diversity.
And to think about things more deeply.
I'll give you one example
of a talk that really made us rethink things.
We often had audience talks at TED,
both at TEDUniversity and on stage.
One talk that was just great in the room.
People like to show vacation photos and we've had a couple of talks like that.
One of them was about a trip that someone took to North Korea,
and his perspective and what he learned in this trip.
It was fascinating to the group in California
that was listening to it.
But it really sounded a bit offensive once you put out to a global audience.
And it wasn't actually that there was anything...
There's nothing wrong with the talk in the context it was given,
but it really had the wrong tone
once you've opened it up to the wider world.
That's the type of thing you have to think about
when thinking about taking talks from TEDx to TED.com.
That they're going to a much wider audience.
Finally, I think the biggest secret to the success of any TED Talk
is practice.
It's rehearsing.
It's working with the speaker from the first moment
that you talk to them and getting them used to the idea
they're going to have to practice and rehearse to get it right.
There's sort of heartbreak, with both TED and TEDx Talks...
"That's such a good talk, but it's not the best that person could give."
They had a really good talk in them but they didn't quite get it out.
And honestly, the difference between a medium talk and a great one
is often just practice.
It's having the person commit to actually rehearsing.
This is something that speakers will often resist. Also our speakers.
And I'm sure this happens with your speakers.
They feel they're above it or they think it's kind of silly.
Or they think they don't need it.
Everyone needs to rehearse.
It was interesting when we did the Cannes advertising festival,
one session was for TED and Hans Rosling was speaking.
He's the Swedish professor.
Global health issues, statistics on the screen,
he narrates them crazily and he's a fantastic speaker.
He has five talks online.
I think he has more views than any other speaker on TED.com.
The other speakers were furious with me because I had put him on first.
So they all had to follow him.
But one of the things they noted to me
is how much he rehearsed.
From the second we opened up the room and we were still setting it up
for hours and hours, he had this table and all these props.
He kept going over it for hours with a countdown clock.
Moving the things around, practicing, getting his phrasing right.
And he's one of the most successful speakers on TED.
So that's one of the things you could really integrate
into your own practice as a TEDx organizer,
and really impress on your speakers: the best talks are produced by practice.
That is what I had to share with you today.
I'm incredibly impressed with all the work you're doing,
and so looking forward to seeing all of your talks come in.
And to talking to you over the next week.
Thanks.
(Applause)