TED Talks owner Chris Anderson on the power of public speaking and being the ultimate influencer

With over two billion TED Talks heard every year, owner Chris Anderson tells James Ashton why in Trumpian times ideas are the new currency of power
TED curator and host Chris Anderson
Marla Aufmuth / TED
James Ashton1 March 2017

When Chris Anderson stepped away from the British magazine empire he founded he took a small conference division with him. Future Publishing had been all about readers’ passions — for computer games, mountain bikes, heavy metal and many other subjects.

Caught up in the bursting of the dotcom bubble, investors’ ardour had cooled and the shares had crashed. So in 2001 Anderson decided to focus on his own passion — a quirky annual event in California where experts gathered to discuss new ideas from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design, simply referred to as TED.

“It was to some extent a deeply appealing landing ground on which to just kind of recover,” says Anderson, who turns 60 this year. “I was shaken up. I’d gone from being a business rock star to a total loser in a year, and it really hurt.”

Fifteen years on, TED has grown from a niche hobby to a multimedia empire. Giving a TED Talk has become a rite of passage for leading academics, statesmen and entrepreneurs, who get less than 18 minutes to convey their big idea while pacing a stage that is usually furnished with little more than a disc of red carpet.

The annual event, now staged in Vancouver, continues but rapid licensing means that somewhere in the world 10 events under the TED banner take place every day, organised by an army of 40,000 volunteers. The internet has transformed the organisation. The number of TED Talks viewed or listened to on radio, TV and now mostly online exceeds two billion a year.

At the heart of all this activity is Anderson, softly spoken and thoughtful, dressed in a black waistcoat, dark shirt and jeans, toying with his glasses as we talk over flat whites in a deserted Chiltern Firehouse. He looks faintly embarrassed when I liken him to a powerful newspaper editor but admits that TED has only just scratched the surface of its ambition.

“I believe passionately that ideas are a force of unlimited power and it has never mattered more that we get behind the right ones,” he says. TED Talkers include the great and the good — Bill Clinton, Bill Gates — but also quirkier figures such as conjuror David Blaine (on holding his breath), Monica Lewinsky (on public shaming) and hitherto unknowns addressing titles such as “How to spot a liar”, “The happy secret to better work” and other ideas worth spreading.

Few appear more than once because “as with movies, it is actually quite hard for the sequel to be as good” and celebrities are often deterred. Anderson’s team of 12 curators have their work cut out turning down self-promoting motivational speakers among the 25,000 suggestions from the public each year.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk on why we should all be feminists is hugely popular
Getty Images

“The most delightful to find are ones who have done something surprising but don’t even think of themselves as speakers. You persuade them grudgingly to come to the stage and figure out a talk.”

TED treads carefully around politics and religion. Would the US President be welcome? As Anderson told the Oxford Union last week, “Trump just isn’t an ideas kind of guy” but he would welcome his adviser Steve Bannon, who “has a worked-out world view”.

In times of heightened political tension Anderson hopes TED can help to find common ground. “I think one of the worrying things now is just how dialled-up the divisions are becoming. There is anger and a righteousness on both sides that is a little terrifying.”

TED’s much-copied success speaks of society’s desire to “brain up” as a reaction to the disposable distractions of social media. So it is no surprise that Anderson thinks it is time to strike back against fake news. “Inadvertently, Facebook, Google and others created this ecosystem where it was possible for kids to make a fortune pumping poison into the public consciousness and then the flames fanned by this algorithmic machine.”

TED talker: Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg
Getty Images

In typical TED style he poses two big questions: what do we want from the internet and, for good measure, what are humans for?

“Do we really want an internet that is personalised to our instinctive responses?” he says. “I don’t want to be defined by my clicks, I want to be defined by my slower thinking.”

It goes back to his point about passionate media. Never mind circulation figures, TV ratings or page views, “I think a much more pertinent measure of the long-term potential of a media operation is the intensity of that attention. If you are just skimming a thing — looking at it from the corner of eye — that still counts as a view or a rating but it is completely inconsequential.”

And humans?

“As you get a world that is increasingly algorithmically driven it has huge implications for capitalism, democracy and the future of work that we haven’t begun to answer. I think most of our kids are going to have to invent their own work.”

He gives today’s education system short shrift as little more than an assembly line. “Go in with everyone else and we’ll plop knowledge into your head. People don’t need knowledge, they’ve got that free on their smartphone. What they need is help dreaming about what they could do and using that as fuel to build their skills. The tragedy of it is that we are not doing all we can to keep kids excited about learning.”

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Among its prizes, fellowships, books — only 20,000 words each, so they can be consumed in one extended sitting — TED is distributing three animated lessons a week, which are being viewed by a million children a day. For all its good works, though, the organisation is not without its critics. Some have argued that it is elitist and that its talks are simply too glossy and too optimistic to have impact in the real word. “The way I like to think of an optimist is someone who takes the stance that problems are there to be solved,” Anderson shoots back.

It would be too simplistic to trace his evangelical zeal to his upbringing. Anderson’s early years were spent in remote parts of India, Afghanistan and Pakistan where his father, a medical missionary and eye surgeon, ran a mobile hospital. After studying philosophy at Oxford he trained as a journalist, working at the South Wales Echo and as a radio producer in the Seychelles. Inspired by the personal computing revolution he took a job as editor of a games magazine and in 1985 set up Future in his living room with a £15,000 loan.

Architect Thomas Heatherwick has spoken about his projects
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The business grew on both sides of the Atlantic and at its peak was worth £1.2 billion. In 1998, shortly before he lost a fortune, Anderson attended his first TED conference in Monterey, California. Enthralled by the rarified meeting of minds, he set about trying to buy the business from its founder, an architect named Richard Wurman. Post-Future, it became part of his not-for-profit foundation and he broadened its subject matter.

For all his success Anderson has also known crushing loss. His eldest daughter, Zoe, died of carbon monoxide poisoning aged 24 in 2010 caused by a faulty boiler in the family’s house in Bath.

“After a year of black I took the decision just to carry her influence forward as best I could,” says Anderson, who lives in New York with his second wife Jacqueline Novogratz, a social entrepreneur, and has two surviving daughters. “Zoe was someone who was full of life: extraordinary, colourful, vivacious, generous, a little bit crazy. She is there on my computer every morning and I dedicated the book I wrote to her. My view of the world is that everyone’s life has ripple effects — even a life that was far too short.”

Follow James Ashton on Twitter: @mrjamesashton

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