Transcriber: Akinori Oyama Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
There is certainly something strange happening.
5 years ago, TED was something that was enjoyed by a 1,000 people once a year.
And today, it's something enjoyed by about 300,000 people every day.
Tela mentioned, more than 100 million TED talks have been viewed.
When you think about that,
it's strange, you know, 100 million lectures viewed on the Internet,
who would've thought? How did it happen?
This event here today actually seems equally miraculous to me.
TED itself had really nothing to do with organizing it.
And, trust me, organizing an event like this takes a huge amount of effort.
And, yet, it's one of more than 100 would be held this year around the world
as part of this TEDx program of independently organized TED events.
The program still in Beta hasn't really even started yet.
No one is making any money.
This is being done for passion, curiosity.
How did that happen?
So I should warn you that the story I will tell
it's not like a top-down plan of some determination to propagate TED to the world.
I think you'll discover TED has a life of its own.
More mysterious than that,
it's a story of a very strange, but I think beautiful, cultural phenomenon
that has emerged out of a really remarkable community,
which by the way includes you.
So, TED past, present, and future.
TED started as an experiment in convergence.
The brilliant Richard Wurman and Harry Marks figured it out 25 years ago
that industries of technology, entertainment, and design were converging,
that if you brought together the people from those 3 worlds,
they would have interesting things to say to each other.
So, it turned out the first TED held in 1984
showcased the brand-new Apple Macintosh
and Sony showed off this strange, shiny, silver, round disks
containing digital sounds which were the first CDs.
And both objects, if you like, oozing technology, entertainment, and design.
People were wowed.
Event lost money and wasn't held again for another 6 years.
But, after that -- (Laughter)
after that it's been held annually,
It really took off.
And, strange things started to happen.
The content broadened.
In addition to the T, E, and D, of TED,
in came story tellers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, business leaders,
just ordinary human beings with a surprising story to tell.
Remarkably, instead of the audience going,
"oh, this is diluted. This is losing relevance to me.",
they loved it. Why? Why?
Well, it turns out that a lot of us forgot somewhere along the line
that are actually all of knowledge is connected.
When you hear someone remarkable, whoever they are,
share something of their passion or what they do,
not only you're inspired by them personally, but you start to see connections
that you didn't see before between what you do and what they do, or someone else does.
So, we spend our lives digging these trenches.
That's we get really good at one thing,
and that's where we live, that's where we're focused.
TED is the moment when you come out of your trench,
and you ascend up a slope,
and you see how what you do connects with whatever else does.
It can be really eye-opening and thrilling.
It can fill you with a new sense of possibility.
So in, let's see, 11 years ago, I was certainly digging my own trench.
I was trying to build this technology publishing company, magazines, websites.
I was in it deep.
This was the year, I first went to TED.
I was smitten.
You know, I'd always thought of myself as this slightly "Odd Man Out."
Like I always struggled to make conversations
about house and God and family gossip,
movies, celebrity, and all the things I think normal people talk about, do they?
(Laughter)
(Audience) We don't know.
CA : (Laughing) 'We don't know'. That was a great comment!
At TED, I found myself surrounded by this motley crew of geeks,
sort of passionate entrepreneurs, inventors, creators.
Really, they didn't have a whole lot in common
except that they were all very curious, they were all absolutely eager or willing
to talk out-of-the-box ideas and to engage in conversations
that depending on your view point,
rather a little bit crazy or might turn out to be really important.
I loved it, I thought I'd come home.
And, the media entrepreneur in me noticed something as well.
So, media were obsessed with this.
Attention is a currency.
We measure it in lots of different ways:
we measure eye balls, how many are there, ratings, circulation, and so forth.
We also look at demographics, who owns those eye balls.
Bill Gates is worth more than Billy Blogs.
And, there is a third measure of attention that is much harder to measure.
So, we don't often talk about it.
We should because it is the most important of the three.
It's the measure of thequality of attention.
Is it focused or casual?
Is there indifference
or is there passion?
Passion is the measure of a media business that has valued for the long term.
You can get away with selling ads for a while for example to large numbers of casual people,
but they pretty well will knew,
passion is how you build a community, how something takes on a life of its own.
And, what I saw at TED was not only what the 800 people there --
you know, really influential people!
But they had a level of attention that was way off the charts.
I mean, they were there for 4 days.
They were focused. They were engaged.
They used words like 'this is the highlight of my year'.
I mean, this was a media thing that just exhibited extraordinary passion.
So, I thought
TED is amazing.
And I also thought, Wow, it's an incredibly potent media asset, if you like,
in the making.
There's something really, really amazing here.
So, I started to dream about
whether there might be some way I could play a bigger role.
And you know, to cut a long and complicated and occasionally painful story short,
2001, a foundation that I had set up found itself as the proud owner of TED
and I got to run it,
and I was terrified.
First of all,
business I'd been building had been smacked hard by the dot-com bust.
I'd had to lay off a thousand people off the workforce.
I knew that it was time for me too to leave.
I felt like an abject failure.
If I failed at TED as well, there would be nowhere to hide.
It also didn't help that I knew nothing about the conference business.
(Laughter)
Or, that I had none of Richard Wurman --
who had been the sole owner --
I had nothing of his huge stage presence.
So, the goal number one was "Don't screw it up."
(Laughter)
And, I worked really hard to figure out, what was it about TED so special?
"Don't touch that. Only tweaks."
Some of the early tweaks included professionalizing the logistics of TED,
courtesy of these two amazing Canadian twins, the McCartney sisters,
who put on events with attention to detail that I hadn't seen before.
And then as far as the program was concerned, it was just continue this process,
make it -- continue the process of broadening it out,
you know, bring in more people, brought in more scientists,
more out-of-the-box thinkers, more non-Americans, more women.
Several core members of the TED community, during what was a 2-year transition process,
really got behind it, Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, Sunny Bates,
Linda Stone, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and
-- actually some people in this room who I won't embarrass, but thank you --
really swung the community around to believing that TED could go on.
And so, the first event did pretty much sell out well ahead of time.
As a junior at 2003, there was one of the things that I felt like really needed to happen.
I felt like this sense of inspiration and possibility
that always hit people at TED,
we just needed to do something with that.
There was so much potential there to make a difference in the real world.
What could we do?
So, at the end of TED 2003,
I urged the audience to consider getting behind some of these big, wild causes
like AIDS, fresh water, you know, the ocean's crisis.
And, some people loved it.
And, some really didn't.
I mean, the truth is,
one person's cause is another person's "Dear God, please shoot me now".
And, it is!
In a conference filled on how people re-discover wonder,
a sense of possibility, curiosity, you have to be really careful
what you kind of do that might be perceived as cramming something down someone's throat.
So, a few longstanding members of the TED community
were thorouly pissed off, and actually left.
and I thought I might have blown it.
However, that little kerfuffle led to something very special.
A group of us went away for a weekend,
and we brain-stormed about, look, there's got to be a way to do this.
This stuff really matters.
It's actually, inherently, quite interesting
How do we bring to it to TED in a more TED-like way?
And, what that led to was this.
So, every year, we bring 3 remarkable people to TED
and give them this unique proposition.
Come and make a wish.
Tell us your dream. You can make one wish without restriction.
This process has,
first of all, allowed us to bring people to TED we could never have brought.
Second, it brought to the conference, the world biggest issues
in a way that seemed different, magical, exciting,
and in a way which led to an extraordinary range of collaborative projects
that frankly wouldn't have happened in any other way.
One is "One.org."
Cameron Sinclair is in the room actually, TED prize winner, Cameron.
Where are you? Here you go. (Applause)
"Open Architecture Network" is an amazing project
that brings together the world's designers and architectures to collaborate
and do stuff that anyone could not do.
It's a beautiful site that gets better every month.
We had "Pangea Day."
James Nachtwey brought the story about TB.
"The encyclopedia of Life" has been built, that's a massive project that TED was part of.
"Once Upon a School", "Next Einstein in Africa",
and this "Charter for Compassion".
are just some of the ones that have been done.
So, the kerfuffle was over, you know,
TED numbers started to grow,
and it really started to feel like there was something good going on
and the puzzle was, how could you get these ideas that were exciting people in the conference?
Could you get them out into the world at large somehow?
So, if you wind the clock back a bit to when I started the foundation that owns TED,
I was really obsessed with this question:
how do you make a difference?
How do you leverage money spent to really have maximum impact?
And, I thought about these 5 things,
all of which have massive amplification of human attention.
And, then, it hit me that there was really a bigger thing that encompasses them all.
And if you focused on that, you know, that might be the way to go.
Think about ideas, you know,
they start off as these little electrical patterns in someone's brain, you know, they weigh nothing.
but they occur in the right circumstances, can spread to another brain,
they can excite the body that houses that brain to do stuff,
and if you're lucky, pass on the pattern to other people.
The ideas do the work for you.
That's a really amazing thing.
And so we wondered how we could let the amazing ideas that happen at TED,
which are after all the most infectious ideas I have ever seen,
boy, if you could see those into the world, what might happen?
And how to do it?
I hired a woman, June Cohen to help me figure out the answer to this question.
She is an experience media executive, long-term TEDster.
And our first shot was television, you know, big audience.
We thought TED talks would look fantastic on TV.
Unfortunately, all the TV executives we spoke to didn't see that.
We got nowhere.
And so in 2006, we thought we do a little experiment,
and just try putting a few of them up ourselves on the web, and see what happened.
We were worried that they would have none of emotional impact of the live event.
We were worried that TEDsters would be annoyed that stuff would be given away.
But so, it was just an experiment.
Majora Carter, Hans Rosling and Ken Robinson,
these were three of the first ones we put up.
What happened was not just people passed them on and surprising numbers viewed them,
the tone of response we got back astonished us.
People laughed, people cried, people were inspired, people tell their friends.
This word again, passion.
We saw the passion and that was a clue, that was something bigger here.
So, we made a decision in 2007 that TED really officially was no longer a conference.
TED was going to be this. [Slide reads:]
We engineered the web site to be built around spreading free talks to the world.
And to our astonishment and delight, TED community far from being upset
that we were giving away the crown jewels, shared this on, it was a thrilling to see.
So, where is this going?
In 2009, we've seen the continuation of this process.
Just letting TED go free to the world, we had this Open Translation Project,
which has been thrilling seeing literally hundreds of translators take TED,
bring those talks to their own communities.
And, now, this TEDx program, spreading the live events to the world.
Where is it heading?
Well, the truth is I don't know.
I think it's an incredible fact, an incredible discovery really
that millions of people around the world are wanting knowledge.
You know, they want this re-discovery of wonder.
They want the sense of possibility.
And they actually want to be part of shaping the future.
That's a surprise
and that's thrilling in its own right.
But, even more thrilling is this.
TED is part of much bigger revolution
in, I'd say, global education that's made possible by the web.
It's an amazing fact that people like this can become a new type of global icon,
that the role of teacher in our world is about to become sexy, wonderful,
you know, I mean, and it should have always been, right?
But that hasn't been for the last few years.
Teachers can reach people across the world. That is amazing.
And I... if you ask what my dream was, I think the way I would answer it,
would be to look at this picture here.
These are kids photographed in the village in Pakistan not far from where I was born.
Their parents would have been born about the same time as me.
Unlike me, I had an education and got to live an amazing life,
they didn't have that chance.
They lived a life griding out a living in tough conditions.
They're beautiful children, may have a different chance.
In 5 years' time, I wish each of these kids will probably have access to a cell phone
that would be more powerful than the computer you own.
I would say that you can make the case that the future of the world depends on
what they see on that cell phone.
Will they be looking at trivia, pornography, incitations to violence?
Although some of them get to look face-to-face at some of the world's greatest teachers
speaking to them in the language that they can understand.
They can give them information they need to come out of the poverty
to realize their true potential.
They might be in here.
They might be the next Einstein or the next Gandhi,
the person who will save the planet for our grandchildren.
How does that happen?
I can't make that happen.
But, maybe, just maybe, we can.
And, certainly today is a really exciting start.
So, thank you to each of you.
(Applause)