what is at the heart of what we do,

which is getting a speaker

and somehow getting something great out of them.

How on earth does that happen?

I think the start point on this is just to remember

how extraordinary a thing it is that a talk works.

Think about it.

You have a person with a brain and an idea

that no one else in the world has, maybe.

What is that thing?

It's some little unique pattern in their brain, right?

And somehow, they open their mouth like this.

Sound waves go out, through the ears of people in the audience

and, by some miracle, maybe, at the end of 18 minutes,

each of those brains has the same pattern in it.

This is astonishing.

It's truly astonishing that this can happen at all.

It doesn't happen in any other species in the same way, as far as we know.

There are a lots of ways in which this astonishing process can go wrong.

And, that's when talks fail.

How is it that a receiving brain can be rewired?

That brain may, as a result of that talk,

be different for the rest of its biological life.

We're giving someone a new world view

that 30 years later might make them

think differently, might make them act differently.

How on earth can that happen?

The way the brain works is step by step, incrementally.

You can't take a complex set of memes, a big knot

and just drop it into a brain and the brain goes, "Thank you!"

and we are done.

It doesn't work that way.

There are a lots of models that I find helpful

and sometimes I think a TED Talk is like playing Tetris with the brain.

All these ideas are coming in,

you're desperately trying to flip them into the right location

so they just slot and land somewhere where they will be received.

What would happen if you wanted to persuade

a bunch of people to come with you on a journey?

What are the two things you need to do?

You've got to start where they are,

and you've got to give them a reason to come with you.

I saw a great example of that in rehearsal just now.

There was a speaker there, Sonia Shah.

She was giving a talk about malaria.

Malaria isn't actually where everyone is right now.

For a lot of people, if you say malaria, they go,

"Oh, God. I suppose I'd better listen."

It's not what people are. It's not where they want to go.

So, she didn't start by saying,

"Ok. Let's get into malaria. Honestly, world, we have to fix this problem."

She said, "I'm going to tell you something that might surprise you.

Since the stone age,

more than half of the deaths of humans have been from one disease."

Boom!

Everyone is suddenly interested. Everyone cares about that.

So, she found the start point, the rallying cry,

"Come on! Let's go on this journey, together!"

So, let's think about the journey and how that happens.

The first part is that journeys happen step by step.

If you can't see the next step, you can't go on the journey.

So, let's think about that seeing.

Often, people in a talk feel like they are surrounded by fog.

They can't see. They can't see the moment.

What generates that fog?

Often it's language which doesn't land for you.

It's conceptual language.

It's language which makes sense in the context of speaker's world view

but it isn't where the people are.

So, if you want to build a concept, you have to build it step by step.

You have to use accessible language. You have to avoid jargon.

And, you have to give examples.

Bryan Stevenson, in his classic talk. It was so powerful.

He made this amazing conceptual statement

that blew up everyone's minds.

He said, "In many parts of the world, poverty is not the opposite of wealth.

It is the opposite of justice."

Those words landed like a bomb in people's brains.

They only landed that way because he had set it up.

He'd told stories about injustice and poverty,

and showed the relationship between them,

and then suddenly boom, gave a conceptual statement that landed.

But, it was built from the ground up, one step at a time.

Talks can't advance difficult ideas without populating them

with these rich examples that make sense to us

that allow our brains to use analogy, to absorb them and put them in place.

And, that means there is actually only a limited number of steps you can take

in an 18 minute talk.

The fog has to be cleared from it.

One of the biggest tragedies that can go wrong with a talk

is that speakers can try and go on too far a journey,

they put out all those stepping stones, without space between them,

allowing the audience to have a chance to make those leaps.

Without the examples, people would be left behind.

You think you've taken someone across this sweeping breadth of knowledge,

you've actually left them right where they started.

It's a tragedy.

The very first thing that has to be done with a talk is to buy into that idea of

"Ok. I can't do everything in 18 minutes. I need to pick a journey."

We can walk a mile in 18 minutes, right? We can't walk 10 miles.

So, pick a mile, but make it an interesting mile

a mile that takes you somewhere great,

and then make every little step on the way interesting.

What else can go wrong in this journey?

People might be able to see the next step,

but they might not want to go there with you.

Why might they not want that?

They might decide they don't like you.

So, we have a lot of pieces in this TED guide.

Commandments, and rules and whatever that we throw out

that actually go to this.

The reason why we say, too much ego on stage is a bad thing

is precisely for this reason.

If someone comes over as a blow-hard,

or is really trying to make themselves sound important,

there is an instant, natural human reaction of,

"Really? I don't like that." We don't like that.

We don't like arrogance. We don't like ego.

So, we start to shut down, the willingness to make the step goes.

The opposite of that is vulnerability and the power of speakers

who are willing to say, "I'm taking a risk here.

I am actually feeling kind of shy and nervous,

and frankly, I may be screwing up here.

But this really matters to me. Please will you come with me?"

and the audience says, "Yes. We're with you."

and they come.

Talks in a theater like this, on this sort of scale,

they work on that level, that human connection level.

Orating, which you have to do for maybe a bigger crowd,

is a completely different biological phenomenon.

It doesn't really work in theater, or indeed on a TED video.

Here, it's people in your living room.

It's chatting human to human and finding that human connection.

It matters so much in making people want to come the next step with you.

That's why eye contact matters.

With eye contact, you feel like you can see into me,

you can feel like you can make a judgment,

whether I really mean this, or if I'm bullshitting you.

And, it helps you decide, do I want to be on this journey with this person?

Humor.

Humor is the ultimate, "Come on, we are going to keep going."

If you are going to on a long walk with someone who can tell great jokes,

you are totally up for it.

It really makes you want to be part of that.

Humor is hard to do right, not many people can,

it won't have escaped your attention

that many of the best TEDTalks have been fueled by humor,

seduced the audience.

I mean, education - honestly, who wants to talk about education typically?

Ken Robinson found this way

of making it the most delicious, delightful, charming, wonderful experience.

He seduced everyone along the journey with him.

Everyone was in love with him well before he got to the core ideas

that really opened people's minds and made them want to

change their lives, and commit to education reform etc.

Humor can't be forced, and not everyone can do it,

but what everyone can do is connect as a human being,

be themselves, be authentic.

So, it's the journey. It's scoping the extent of it,

and not trying to do too much, then taking people every step of the way.

What are the natures of some of those journeys?

There are different words we can give them.

Sometimes, a good word for a journey is just a story,

and a lot of talks are basically someone telling a remarkable story

from which there are takeaways.

This is a very profound and deep human experience

and our brains know how to do this.

They know how to start with the narrative, and just continue.

That is exactly what's happening.

But there are other journeys that tap into some of that same process.

You can go on a journey of discovery.

You reveal something, then, naturally, you reveal something else

and that leads to something else.

It feels like you are on this journey and every step feels natural.

You have anticipation about what the next step is going to be.

Or, it can be a journey of persuasion.

If you want to get a fantastic example of that,

look at Dan Pallota's talk from the last TED

where he set out to change for all time everyone's view of the non-profit world.

He just went through it step by step, making these arguments one at a time

that just seemed more and more compelling,

a beautiful interaction with the visuals when needed,

his own story telling, his own logic - a fantastic journey of persuasion.

A lot of the most interesting talks almost have the structure of the detective story.

So, it's a story, but it starts with a riddle.

It might be a question like as simple as,

"How on earth do we solve climate change?" or some problem.

You start with some issue that you think will intrigue people.

"I want to share with you how I learned

everything I thought I knew about stress is dead wrong."

There is a talk like that this week.

Then you take people on, you show them the clues,

you show them the moment of: "Aha!", or revelation, perhaps.

Doing that you are giving all those receiving brains the chance

to do something very human and natural, just put the pieces together,

clue, clue, clue, conclusion.

Wow! I get it! Mind reset, re-snapped.

You know, we talk a lot at TED, or people talk a lot

about inspiration and the importance of that in talks.

This is a topic where we have to be really careful because inspiration

is one of those things that you don't get by targeting directly.

A speaker who comes to you and says, "I can deliver an inspiring talk." Run!

It's the last thing you want.

Inspiration comes when an audience sees that someone is being authentic,

when they see that someone has expanded

their own sense of possibility in the world.

People who try and say,

"And, now is the moment, where you, yes you, can get out of your chair

and change your life. We can all do this together, can't we?"

We've all seen those talks now and we're all, honestly, tired of them.

We feel, when we hear them, we are being manipulated.

Those kinds of talks can have this massive push-back reaction,

and it turns out there are hundreds of people out there

who have been inspired by TED, and want to be that person

strutting the stage and delivering that inspiration.

There's a lot of pressure on you, as organizers,

to book them and put them on. Be careful.

People think that they have cracked the code of TED when they think emotion.

You know, a talk has to be emotional.

And, that's absolutely true. Emotion really matters.

But again, please not directly.

Don't go, "Ok. This is the moment when I am going to make the audience cry."

And, you slip out of your pocket the picture of your granddaughter,

or your sister, and describe her terrible disease or her whatever.

Don't do that. It's too familiar now.

A few people have done that and got away with it,

but it feels manipulative now.

The single thing that matters most in all this

is that someone actually does have something to say.

That there is a realistic journey that you can take someone on

in 6, 12, or 18 minutes, that actually is fresh and matters.

Absent of that, there is no chance of the talk landing anyway.

So, that is the single hardest thing to do.

Is this person really a leader in this field?

Do they really have an idea that the world needs to know about?

And have they found the way to make it accessible?