Skip to Content

The 10 Most Annoying TED Talks Of All-Time

Bill Gates, David Cameron and other smug speakers

By Peter Bradshaw
this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Whether it's unpopular politicians pretending to be your mate or rockstars sermonising on poverty, here are the ten worst TED talks of all time.

10: Simon Sinek - How Great Leaders Inspire Action (2009)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Motivational speaker Simon Sinek asks: "Why is it that Apple is the market leader?" "Why is it that Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement?" Sinek provides reasonable answers to these questions — it's all about the fundamental, inspiring passion — but this is surface-skimming stuff, and the juxtaposition of Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and TiVo is glib and politically naïve.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/u4ZoJKF_VuA

9. Kate Hartman - The Art of Wearable Communication (2011)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Wacky artist, designer and author Kate Hartman demonstrates the quirky things that she has designed: offbeat silly hats which have a sort of funnel that allows you to talk to your own brain. Or something. If this was a spoof it would be… sort of not funny.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/X7ui-iAp8Pc

8. Jason Seiken - If PBS Can Do It, So Can You! (2012)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Jason Seiken is the former digital chief of America's venerable Public Broadcasting Service who spoke about how very clever he was in making boring old PBS super-hip in the online age. This content of this self-important video is what got Seiken a brief and ill-fated job as editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o3n0LIwAyWM

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

7. Brené Brown - The Power of Vulnerability (2010)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Smug, platitudinous and all but meaningless. An awful lot of self-help waffle here about the importance of letting yourself be vulnerable, because without laying yourself open you won't experience joy or emotional growth: let yourself "be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen". Of course, Brown is herself a very smooth performer who I suspect would die rather than actually be "vulnerably seen" at a prestige event like this.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iCvmsMzlF7o

6. Bill Clinton - My Wish: Rebuilding Rwanda (2007)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Clinton is a TED turn who is also much mocked by other TED speakers. And his unendurably boring and conceited waffling about how we can help Rwanda build a better healthcare system is all too obviously, at least in part, a matter of pulling moral rank on everyone with a huge moral subject. He just drones on and on and on.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ft24bHtNJwY

5. Bill Gates - Innovating to Zero! (2010)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Wait. Did I say Bill Clinton was boring? Bill can match Bill, stifled yawn for stifled yawn. His talk is about energy and climate change, impeccably important subjects, of course, but delivered in a kind of unvarying, muted harangue of self-regard.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JaF-fq2Zn7I

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

4. Malcolm Gladwell - Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce (2004)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Gladwell is a natural TED star but this is annoying. He is smugly promoting his book, entitled Blink. Then he launches into an almost self-parodic Gladwellian riff — the discovery of something offbeat and super-quirky and little-known, in this case the career of market researcher Howard Moskowitz and his ideas about spaghetti sauce. It's a bit dull, compared with the great days of The Tipping Point.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iIiAAhUeR6Y

3. David Cameron - The Next Age of Government (2010)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Horrendous and intolerable. Pink-cheeked Cameron smugly embraces the open-necked-shirtness of TED but looks and sounds like someone at the Eton College Debating Society with much false modesty about how unpopular politicians are. He goes in for heavy-handed and redundant PowerPoint questions flashed up on screen. The main one is: why on earth are we listening to you?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3ELnyoso6vI

2. Elizabeth Gilbert - Your Elusive Creative Genius (2009)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Elizabeth Gilbert has selected a sleek all-black outfit for this occasion, which is almost insufferable. Her sense of her own bestselling super-celebrity and faux bemusement at how silly it is, are hard to take. She quotes the poet Ruth Stone on the importance of grabbing inspiration when it comes. There's nothing wrong with this. But her own prestige is worn as heavily as medieval armour.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/86x-u-tz0MA

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

1. Bono - The Good News on Poverty (2013)

this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

In his TED talk, Bono delivers that distinctive part of himself in a much purer form than that which is revealed on stage while singing — his profound inability to get over himself. The fact that it is him up on that TED stage, him, is something that Bono finds absolutely fascinating and intriguing. Poverty relief is his passion. Fair enough. But did he need to be so self-congratulatory about it?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/BdDkF0Lw-ag

Watch Next
 
preview for Esquire UK - Featured Videos
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Culture

shogun

Shōgun: Your Guide to Understanding the Characters

best movies of 2023

The Best Movies of 2024

interrailing

Strangers on a Train: Interrailing With My Father

cosmo jarvis

Cosmo Jarvis on the Runaway Success of ‘Shōgun’

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below