The boy from Edsbyn who taught the world to tell a story.

David JP Phillips is the speaker behind the world's most viewed talk on storytelling. But the story of how he got there starts a long way from any stage.

He grew up in Edsbyn, a small town in the Swedish region of Hälsingland, the son of an English father, Duncan, and a Swedish mother, Anna - which is where the initials JP come from: John Paul. It was an ordinary childhood in an unremarkable place, and nothing about it suggested that this red-haired boy would one day stand on the world's biggest stages, teaching millions of people how to move an audience.

At eighteen he landed his first job, as a support technician at Microsoft. At twenty he started his first company. A few years in London as an e-learning manager taught him how people actually learn - and when he came home to Sweden he built a company with a single obsession: to make people better at standing up and being understood.

He did not go about it the usual way. Instead of re-telling what the textbooks already said, David built his knowledge by doing something almost nobody had the patience for. He observed, analysed, applied and documented - thousands of speakers, year after year. Out of that work came things the world had not seen before: a study of more than 5,000 speakers, and a map of the 110 communication skills that today power his AI tool, AttentionCode.

The breakthrough came on the TEDx stage. How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint (2015) became a global phenomenon, and is used as teaching material by universities including Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and MIT. The Magical Science of Storytelling (2018) became the most viewed talk on storytelling in the world and carried David onto the great international stages. In 2020 he shared the results of his 5,000-speaker study, and in 2024 he returned to TEDx a fourth time, this time on how to handle nervousness. Together, his talks have been watched more than 16 million times.

David is also an author. His book High on Life - about the six substances that shape how we feel, communicate and influence one another - became a bestseller in Sweden and has been published in 34 languages, translating the neuroscience of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, cortisol, endorphins and testosterone into something anyone can use.

Today he leads a team that teaches and speaks around the world, for clients like Google, Microsoft and Oracle. But the foundation is the same as the day it started in Edsbyn: science, obsession, and the belief that anyone - anyone at all - can learn to tell a story that people never forget.