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The Power of Vulnerability (TEDx Houston)
Brown's 2010 TEDx Houston talk — the viral lecture that brought vulnerability research to mass attention and catalyzed a decade of subsequent cultural work.
The Power of Vulnerability is the June 2010 TEDx Houston talk in which Brown first brought her vulnerability research to mass public attention. The twenty-minute talk — initially delivered to a local audience of a few hundred — became one of the most-viewed TED talks in the platform's history, accumulating tens of millions of views in the years following its release. Its impact was disproportionate to its technical content; the talk did not present new research findings but articulated the existing findings in a form that made them viscerally comprehensible to a general audience. The viral reach created the cultural conditions in which Brown's subsequent books found their readership, her frameworks became operational in organizations, and her engagement with the AI transition could occur at scale.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The talk's power derives from Brown's own vulnerability in delivering it. She describes in the talk her breakdown after her initial attempt to study vulnerability produced results she did not