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About this talk

TED 2002 TED

Translated into Japanese by Wataru Narita

Reviewed by Masahiro Kyushima
Comments? Please email the translators above.
More talks translated into Japanese
About Chris Anderson (TED)
After a long career in journalism and publishing (during which he launched Business 2.0 and the
games website IGN), Chris Anderson became the Curator of the TED Conference in 2002.

This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now,
in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for
a bit. So, I'm just going to grab a chair here.
Two years ago at TED, I think -- I've come to this conclusion -- I think I may have
been suffering from a strange delusion. I think that I may have believed
unconsciously then that I was kind of a business hero. I had this company that I'd
spent 15 years building. It was called Future. It was a magazine publishing
company. It had recently gone public, and the market said that it was apparently
worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. A magazine I'd
recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy
pumping hot air into the bubble -- (Laughter) -- and I was the 40 percent owner of a
dot com that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. And all
this had come from nothing. 15 years earlier, I was a science journalist who people
just laughed at when I said, "I really would like to start my own computer
magazine." And 15 years later there are -- there are 100 of them. And 2,000 people
on staff and -- it was just such heady times. The date was February 2000. I thought
the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law -- ever
upward onto the right -- it was going to go on forever. I mean, it had to. Right? I was
in for quite a surprise.
The dot com, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company
to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of
business hell. I saw -- I watched everything that I'd built crumbling. And it looked
like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing.
And it was gut wrenching. The first took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to
reach 350 employees -- something which I was very proud of in the business.
February 2001. In one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was
finished 1,000 people had lost their jobs from -- from my companies. I felt sick. I

watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18
months. And, worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind
of evaporating. I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "LOSER."
(Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how
the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing?
Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball but, I was at that point,
ready to move on, and to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. And the
reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of
people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster -- emotional
rollercoaster -- in the last couple years. This has been a big, big transition time, and
I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to
the next stage, to whatever's next. The theme next year is re-birth.
It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement
on the future of TED. And at about the same time, and I think partly because of
that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus. I
started to read again. And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business
games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest -cosmology, to psychology, to evolutionary psychology, to anthropology, to -- you know,
all this stuff had changed. And the way in which you could think about us as a
species, and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting.
And what was really most exciting, and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at
least 20 years before I did, was that all this stuff is connected. It's connected. It all
hooks into each other.
We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this, just
one example. Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously
asked once, "What do you most desire?" And she answered "a penis." And when you
think about, it's very true. What we all most desire is a penis. Or, you know,
"happiness," as we say in English. (Laughter) And something -- OK, good luck with
that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) (Applause)
But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just
something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out
that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it which are really
interesting. You can ask about what causes it biochemically; neuroscience,
serotonin, all that stuff. You can ask what are the psychological causes of it? Nature,
nurture, current circumstance? Turns out that the research done on that is
absolutely mind-blowing. You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial
intelligence problem. Why -- do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of
happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? You can view it in sort of
geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so
desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost
all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have, whether it's two
dollars a day or whatever, are almost equally happy on average? Or you can view it

as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing. Why would our -- did our genes invent
this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain,
parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate?
Are we the victims of a mass delusion? And so on, and so on.
To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to
branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered,
other than TED where you can ask that many questions, in that many different
directions. And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: To understand
anything, you just need to understand the little bits. A little bit about everything
that surrounds it. And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of
trying to figure out, why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff? And at the end of
the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and
it's because all these different bits have been put together. It's the total brain
experience, we're going to -- it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage.
(Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is.
Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? So, I
will. Here's the vision for TED.
Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. Jeff Bezos
kindly remarked to me, "Chris, TED is a really great conference. You're going to
have to fuck up really badly to make it bad." (Laughter) So I gave myself the job
title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that
the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. Truth,
curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms.
Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are
represented here. That's not going to be changed at all.
Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next
year. The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a
magazine business with monthly deadlines. There's a year to do this and already, as
I hope to show you a bit later, there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next
year. And I'm getting fantastic help from the community -- this is just such a great
community and combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's
interesting in the country, if not the planet. It's true.
Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience
throughout the year a little bit. And one key way that we're going to do this is to
introduce this book club. Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's
a gift that I would like to pass on, so when you sign up for TED2003, every six
weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked
to TED. They may well be by a TED speaker and so we can get the conversation
going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual,
emotional journey. I think it will be great.
And then, fourthly, I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new
owner of TED. What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED

will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. And, more important, I think,
the ideas that are exhibited and realized here, are ideas that the foundation can use
because there's fantastic synergy. Already, just in the last few days, we've had so
many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about,
that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people
together -- some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can
raise and the ideas -- I really believe that that combination, will, over time make a
difference. I'm incredibly excited about that. In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've
been as excited by anything, ever in my life. I'm in this for the long run and I would
be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me.

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