CHRIS ANDERSON:
The entrepreneur
bought TED in 2001.
“It felt like some-
thing you could
devote your
life to,” he says.
TED’s atmosphere is more Sundance than circus, but the
bull session still thrives. And that’s something, sadly, that
you won’t find on a conventional college campus. “I teach
really smart kids,” says Swarthmore professor Barry
Schwartz, whose TED talk on the paradox of choice was
based on his best-selling book, “but mostly I’m teaching
them. Maybe once or twice a year, some particularly sophisticated,
talented, imaginative kid will come up with something I haven’t
already thought of.” The same holds true, he says, of his fellow faculty.
“The problem is I’ve been in this place for a long time and after awhile
you develop this lazy attitude that you no longer have anything to
learn from your colleagues. You withdraw into your own cocoon.
Well, people who come to TED are open to being changed by their
interactions and conversations. They’re in an environment where
they’re going to learn something new every five minutes. You could
create something like that on a college campus,
but generally that doesn’t happen.”
It’s “networking extraordinaire—just a total
bonanza,” says Cyndi Stivers, editor of Entertain-
ment Weekly ’s E W.com. And out of that network-
ing comes action. Wired magazine was born
there. An Inconvenient Truth got a big push at the
conference. Researchers and not-for-profits find
sponsors; writers and scholars find agents and
publishers; Web geeks find a path out of obscurity. Esra’a Al Shafei
is a 23-year-old from Bahrain who runs an online hub for journalism
and free expression called Mideast Youth.com. In 2009, she was
made a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. “TED
gives you a sense of credibility,” she says. “I’ve been running Mideast
Youth for four years, but before the fellowship, nobody talked about
it.” TED connections have led her to sources of money and technical
and moral support that helped her launch CrowdVoice,
which tracks voices of protest around the world.
“WHEN YOU PUT SMART PEOPLE P ART EOPLE
TOGETHER IN A ROOM, THEY
ENGAGE. CHRIS WANTS TO USE THAT
TO CONTRIBUTE TO A BETTER WORLD.”
2001. “I showed up there in 1998 for the first time,” he tells me, “and
basically fell completely in love with the conference, the people
attending, their willingness to think big, crazy thoughts. From my
point of view, it felt like something you could devote your life to.”
Like TED, Anderson himself is a blend of technology, shiny
entrepreneurialism, and do-good zeal. As the son of a missionary
doctor, he grew up in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, and as an
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