Mom Erin Freschi and her son Sawyer, 8, watch TED Talks together at night and the rest of the family has started joining in too. Scroll down for Erin and Sawyer’s top 10 picks to watch together. Photo: Courtesy of Erin Freschi

Erin Freschi, a California mom who has worked in education for nearly 25 years, has a nightly ritual with her 8-year-old son, Sawyer. Instead of bedtime stories or songs, Freschi and her son wind down by watching TED Talks.

The name of their unique ritual? TED Before Bed.

“It started when Sawyer was in first grade,” said Freschi. “He is pretty advanced for his age, and he was getting bored with the books and things he was getting for homework. We used to Google things that came up during the day. But we got to a point where we were running out of things to Google.”

Then Freschi watched Simon Sinek’s TED Talk in a work meeting, and she knew she wanted to share it with her son.

“Sinek talks a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sawyer just loves him,” she said. “That night I showed [the talk] to him, and he loved it. Now it’s the last thing we do every night before he goes to sleep.”

The ritual has stimulated Sawyer’s appetite for learning — and strengthened the mother-son bond. “We’ve always been close, but it just gives us this secret world we can share,” said Freschi. “It’s a special time for us to learn and think about new ideas together.”

Her husband joins in now, too.

“This week, we watched Greg Gage’s talk about do-it-yourself neuroscience tools. It was the first time Sawyer had heard the term ‘neuroscience,’ so we talked a little bit about that. And then he said, ‘I want one of those machines. Daddy, could you make one of those?’ It got him excited about the brain and how it works.”

Sometimes, the family watches TED Talks; sometimes they opt for TED-Ed lessons.  Both have opened up new conversations, including one about recycling, inspired by TED-Ed’s “The life cycle of a plastic bottle.”

“We’ve always been recyclers, and we try hard not to be wasteful, but it brought the concept home for him,” said Freschi. “It made more sense than, ‘Mommy and Daddy say we have to recycle.’ He’s always had an inquisitive mind, and you kind of hit a wall sometimes. Talks can spur that excitement again.”

Sawyer, who says that one of his goals in life is to be President of the United States, loves science and history, and says he’s interested in any talk that has to do with civil rights.

“I believe in civil rights,” he says. “I want to be a civil rights leader, actually.”

Erin and Sawyer’s top 10 talks to watch together:

1. BLACK: My journey to yo-yo mastery
2. Joshua Klein: A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows
3. Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
4. Greg Gage: How to control someone else’s arm with your brain
5. Anand Varma: A thrilling look at the first 21 days of a bee’s life
6. David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes
7. Chris Hadfield: What I learned from going blind in space
8. Anthony Hazard: The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you
9. Emma Bryce: What really happens to the plastic you throw away
10. Eleanor Nelsen: Why do your knuckles pop?

We know this thanks to Brian Stefanelli’s website, After TED Talks, which posts his interviews with TED and TEDx speakers after their talks go live online. While these interviews dig into the topic of the talks, Stefanelli makes sure to ask speakers the same four questions: “What hardware do you use?” “What apps or software can you not live without?” “What are you currently reading?” and “What projects are you currently working on?” Their answers are fascinating.

Stefanelli discovered TED when someone posted a talk given by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier at TEDxSF on StumbleUpon. “He was playing some sort of bamboo instrument from Vietnam,” recalls Stefanelli. “I spent the next few hours looking for other talks and became obsessed.” He found himself growing curious about (a) what his favorite speakers had been up to since they gave their talk and (b) how they generally organized their lives. So he decided to ask them — and blog the results. “There are many people that are just as curious as I am,” he says.

“In the beginning, I figured that if I could get a speaker who was listed in the most-viewed TED Talks of all time section on the TED site to answer my questions, it would give me credibility when I approached other speakers. But it turned out those speakers were really hard to get in touch with,” he says. So he took another tack, and just starting chatting with speakers he liked via social media. This produced better results.

“The first speaker that actually sent back a response was James Howard Kunstler. He was really generous with his answers,” says Stefanelli. “After that, I was motivated to reach out to more people.”

So far, he has interviewed 15 speakers whose talk topics range from topics from green design to the treatment of the Hazara people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They’re short, compelling reads — perhaps because, as he says, “I have an admiration for every speaker I interview.”

Fanfare shares art, music, remixes, websites and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

Singer and songwriter Nigel Gordon writes songs on his guitar inspired by TED Talks.

Many people feel a burst of inspiration after watching a TED Talk. Some take action by volunteering their time or making a donation. Nigel Gordon, on the other hand, has an individual reaction: He writes songs about TED Talks he loves.

A singer and songwriter, as well as an entrepreneur, Gordon got his introduction to TED when a friend sent him Sir Ken Robinson’s “How schools kill creativity.” “I’ve been a TED addict ever since,” he says.

In 2012, Gordon heard Sugata Mitra’s talk “The child-driven education,” which tells the story of what happened when Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in India, and came back to discover that kids had used it to teach themselves a wide range of subjects. (Mitra would go on to win the 2013 TED Prize for his idea, the School in the Cloud.) Gordon was captivated by this idea.

“Through a potent mix of curiosity and self-organized teamwork, the kids taught themselves to use the computer and, with it, to broadly educate themselves,” says Gordon. “My takeaway: Curiosity drives learning.”

He picked up his guitar and wrote the song “Curiosity.” It starts: “Curiosity killed the cat / I want to die like that.”

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Speaking of death, Gordon was also very moved by Stephen Cave’s talk, “The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death.” It inspired him to write “A Good Story.” This was a challenging one, however, because Gordon wanted to infuse the heavy subject with the same sense of humor that Cave brought to the stage. Also, Gordon just wasn’t sure how to end the song. “I finally realized I could end it the same way that death ends life: instantly. So I incorporated an abrupt flash-ending,” he says. “The song just … stops.”

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Most recently, Gordon found himself moved by Ziauddin Yousafzai’s talk, “My daughter, Malala.” He already knew the story of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winner, but hearing from her father was devastating, he said. A few days later, he happened to watch a talk by Karima Bennoune, in which she pointed out that extremists like Osama Bin Laden are household names in the West, while people like Malala are not as well known. Gordon decided it was time to start writing again. “Ma-la-la. Her name itself is pure music,” he says.

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Gordon has a vision for this song—he’d love to record it with a group, “We Are the World”-style. “My dream: that the ‘Malala’ song be turned into an anthem, to support Malala’s global, peaceful fight for a girl’s right to an education,” he says.

Gordon admits that he did once attempt to write a song about TED itself, but that this endeavor didn’t go so well.

“I couldn’t manage to personalize the song or to make it a story,” he says. “It ended up more like a wordy PowerPoint presentation.”

But still, he says, his TED-inspired songs are not limited to the three above. “TED Talks have significantly enriched my life and widened my range of interests,” he says. “In that sense, many of my songs written in the past four years reflect the impact that TED has had on me.”

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

About the artist: “An illustration can be like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar,” says Holt. “If someone is captivated by an image, they can absorb so many things along with it.”

Holt began the sketch in pencil, then used a brush pen to draw the images. She cleaned it all up using a Wacom tablet and her laptop. “I am really into pattern, and the fact that the talk centered on Syria, which has a rich history of decorative art, inspired me to cram as many patterns in as possible,” she says. “I chose to make the whole thing a dark, charcoal gray—a nod to the monotony and hardship of refugee camps.”

Melissa Fleming saw the sketches on Twitter. “I was blown away,” she says. “It warms my heart that a young artist in England would care enough to engage her talent to make a difference for the refugee cause.” She retweeted to share the images — and then emailed TED to tell us about them too. “I love how she highlighted the facts and figures, but brought the personal stories alive. It is a complete talk in itself in a few evocative frames,” she says.

As Holt says, “I hope it makes people want to go and give the gift of their talents, whatever those may be, to people who need them to rebuild their lives. I hope this image passes on that itchy, scratchy, philanthropy feeling that I got from Melissa’s talk.”

Watch this powerful TED Talk, which manages to make an issue that usually feels overwhelming and distant feel personal, immediate and changeable.

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This interactive graph shows the most popular words in TED Talk descriptions over time. Click on the image to explore the visualization. Created by: Santiago Ortiz

At first glance, the image above may look like an artistic tangle of worms. But it is actually a visualization of the words that appear most often in TED Talk descriptions. Each line corresponds to a word, and its snaking movement shows how its frequency of use has changed over time. Mouse over the word “work” and you can see that the line plateaus in 2007 and 2008, then stairsteps down from there. Meanwhile, the line for the word “brain” serpents its way to an all-time high this year.

This is one of the latest works from Santiago Ortiz, an information visualizer who lives in a small town in Argentina. On the website Moebio.com, he posts what he calls “experimental experiences with data” that run the gamut from Twitter conversations represented as stars in a galaxy to a brightly colored stream of the major players in The Iliad.“One of my specialties is networks of people who are connected by texts, by speech, by messages,” he says. “It’s a mixture of network analysis and text analysis. I studied mathematics — but before that, I studied music. I was always interested in using mathematics in creative ways.”

Ortiz has been visualizing TED Talks since 2007, when he was working for the Spanish data agency Bestiario and created “The TED Video Sphere.” This sphere organized all the talks available at the time into a globe, with a spiderweb of lines noting connections between talks. Click on a talk and it spins to the center of your screen, like a merry-go-round of ideas. Mouse over the lines, and you see information on how talks are related. You can view this sphere from the inside or from the inside — and you can zoom in to see the details or stay zoomed out to see the whole system. 

Take the “TED Video Sphere” for a spin—literally— by clicking on the image. Created by: Santiago Ortiz, copyright Bestiario 2009

“At the beginning, I used to watch basically every TED Talk, but that became impossible,” he says. “So I thought about an explorative serendipity interface. I thought it would be interesting as a way to discover new talks.” 

When it came time to choose a shape, the answer was obvious to him. “[A sphere] is a good metaphor,” he says. “A sphere is a good geometrical archetype for a community in which everyone is in the center, in a way. Connections are the core of this community.”

To create the sphere, Ortiz built a crawler to go to all pages of TED.com and gather data. As such, the sphere hasn’t been updated with talks published since it was created. “It’s a photograph of that moment,” he says.

Ortiz used a different method to create his newest visualization, which he calls “TED Word Flows.” He coded it using a spreadsheet we update daily with each new talk, so that it’ll always stay current.

“For this one, I took all the short summaries of talks and made an analysis,” explains Ortiz. “You can roll over a word and see how the word has been mentioned different amounts of times throughout the years.”

This is what happens when you mouse over a word in this data experience. Created by: Santiago Ortiz

When he finished the initial coding for this project, Ortiz was surprised to see the lines that emerged. “You create very simple rules that connect the data with the graphical expression,” he says. “Sometimes you expect something linear and what you get is something exponential; sometimes you expect something exponential and it’s linear.” While he’d thought he’d see wild variations in every line — and to see new words pop into the graph each year — he saw remarkable consistency over time.

Of course, there are exceptions. And for the words in the flow that showed change over time, Ortiz had fun thinking about what might have happened. “The [words] can be a mirror, or the anti-mirror of reality,” he says. He points out the line for the word ‘global,’ which peaks in 2006 and then more or less disappears. “Maybe in the first year of TED.com, a lot of people used the word ‘global’ because that was the intention. But then TED went global and because it was so evident that it was global, the word just lost meaning. The drop of the word represents almost the opposite of reality.”

Before Word Flows, Ortiz visualized the most common words in TED Talk descriptions in a cloud form. “It’s beautiful as a three-dimensional object, but it’s not the best visualization because you have to navigate a lot to actually read it,” he says. “You get lost in the words.”

Take a journey through the most popular words in TED Talk descriptions. Created by: Santiago Ortiz

Ortiz says that he is far from done creating visualizations from TED Talk data. He says that he is already at work on a new piece—one quite vast in scale. The idea is to somehow show the talk descriptions as a heat map, noting hot words that connect to other talk descriptions. He envisions a new way to navigate through the TED library. “You will see the connected texts arrive and can click and then go and see the video,” he says. “With some collaboration, I could actually embed the videos in the visualization and make a big interface with all of the talks.”

Stay tuned. We’ll share new experiences from Ortiz on the TED Blog.

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

When Cecilia Matei’s science teacher showed a TED Talk about the promise of stem cell research to her class at the American School of Milan, Italy, she was immediately intrigued.

“For me it was a completely new subject that I had never heard of before,” the 13-year-old says.

The talk inspired her to create this drawing (click on it to see a larger version), a cross between a comic strip and a movie storyboard. While the star of the image is named “Jennifer Brain,” she closely resembles real-life TED speaker Susan Solomon, who at TEDGlobal 2012 shared the advances being made toward creating lab-grown stem cell lines, which could accelerate many types of medical research.

Matei’s teacher, Joseph Leonetti, handpicked this talk to kick off a special project for his students — as they did a three-week lesson on cell structures and processes in class, they were tasked with researching stem cells at home. “They were responsible for finding out what stem cells are, where they come from, how they are used and the ethical issues surrounding them. They were guided in the right direction,” he says. “Almost each class session started with students eagerly discussing what they had found out about stem cells the night before.”

This image was one of Matei’s homework assignments from the lesson. She walks us through the action of it: “Famous scientist Dr. Brain is invited to give a TED Talk about her studies,” she says. “She’s trying to convince people that stem cell research could help cure many diseases.”

In general, Matei says that her favorite subjects in school are math, English and, of course, science. “I loved every lab and experiment in Mr. Leonetti’s class,” she says. As for her favorite TED Talks she prefers ones “about new technological inventions.”

So we’ll have to wait and see what’s next for Dr. Jennifer Brain.

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

The animal you see in this watercolor-washed illustration is not a camel. This is, technically, a dromedary. Anja Kantowsky, a communications consultant who lives in Germany, created this image at the TEDSalon Berlin in June as she watched a talk from nine-time TED speaker Hans Rosling and his son Ola Rosling that used the differences between the two animals to make a point.

“A camel has two humps, and a dromedary just one,” explains Kantowksy. “Hans and Ola used the two to paint a picture of how wealth is distributed across the population. In a camel-hump-shaped world, there are many poor, no middle class and some rich; in a dromedary-hump-shaped economy, the majority of people are in the middle with few very poor and very rich. I was interested to hear that the world’s wealth is distributed in dromedary-hump pattern right now. I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

Kantowsky sought to capture this point, and others made by the pair in their talk (which will appear on TED.com in the fall) in her sketch above. It’s one of 12 that she drew freehand during the TEDSalon Berlin, using the app Paper. “It has a watercolor pencil—it’s their killer feature,” says Kantowsky. “If you have a look at #madewithpaper on Twitter, you’ll realize that it’s kind of like a popular Instagram filter. You see a lot created with it.”

In her work, Kantowsky often uses drawing as a tool, and she recently took a workshop that got her especially interested in sketchnoting. So she was excited to sketch talks in the TEDSalon Berlin. “Having watched only single talks before, the salon experience was new to me,” says Kantowsky. “All the talks came together to form the theme ‘Bits of Knowledge.’ It brought together narratives on data, networks and their disruptive power.”

But the Roslings’ talk was by far and away Kantowsky’s favorite. “I admired their technique—a quiz—to teach us that we have false assumptions about how the world works,” she says. “They were very effective in showing me that I have to re-assess my view of the world. They would be great communications consultants!”

See all of Kantowsky’s sketches below:

[slideshare id=36458214&doc=140630-bitsofknowledge-sketchedbykantafiore-140630061827-phpapp02]

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

Some great ideas make you want to get up and dance. Ever wondered what Stewart Brand’s talk on de-extincting animals would sound like set to music? Even if the answer is no, which it likely is, today is your lucky day. A band called Grupo TEDx has written such a song, giving Brand’s talk some serious Latin flair. Listening may well inspire hip-shaking.

Grupo TEDx is a cumbia band assembled to promote last year’s TEDxBuenosAires. It brought together musicians with a passion for TED Talks and, together, they crafted songs about some of their favorites. Naturally, they chose two blockbuster talks from TEDxBuenosAires to set to music—Jorge Melguizo’s “Medellîn, the creative city” and Lisa Solmirano’s “Inclusion through sports.” But they also crafted songs based on Brand’s TED Talk, “The dawn of de-extinction—are you ready?,” Stephen Johnson’s talk, “Where good ideas come from,” Timothy Prestero’s talk, “An incubator designed for people, not awards” and Alastair Parvin’s talk, “Architecture for the people, by the people.” See what the band is about in the video below.

“We wanted to make these ideas even more popular,” says Javier Mentasti, the executive creative director at Ogilvy and Mather Argentina whose team came up with the idea for the band and made it a reality. “We wanted to use the famous Latin American beat—cumbia—to put the talks into rhythms and into the mouth of every single person singing.”

He says that the band intentionally chose a wide range of talks for their songs. “We tried to cover all the TED world—technology, culture, innovation,” Mentasti says. “Every song brings out an idea that we thought would inspire Latin American people the most. But, between us, ‘Medellîn’ was our favorite. Great talk, and great for cumbia.”

Alastair Parvin, for one, was very excited to hear the cumbia version of his talk. “Frankly, it makes the original talk seem rather dull by comparison! I think from now on I’ll make a point of only ever giving talks if these guys can come and be the backing band,” he says. “On a more serious note, though, there is something quite cool about the idea of reviving the traditional idea of storytelling  in music, of spreading ideas like traveling folk musicians and taking ideas out of their academic setting. I like the idea of it being overheard by accident somewhere incredibly unexpected.”

In all, Grupo TEDx played 30 shows, reaching an estimated 962,000 listeners. As for whether the band will ever reunite, Mentasti says it’s in the realm of possibility. “It would be difficult—this was done with a very, very low budget,” he says. “But when you get inspired by a TEDx talk, you never know.”

Listen to Grupo TEDx’s first volume of songs below. And then hope that they make more.

[bandcamp width=700 height=340 album=88013240 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

TEDSketchNotes.Tumblr.com gives you Cliffs Notes to talks from speakers like Del Harvey, Ken Robinson, Andras Forgacs and Ed Yong, in sketchbook form. The passion project of Chicago-area designer Stefani Bachetti, what sets this Tumblr apart from other sketchnote spins on talks (see them from TEDGlobal 2011, TED2012, TED2013 and TED2014) is that a new image gets posted every weekday, more or less.

“I’ve been doing sketchnotes professionally on the side for a while, and teach the occasional workshop on it,” says Bachetti. “I’m always telling people interested in getting better to go watch a bunch of TED Talks to practice. I figured if I’m always telling people to go do it, maybe I should lead by example.”

Bachetti takes notes as she watches a talk, then spends an additional 10 to 15 minutes filling in color and shading. From there, she posts the image to Tumblr. “I’ve been trying to make sure there’s a blend of ‘classics’ and newer releases,” she says of her talk selections. “I do notice myself gravitating to videos with higher view counts. But certain topics just seem to lend themselves to being visualized.” 

While she’s posted many sketches so far, Bachetti can easily pick her favorite.

“It’s probably Mary Roach’s talk, ‘10 things you didn’t know about orgasm.’ I have read several of her books and think she’s hysterical. The mood of the sketch reflects both the dynamic nature of her talk, as well as my affinity for her in general,” says Bachetti. “I’m really excited by how the series is evolving. I started out being very structured with the layouts, but am starting to experiment more with each sketch. I’m seeing how to more clearly define the flow of each talk without losing playfulness.”

See a few of her sketchnotes below. And check out many more on TEDSketchNotes.Tumblr.com »

Are you a TED fan who remixes talks on paper, in music or on video? Write kate@ted.com to have your work featured on the TED Blog. 

Kylie Dunn follows the Yellow Brick Road, with the help of the scarecrow, tin man and lion. Illustration: Matthew Dunn

Kylie Dunn has come up with the perfect analogy for her Year of TED, a self-improvement project she dreamed up in 2011 to infuse ideas from TED Talks into her everyday life. She says that the experience was akin to the Wizard of Oz, with herself playing each of the main characters.

Dunn was recently invited to give a talk about her experience at TEDxHobart in Tasmania, Australia. “I’d been watching TED Talks for years. I’d been hoarding this inspiration in my head and heart, and I decided it was time to do something with it,” she says in her TEDx talk. “There was a great analogy for the process I was going through—the journey to find my authentic self and to honor that. I may not have been following the Yellow Brick Road, but it’s a great way to explain the experience and the lessons from it … And yes, I did feel like I battled more than one Wicked Witch and an army of flying monkeys in the process.”

Below, watch Dunn’s talk for much more about what it was like to journey toward the Emerald City. And after watching, read a Q&A with Dunn about what it was like to, after years of watching, give a talk herself. Her thoughts on the process of writing a talk are truly insightful.

How did you first discover TED?

I was stumbled into the TED world back in 2007 or 2008. And I mean by that: I found TED through StumbleUpon. I’m pretty sure Jill Bolte-Taylor’s was the first TED Talk I ever watched although, having watched around 400 talks now, it is hard to remember.

Having watched a ton of talks over the years, how did you go about writing your own?

With some difficulty! I’ve watched so many amazing and inspiring talks that the bar in my mind was set pretty high. So, of course, I looked to the wisdom of a TED Talk — I watched Nancy Duarte’s “The secret structure of great talks.” It’s interesting because the talk I ended up giving wasn’t my initial plan. The original talk was more focused on the construct of the Year of TED and how it gave me accountability. I still touch on in the talk, but overall if felt too dry and it didn’t get into enough of the nitty gritty about the activities. So I went back to the Nancy Duarte talk, and started again with what I had wanted to achieve from this project. I got the idea to group the talks instead of give a laundry list and, once I did that, everything started to fall into place.

The rehearsals with the organizing team and other speakers were a valuable part of the process for me. Since they didn’t know the story, they could point out the things that didn’t make sense, the areas where I needed to explain more or remove something. That helped me make the talk a lot tighter, and a lot more personal in many ways. For some reason, they really wanted to know about the parts where I failed and struggled. You know, the bits that are so easy to stand up and talk about.

How did you start to recognize the parallels between your Year of TED and the Wizard of Oz?

That idea came to me in the fifth month of the Year of TED. It started with a comment I made about feeling like I’d gone down the rabbit hole. That’s about the only parallel to Alice in Wonderland, but it started me thinking whether there was some analogy that worked – some story of a transformative journey that focused on finding yourself. It wasn’t much of a leap from there to the Wizard of Oz. The parallels just leapt out at me. With the lead characters wanting a brain, a heart, courage and to get home, it occurred to me that — when you broke everything down — this was the core of what I was doing. I love how that’s come together for me as a way of explaining some of the core lessons from the project. Last January, I wrote a blog post about it, but the analogy has taken on a life of its own in the last few months. Which is why I wanted to include it in the talk.

How did you handle the stage fright of giving a talk?

Does anyone handle it? I feel like I just pushed through because I wanted it so much. It was weird for me because this isn’t the first time I’ve presented to an audience — I’ve done that a few times in my life. It’s not even the first time I’ve spoken about My Year of TED — I presented to a smaller group last year. But this was something altogether different because it was at a TEDx event, and I knew it would be recorded and therefore very discoverable. It also meant no notes, so part of the coping process was rehearsing at least five times a day in the week leading up to the event. This included giving the talk in the shower or when I was driving the car. Sometimes, I think I was even doing it in my sleep.

The thing that was great was being able to rehearse in the space the day before the event. It gave my brain a calmness of, “Oh I’ve done this already, so I can do it again.” That helped me sleep, actually, which was very beneficial. Since I spoke last at the event, I had many hours of watching other speakers to work the stress levels back up. But once I walked onto the red dot and the spotlights went on, I sort of went into auto-pilot. It was quite surreal. I felt calmer than I appear to be on camera.

What surprised you most about the experience of giving a talk?

Just how difficult it was to verbalize some of my experiences. I felt that since I had been quite fearless in writing about my faults and failings on the blog, that talking about them wouldn’t be too daunting. But I found that saying out loud how broken you are increases the vulnerability ten-fold. The first time I read out the talk, I was teary and my voice cracked — and that was just to my incredibly supportive partner, Derek. The rehearsals with the organizers and other speakers were a little easier, but still hard. I was worried about breaking down into a blubbering mess on stage. The speaker coaches were great, though, and along with the curator, they encouraged me to be even braver with what I was willing to include.

The other surprise was how much I needed visual feedback from the audience. I couldn’t see the audience for the most part, and it’s very daunting to stand in a darkened room and bare your soul to a room of strangers. It helps that the people at the event were very supportive and engaged with all of the speakers, so I felt safe in the room. That made a huge difference.

If could only recommend one single TED Talk to the people you love from now on, which one would it be?

Mine, of course. But seriously… I knew that you were going to ask me a question like this. After the number of talks I’ve watched, it’s like asking a parent to pick their favorite child – it depends on the day and the mood we’re all in.

A large part of me wants to say Susan Cain’s “The power of introverts,” because it’s so universal. If you are an introvert it helps you get that there is nothing wrong with you, and if you aren’t an introvert it should help you understand that you need to stop trying to fix us. But then there are Brené Brown’s talks, which are great for helping people understand that shame and vulnerability are universal, and learning to overcome the hurdles of perfection is the only way to live. And of course, I want the people I love to be happy. Neil Pasricha’s “The 3 A’s of Awesome” was fantastic at improving my general happiness.

If I have to pick one though, my choice is Philip Zimbardo’s “The psychology of time.” It’s nice and short, so that would work well for a lot of the people I love. But mostly, I’d chose it because the activity that I did around this talk had such a profound effect on me. I would also hope that because it is such a sharp talk would inspire them to learn more — not only about that topic, but about TED as a whole.

That is a very unfair question to ask me though. If you asked me next week I’m sure I would give a different answer.

Check out Dunn’s e-book, 30 Days of Drive: A Practical Guide from my Year of TED. Or read more about her at her website.

Chris Bailey runs the website A Year of Productivity, and watched 70 hours of TED Talks in a single week. He says, “Picking a TED Talk is like picking a song.”

Chris Bailey might be the most productive man you’d ever hope to meet. At least, that’s his goal. In May of this year, he committed to a year-long project in which he would do anything and everything to make his life more efficient. So far, that has included living in isolation, only using his smartphone for an hour a day, and getting up at 5:30am every morning.

Most recently, he decided to watch 70 hours of TED Talks in 7 days. Yes, in the span of a week, Bailey watched 296 talks, beginning with Meg Jay’s “Why 30 is not the new 20,”  ending with Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley’s “Mapping ideas worth spreading” and taking meticulous notes on everything in between. In the end, he compiled very efficient lists of 100 things he learned, the 7 characteristics of highly effective TED speakers and 10 talks to make you more productive.

We had to hear more. So we called Bailey at home to talk more about why he values productivity so highly — and what it was like to watch so many freaking TED Talks in one go. Below, an edited version of our conversation.

What prompted your year of productivity experiments?

I graduated on May 1^st with a business degree and, while I had two job offers, I thought, “If there’s a time when I can do this project, it’s now.” So between school and work, I am taking a one-year sabbatical to just devour everything I can get my hands on about productivity and write about it.

Would you say that you’re a naturally productive person? Or is it something that you’ve had to train in yourself?

I think it’s more natural than anything. I’m not sure if this is a good thing, but I always feel a little bit guilty when I’m not using my time the best that I can. The way time works, you have 24 drops of it every day so you might as well make the best of them. No matter what you do, there is a cost to it. If you’re spending time with the love of your life, that’s very valuable time but it’s also time when you’re not helping the world. You have to make choices. I really do subscribe to the philosophy, “Why do anything if you’re not going to do it right?” I take that to the work that I do, to school when I was in it, and now to A Year of Productivity.

Why do you think the concept of productivity resonates with people? I’m thinking of the phrase “productive member of society,” or “fitter, happier, more productive” from Radiohead’s OK Computer. Why is the idea of accomplishing things in a short amount of time so appealing?

It’s very much a part of our cultural vernacular, and I think rightfully so. We live in a very fast-paced world, and getting more done in a shorter amount of time is what most people want to do. But I think, increasingly, people have varying definitions of productivity. Some people might see it as getting as much out of the time that they have as they can. Some people might see it as getting more done in less time. And some people might see productivity as being able to work for six hours instead of 10, and then having more energy and time to spend with friends and family. I think what makes the concept so appealing is people can project onto productivity what means the most to them. People have different values, different priorities, and depending on those, they can mold their definition and interpret productivity to fit who they are.

Which was harder for you: living in seclusion for 10 days, or using your smartphone for only an hour a day for three months?

I’m on my smartphone all day long — it’s glued to my pocket, it’s another appendage, it’s attached to my hip. So that was kind of a reprogramming of my life, in a way. The smartphone experiment was longer, but I think on the whole, the difficulty of that experiment was spread out over the three months while the difficulty of living in reclusion was very concentrated. The good part about the reclusion experiment was that I knew there was an end in sight. Whatever happened, however my mood changed throughout the course of the experiment, I could always tell myself, “Okay, I only have five more days of this to go.” It was very emotionally draining, partly because I had no social interactions during the experiment and partly because I had no exposure to sunlight.

How do you set goals and targets for yourself with your experiments? Ten days of seclusion sounds like a lot to me!

I wanted to do an amount of time that pushed my limits. When I design an experiment, I want to make sure that it is not so completely outside of my comfort zone that I panic when I think about it, but that I also won’t be comfortable. So I play with different lengths of time. Ten days is a nice even number. A lot of my experiments are for seven days, which is of course a week. They’re both numbers that everybody can understand. Because not only do I have to do these experiments — I want people to read about them when I’m done. When it’s a nice round number, I think that makes it a lot easier for me to digest it, as well as for me to write about it. So me using my smartphone for an hour a day for three months — that’s a quarter of a year. I’m also working on an experiment where I’m reducing my body fat from 17% to 10%, while gaining 10 pounds of lean muscle mass. 10 pounds of lean muscle mass — that’s a number that a lot of bodybuilders aspire to gain. It’s a lot. It’s a goal that’s out of my comfort zone, but not into my panic zone.

Why did you decide to do an experiment with TED Talks?

Well, I love TED Talks. Every week, I go through a couple hours worth of talks to see what’s new. I love being inspired by interesting people, as well as by their ideas. I wanted to surround myself completely in the feeling of TED for one week, and see, “What characteristics do the best speakers at TED have? What characteristics do the best TED Talks have?” My thought was: this is where some of the most fascinating people from all around the world gather together, and I want to immerse myself in it as a productivity experiment. But my project is a year of productivity, so I wanted to spin it to be more about productivity. So I experimented with information retention and my energy levels and my focus, through taking breaks, through consuming different amounts of caffeine, and through my meditation practice, to be mindful of how these things affected one another.

In all, you watched 296 talks?

I did.

How did you pick talks? Some you watched are kind of obscure.

A quarter of the talks I watched were submitted by readers. Before I set out on this one-week adventure, I put out a call and asked, “Do you have any TED Talks that inspired you, or changed your game, or motivated you, or made you more productive?” I got about two days worth of talks that way. After that, I ignored the homepage and searched for topics like sleep and motivation, and I found a lot of fantastic playlists. There’s ants, there’s journalism, there’s the Middle East, there’s piano TED Talks. Any kind of talk that you can imagine, chances are it’s in a list. I think picking a TED Talk is like picking a song — you really can find one for every mood.

Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20 The first talk you watched was Meg Jay on making the most of your 20s. I thought that was such an interesting choice for the first talk. How did you decide on that one?

That was actually just the first talk that someone submitted. But it was meaningful for me, because it kind of confirmed the attitude that I have about my 20s. I’m 23, and this talk really struck a chord with the way I work and think, in that, you shouldn’t waste time. Time is a terrible thing to waste or just burn through, especially right off. And so that talk really connected with me.

What are the three talks that stuck with you the most?

The talks that really stuck out at me, out of the 300 talks that I watched, were the ones that moved me or that made me laugh. Every talk — some were dense with information, some were motivational, but what you remember are the talks that make you feel. Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what Definitely “Love no matter what” by Andrew Solomon. It’s just a beautiful talk about the human condition and about acceptance. It was one of the most emotional talks — one of the most inspiring and warm talks — that I watched throughout the course of the experiment. And Andrew Solomon’s presentation style is so not parallel to what he talks about. When he gets up on stage, you think, “This is going to be rigid, this is going to be a very formal talk.” But then all that kind of washes away, and what you’re left with is his message to love no matter what, to accept the people in your life no matter what, and that’s a message that struck a really strong chord with me.

Then of course Ken Robinson’s “Schools kill creativity.” That made me laugh like no other TED Talk did throughout the course of the experiment. There’s a quote from a famous monk: “You have to open the mouth before you can throw in the pill of wisdom.” I think humor is an incredible way to connect with people, and that’s something that he did so well in that talk. Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music

And the third talk: Benjamin Zander’s “The transformative power of classical music.” For a lot of people, including myself, I’ve been to a few classical musical concerts and I’ve enjoyed myself. It’s been calming, but I wasn’t able to connect with the music. He takes a topic that some people are afraid of — that some people misunderstand and other people push away — and he brings it down to earth. He really makes classical music your friend during his TED Talk, and that’s what I really enjoyed.

In general, how would you say that you feel when you feel like you’re wasting time?

It depends on if my intention was to waste time in the first place. If you intend to have a lazy afternoon and watch a marathon of Breaking Bad while you’re eating Ben & Jerry’s on the couch, and you do that, then I think you were productive, because it was your intention to do that. If I intend to waste time, I feel very, very productive. It’s if my actions don’t match up with I wanted to do that I don’t consider myself productive.

What’s something that you should never apply the rules of productivity to?

People. Being surrounded by people you love. But now that I say that, I really do think you should apply productivity to everything, even if it’s hanging out with people you love. You might just need to rework your definition of productivity a bit for that situation. Productivity, when you’re spending time with a loved one, might not mean getting the most done in the least amount of time. Productivity in a situation like that might be deeply investing in that relationship, so that the relationship compounds and provides you with even deeper rewards in the future. I think you should bring the attitude of productivity to everything that you do, especially when you have the right definition of productivity in the first place.

Check out some of Bailey’s articles about his Week of TED experience: