Talking the TED Talk

This year’s conference had Monica Lewinsky, machine learning and a lot of terrified speakers

During almost 30 years as a performance artist, Marina Abramovic has been fearless. In one instance, she stood for extended periods while her partner held a drawn bow, the arrow pointed at her heart. At another performance she offered museum visitors a selection of tools to use on her body, including knives and a loaded pistol. She’s cut herself and sat naked on a block of ice. More recently, she spent days in an installation at the Museum of Modern Art where any random person could pull up a chair and stare into her eyes for hours.

All of that she could handle. But a TED talk? “I was so nervous!” she says the day after her stint on the famous red circle. In fact, her first instinct was to decline the invitation. She worried that she was a poor candidate for a venue that seems to favor computer scientists, philanthropists and underdog crusaders for social justice and animal rights. “You have 18 minutes! What can you do?”

As every TED attendee knows, along with millions more who view the talks online, you can do quite a lot. The wild success of this conference, in spaces both real and cyber, provides consistent proof of that. In those 1080 seconds people can appall you with the scope of global human trafficking, terrify you with tales of deadly superbugs that antibiotics can’t kill, impress you with demonstrations of electronic vests that made blind people see, or tug at your heartstrings with a tale involving a sex change, a daughter with cancer and the invention of satellite radio (all that from one person). Or, of course, 10 minutes can also bore you silly (did you know China is a huge world power? OMG!), or at least make you roll your eyes.

The nervousness comes because the talks are not just directed at TEDsters in attendance but a far larger shadow audience that will one day view them online. The Vancouver Convention Center holds 1500 people, packed in the custom-built David Rockwell-designed theatre and lounging around in dozens of “simulcast” areas where talks are live-streamed. Though the five-day event is a world-class schmoozefest, those talks are the core of the experience. But after the show the talks will undergo an elaborate post-production process where multiple camera angles, including images of clearly enchanted observers, are edited into a compelling package. (For the first time this year, TED added an NFL-style spidercam to the mix, sliding its way along cables over the heads of the audience members.) Upon completion the talks are distributed around the world through a growing list of outlets, including the TED website, Netflix, the TED Radio Hour, airline entertainment, TED Books, and educational guides. A crowd-sourcing system translates them into every imaginable language. (Can TED fortune cookies be far behind?)

But only live attendees (and 650 people attending the TEDActive remote viewing party at the Whistler ski resort) get the total immersion package, which includes over 30 hours of talks over four days. Sitting through them makes your brain feel like a mushy piñata, whacked by one mind-blowing idea after another. Did you know that babies use sophisticated data analysis to guide the way they use squeeze toys? Meet the Frank Gehry of the rain forest, who creates the bamboo edifices in Bali. Believe it or not, when adulterers say to their betrayed spouses It’s not about you, they’re telling the truth. Oh, and here’s a guy who landed a spaceship on an asteroid.

Chris Anderson at TED 2015 opening session

TED’s leader and “curator” Chris Anderson rhapsodizes on what happens when everything works, as he believes it did this year in one of several talks about machine learning. “She [Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li] has a complex pattern of millions of neurons in her brain,” he says. “Somehow in 18 minutes, the audience had the same pattern in their brains!”

Now that TED talks are so widely distributed, some people complain that they have become too formulaic. In the run-up to a TED conference, hit pieces always appear, mocking the form, and invariably noting the $8500 (and up!) attendance fee. This year a New York Times piece called “The Church of TED” charged that the talks were manipulative hucksterism in the mode of crooked evangelists, and speculated that TED might become a cultish religion of its own.

Anderson dismisses such criticism as uninformed, lazy or just plain mean. “TED is clearly not about religion,” he says, “It’s about ideas.” He says that he urges speakers to avoid formulas, and strives for the talks to be as authentic as possible. Nonetheless, TED gives its speakers access to acting coaches, who tell them not to move around so much, don’t talk so fast, try to make eye contact. And each speaker goes through multiple rehearsals with TED staffers, who provide notes for improvement.

The key, says Anderson, is to make sure the people are authentic. “There are definitely people who watch TED and decide that they want to be the person strutting the stage inspiring everyone,” says Anderson. “Someone who comes with that intent will always fail. It’s kind of horrible. You don’t inspire by trying to inspire. You inspire by doing something remarkable and sharing it authentically. We’ve definitely gotten more sensitive to talks that feel too much like performances, feel like someone is trying to use a formula.”

TED 2015, as always, tried to avoid that. But it also presented interesting clues to the future of the TED talk. Anderson admits that in the past, he and his team might have gone overboard on the formula, leading to “stilted performances.” One year they urged speakers to make use of props. But now speakers do what makes them comfortable, or as comfortable as they can be in a state of high anxiety. (One speaker, Alan Eustace, confirmed to me before his talk that his heart rate was probably higher than it was on his 135,000-foot dive from the stratosphere wearing only a spacesuit.) Some speakers read from notes on a podium, others held index cards, still others displayed the outline of their talk on a screen in the back of the theatre, to make sure they hit all their points. Some of this year’s talks had the usual dollop of saccharine — do scientists really think that showing pictures of their kids makes their work more interesting? — but others eschewed it and focused simply on subject matter.

Some of those were among the very best talks in another solid year for the conference. My own favorite shared a discovery that using high-speed photography it is possible to capture otherwise imperceptible undulations in objects such as leaves or potato chip bags that can act like a tape recorder to capture sounds. The researcher sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to a candy wrapper and then decoded the video to play back the song. Apparently, one day we may be surveilled by our Christmas trees.

There were also several dense but fascinating talks on machine learning. And there were some good talks in a long session on exoplanets and asteroids, though maybe one too many. It seemed that each speaker in the session tried to top the previous one in his or her optimism regarding the prospect of extraterrestrial human colonization. (We may have been only one talk away from directing the audience to shuttle buses to Mars.)

But the most interesting development came in a 105-minute session that Anderson turned over completely to organizers of Pop-Up Magazine, a revue of spoken word and musical performances. It was like the TED stage had been invaded by public radio. Most of these talks used the raw material of long form non-fiction magazine articles or book excerpts, taking a third-person view rather than the first person one of the usual TED talk. As with segments of This American Life, a musical ensemble of piano and violins accompanied some of the talks. Others had the Brooklyn-y stand-up quality of The Moth. Some of the stories were remarkable, especially one about listening to 60-year-old private tape recordings of Louis Armstrong having a profane argument with his wife.

But as entertaining as those performances were, they didn’t seem TED-ish. Where were the lessons? Where was the inspiration? Still, Anderson says that the session might have convinced him to encourage a broader palette of tools in future talks. But not too much. “If every story was like this at TED people would get tired,” he says.