WEBVTT

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What is a great TED Talk?

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What are the elements of a great TED Talk?

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What makes a TED.com talk?

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(Laughter)

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If you're thinking about that you'd like
some of the talks from your event

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to make it to TED.com,

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what are some of the filters
that we look at

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to come to that decision?

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Fortunately, they're really the same,

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what makes a great TED Talk
makes a great TED.com talk.

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But I want to talk through that
with you in a way you can think about both

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as you're booking speakers
and working with them.

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The first thing to thing
we think makes a great TED Talk

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is "Tell us something new."

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Many of us at TED come
from journalistic backgrounds

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and you can almost think about TED
as a biannual magazine on stage.

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We really think
about what is new out there.

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What are the new, different ideas
we haven't heard of before?

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Sometimes is the topic.

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There are speakers at TEDGlobal this year,

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who are here claiming
that plants have brains.

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I haven't heard that before.

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That's a really interesting perspective.

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Sometimes is a really
new angle on an old topic.

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For example, about climate change.

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We had Al Gore four years ago,
that was a really definitive talk

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that climate change
is a fact, it's a problem.

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To talk about climate change,
you need a new angle.

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Think about having a material scientist,

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or a photographer
who photographs icebergs.

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Someone telling the story in a new way.

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We think about this for TED.com:
is this new, fresh and relevant?

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One of the great, amazing things for us

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in working with the TEDx community

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is that you know your communities
and there are so many stories,

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ideas, issues and people
that are local to you

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that could be presented and brought
to an international audience

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in ways we've never heard of before.

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You're the eyes and ears
in your own regional areas,

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and we're so excited
about bringing those new ideas in.

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The second thing to think about

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is evoking contagious emotions.

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One of the things we consider
for talks on TED

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is "Are these talks spreading?"

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Are people sharing them with each other?

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Do they have a viral nature?

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When you think about viral videos online,

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obviously people first think
of kitty videos, and pranks,

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that you want to share because
they surprise you or make you laugh.

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But there are other kinds
of contagious emotions.

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People want to share something
when it is emotional.

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When something brings a lump
to their throat,

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or kind of brings butterflies
to their stomachs,

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they want someone
next to them to share it.

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But they also share things
that teach them something new.

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If you get an aha! moment from a talk,
you want to share it, let others know.

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Or if you've learned
something important, that feels urgent,

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you want to pass that on.

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Not every talk needs to inspire

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this incredible desire to be shared
with somebody else,

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but many of the great talks do.

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The next thing to think about
is to tell a story.

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This is so fundamental
to every great TED Talk.

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It's not just relaying facts,
it's not just a lecture.

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A great speaker takes you on a journey,

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they tell you a story,
they pull you along with them.

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It doesn't matter whether
it's about bacteria or architecture,

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fish or climate change.

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You're pulled in
and you go along with them.

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That doesn't mean that every person
has to describe their talk as a journey,

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but it should take you somewhere.

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Part of telling you a great story
is being personal.

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A great story tells you
something about the speaker.

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It doesn't need to be confessional,
you don't want to know everything.

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But you want to feel them
inside the story.

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A great talk that has
a personal story at the center.

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That personal story could be about
their passion for certain kinds of fish,

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or something from their childhood
that brought them to an insight later on.

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But the personal story, I think, is how
we relate to an individual TED Talk.

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We may not know anything
about the subject matter,

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or we may not even think we care about it,

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but we can relate
to that personal storytelling.

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You can also think about it
as a personal story with an idea inside,

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or an idea that has
a personal part at the center.

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This is an odd thing to say...

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My sister-in-law is a rabbi,

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and she says she uses TED Talks
all the time for "sermon fodder."

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And she believes every TED Talk
is kind of a secular sermon.

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It's kind of teaching you something,
it's giving you a lesson.

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It's giving you a way to think
about your own life and journey.

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That's very subtle,
I don't tell any of the speakers that,

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it's not part of our speaker prep,

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but it's an interesting lens
on what makes a great talk.

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One more thing about the personal.

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You want to guard against people
going too far in that direction

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and just a quick example.

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One of the trends we have to fight at TED

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is every speaker wanting
to replicate Jill Bolte Taylor's talk.

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Bolte Taylor was the neuroscientist
who observed a stroke from the inside out.

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Incredible talk,
our most popular of all time.

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But it's very unique,

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and people sort of misinterpret
what was great in that talk.

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It's great because it has science
combined with emotion,

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draws in your left and right brain.

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It's an incredible story.

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She shows a human brain,
she almost cries.

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It's an incredible journey,

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but often people will interpret that

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as just the part
about her crying at the end.

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They'll forget about all the other pieces
that went into it along the way.

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Guard against that.

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(Laughter)

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The next piece
is don't lose the audience.

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I've found this image by searching
for the word "'chase" on Flickr.

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But my idea is often times,
speakers who are such experts

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in their own area,

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will kind of race ahead of the audience.

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Many of the speakers that we bring
are experts in their own field

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and are used to addressing
people in their own field.

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Scientists that talk to scientists,
businesses to businesses audiences.

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Architects and artists are sometimes
the biggest culprits.

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They all use the jargon of their own field

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and that's incredibly alienating
to the audience.

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One of the things you want
to talk through with the speakers

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is this idea that they are speaking
to a general intelligent audience.

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That's something you can help them with.

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When you're inside your field,
you don't know what your jargon is.

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You don't know words like
"postmodernist structure"

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is not really accessible
to the average audience.

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That's something you can help
your speakers with, reviewing their talks,

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helping them understand.

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"I went to college
and I don't understand that word."

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Or "I'm tracking with you,
but you really lost me there.

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Can we think of another way
of explaining that?"

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That will be really helpful to them.

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Often times we'll see talks
that are such interesting topics

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but they are just addressed in a way
that the general audience can't follow.

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It's just too specific for us to use.

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The next thing is start strong.

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For us, this has to do both with editing
and also with the talk.

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On TED.com, we think you all know,

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or maybe some of you might not,

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we edit, of course, all the talks
that go on to TED.com

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No talk was as perfect on the stage
as it was when we put it online.

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We really work to bring
the speakers' best selves out,

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while staying extremely true
to what they actually delivered.

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But we edit out their "umms,"

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if they trip or spill water on themselves.

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All these things have happened
and won't appear on TED.com.

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What we also do, and it's really important
in TED Talks' success,

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is we edit the very beginning.

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We don't begin with the opening remarks,
the "hello," "Thank you for having me."

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Or even their opening jokes,
people like to have one.

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But their opening joke distracts.

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We edit the talk so that it begins
right where it takes off.

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We do that online because people online
are very vulnerable to distraction.

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We all know this.

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You start watching a video,

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and at the beginning
there's a host's introduction,

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something slow, and you don't mean to,
but you just got distracted.

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You start an email, or a web search,
and you're just gone.

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So we start our talks that way
and we edit them that way,

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but it's good to keep it
in mind for the talk itself,

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when you're hearing the person rehearse.

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We've had speakers at TED who wanted
to read two paragraphs out of a letter

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at the beginning of their talk.

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Or start with something
that really doesn't grab us,

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but two minutes in,
they get really interesting.

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It's just something for you to think about
as you're helping the speakers,

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to start on something
really compelling and interesting.

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Another thing to think about is focus.

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18 minutes is a very short
period of time, as you know.

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And there are talks even shorter.

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There is time for one idea.

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Only one idea.

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And it's so hard for most speakers,
and I'm guilty of the same thing.

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They want to tell everything.

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Or they want to have multiple ideas

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and get them all in 18 minutes.

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And they do that either by rushing
through things or leaving things out,

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or simply just by not quite making sense.

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Or not fulfilling
the potential of the talk.

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The more you can focus in, the better.

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This one is particularly for TEDx talks
coming onto TED.com

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In curating most of your events
you always want a mix

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of local and global ideas.

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One of the things with many
of the TEDx talks we've looked at

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is that they can often be very local

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without addressing the audience in a way
that can be expanded beyond that.

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And we have this issue at TED as well
as we work with speakers.

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I think that many of your events
will have local talks

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that are really interesting
to the people in the room,

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to the local community.

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But those talks aren't
quite appropriate for TED.com.

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For the ones we'd use, we want
to be able to extract wider.

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If it's a local idea,
have it presented in a way

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that a wider audience can see relevance.

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Part of the things that go into that
is being aware of regional knowledge.

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If you're talking about something local,
if there is an issue in Houston

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or a new building going up in Sao Paulo,

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everyone in the room might know
that this is happening,

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but just helping the speaker
give a sentence of context

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about what it is they're talking about

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will help the talk transcend the room

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and move into and be applicable
to the wider world.

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This doesn't mean you shouldn't be
covering certain local ideas,

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but should think about it with an eye
towards the people who aren't in the room.

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And this is something we've really had
to train ourselves on in TED.

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We are not addressing
a thousand fairly wealthy people

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in a room in California anymore.

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We're just not.
We're addressing the world.

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And that really shifts
how we think about the program.

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Our obligation to be broad,
our obligation to diversity.

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And to think about things more deeply.

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I'll give you one example

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of a talk that really
made us rethink things.

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We often had audience talks at TED,

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both at TEDUniversity and on stage.

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One talk that was just great in the room.

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People like to show vacation photos
and we've had a couple of talks like that.

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One of them was about a trip
that someone took to North Korea,

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and his perspective
and what he learned in this trip.

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It was fascinating
to the group in California

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that was listening to it.

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But it really sounded a bit offensive
once you put out to a global audience.

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And it wasn't actually
that there was anything...

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There's nothing wrong with the talk
in the context it was given,

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but it really had the wrong tone

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once you've opened it up
to the wider world.

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That's the type of thing
you have to think about

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when thinking about taking talks
from TEDx to TED.com.

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That they're going
to a much wider audience.

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Finally, I think the biggest secret
to the success of any TED Talk

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is practice.

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It's rehearsing.

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It's working with the speaker
from the first moment

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that you talk to them
and getting them used to the idea

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they're going to have to practice
and rehearse to get it right.

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There's sort of heartbreak,
with both TED and TEDx Talks...

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"That's such a good talk, but it's not
the best that person could give."

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They had a really good talk in them
but they didn't quite get it out.

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And honestly, the difference
between a medium talk and a great one

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is often just practice.

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It's having the person commit
to actually rehearsing.

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This is something that speakers
will often resist. Also our speakers.

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And I'm sure this happens
with your speakers.

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They feel they're above it
or they think it's kind of silly.

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Or they think they don't need it.

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Everyone needs to rehearse.

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It was interesting when we did
the Cannes advertising festival,

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one session was for TED
and Hans Rosling was speaking.

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He's the Swedish professor.

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Global health issues,
statistics on the screen,

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he narrates them crazily
and he's a fantastic speaker.

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He has five talks online.

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I think he has more views
than any other speaker on TED.com.

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The other speakers were furious with me
because I had put him on first.

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So they all had to follow him.

00:13:04.554 --> 00:13:07.407
But one of the things they noted to me

00:13:07.431 --> 00:13:09.855
is how much he rehearsed.

00:13:09.879 --> 00:13:13.118
From the second we opened up the room
and we were still setting it up

00:13:13.196 --> 00:13:19.145
for hours and hours, he had
this table and all these props.

00:13:19.169 --> 00:13:22.995
He kept going over it for hours
with a countdown clock.

00:13:23.019 --> 00:13:26.074
Moving the things around, practicing,
getting his phrasing right.

00:13:26.176 --> 00:13:28.605
And he's one of the most
successful speakers on TED.

00:13:28.629 --> 00:13:31.403
So that's one of the things
you could really integrate

00:13:31.428 --> 00:13:35.346
into your own practice
as a TEDx organizer,

00:13:35.371 --> 00:13:39.851
and really impress on your speakers:
the best talks are produced by practice.

00:13:40.777 --> 00:13:44.108
That is what I had to share
with you today.

00:13:44.132 --> 00:13:48.269
I'm incredibly impressed
with all the work you're doing,

00:13:48.294 --> 00:13:51.063
and so looking forward to seeing
all of your talks come in.

00:13:51.087 --> 00:13:53.136
And to talking to you over the next week.

00:13:53.161 --> 00:13:54.164
Thanks.

00:13:54.188 --> 00:13:55.263
(Applause)