The BEST episodes of TED Talks

#1 - Andy Puddicombe: All it takes is 10 mindful minutes

Season 2013 - Episode 8 - Aired 1/12/2013

#2 - Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

Season 2011 - Episode 61 - Aired 2/7/2011

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.

#3 - Sylvia Earle: How to protect the oceans

Season 2009 - Episode 28 - Aired 2/19/2009

Legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle shares astonishing images of the ocean -- and shocking stats about its rapid decline -- as she makes her TED Prize wish: that we will join her in protecting the vital blue heart of the planet.

#4 - David Merrill: Toy tiles that talk to each other

Season 2009 - Episode 23 - Aired 2/12/2009

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

#5 - Enric Sala: Let's turn the high seas into the world's largest nature reserve

Season 2018 - Episode 173 - Aired 6/6/2018

What if we could save the fishing industry and protect the ocean at the same time? Marine ecologist Enric Sala shares his bold plan to safeguard the high seas — some of the last wild places on earth, which fall outside the jurisdiction of any single country — by creating a giant marine reserve that covers two-thirds of the world's ocean. By protecting the high seas, Sala believes we will restore the ecological, economic and social benefits of the ocean. "When we can align economic needs with conservation, miracles can happen," Sala says.

#6 - Amit Kalra: 3 creative ways to fix fashion's waste problem

Season 2018 - Episode 49 - Aired 2/15/2018

What happens to the clothes we don't buy? You might think that last season's coats, trousers and turtlenecks end up being put to use, but most of it (nearly 13 million tons each year in the United States alone) ends up in landfills. Fashion has a waste problem, and Amit Kalra wants to fix it. He shares some creative ways the industry can evolve to be more conscientious about the environment — and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.

#7 - Barry Schwartz: Using Our Practical Wisdom

Season 2010 - Episode 46 - Aired 11/1/2010

#8 - Barry Schwartz: Our loss of wisdom

Season 2009 - Episode 24 - Aired 2/16/2009

#9 - Jeff Speck: 4 ways to make a city more walkable

Season 2017 - Episode 27 - Aired 2/9/2017

Freedom from cars, freedom from sprawl, freedom to walk your city! City planner Jeff Speck shares his "general theory of walkability" -- four planning principles to transform sprawling cities of six-lane highways and 600-foot blocks into safe, walkable oases full of bike lanes and tree-lined streets.

#10 - Franz Freudenthal: A new way to heal hearts without surgery

Season 2016 - Episode 169 - Aired 9/9/2016

At the intersection of medical invention and indigenous culture, pediatric cardiologist Franz Freudenthal mends holes in the hearts of children across the world, using a device born from traditional Bolivian loom weaving. "The most complex problems in our time," he says, "can be solved with simple techniques, if we are able to dream."

#11 - Christopher Bell: Bring on the female superheroes!

Season 2016 - Episode 162 - Aired 8/30/2016

Why is it so hard to find female superhero merchandise? In this passionate, sparkling talk, media studies scholar (and father of a Star Wars-obsessed daughter) Christopher Bell addresses the alarming lack of female superheroes in the toys and products marketed to kids — and what it means for how we teach them about the world.

#12 - Olivier Scalabre: The next manufacturing revolution is here

Season 2016 - Episode 156 - Aired 8/22/2016

Economic growth has been slowing for the past 50 years, but relief might come from an unexpected place — a new form of manufacturing that is neither what you thought it was nor where you thought it was. Industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre details how a fourth manufacturing revolution will produce a macroeconomic shift and boost employment, productivity and growth.

#13 - Hannah Fry: The mathematics of love

Season 2015 - Episode 26 - Aired 2/13/2015

Finding the right mate is no cakewalk — but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.

#14 - Siddharthan Chandran: Can the damaged brain repair itself?

Season 2014 - Episode 36 - Aired 2/24/2014

After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happens that the brain can repair itself, building new brain cells to replace damaged ones. But the repair doesn't happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative conditions like motor neuron disease (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS). Siddharthan Chandran walks through some new techniques using special stem cells that could allow the damaged brain to rebuild faster.

#15 - Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Season 2012 - Episode 12 - Aired 3/16/2012

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

#16 - Allan Savory: How to green the desert and reverse climate change

Season 2013 - Episode 43 - Aired 3/5/2013

#17 - Adam Grant: Are you a giver or a taker?

Season 2017 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/3/2017

In every workplace, there are three basic kinds of people: givers, takers and matchers. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant breaks down these personalities and offers simple strategies to promote a culture of generosity and keep self-serving employees from taking more than their share.

#18 - Apollo Robbins: The art of misdirection

Season 2013 - Episode 173 - Aired 9/13/2013

Hailed as the greatest pickpocket in the world, Apollo Robbins studies the quirks of human behavior as he steals your watch. In a hilarious demonstration, Robbins samples the buffet of the TEDGlobal 2013 audience, showing how the flaws in our perception make it possible to swipe a wallet and leave it on its owner’s shoulder while they remain clueless.

#19 - Helen Pearson: Lessons from the longest study on human development

Season 2017 - Episode 205 - Aired 10/2/2017

For the past 70 years, scientists in Britain have been studying thousands of children through their lives to find out why some end up happy and healthy while others struggle. It's the longest-running study of human development in the world, and it's produced some of the best-studied people on the planet while changing the way we live, learn and parent. Reviewing this remarkable research, science journalist Helen Pearson shares some important findings and simple truths about life and good parenting.

#20 - Chris Sheldrick: A precise, three-word address for every place on earth

Season 2017 - Episode 223 - Aired 10/19/2017

With what3words, Chris Sheldrick and his team have divided the entire planet into three-meter squares and assigned each a unique, three-word identifier, like famous.splice.writers or blocks.evenly.breed, giving a precise address to the billions of people worldwide who don't have one. In this quick talk about a big idea, Sheldrick explains the economic and political implications of giving everyone an accurate address -- from building infrastructure to sending aid to disaster zones to delivering hot pizza.

#21 - Anna Rosling Rönnlund: See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income

Season 2018 - Episode 19 - Aired 1/18/2018

What does it look like when someone in Sweden brushes their teeth or when someone in Rwanda makes their bed? Anna Rosling Rönnlund wants all of us to find out, so she sent photographers to 264 homes in 50 countries (and counting!) to document the stoves, bed, toilets, toys and more in households from every income bracket around the world. See how families live in Latvia or Burkina Faso or Peru as Rosling Rönnlund explains the power of data visualization to help us better understand the world.

#22 - Cleo Wade: Want to change the world? Start by being brave enough to care

Season 2018 - Episode 20 - Aired 1/19/2018

Artist and poet Cleo Wade recites a moving poem about being an advocate for love and acceptance in a time when both seem in short supply. Woven between stories of people at the beginning and end of their lives, she shares some truths about growing up (and speaking up) and reflects on the wisdom of a life well-lived, leaving us with a simple yet enduring takeaway: be good to yourself, be good to others, be good to the earth. "The world will say to you, 'Be a better person,'" Wade says. "Do not be afraid to say, 'Yes.'"

#23 - George Steinmetz: Photos of Africa, taken from a flying lawn chair

Season 2018 - Episode 25 - Aired 1/24/2018

George Steinmetz's spectacular photos show Africa from the air, taken from the world's slowest, lightest aircraft. Join Steinmetz to discover the surprising historical, ecological and sociopolitical patterns that emerge when you go low and slow in a flying lawn chair.

#24 - Guy Winch: How to fix a broken heart

Season 2018 - Episode 37 - Aired 2/5/2018

At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. Imagine how different things would be if we paid more attention to this unique emotional pain. Psychologist Guy Winch reveals how recovering from heartbreak starts with a determination to fight our instincts to idealize and search for answers that aren't there -- and offers a toolkit on how to, eventually, move on. Our hearts might sometimes be broken, but we don't have to break with them.

#25 - Jochen Wegner: What happened when we paired up thousands of strangers to talk politics

Season 2019 - Episode 186 - Aired 9/3/2019

In spring 2019, more than 17,000 Europeans from 33 countries signed up to have a political argument with a complete stranger. They were part of "Europe Talks," a project that organizes one-on-one conversations between people who disagree — sort of like a Tinder for politics. Editor Jochen Wegner shares the unexpected things that happened when people met up to talk — and shows how face-to-face discussions could get a divided world to rethink itself.