The BEST episodes of TED Talks season 2015
Every episode of TED Talks season 2015, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of TED Talks season 2015!
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker "ideas worth spreading," talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been reengineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world's most inspiring voices. [TED-Ed and TEDx are separate TVDB series and should NOT be listed here. Episode ordering and dates are sourced from YouTube.]
#1 - Mac Stone: Stunning photos of the endangered Everglades
Season 2015 - Episode 166 - Aired 9/30/2015
For centuries, people have viewed swamps and wetlands as obstacles to avoid. But for photographer Mac Stone, who documents the stories of wildlife in Florida's Everglades, the swamp isn't a hindrance — it's a national treasure. Through his stunning photographs, Stone shines a new light on a neglected, ancient and important wilderness. His message: get out and experience it for yourself. "Just do it — put your feet in the water," he says. "The swamp will change you, I promise."
Watch Now:Amazon#2 - Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin: A hilarious celebration of lifelong female friendship
Season 2015 - Episode 216 - Aired 12/17/2015
Legendary duo Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have been friends for decades. In a raw, tender and wide-ranging conversation hosted by Pat Mitchell, the three discuss longevity, feminism, the differences between male and female friendship, what it means to live well and women's role in future of our planet. "I don't even know what I would do without my women friends," Fonda says. "I exist because I have my women friends."
Watch Now:Amazon
#3 - 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.
Watch Now:Amazon
#4 - Tom Wujec: Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast
Season 2015 - Episode 21 - Aired 2/5/2015
Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.
#5 - Harry Baker: A love poem for lonely prime numbers
Season 2015 - Episode 39 - Aired 3/4/2015
Performance poet (and math student) Harry Baker spins a love poem about his favorite kind of numbers — the lonely, love-lorn prime. Stay on for two more lively, inspiring poems from this charming performer.
#6 - Monica Lewinsky: The price of shame
Season 2015 - Episode 51 - Aired 3/20/2015
"Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop," says Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, she says, “I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” Today, the kind of online public shaming she went through has become constant — and can turn deadly. In a brave talk, she takes a hard look at our online culture of humiliation, and asks for a different way.
#7 - Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We’re not ready
Season 2015 - Episode 61 - Aired 4/3/2015
In 2014, the world avoided a global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers — plus, frankly, some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. So, now's the time, Bill Gates suggests, to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training. As he says, "There's no need to panic ... but we need to get going."
#8 - Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
Season 2015 - Episode 220 - Aired 12/23/2015
What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.
#9 - Greg Gage: How to control someone else's arm with your brain
Season 2015 - Episode 77 - Aired 4/28/2015
Greg Gage is on a mission to make brain science accessible to all. In this fun, kind of creepy demo, the neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow uses a simple, inexpensive DIY kit to take away the free will of an audience member. It’s not a parlor trick; it actually works. You have to see it to believe it.
#10 - Lucianne Walkowicz: Let's not use Mars as a backup planet
Season 2015 - Episode 214 - Aired 12/15/2015
Stellar astronomer and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA's Kepler mission, searching for places in the universe that could support life. So it's worth a listen when she asks us to think carefully about Mars. In this short talk, she suggests that we stop dreaming of Mars as a place that we'll eventually move to when we've messed up Earth, and to start thinking of planetary exploration and preservation of the Earth as two sides of the same goal. As she says, "The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet."
#11 - Carl Safina: What are animals thinking and feeling?
Season 2015 - Episode 200 - Aired 11/19/2015
What's going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they're thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.
#12 - Andreas Ekström: The moral bias behind your search results
Season 2015 - Episode 194 - Aired 11/10/2015
Search engines have become our most trusted sources of information and arbiters of truth. But can we ever get an unbiased search result? Swedish author and journalist Andreas Ekström argues that such a thing is a philosophical impossibility. In this thoughtful talk, he calls on us to strengthen the bonds between technology and the humanities, and he reminds us that behind every algorithm is a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate.
#13 - Alan Eustace: I leapt from the stratosphere. Here's how I did it
Season 2015 - Episode 151 - Aired 9/4/2015
On October 24, 2014, Alan Eustace donned a custom-built, 235-pound spacesuit, attached himself to a weather balloon, and rose above 135,000 feet, from which point he dove to Earth, breaking both the sound barrier and previous records for high-altitude jumps. Hear his story of how -- and why.
#14 - Sarah Jones: One woman, five characters, and a sex lesson from the future
Season 2015 - Episode 104 - Aired 6/10/2015
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.
#15 - Daniel Kish: How I use sonar to navigate the world
Season 2015 - Episode 58 - Aired 3/31/2015
Daniel Kish has been blind since he was 13 months old, but has learned to “see” using a form of echolocation. He clicks his tongue and sends out flashes of sound that bounce off surfaces in the environment and return to him, helping him to construct an understanding of the space around him. In a rousing talk, Kish demonstrates how this works and asks us to let go of our fear of the “dark unknown.”
#16 - Raymond Wang: How germs travel on planes -- and how we can stop them
Season 2015 - Episode 211 - Aired 12/10/2015
Raymond Wang is only 17 years old, but he's already helping to build a healthier future. Using fluid dynamics, he created computational simulations of how air moves on airplanes, and what he found is disturbing -- when a person sneezes on a plane, the airflow actually helps to spread pathogens to other passengers. Wang shares an unforgettable animation of how a sneeze travels inside a plane cabin as well as his prize-winning solution: a small, fin-shaped device that increases fresh airflow in airplanes and redirects pathogen-laden air out of circulation.
#17 - Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?
Season 2015 - Episode 105 - Aired 6/12/2015
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.
#18 - Genevieve von Petzinger: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?
Season 2015 - Episode 201 - Aired 11/20/2015
Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist, rock art researcher and TED Senior Fellow Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.
#19 - Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed
Season 2015 - Episode 187 - Aired 10/30/2015
You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded -- the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."
#20 - Jamie Bartlett: How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream
Season 2015 - Episode 149 - Aired 9/2/2015
There’s a parallel Internet you may not have run across yet -- accessed by a special browser and home to a freewheeling collection of sites for everything from anonymous activism to illicit activities. Jamie Bartlett reports from the dark net.
#21 - Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?
Season 2015 - Episode 76 - Aired 4/27/2015
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter by leaps and bounds — within this century, research suggests, a computer AI could be as "smart" as a human being. And then, says Nick Bostrom, it will overtake us: "Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make." A philosopher and technologist, Bostrom asks us to think hard about the world we're building right now, driven by thinking machines. Will our smart machines help to preserve humanity and our values — or will they have values of their own?
#22 - Matt Kenyon: A secret memorial for civilian casualties
Season 2015 - Episode 136 - Aired 8/13/2015
In the fog of war, civilian casualties often go uncounted. Artist Matt Kenyon, whose recent work memorialized the names and stories of US soldiers killed in the Iraq war, decided he should create a companion monument, to the Iraqi civilians caught in the war's crossfire. Learn how he built a secret monument to place these names in the official record.
#23 - Frances Larson: Why public beheadings get millions of views
Season 2015 - Episode 161 - Aired 9/22/2015
In a disturbing — but fascinating — walk through history, Frances Larson examines humanity's strange relationship with public executions … and specifically beheadings. As she shows us, they have always drawn a crowd, first in the public square and now on YouTube. What makes them horrific and compelling in equal measure?
#24 - Patience Mthunzi: Could we cure HIV with lasers?
Season 2015 - Episode 137 - Aired 8/14/2015
Swallowing pills to get medication is a quick, painless and often not entirely effective way of treating disease. A potentially better way? Lasers. In this passionate talk, TED Fellow Patience Mthunzi explains her idea to use lasers to deliver drugs directly to cells infected with HIV. It's early days yet, but could a cure be on the horizon?
#25 - Alix Generous: How I learned to communicate my inner life with Asperger's
Season 2015 - Episode 138 - Aired 8/17/2015
Alix Generous is a young woman with a million and one ideas -- she's done award-winning science, helped develop new technology and tells a darn good joke (you'll see). She has Asperger's, a form of autistic spectrum disorder that can impair the basic social skills required for communication, and she's worked hard for years to learn how to share her thoughts with the world. In this funny, personal talk, she shares her story -- and her vision for tools to help more people communicate their big ideas.