Robinson gave three TED talks on the importance of creativity in education, viewed over 80 million times (2017). At the time of his death in August 2020, his presentation "Do schools kill creativity?" was the most watched TED talk of all time, with 66.3 million views on the TED channel and millions more on YouTube. It has been translated into 62 languages. In April 2013, he gave a talk titled "How to escape education's death valley", in which he outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish – and how current American education culture works against them. In 2010, the Royal Society of Arts animated one of Robinson's speeches about changing education paradigms. The video was viewed nearly half a million times in its first week on YouTube and as of December 2017 has been viewed more than 15 million times.