You may remember a time when it was difficult to make it through the day without hearing someone cite a TED Talk. A major technological reason for that was streaming video’s new accessibility on practically everyone’s computer (especially those of people bored at work). A major cultural reason was there was a considerable demographic overlap between those who knew their way around the new video-sharing realms of the internet and those likely to want to hear a “thought leader” speak for eighteen minutes or less. Whether schools kill creativity, the mechanics of procrastination, what happens when you reply to spam e‑mail: these are just a few of the subjects that most aggressively captivated the minds of the suddenly large and chatty TED Talk audience of the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens.
Since those days, some of the most popular TED Talks ever given have undergone reputational re-evaluation. The robustness of the science undergirding Amy Cuddy’s “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are” has been called into question, while Bill Gates’ “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” from 2015, started to look a whole lot more prescient four or five years after it was uploaded.
But what makes a lecture people enjoy — and desire to get others watching — has less to do with its content than with its form and delivery. That’s one lesson we can take from the new animated video above, “How to Explain Something Complicated,” the eighth and most recent in TED-Ed’s series “Public Speaking 101”: something most of us, even if we’ve never dreamed of stepping onto TED’s (or merely TEDx’s) stage, have to face doing sooner or later.
When explaining any complex matter, from your startup’s mission to just how your brother met his bride, it helps to draw on familiar examples. This lesson does that using, naturally, a TED Talk, identifying and breaking down the ways in which social psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s “The Surprising Science of Happiness” exemplifies a suite of techniques in the public speaker’s arsenal. These include sparking your listener’s curiosity right away; introducing them to the first concept you’ll be discussing while doing so, as the base of a “tower” to be built one by one with subsequent concepts; and leading the audience to a “knowledge gap” that you later fill in with the “big idea” at the center of your talk. Surprise is important, and so are metaphors, the more vivid the better. In our age consumed with visions of smartphone addiction, global pandemics, and the AI apocalypse, TED Talks may seem a quaint artifact of a more naïvely techno-optimistic time. But the day will never come when we need no longer explain things — least of all ourselves.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
