TED Talks with English transcript

Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion

TEDWomen 2015

Aspen Baker: A better way to talk about abortion
1,791,168 views

Abortion is extremely common. In America, for example, one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime, yet the strong emotions sparked by the topic -- and the highly politicized rhetoric around it -- leave little room for thoughtful, open debate. In this personal, thoughtful talk, Aspen Baker makes the case for being neither “pro-life” nor “pro-choice” but rather "pro-voice" -- and for the roles that listening and storytelling can play when it comes to discussing difficult topics.

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Manuel Lima: A visual history of human knowledge

TED2015

Manuel Lima: A visual history of human knowledge
1,916,809 views

How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data -- from languages to dynasties -- using trees and networks of information. It's a fascinating history of visualizations, and a look into humanity's urge to map what we know.

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Memory Banda: A warrior’s cry against child marriage

TEDWomen 2015

Memory Banda: A warrior’s cry against child marriage
1,355,672 views

Memory Banda’s life took a divergent path from her sister’s. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional “initiation camp” that teaches girls “how to sexually please a man.” She got pregnant there — at age 11. Banda, however, refused to go. Instead, she organized others and asked her community’s leader to issue a bylaw that no girl should be forced to marry before turning 18. She pushed on to the national level … with incredible results for girls across Malawi.

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Rajiv Maheswaran: The math behind basketball's wildest moves

TED2015

Rajiv Maheswaran: The math behind basketball's wildest moves
2,683,104 views

Basketball is a fast-moving game of improvisation, contact and, ahem, spatio-temporal pattern recognition. Rajiv Maheswaran and his colleagues are analyzing the movements behind the key plays of the game, to help coaches and players combine intuition with new data. Bonus: What they're learning could help us understand how humans move everywhere.

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Dame Ellen MacArthur: The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world

TED2015

Dame Ellen MacArthur: The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world
2,007,003 views

What do you learn when you sail around the world on your own? When solo sailor Ellen MacArthur circled the globe – carrying everything she needed with her – she came back with new insight into the way the world works, as a place of interlocking cycles and finite resources, where the decisions we make today affect what's left for tomorrow. She proposes a bold new way to see the world's economic systems: not as linear, but as circular, where everything comes around.

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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

TED2015

Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road
2,536,355 views

Statistically, the least reliable part of the car is ... the driver. In 2015, Chris Urmson was head of Google's driverless car program, one of several efforts to remove humans from the driver's seat. He shares fascinating footage that shows how the car sees the road and makes autonomous decisions about what to do next.

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Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?

TED2015

Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?
1,800,584 views

Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world -- and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.

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Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Meet the women fighting on the front lines of an American war

TEDWomen 2015

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Meet the women fighting on the front lines of an American war
1,180,525 views

In 2011, the US Armed Forces still had a ban on women in combat -- but in that year, a Special Operations team of women was sent to Afghanistan to serve on the front lines, to build rapport with locals and try to help bring an end to the war. Reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the story of this "band of sisters," an extraordinary group of women warriors who helped break a long-standing barrier to serve.

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Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions -- in design and life

TEDSalon NY2015

Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions -- in design and life
2,000,740 views

Book designer Chip Kidd knows all too well how often we judge things by first appearances. In this hilarious, fast-paced talk, he explains the two techniques designers use to communicate instantly -- clarity and mystery -- and when, why and how they work. He celebrates beautiful, useful pieces of design, skewers less successful work, and shares the thinking behind some of his own iconic book covers.

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Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism

TED2015

Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism
1,699,224 views

Decades ago, few pediatricians had heard of autism. In 1975, 1 in 5,000 kids was estimated to have it. Today, 1 in 68 is on the autism spectrum. What caused this steep rise? Steve Silberman points to “a perfect storm of autism awareness” — a pair of psychologists with an accepting view, an unexpected pop culture moment and a new clinical test. But to really understand, we have to go back further to an Austrian doctor by the name of Hans Asperger, who published a pioneering paper in 1944. Because it was buried in time, autism has been shrouded in misunderstanding ever since. (This talk was part of a TED2015 session curated by Pop-Up Magazine: popupmagazine.com or @popupmag on Twitter.)

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Latif Nasser: The amazing story of the man who gave us modern pain relief

TED2015

Latif Nasser: The amazing story of the man who gave us modern pain relief
1,689,086 views

For the longest time, doctors basically ignored the most basic and frustrating part of being sick -- pain. In this lyrical, informative talk, Latif Nasser tells the extraordinary story of wrestler and doctor John J. Bonica, who persuaded the medical profession to take pain seriously -- and transformed the lives of millions.

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Roxane Gay: Confessions of a bad feminist

TEDWomen 2015

Roxane Gay: Confessions of a bad feminist
1,781,161 views

When writer Roxane Gay dubbed herself a "bad feminist," she was making a joke, acknowledging that she couldn't possibly live up to the demands for perfection of the feminist movement. But she's realized that the joke rang hollow. In a thoughtful and provocative talk, she asks us to embrace all flavors of feminism -- and make the small choices that, en masse, might lead to actual change.

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Margaret Heffernan: Forget the pecking order at work

TEDWomen 2015

Margaret Heffernan: Forget the pecking order at work
3,377,127 views

Organizations are often run according to "the superchicken model," where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn't what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: "Companies don't have ideas. Only people do."

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Ash Beckham: When to take a stand -- and when to let it go

TEDxBoulder

Ash Beckham: When to take a stand -- and when to let it go
1,623,269 views

Ash Beckham recently found herself in a situation that made her ask: who am I? She felt pulled between two roles — as an aunt and as an advocate. Each of us feels this struggle sometimes, she says -- and offers bold suggestions for how to stand up for your moral integrity when it isn't convenient.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier: A visual history of inequality in industrial America

TED2015

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A visual history of inequality in industrial America
1,300,437 views

For the last 12 years, LaToya Ruby Frazier has photographed friends, neighbors and family in Braddock, Pennsylvania. But though the steel town has lately been hailed as a posterchild of "rustbelt revitalization," Frazier's pictures tell a different story, of the real impact of inequality and environmental toxicity. In this short, powerful talk, the TED Fellow shares a deeply personal glimpse of an often-unseen world.

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Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face

TEDWomen 2015

Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face
1,613,290 views

Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives -- how we learn, how we communicate, how we make decisions. Yet they're absent from our digital lives; the devices and apps we interact with have no way of knowing how we feel. Scientist Rana el Kaliouby aims to change that. She demos a powerful new technology that reads your facial expressions and matches them to corresponding emotions. This "emotion engine" has big implications, she says, and could change not just how we interact with machines -- but with each other.

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Sarah Jones: One woman, five characters, and a sex lesson from the future

TED2015

Sarah Jones: One woman, five characters, and a sex lesson from the future
1,736,532 views

In this performance, Sarah Jones brings you to the front row of a classroom in the future, as a teacher plugs in different personas from the year 2016 to show their varied perspectives on sex work. As she changes props, Jones embodies an elderly homemaker, a “sex work studies” major, an escort, a nun-turned-prostitute and a guy at a strip club for his bachelor party. It’s an intriguing look at a taboo topic, that flips cultural norms around sex inside out.

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Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?

TED2015

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?
2,949,831 views

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.

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Linda Cliatt-Wayman: How to fix a broken school? Lead fearlessly, love hard

TEDWomen 2015

Linda Cliatt-Wayman: How to fix a broken school? Lead fearlessly, love hard
2,127,946 views

On Linda Cliatt-Wayman's first day as principal at a failing high school in North Philadelphia, she was determined to lay down the law. But she soon realized the job was more complex than she thought. With palpable passion, she shares the three principles that helped her turn around three schools labeled "low-performing and persistently dangerous." Her fearless determination to lead -- and to love the students, no matter what -- is a model for leaders in all fields.

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Noy Thrupkaew: Human trafficking is all around you. This is how it works

TED2015

Noy Thrupkaew: Human trafficking is all around you. This is how it works
2,004,712 views

Behind the everyday bargains we all love -- the $10 manicure, the unlimited shrimp buffet -- is a hidden world of forced labor to keep those prices at rock bottom. Noy Thrupkaew investigates human trafficking – which flourishes in the US and Europe, as well as developing countries – and shows us the human faces behind the exploited labor that feeds global consumers.

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Tony Fadell: The first secret of design is ... noticing

TED2015

Tony Fadell: The first secret of design is ... noticing
2,938,799 views

As human beings, we get used to "the way things are" really fast. But for designers, the way things are is an opportunity ... Could things be better? How? In this funny, breezy talk, the man behind the iPod and the Nest thermostat shares some of his tips for noticing -- and driving -- change.

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Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed

TED2015

Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed
7,578,583 views

Bill Gross has founded a lot of start-ups, and incubated many others -- and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others -- and surprised even him.

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Jimmy Nelson: Gorgeous portraits of the world's vanishing people

TEDGlobal 2014

Jimmy Nelson: Gorgeous portraits of the world's vanishing people
1,577,385 views

When Jimmy Nelson traveled to Siberia to photograph the Chukchi people, elders told him: "You cannot photograph us. You have to wait, you have to wait until you get to know us, you have to wait until you understand us." In this gorgeously photo-filled talk, join Nelson's quest to understand -- the world, other people, himself -- by making astonishing portraits of the world's vanishing tribes and cultures.

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Yassmin Abdel-Magied: What does my headscarf mean to you?

TEDxSouthBank

Yassmin Abdel-Magied: What does my headscarf mean to you?
2,259,470 views

What do you think when you look at this speaker? Well, think again. (And then again.) In this funny, honest, empathetic talk, Yassmin Abdel-Magied challenges us to look beyond our initial perceptions, and to open doors to new ways of supporting others.

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Jeffrey Brown: How we cut youth violence in Boston by 79 percent

TED2015

Jeffrey Brown: How we cut youth violence in Boston by 79 percent
1,146,238 views

An architect of the "Boston miracle," Rev. Jeffrey Brown started out as a bewildered young pastor watching his Boston neighborhood fall apart around him, as drugs and gang violence took hold of the kids on the streets. The first step to recovery: Listen to those kids, don't just preach to them, and help them reduce violence in their own neighborhoods. It's a powerful talk about listening to make change.

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