James Veitch's TED talks, recut into one 13-minute run

TL;DR. James Veitch has two TED talks on the same joke: what happens if you reply to the emails everyone else deletes. Together they run 17:29. The mix below cuts them to 13:36, opens on the punchline instead of the setup, and throws away both endings. That's not a highlights reel. It's a recut, and Segue is a decent tool for making one, because you're setting in and out points on the real videos rather than editing a file.

Most "best of" pages give you short moments stacked back to back. This one doesn't, and it's worth being straight about that up front. Six clips, two of them nearly four minutes long, covering about 78% of the source. What you're looking at is closer to a director's cut of two talks than a reel of their best bits.

The two talks

Both are on TED's channel, and both are Veitch working the same seam.

This is what happens when you reply to spam email was recorded at TEDGlobal>Geneva in December 2015. It runs 9:48. Veitch gets an email from a man called Solomon Odonkoh offering to ship him gold, and instead of deleting it he replies. It has 58.0 million views on YouTube and another 67.2 million on TED.com, which makes it one of the most watched talks TED has ever published.

The agony of trying to unsubscribe was recorded at TEDSummit in June 2016 and runs 7:41. A supermarket he calls SafeMart won't stop emailing him about a shop opening, so he starts emailing back. 23.1 million views on YouTube, 25.0 million on TED.com.

(View counts as of August 3, 2026.)

Why the mix opens with the ending

The first clip is the payoff of the first talk. Veitch asks Solomon to use a code, sends him a list of code words, and gets back an email written entirely in confectionery. Then the mix hard cuts to "A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails," and the setup runs from there.

That's a cold open, and it's deliberate. The first clip ends on applause, which gives the cut somewhere to land. You get the best 20 seconds of the talk before you've earned them, and then you watch Veitch earn them.

It costs you something. If you've never seen the talk, the Gummy Bear email arrives with no idea who Solomon is or why anyone is discussing gold. The trade is that nobody bounces in the first 30 seconds.

What got cut

Here's the part nobody writes down. 3:52 of the 17:29 didn't make it, and the cuts are not evenly distributed.

From the spam email talk:

• 0:35 to 0:50. The deliberation. "My hand was kind of hovering on the delete button... Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do." The mix goes straight from the email to the reply.
• 4:33 to 4:46. "Friends were saying, 'James, do you want to come for a drink?' I was like, 'I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold.'"
• 7:10 to 7:53. The only serious stretch in the talk: that he isn't being cruel, he's wasting a scammer's time, and "any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings." Plus the practical advice to use a pseudonymous email address.
• 9:11 to the end. The closing punchline. Winnie Mandela asks for 3,000 dollars, Veitch replies "I SHOT THE SHERIFF," and the screen adds "(BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY)." The mix ends one beat early, on "NO WOMAN, NO CRY."

From the unsubscribe talk:

• The first 1:08. The whole opening about his mother pulling the car over and young Veitch getting out and pretending to have died, because he was bored and found a game. That's the idea the talk is built on, and the ending calls back to it.
• 6:59 to the end. The callback itself: "don't fight the frustration. Let it be the catalyst for whimsy."

So both talks lose their last line, and the second one loses the thing that holds it together. Whether that's a good trade depends on what you want the 13 minutes for. If you're sending someone the jokes, it's fine. If you're sending them the talk, put those two back.

The code words, in full

The best bit is short enough to quote. At around 5:08 Veitch proposes a code for all further correspondence:

• Lawyer: Gummy Bear
• Bank: Cream Egg
• Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle
• Claim: Peanut M&Ms
• Documents: Jelly Beans
• Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard

He signs off "Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence." At around 6:12, Solomon replies using every one of them, asking for 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard.

YouTube time is not talk time

One practical thing, if you go to clip a TED talk yourself. TED's YouTube uploads open with about 11 seconds of title animation before the speaker says anything. TED.com lists both of these talks as exactly 10 seconds shorter than YouTube does.

It means every timestamp you've read in a transcript is roughly 11 seconds early against the video you're actually clipping. The first clip in this mix starts at 12.32 seconds, which looks arbitrary until you know it's the frame where the animation ends and Veitch says "A few years ago." Set your in point off the transcript and you'll open on a spinning logo every time. The guide to clipping TED talks covers the rest of the workflow.

How this mix was built

Paste the video, mark the in and out of each stretch you want, then chain them into one link. No download, no re-upload, no timeline to fight. The clips play from TED's real uploads, so the views still land with TED.

Two things here need Segue Pro. Chaining clips across more than one video is one, and it's scoped to videos on a single channel, which these two talks are (both TED uploads). Reordering clips so the payoff runs first is the other half of what makes this mix work, and that's in the studio too.

If you disagree with the cuts above, that's the useful reaction. Open the studio, build your own from the same two talks, and put the sheriff line back.