How about a good laugh?

Or even a minor one?

Friends, we’re in Low Power Mode, which is what I call it when I take vacations or otherwise have to take a couple of days off from writing. During Low Power Mode, we skip the “7 other things” and revisit some “greatest hits” from the last 5 years of the newsletter.

If you look at the official TED Talk website, they have an ongoing playlist of the top 25 most-watched TED Talks of all time.

The playlist runs seven hours, and the transcripts are a combined 70,000 words. That's like a 200-page book. It would take a while to watch them all.

Still, I wondered if analyzing the language across all 25 talks might yield some takeaways. With nearly 1 billion total views, even though they're about different subjects, do these TED Talks have anything in common?

So, I took some time, and I copied and pasted the transcripts of all 25 TED Talks into a single text document. Then, I ran the text through a word cloud generator.

Sure enough, there was a word that popped out. That word was: “laughter.”

Across 25 talks, there were 380 instances of laughter, which works out to .948 laughs every 60 seconds—just shy of a literal “laugh a minute."

Now, I don’t think any of the speakers ever actually says the word in their TED Talks. Instead, it's inserted into the transcripts every time the audiences chuckles or laughs, with parenthesis around it: “(Laughter.)"

And frankly, barring a few exceptions, these TED Talks aren’t exactly uproariously funny. Instead, the "laughter" in the transcripts seems more like the audience communicating with the speaker: giving auditory feedback when things are funny, sure, but also more often to express agreement, or out of politeness.

It's related to "applause," which appeared 95 times throughout the transcripts. Combine both words, and we reach an average of 1.2 verbal audience reactions per minute.

Or, for that matter the sheer number of question marks: 579 in total.

That's compared to 3,910 “periods” used to end sentences, which means that fully 15 percent of the time, the speakers weren't giving information. Instead, they were inviting their audiences to ponder a question and stay engaged.

OK, here's my big takeaway, which I think has implications for anyone who ever has to communicate anything to anyone else. (I think that’s everybody.)

Calling these top TED Talks, "talks," is a bit of a misnomer. They're more like guided conversations, with the speakers giving the audience prompt after prompt after prompt—practically begging and cajoling them, in fact, to stay engaged.

Combine my admittedly unusual metrics, and you find that there are a total of 1,061 instances across 25 talks during which the speaker either asks the audience a question or delivers a line inducing laughter or applause.

That works out to about once every 21 seconds.

No matter what they're talking about—from Pamela Meyer's "How to Spot a Liar," to Amy Cuddy's, "Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are," to Elizabeth Gilbert's, "Your Elusive Creative Genius"—they keep doing the same thing: continuously prompting the audience to engage, connect, and stay interested.

So, maybe think about this exercise the next time you have to sit through a not-so-great presentation, or if you want to explore or explain something to someone.

Maybe the secret is realizing that your goal isn’t just to share information. It's to prompt engagement. Because anybody can give a presentation. It's another level entirely to have a conversation.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Thanks for reading. Photo is just a fair use screenshot from the TED website. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.