In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than...

His Holiness the Karmapa talks about how he was discovered to be the reincarnation of a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism. In telling his story, he urges us to work on not just technology and design, but the technology and design of the...

Today, cosmic rays are used to understand things like supernovas, but in the early 1900s, they helped us discover brand-new subatomic particles long before the first accelerators.

Adults tend to think of kids as "future citizens" -- their ideas and opinions will matter someday, just not today. But kids make up a quarter of the population, so shouldn't they have a say in what the world they'll inherit will look...

We've broken down our preconceived notions about mass and time, now let's redefine what they really are. Since we know that time is not a universal constant, what is? Matt defines causal order and explains how even though time may look...

What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you're not sure you want to do just one thing for the rest of your life, you're not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist Emilie Wapnick describes the kind of people she...

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long,...

Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.

Is your school or workplace divided between the "creatives" versus the practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own...

In which John Green teaches you about the United States in the 1920s. They were known as the roaring 20s, but not because there were lions running around everywhere. In the 1920s, America's economy was booming, and all kinds of...

Imagine if the only videos on YouTube were people looking for love. That could have been the world we lived in! Before it had 1.9 billion users per day, YouTube started as a video-based dating service, complete with the truly excellent...

Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance...

In this revelatory talk, technologist Kayvon Tehranian explores why NFTs -- digital assets that represent a certificate of ownership on the internet -- are a technological breakthrough. Learn how NFTs are putting power and economic...

What is a mistake? By talking through examples with his improvisational jazz quartet, Stefon Harris walks us to a profound truth: many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don't react to them appropriately.

Bruce McCall paints a retro-future that never happened -- full of flying cars, polo-playing tanks and the RMS Tyrannic, "The Biggest Thing in All the World." At Serious Play '08, he narrates a brisk and funny slideshow of his...

My open letter to the universe.

Hank unravels the fascinating yarn of how the world came to use so-called Arabic numerals -- from the scholarship of ancient Hindu mathematicians, to Muslim scientist Al-Khwarizmi, to the merchants of medieval Italy.

Many economists think that an eternally growing economy is necessary to keep improving people's lives, and that if the global economy stops growing, people would fight more over the fixed amount of value that exists, rather than working...

Does collecting more data lead to better decision-making? Competitive, data-savvy companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix have learned that data analysis alone doesn't always produce optimum results. In this talk, data scientist...

The internet is full of all sorts of wild claims about shadow governments, lizard people, and the shape of the earth. How can these stories inspire tin foil hats despite hard evidence against them?

Some experts have brought Minecraft into the classroom, allowing teachers to customize lessons and students to engage with concepts in new ways. And while educational games aren't new, Minecraft has some unique advantages that could...

The Kepler space telescope found a star that randomly gets really dim, and some people are suggesting the star's being blocked by a huge alien structure. It's probably not aliens, though.

Europe was in transition politically and culturally at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, we're looking at the dawn of modern science, and the rise of Modernism in the arts, especially in music, dance, and visual arts. We'll look...

We're generally taught that chromosomes determine an animal's sex, but it is way more nuanced than that.