The 20 Best TED Talks of All-Time

Published on April 4, 2013 at 8:56 pm by Alexandr Oleinic in Lists

One of the greatest ideas of the 21st century are TED talks. Being available to everyone with an internet connection, these talks offer some interesting insights and ideas on all subjects one can imagine. Each talk has 15 minutes and is conducted by leaders and visionaries in various fields. Thus, it’s important to look at the best TED talks of all-time. But first, some background.

With the slogan “Ideas worth spreading,” TED is a nonprofit company which holds a global set of conferences. It started in 1984 as a conference based on three subjects: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Later its goal became much wider and now includes many subjects. TED talks started as a simple way of sharing ideas within the world, but rapidly their popularity spread in every corner of the planet. In this way, TED’s website was redesigned in order to center around TED talks. Currently, TED talks have reached over one billion views.

As you’ll see in our list of the best TED talks of all-time, as a whole, they feature many influential people, visionaries and the smartest thinkers from their respective fields. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, Larry Page, Sergey Brin represent only a small fraction of those who have participated at TED conferences in the past, and thus, whose talks are now available to everyone. There are over 1,300 speeches available currently on TED’s website, and they all can serve as a wonderful source of inspiration for everyone who watches them.

As Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, said in an interview: “The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.”

We have gathered the 20 best TED talks of all-time. They are the main contributors to the impressive number of a billion views reached by TED.