The BEST episodes of TED Talks season 2016
Every episode of TED Talks season 2016, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of TED Talks season 2016!
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 - Travis Kalanick: Uber's Plan To Get More People Into Fewer Cars
Season 2016 - Episode 44 - Aired 3/4/2016
Uber didn't start out with grand ambitions to cut congestion and pollution. But as the company took off, co-founder Travis Kalanick wondered if there was a way to get people using Uber along the same routes to share rides, reducing costs and carbon footprint along the way. The result: uberPOOL, the company's carpooling service, which in its first eight months took 7.9 million miles off the roads and 1,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air in Los Angeles. Now, Kalanick says carpooling could work for commuters in the suburbs, too. 'With the technology in our pockets today, and a little smart regulation,' he says, 'we can turn every car into a shared car, and we can reclaim our cities starting today.'
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#2 - Tshering Tobgay: This Country Isn't Just Carbon Neutral - It's Carbon Negative
Season 2016 - Episode 49 - Aired 3/11/2016
Deep in the Himalayas, on the border between China and India, lies the Kingdom of Bhutan, which has pledged to remain carbon neutral for all time. In this illuminating talk, Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country's mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation.
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#3 - 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.
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#4 - 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.
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#5 - 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."
Watch Now:Amazon#6 - Thomas Peschak: Dive into an ocean photographer's world
Season 2016 - Episode 40 - Aired 2/29/2016
Somersaulting manta rays, dashing dolphins, swarming schools of fish and munching sharks inhabit a world beneath the ocean's surface that few get a chance to see. Conservation photographer Thomas Peschak visits incredible seascapes around the world, and his photos reveal these hidden ecosystems. 'You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know it exists,' he says. Join Peschak in a new, immersive TED Talk format as he shares his stunning work and his dream for a future of respectful coexistence with the ocean.
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#7 - Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business
Season 2016 - Episode 159 - Aired 8/25/2016
What is the blockchain? If you don't know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
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#8 - Oded Shoseyov: How we're harnessing nature's hidden superpowers
Season 2016 - Episode 182 - Aired 9/28/2016
What do you get when you combine the strongest materials from the plant world with the most elastic ones from the insect kingdom? Super-performing materials that might transform ... everything. Nanobiotechnologist Oded Shoseyov walks us through examples of amazing materials found throughout nature, in everything from cat fleas to sequoia trees, and shows the creative ways his team is harnessing them in everything from sports shoes to medical implants.
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#9 - Sangeeta Bhatia: This Tiny Particle Could Roam Your Body To Find Tumors
Season 2016 - Episode 96 - Aired 5/12/2016
What if we could find cancerous tumors years before they can harm us - without expensive screening facilities or even steady electricity Physician, bioengineer and entrepreneur Sangeeta Bhatia leads a multidisciplinary lab that searches for novel ways to understand, diagnose and treat human disease. Her target: the two-thirds of deaths due to cancer that she says are fully preventable. With remarkable clarity, she breaks down complex nanoparticle science and shares her dream for a radical new cancer test that could save millions of lives.
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#10 - Joe Gebbia: How Airbnb Designs For Trust
Season 2016 - Episode 51 - Aired 3/14/2016
Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, bet his whole company on the belief that people can trust each other enough to stay in one another's homes. How did he overcome the stranger-danger bias Through good design. Now, 123 million hosted nights (and counting) later, Gebbia sets out his dream for a culture of sharing in which design helps foster community and connection instead of isolation and separation.
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#11 - Caleb Harper: This computer will grow your food in the future
Season 2016 - Episode 46 - Aired 3/8/2016
What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's 'food computers' and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
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Season 2016 - Episode 34 - Aired 2/19/2016
When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops flying machines, and his latest projects are pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight -- from a flying wing that can hover and recover from disturbance to an eight-propeller craft that's ambivalent to orientation ... to a swarm of tiny coordinated micro-quadcopters. Prepare to be dazzled by a dreamy, swirling array of flying machines as they dance like fireflies above the TED stage.
Watch Now:Amazon#13 - Celeste Headlee: 10 Ways To Have A Better Conversation
Season 2016 - Episode 31 - Aired 2/16/2016
When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations -- and that most of us don't converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening. In this insightful talk, she shares 10 useful rules for having better conversations. "Go out, talk to people, listen to people," she says. "And, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed."
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#14 - Brian Little: Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle Of Personality
Season 2016 - Episode 125 - Aired 6/23/2016
What makes you, you Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits - sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think.
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#15 - eL Seed: A project of peace, painted across 50 buildings
Season 2016 - Episode 142 - Aired 7/19/2016
eL Seed fuses Arabic calligraphy with graffiti to paint colorful, swirling messages of hope and peace on buildings from Tunisia to Paris. The artist and TED Fellow shares the story of his most ambitious project yet: a mural painted across 50 buildings in Manshiyat Naser, a district of Cairo, Egypt, that can only be fully seen from a nearby mountain.
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#16 - Jonathan Tepperman: The risky politics of progress
Season 2016 - Episode 164 - Aired 9/1/2016
Global problems such as terrorism, inequality and political dysfunction aren't easy to solve, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. In fact, suggests journalist Jonathan Tepperman, we might even want to think riskier. He traveled the world to ask global leaders how they're tackling hard problems — and unearthed surprisingly hopeful stories that he's distilled into three tools for problem-solving.
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#17 - James Veitch: The agony of trying to unsubscribe
Season 2016 - Episode 165 - Aired 9/2/2016
It happens to all of us: you unsubscribe from an unwanted marketing email, and a few days later another message from the same company pops up in your inbox. Comedian James Veitch turned this frustration into whimsy when a local supermarket refused to take no for an answer. Hijinks ensued.
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#18 - David Burkus: Why you should know how much your coworkers get paid
Season 2016 - Episode 176 - Aired 9/20/2016
How much do you get paid? How does it compare to the people you work with? You should know, and so should they, says management researcher David Burkus. In this talk, Burkus questions our cultural assumptions around keeping salaries secret and makes a compelling case for why sharing them could benefit employees, organizations and society.
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#19 - Jia Jiang: What I learned from 100 days of rejection
Season 2016 - Episode 232 - Aired 12/7/2016
Jia Jiang adventures boldly into a territory so many of us fear: rejection. By seeking out rejection for 100 days -- from asking a stranger to borrow $100 to requesting a "burger refill" at a restaurant -- Jiang desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often brings and, in the process, discovered that simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you expect to find dead ends.
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#20 - Vanessa Ruiz: The spellbinding art of human anatomy
Season 2016 - Episode 160 - Aired 8/26/2016
Vanessa Ruiz takes us on an illustrated journey of human anatomical art over the centuries, sharing captivating images that bring this visual science — and the contemporary artists inspired by it — to life. "Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook," she says, "connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art."
#21 - Joe Lassiter: We need nuclear power to solve climate change
Season 2016 - Episode 225 - Aired 11/28/2016
Joe Lassiter is a deep thinker and straight talker focused on developing clean, secure and carbon-neutral supplies of reliable, low-cost energy. His analysis of the world's energy realities puts a powerful lens on the stubbornly touchy issue of nuclear power, including new designs for plants that can compete economically with fossil fuels. We have the potential to make nuclear safer and cheaper than it's been in the past, Lassiter says. Now we have to make the choice to pursue it.
#22 - Allan Adams: What the discovery of gravitational waves means
Season 2016 - Episode 33 - Aired 2/18/2016
More than a billion years ago, two black holes in a distant galaxy locked into a spiral, falling inexorably toward each other, and collided. 'All that energy was pumped into the fabric of time and space itself,' says theoretical physicist Allan Adams, 'making the universe explode in roiling waves of gravity.' About 25 years ago, a group of scientists built a giant laser detector called LIGO to search for these kinds of waves, which had been predicted but never observed. In this mind-bending talk, Adams breaks down what happened when, in September 2015, LIGO detected an unthinkably small anomaly, leading to one of the most exciting discoveries in the history of physics.
#23 - Shonda Rhimes: My Year Of Saying Yes To Everything
Season 2016 - Episode 32 - Aired 2/17/2016
Shonda Rhimes, the titan behind Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder, is responsible for some 70 hours of television per season, and she loves to work. "When I am hard at work, when I am deep in it, there is no other feeling," she says. She has a name for this feeling: The hum. The hum is a drug, the hum is music, the hum is God's whisper in her ear. But what happens when it stops? Is she anything besides the hum? In this moving talk, join Rhimes on a journey through her "year of yes" and find out how she got her hum back.
#24 - Laura Vanderkam: How to gain control of your free time
Season 2016 - Episode 239 - Aired 12/16/2016
There are 168 hours in each week. How do we find time for what matters most? Time management expert Laura Vanderkam studies how busy people spend their lives, and she's discovered that many of us drastically overestimate our commitments each week, while underestimating the time we have to ourselves. She offers a few practical strategies to help find more time for what matters to us, so we can "build the lives we want in the time we've got."
#25 - Trevor Timm: How Free Is Our Freedom Of The Press?
Season 2016 - Episode 102 - Aired 5/20/2016
In the US, the press has a right to publish secret information the public needs to know, protected by the First Amendment. Government surveillance has made it increasingly more dangerous for whistleblowers, the source of virtually every important story about national security since 9/11, to share information. In this concise, informative talk, Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder and TED Fellow Trevor Timm traces the recent history of government action against individuals who expose crime and injustice and advocates for technology that can help them do it safely and anonymously.