Happy 5th Birthday, TED Talks: 5 All-Time Favorite Talks

Democratizing knowledge, the meaning of life, and why everything we know about creativity is wrong.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of TED talks becoming available to the world. As of this week, there are 1000 TED talks online in 81 languages, and they’ve been seen a cumulative half billion times.

I can’t overstate how much TED has changed my life personally, and what a tour de force it has been culturally. I’ve previously said that my first month of watching TED talks in 2006 gave me more — more insight, more knowledge, more inspiration, more creative restlessness to do something with my life — than four years of “Ivy League education” combined, and I’ll say it again. In more ways than I can count, TED has changed my outlook on the world, vastly expanded my scope of curiosity, and infinitely enriched my life with the tremendously interesting, generous and kind people I’ve been fortunate to meet in the TED community, online and off.

Some time ago, I channeled my love for TED in a remix project called TEDify, collaging and animating soundbites from TED talks into narratives along different themes. Here’s one, exploring the evolution of storytelling:

Today, to celebrate the big occasion, I’ve tried to curate my five favorite TED talks of all time — operative word being “tried,” since it felt a bit like asking a parent to pick out her favorite child.

ELIZABETH GILBERT ON GENIUS

When Elizabeth Gilbert took the TED stage in 2009, it didn’t take long to realize her talk would be among TED’s finest. Unlike other author talks, hers followed what I consider to be the perfect formula for a stellar TED talk: Take the experience or craft you are best known for and draw from it a universal metaphor for some great truth about the human condition. Gilbert’s assertion that we use concepts like “genius” and “muse” to shield ourselves from the results of our own work hits home for just about anyone in a “creative” field, bringing into question some of our most fundamental assumptions about creativity.

Above all, Gilbert makes a powerful case for the tremendous importance of showing up — of good old-fashioned hard work — in the creative process, something we all intuitively understand but often roll our eyes at because it isn’t as exciting and glamorous and alluring as the prospect of a Eureka moment or a single flash of insight that magically transforms our mediocrity into genius.

Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole!’ And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless,just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert is the author Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, which, despite the awful Hollywood adaptation, remains an excellent read.

MATTHIEU RICARD ON HAPPINESS

In 2004, French neuroscientist-turned-Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard delivered a layered, thoughtful and thought-provoking talk on happiness and its cultural conceits, much of which I used in the TEDify remix on happiness.

The whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It’s more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury.This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul; this is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most: the way our mind functions.” ~ Matthieu Ricard

Besides his fantastic Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, one of the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness, Ricard is also the author of The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life — a remarkable record of a 10-day conversation between Ricard and his father, renowned French intellectual and philosopher Jean-Francois Revel.

PHILIPPE STARCK ON DESIGN

Eccentric and brilliant and French as ever, Philippe Starck weaves a remarkable story of design, existentialism and moral philosophy in his 2007 talk, injecting an oh-so-needed shot of humility into the buttocks of our generational and civilizational arrogance.

That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It’s our romanticism. Mu-ta-tion. We are mutants. And if we don’t deeply understand, if we don’t integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. Because every generation thinks we are the final one. We have a way to look at Earth like that, you know, ‘I am the man. The final man. You know, we mutate during four billion years before, but now, because it’s me, we stop. Fin. For the end, for the eternity, it is one with a red jacket.’” ~ Philippe Starck

For more of Starck’s design genius, don’t miss the equally provocative Starck, capturing over three decades of his work, eccentricity and cultural insight.

JANINE BENYUS ON BIOMIMICRY

Biomimicry is one of the most promising frontiers of innovation at the intersection of design, engineering and sustainability. In 2009, Kirstin Butler wrote about AskNature — an ambitious biomimicry portal by Janine Benyus connecting designers, engineers and scientists to collaborate on biomimetic innovation. Benyus set the stage for the project in 2005 with a showcase of 12 brilliant, sustainable designs inspired by nature, then followed up in 2009 by showing these concept in action, implemented in real-life design and engineering products — concepts so simple yet so brilliant it makes one wonder why we aren’t implementing nature’s age-old, time-tested systems in every aspect of modern life.

If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we’ve forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names. And that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet. And that we are surrounded by genius. Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses, and take advice from them, design advice. ” ~ Janine Benyus

Find even more in Benyus’s excellent Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.

STEVEN JOHNSON ON INNOVATION

Steven Johnson is easily my favorite nonfiction writer. Last year, he delivered a fantastic talk at TED Global, based on his book Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, exploring the cross-pollination essential to ideation and revealing the combinatorial nature of creativity. The talk was later animated by the RSA for an even more delicious treat.

That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.” ~ Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From topped my list of 2010′s 10 best books in business, life and mind.

BONUS

The TEDx program, a series of self-organized TED-like events around the world, has been one of TED’s great successes, with some 2,000 events to date in more than 80 countries worldwide. Many of them are produced and curated with a formidable level of quality, delivering talks that could’ve easily been given on main-stage TED. My favorite TEDx gem has to be Brené Brown’s moving TEDxHouston talk on wholeheartedness and vulnerability, sitting at the intersection of science, storytelling and philosophy:

In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen — really seen.” ~ Brené Brown

Brown is the author of the fantastic The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.

What TED talks changed your worldview, your priorities or your life, in ways big or small?

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The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with the meaning of life.

Several weeks ago, we took at look at What Is Time? — Michiu Kaku’s BBC documentary, exploring the nature and origin of the all-permeating phenomenon, and earlier this week Stephen Hawking’s iconic A Brief History of Time joined this list of 10 essential primers on (almost) everything. But the world might be ready for a compelling new voice to unravel and synthesize the fundamental fabric of existence, and hardly anyone is better poised to fill these giant shoes than Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll.

In From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Carroll — who might just be one of the most compelling popular science writers of our time — straddles the arrow of time and rides it through an ebbing cross-disciplinary landscape of insight, inquiry and intense interest in its origin, nature and ultimate purpose.

This book is about the nature of time, the beginning o the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We’re not thinking small here. The questions we’re tackling are ancient and honorable ones: Where did time and space come from? Is the universe we see all there is, or are there other ‘universes’ beyond what we can observe? How is the future different from the past?” ~ Sean Carroll

Sample Carroll’s entertaining and enlightening storytellng with his excellent talk from TEDxCaltech. (And, on a related note, don’t miss TED’s freshly launched platform for TEDx talks, showcasing over 2,000 talks by some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.)

From entropy and the second law of thermodynamics to the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe to quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, Carroll weaves a lucid, enthusiastic, illuminating and refreshingly accessible story of the universe, and our place in it, underpinning which is the profound quest for understanding the purpose and meaning of our lives.

We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy. [P]urpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent. [I]t is our job to create them. One of those purposes — among many — stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.” ~ Sean Carroll

Sitting at the relentlessly fascinating intersection of cosmology, theoretical physics, information theory and philosophy, From Eternity to Here comes as a fine addition to this running reading list of must-read books by some of this year’s TED speakers.

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5 Must-Read Books by TED Global 2011 Speakers

What the pursuit of pleasure has to do with lie-detection, the history of money and the sorrows of work.

TED is among the highlights of my year and, every time before the big event, I like to prepare by reading or re-reading books by that TED season’s roster of speakers. (Previously: Long Beach 2011 in two parts and TED Global 2010.) Last week, TED revealed next month’s TED Global speakers and I was delighted to find, as always, some of my favorite thinkers, writers and doers on the list. Here are five fantastic books by some of them.

HOW PLEASURE WORKS

We’ve previously looked closely at the art and science of happiness, and one of the simplest ways in which we humans grasp after happiness is through the pursuit of pleasure. What is pleasure, exactly, and is it really just a simplistic, false substitute for happiness? That’s exactly what Yale psychologist Paul Bloom explores in How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like — a fascinating look at the complex cognitive and sociological elements of what we find pleasurable. Bloom looks at common pleasure sources across the entire spectrum of social conduct — food, sex, art, video games, drugs, saunas, crossword puzzles, reality TV — through a hybrid lens of developmental psychology, evolutionary science, philosophy, neuroscience, behavioral economics and sociology to examine the mechanisms and ultimate function of pleasure.

Bloom explores the prevalent theory of “essentialism” — the idea that things in the world, including other people, have invisible, distinct essences that make them what they are, and we are born with a predilection for subscribing to this worldview. Bloom uses essentialism to explain the mysterious pleasures of everyday life, from our attachments to objects like celebrity memorabilia to our hunger for art to the pleasures of the imagination to the appeal of science and religion, examining pleasure through both its developmental origin in us as individuals and its evolutionary roots in our species.

If you look through a psychology textbook, you will find little or nothing about sports, art, music, drama, literature, play, and religion. These are central to what makes us human, and we won’t understand any of them until we understand pleasure.” ~ Paul Bloom

What makes Bloom’s argument most interesting, perhaps, is that it centers around two seemingly conflicting claims: That pleasure is deep and transcendent, which implies it must be socialized, cultured and learned, and that pleasure is a byproduct of evolution, which implies that it should be simple, superficial and a knee-jerk response to environmental stimuli. The truth, however, is a marriage of the two — we have evolved essentialism to help us make sense of the world, but it now pushes us to desire things that have nothing to do with survival and reproduction. (Pornography, for instance, is enjoyed by a great deal of people, and while we’re biologically inclined to have an interest in real-life attractive naked people, there’s absolutely no reproductive advantage associated with watching attractive naked people get it on on the screen.)

Gracefully dancing across everything from Shakespeare to cannibalism to IKEA furniture, Bloom more than lives up to his reputation as one of modern psychology’s deepest thinkers, crispest writers and most eloquent storytellers. Besides, as Newsweek‘s Mary Carmichael put it, “Is there anyone who could resist a book about sex, food, art, and fun?”

THE ASCENT OF MONEY

Historian Niall Ferguson is a prolific and relentlessly fascinating author, so choosing just one of his excellent books is no easy task. His most recent masterpiece, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we’re just beginning to barely emerge from the financial crisis that swept the Western world four summers ago, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.

Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson

Above all, the book is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a celebration of the holistic, cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe is the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.

Ferguson’s latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, comes out in November and looks to be very much worth a read.

LIESPOTTING

Years ago, I did a thesis largely on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the study of emotion through facial expression. He devised a system for coding and interpreting facial “microexpressions,” which has since been used by everyone from the FBI to financial loan officers to actors, and has become instrumental in assisting lie detection. My longstanding fascination with the field led me to the work of Pamela Meyer, who uses visual cues and psychology to detect deception. In Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, Meyer reveals some of the most reliable techniques for detecting and, in turn, protecting ourselves against dishonesty.

Calling myself a liespotter — a human lie detector — might suggest that I live in anticipation of being deceived, wary and suspicious of everyone with whom I come into contact. Actually, becoming a trained liespotter allows you to do the opposite. You’ll know you have the tools you need to protect yourself in situations in which you might encounter falsehood or obfuscation. Becoming a liespotter doesn’t inspire paranoia — it frees you from it.” ~ Pamela Meyer

Though Meyer’s work isn’t nearly as rigorously scientific as Ekman’s and at times calls for a grain of salt, it nonetheless offers the foundation of a skill few of us have and most of us desire.

Liespotting will introduce the [basic] method, which combines facial recognition with advanced interrogation techniques. It will show you how to read the map of the human face and body, as well as how to decode human language and vocal tone, exposing the myriad signs people inadvertently leave behind when they are working to hide the truth about something that really matters.” ~ Pamela Meyer

While the techniques in Liespotting can be tremendously valuable in an ideal, neutral scenario, the thing I find most important to remember — and most difficult to accept — is that even if we worked ourselves into the perfect, most accurate human lie detectors, when it comes to the dishonesty of those we care about the most about the things that most matter to us, we have a remarkable ability to ignore, dismiss and disregard any intuitive or factual evidence of deception. In order for Meyer’s techniques to be of practical value in those most crucial situations, we need to couple them with a keen awareness of this bigger, fundamental human bias and an actionable desire to change.

THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK

Sure, I’ll take any excuse to sing the praises of Alain de Botton, dubbed the creator of the “literary self-help genre” and a master of philosophical social criticism through an eloquent blend of wit and wisdom. (His How Proust Can Change Your Life will change your life.) There’s no better way to celebrate his second TED Global appearance than with The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, about which he spoke in his first:

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.” ~ Alain de Botton

One of the reasons we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery. And the dominant form of snobbery that exists today is job snobbery — you encounter it within minutes at a party when you get asked that famous, iconic question of the 21st century: ‘What do you do?’ The opposite of a snob is your mother.” ~ Alain de Botton

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BABY

Children are at once profound and enigmatic vessels of the human mind, and yet the first 2,500 years of philosophy contain almost no reference to or study of children. But the scientific revolution of the past 30 years has led philosophers and scientists to take children seriously for the first time. That’s exactly what psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik addresses in The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life — an ambitious look at how babies, in many ways, are more conscious than adults in that they don’t operate on the kind of autopilot that often drives us. In the process, Gopnik explores philosophical questions about the nature of love, the relativity of truth, and various facets of the human condition.

Childhood is a profound part of the human condition. But it is also a largely unexamined part of that condition — so taken for granted that most of the time we hardly notice it at all. Childhood is a universal fact, but when we do think about it, it is almost always in individual first-person terms: What should i do, now, about my child? What did my parents do that led me to be the way I am? Most books about children are like this, from memoirs and novels to the ubiquitous parenting advice books. But childhood is not just a particular plot complication of Irish autobiographies or a particular problem to be solved by American self-help programs. It is not even just something that all human being share. It is, I’ll argue, what makes all human beings human.” ~ Alison Gopnik

If you missed last year’s roundup, it’s never too late to catch up with these 7 must-read books by TED Global 2010 speakers, as well as these two sets of must-reads by this year’s TED Long Beach speakers.

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