John Rives's 'Four In The Morning'

It started out as a joke. John Rives, a poet, was asked to present a TED Talk in 2007, and, unsure of what to present, he resulted in share something “so niche it [was] actually inconsequential or actually cockamamie”: a conspiracy theory revolving around 4 AM (Rives). Before the TED Talk, while researching a Polish poet named Wislawa Szymborska, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1996, Rives came across an eerily familiar poem entitled “Four in the Morning”. Because he was unsure why this poem, which he’d never read before, felt familiar, he became fixated on the concept of 4 AM, hearing references to the time over and over in his daily life, inspiring him to create the 2007 TED Talk conspiracy. During the 2007 TED Talk, Rives ties numerous events, movies, television, and pieces of literature together, “proving” in that there is some bigger, ridiculous reason behind why the time of 4 AM is so commonly referenced. However, in October of 2014, after years of TED Talk fans sending him T.V. clips, movie scenes, and songs which all referenced 4 AM, Rives finally discovered the once-forgotten root of his attachment to 4 AM-- an old lover in college had sent him a mixtape where one of the songs referenced the time.
In March of 2014, during Rives’ third TED talk, “The Museum of Four in the Morning”, in explaining the background behind his newfound hobby of collecting references to 4 AM, Rives proves that even the most silly, benign, or even ridiculous of concepts are the ones that connect us all, making the human experience oftentimes