The Trouble with TED

The promise and perils of our cultural obsession with intellectual tourism (Part 3), brought to you by Zip Recruiter

“I am accused of simplifying things. I always say: why is that an accusation? That’s called journalism.”

-Malcolm Gladwell, on his critics

“The reforms that ask the least of us are often the ones most apt to go viral.”

-Jesse Singhal, on fad psychology

“This total indifference to outcomes and this prioritizing of cute solutions over effective solutions is one of the most corrosive impacts of this brand of airport books.”

-Michael Hobbes, on the legacy of Nudge

1. Have you met TED?

During the summers between my years at Kenyon I had a ritual of making breakfast and watching a TED talk or two while drinking a (in retrospect) worrying amount of French press Peet’s coffee. Never before has one man accomplished so little while so caffeinated. Still, the naive 20 something that I was, I emerged from these bougie Berkeley breakfasts convinced that I now had the knowledge necessary to eradicate poverty, end racism, and halt climate change in its tracks. What a blessing this TED thing was, right? It seemed like it was only a matter of time until these inspirational speakers all teamed up in an Avengers-esque fashion to solve all of the world’s problems. After all, if we already knew about all this stuff that could save the world, what was stopping us from saving it already?

While I waited for the answer to that question, one thing that was crystal clear was that I wasn’t the only one that really enjoyed Gladwell’s books, Freakonomics, or TED Talks. All of them grew to take over the intellectual airwaves of the post 9/11 world. Tellingly, each eventually got its own podcast spinoff: Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” NPR darling “The TED Radio Hour,” and of course Freakonomics which by my count has 5 different podcasts under its intellectual umbrella. You can’t throw a frisbee without hitting one of them, their offspring, or their imitators in the modern podcast circuit.

The rise of this kind of media is part of a larger economic shift that author Daniel Drezner dubs the emergence of “the ideas industry.” In his book of the same name, he outlines how during the past few decades political polarization, heightened inequality, and eroding trust in authority drove people to stop looking to government for solutions and start embracing thought leaders peddling their groundbreaking ideas. Capitalism and mass media of course make it tremendously profitable to have a “world-changing” idea, which people will pay good money to consume via book, video, or podcast. It’s a predictable and lucrative formula.

Yet, as astute readers of Reddit noticed long ago, while the front page announces a cure for cancer and bacteria that eat plastic waste seemingly every day, these game-changing innovations seem to perpetually remain on the horizon. So too have I begun to wonder when the bright futures promised by TED will power pose their way into reality, exactly. Put another way: is this content actually anything more than entertainment for fancy people so they can feel smarter at dinner parties?

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with intellectual content being entertaining or with entertainment becoming intellectual in nature. Our culture and economy today are so dependent on distraction and entertainment that I frankly don’t blame anyone for looking to the realm of entertainment for enlightenment on how we should live. It’s easy to do and feels great. The one thing intellectual tourism can reliably do well is give you that exhilirating rush of understanding. Yet this quick hit of intellectual stimulation also betrays its limits as a genre.

TED Talks, let’s not forget, got their start as a form of brainy entertainment for college educated elites. Long before the tantalizing talks were free online, TED was a prestigious conference in California. The incentives of this nerdy gathering were never to truly change the world, but mainly to tickle its wealthy patrons in a way that felt worth the exorbitant price of the tickets. At $5,000-$10,000 for the cheapest ones, this gives TED the dubious honor of being the only tickets more expensive and coveted by white people than the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. With that larger context in mind, it’s honestly not surprising that few of the ideas that have gone viral at TED have gone on to do all that much off of the stage.

An idea that makes a great TED Talk is likely to be either emotionally moving, surprising, counterintuitive, or funny. Yet being able to deliver a speech for 18 minutes that soundly incorporates these attributes is in no way a guarantee that the content of your speech is:

a) correct

b) not wildly oversimplified in order to be entertaining

c) in any way applicable or scalable to the large and frustrating world off the prestigious TED stage.

My question for TED is the same as my main critique of Andrew Huberman: At this point, is this kind of knowledge actually what we’re missing to improve our world?

2. What’s missing from our love affair with “ideas worth spreading?”

I’m fairly convinced that the biggest thing TED Talks and Gladwell books actually accomplish is making consumers of them seem marginally more interesting and intelligent at cocktail parties. I know this from personal experience. After viewing Malcolm Gladwell’s famous tomato sauce TED Talk in my early twenties, I noticed that I could fairly easily convince people that I knew much more about tomato sauce, marketing, consumer psychology, and Malcolm Gladwell than I really did. It’s the same sort of intellectual paper tiger phenomena that I’d observed in college when I realized that by browsing the front page of Reddit regularly I could suddenly interject on a wide variety of social & cultural issues, provided that no one asked any follow up questions. Content like this can fast track us to a form of “faux-enlightenment.” The danger is that we trade being informed about many topics with actually being involved in any of them.

My stance today is that new ideas, whether they come from peer-reviewed scientific papers (where, not to be a buzzkill, but less than one third of psychology studies can be successfully replicated) or a popular book or podcast, are just one relatively small piece in actually changing the world we live in. They are to social change what packets of seeds are to gardening. I worry the overhyped popularity of the ideas industry has created a bunch of people with tons of seeds but little skill or interest in actually planting them. Just as stockpiling seeds will not lead to a thriving garden, neither will loading up on a bunch of new or groundbreaking ideas change the world we live in. The real work of change is in implementation, scaling, and then assessing ones work.

This asymmetry of knowledge intake to action output can easily lead to a state of hyper-informed impotence. In this world, we’ll all be capable of quoting witty aphorisms and learnings from podcasts, NPR stories, and airport books ad nauseam, but remain largely uninvolved in changing the very things we can so articulately critique at dinner. Revolutions aren’t fought and won by counterintuitive arguments changing hands over natural wine. True progress has never come only from the intellectual realm.

In the environmental movement, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring mattered, but so too did the passage and enforcement of the Clean Air Act. In the fitness world, you quickly learn that starting any exercise routine is better than endlessly researching the optimum one for you on r/fitness or via Huberman’s circuitous podcasts. Let’s not let the heady rush that brainy content delivers limit us to merely looking for more similar content to entertain us. We all can and should do more than just get incrementally smarter about explanations for what’s wrong with ourselves and the world; we must at some point venture out into it, get our hands dirty, and work together to clean things up. Obtaining eye-opening knowledge should always be thought of as an invigorating starting point, but in our world it’s often framed as a cozy destination.

It’s the same reason why finding exceptional recipes is absolutely not the secret to becoming a restaurant chef. The knowledge and ratios of ingredients contained in recipes is perhaps less than 5% of what goes into successful restaurant cooking. The majority is managing a space, managing people, managing money, managing time, and doing all of the above consistently with inherently perishable ingredients under great stress while facing the whims of the fickle and Yelp-happy public.

Yet while people don’t expect that buying a stack of cookbooks will turn them into a chef, the way intellectual tourism is always framed is always that this stuff is serious, it works, and it just might be the secret to improving our world. Whether this is marketing hype or people’s assumptions is ultimately much less relevant than the staying power and cultural impact of these ideas. Like it or not, we now live in a world where counterintuitive explanations for plane crashes and organ donations go viral in the same way as Alison Roman’s caramelized shallot pasta did. Yet while Alison Roman would get flak if her recipe turned out to taste terrible, few people seem to care that the plane crash explanation was patently false (and maybe racist) and the organ donation example never actually achieved the outcomes it was assumed to. More distressingly, when an Asiana Airlines flight crashed at SFO in 2013, Gladwell’s rancid theory about the “cultural causes of airplane crashes” was dutifully trotted out by multiple news outlets in the name of a good faith inquiry. Cass Sunstein of Nudge got a prominent role in the Obama administration despite the fact that tweaking the check boxes for organ donation forms, his marquee example of the power of nudges, didn’t actually change organ donation rates. Nobody bothered to ask Sunstein about the fact that the country with the highest level of organ donation rates, Spain, didn’t achieve this via cute nudges on their forms, they did it through a concerted public health campaign that took decades.

So, the bigger reason that the popularity of this content is troubling for me isn’t just the comfortable complacency it encourages in consumers; it’s that it often steers us to pursue the wrong solutions to very real problems. The ideas that triumph in the hellish Jurassic World for intellectuals that we’re living in are cute, contrarian, and marketable, but rarely thoughtful, useful, or correct. The veracity and merits of an idea have been utterly divorced from its virality. Thanks, I hate it.

3. What are the real joys and limits of being an effective storyteller?

Today, Malcolm Gladwell’s writing has become so successful and influential that he has become his own brand. His name is now a shorthand for the modern public intellectual. His work is enviably influential, not only read by millions, but giving him consistent access to business and governmental titans, who drink in his every word in exchange for a six figure speaking fee. He has become a god amongst men in the world of thought leadership. It’s not surprising then he was a role model for me and so many other aspiring writers and intellectuals.

After binging a Malcolm Gladwell book as a young man, I’d reliably feel this buzzing excitement that was hard to put into words yet often left me feeling oddly hollow after it faded. In his delightful Medium article, about Gladwell’s writing style, Tom Rivers describes this feeling perfectly:

“After finishing Gladwell’s books, you feel as if you can explain so much, with such simple concepts. You feel special, intellectually as if you’ve stumbled across a secret that no-one else knows about. You will bring up what you now know in every conversation and dinner party you attend for the next six months. People seem impressed, at least to your face.”

This is the true magic of Malcolm Gladwell. He’s undeniably a very talented, successful writer. Unlike Andrew Huberman, I genuinely enjoy his content, even if I now understand much of it to be incomplete or problematic. The way he compellingly intertwines science, journalism, and persuasive nonfiction writing is second to none. His most enviable skill in my book is his ability to translate complex ideas from one discipline and put them into terms that the general public can not only relate to, but will find delightful and inspiring.

Yet what’s key to remember is that translating ideas is not the same as making these ideas real. I underline this distinction because it’s often forgotten about or obscured in how this type of content is presented, discussed, and absorbed into our culture. I think what people miss is that what makes this type of media so electric and fun to consume and what makes it so limiting and problematic are actually the exact same attributes. Ultimately, we are all hopeful, emotional, storytelling creatures, not data-munching optimization robots. So the pared down, colorful, narrative approach to the world that intellectual tourism trades in is so seductive precisely because it’s inaccurate and oversimplified, not in spite of it. Like moths to a flame, we are drawn to the rosy fiction it presents as brainy truth. As a result, it can only deliver satisfaction, never salvation. The triumph of “the ideas industry” or “intellectual tourism” as I’ve dubbed it is ultimately a triumph of the marketability of behavioral economics & social psychology, that sadly says little about the merits of the ideas and people it has popularized. If anything, this sea change of content has proven the absurd truth that you can write a best-selling book and become a star of the TED Talk and podcast circuit not in spite of your ideas being wrong, obvious, or a surreal mix of both, but precisely because of these flaws.

As Henry Oliver describes it in The Common Reader:

“When I first read The Tipping Point, it was electric. “Look at the world around you.” Gladwell says in his closing lines. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.” Zing! The effect was somewhat less exciting this time around, over a dozen years later. After all, it is not the “slightest” push that is required: the case studies make that abundantly clear. People criticize Gladwell for allowing rhetoric to triumph over precision. But he knows what the literalists do not. Readers only respond to something large and exciting. The Tipping Point is more than factual reportage: like a great novel, it is a moral vision of the world, and how things could be were we to act a little differently.”

4. What happened to that aspiring sociologist?

What I know now that I didn’t know when I first read Malcolm Gladwell in high school is that I didn’t actually want to be a sociologist. I wanted to write. Thankfully Kenyon College’s sociology department let me do a lot of writing, encouraged it even. They also let me have a lot of leeway about what I got to write about. I was as obsessed with food then as I am now and my advisor and others generously encouraged me to weave together sociology and food how I saw fit. My senior thesis “Dying for Doritos? Towards a Critical Social Theory of Junk Food” was a positively Gladwellian joyride that wove together Herbert Marcuse’s theory of true and false needs, Michael Pollan quotes, studies about obesity, and terms like “hyper-palatable” with the unshakable confidence that only a 21 year old man can have.

Re-reading this thirty plus page thesis while finishing this article I was struck by both its seductively assertive language and its naiveté and tendency towards the original sin of both sociology and Malcolm Gladwell: articulately restating the obvious. Like the aspiring Gladwell that I was when I wrote it, I ended up creating something that was both surprisingly readable given the subject matter and also remarkably non-groundbreaking or terribly applicable to the real world. For better or worse, I’d created a my own mini version of intellectual tourism: a beautiful ideological diorama worth admiring for a few minutes.

Since leaving Kenyon, after a brief detour through professional cooking, I ended up in another field that let me write professionally and profusely: content marketing. While doing this work I’ve gotten a compliment at few workplaces that has stuck with me. Inevitably over a vent session with a co-worker they’ll point out that I always seem to come up with the perfect way to describe what is dysfunctional about our workplace.

This is always very flattering and validating to hear. Yet while I try to take the compliment in stride, storytelling and communications having become my craft, the larger story honestly troubles me. While I can crank out clever analogies about what isn’t working in a certain process like it’s my job (sometimes it is), that doesn’t necessarily make me any more effective at changing things. Sometimes being able to articulately phrase what’s going wrong has allowed me to persuade other people of my cause and work to turn things around. Just as often I’ve been surprised by how stubborn people and institutions are even when presented with an articulate explanation of why they ought to change. We are all entangled in so many larger institutions and incentives that they usually hamstring even the most earnest efforts to reform. Capitalism is of course the largest and most powerful impediment to most types of change. Good ideas and great stories never triumph; profitable, marketable, exploitable ones do. Or as Upton Sinclar so concisely put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

With this lens, we reach a final, sadder conclusion. A big part of why TED talks and airport books go viral is precisely because of how unchallenging they are to the status quo. Consuming one requires nothing more than a small investment of your time. It makes you feel smart as an individual, but rarely asks you to confront systems of power or change policies. It’s not a coincidence that psychology and economics are two of the dominant genres of this kind of nonfiction-as-entertainment. These fields mesh perfectly with our national obsession with individualism and free markets. Their prodigious offspring of books and podcasts endure because they’re inherently profitable. They’re easily marketable catnip for aspiring captains of industry, MBA students, and tech and finance bros. That’s why whatever timid, half-hearted ideas for reform they gesture at in their concluding chapters tend to focus on cutesy mental shifts, timid technocratic tinkering, and gentle market nudges. Content like this is intellectually provocative but also oddly de-fanged ideologically. It’s defined as much by how obliging it is to the dominant systems of power as it is by how seductively confident its arguments are.

I realize it’s a bit ironic for me to say this after spilling nearly 10,000 words on the subject, but I also think it would be a mistake to lob criticism only at the creators of this content without also considering us, the consumers. Gladwell and Dubner after all are just fulfilling a need as old as humanity: satisfying our hunger for engaging stories. We’ve long looked to stories and storytellers to help us find meaning and structure in a chaotic world. While Homer didn’t set out to write a counterintuitive tale about the hidden factors that “nudged” the Greeks into the Trojan War, I suspect if he were writing today he might have. Free markets, behavioral psychology, and marketing are to us what Gods, ships, and spears were to the ancient Greeks. So in addition to picking apart the faulty logic of pop science media, the charlatans it elevates, and the false gods it venerates, we’d do well to look in the mirror and ask when and why we started expecting our storytellers to provide us with anything more than an entertaining diversion. What makes us look to authors as prophets, leaders, or saviors? Have we so little faith left in government, social activism, and ourselves? Perhaps.

No matter what you believe, we are all left to grapple with the reality that, despite the intellectual mirages paraded by Gladwell, Dubner, Huberman and TED, reforming any person or institution from within or without is never as simple, straight forward, or elegant as they suggest. It’s never as fun or cute as we were promised or as smooth and rewarding as we’d like it to be. In fact, if you look at where real social, environmental, and political progress has come from in our history, it’s rarely been from quirky “nudges” or counterintuitive intellectual reframes. Actual progress is painful, time-consuming, collaborative, complicated, and expensive. Like the flawed protagonists of David Simon’s masterpiece The Wire, I’ve also grown to understand that real change is often messy, frustrating, and circular. More often than not things end up close to where they were at the start, with would-be reformers either converted to the dark side or repelled like a virus by an institutional immune system that sees their every effort as an existential threat. Of course, even the genius writing of The Wire can only poetically describe Baltimore’s failings, not address them. The humbling truth I’ve arrived at all these words later is that fascinating concepts only get us so far. Even great stories can only do so much. We freight them with hope at our own risk.