A Truly Inspiring TED Talk About the Spinning Beach Ball of Death

The crew at Improv Everywhere was invited to participate in a talk at TED, an annual conference in Long Beach, California that focuses on “Ideas Worth Sharing.”

For the conference this year, the TED curators approached me about staging something unexpected to surprise their audience. We had previously staged a musical prank at a conference, but I wanted to do something new and different for TED. I came up with the idea to have a fake speaker give a talk and make it seem like his big moment in the spotlight had been ruined by a computer crash. Apple users love to hate the notorious Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I started with that image and set out to heighten it to absurdity.