51–60 of 93 posts
The only TED talk that has ever brought tears to my eyes - Jamie Oliver's: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
Always liked Thomas Barnett's talk on the Pentagon's new map for peace. Interesting ideas. Delivers with some humor. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new...
Asides from being very funny, I have never heard of a force like the two-sided, Leviathian / SysAdmin one that he describes.
Attributing some of the failure in Iraq, namely the persistent Leviathian force and the non-existant SysAdmin force is very compelling, to say the least.
Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm... A surprisingly powerful ode to people who just do the work. Our jobs may not be dirty but the lessons are still interesting and applicable; connecting to startups isn't that hard. I like many of the other linked talks too, but as of my writing this one was not posted.
That was fantastic, and I don't think I would have ever come across it otherwise. Thank you.
I also hate the verbal tic he demonstrates, which is becoming depressingly common, of saying "right" after every few sentences in a story. For example: "I was working on a crab boat, right? And this big wave comes over the side, right?" Etc. It's a lazy way of trying to psychologically condition the audience into agreeing with you without actually doing the hard rhetorical work of convincing them. Drives me nuts.
http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind... ("Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples. .. Dr Ramachandran is the author of the author of Phantoms in the Brain (the basis for a Nova special), A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in…
This is also my favorite TED talk. Ramachandran has come up with some clever ways to study and heal the brain. His mirror box therapy is not only simple and effective, but his prerequisite theory was accurate yet initially based on a tiny amount of evidence. Here's a short talk by Ramachandran on mirror neurons: http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_sh...
She was able to articulate the feeling that stereotyped people have. Unfortunately, we are all guilty in some way knowingly or unknowingly. It is a must watch.
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_...
This is one I saw recently - It's good. And quite relevant to entrepreneurs - http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was fantastic, and I don't think I would have ever come across it otherwise. Thank you.
I didn't like it. Rowe has a disingenuously self-deprecating speaking style, where he says again and again how much he "got wrong", but the subtext is how smart he is for realizing certain things that the rest of us supposedly haven't. And his big insight is that for every Steve Jobs, we need a bunch of workers to actually build the iPods? Wow, golly. I also hate the verbal tic he demonstrates, which is becoming depr…
Nor did I get the feeling that his claims of being wrong was in any way disingenuous. At worst it's a ploy to structure his talk.
Every TED talk works off the assumption that the speaker has some insight worth sharing with the audience, presumably non-obvious or non-trivial realizations, so of course he's going to try say something worth thinking about. There's nothing subtext about it; it's the whole point of being on stage.
My takeaway was not simply "for every Steve Jobs, we need a bunch of workers to actually build the iPods", but that there are a lot of seemingly oddball jobs done by happy people who did not bother to "follow their bliss", that conventional wisdom on what work might make you happy or how work should be approached might very well be wrong, and that plain old labor should not be looked down on.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_...
I also like answers to questions after this talk.