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Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Talks, Builds his Brand
By DAVID HOCHMAN
Chris Anderson was sitting in a very low-power pose. Off to the side at an all-staff meeting at TED’s Hudson Street headquarters in January, he was folded forward with his hand on his neck, a posture that communicates self-protection according to the 2012 TED Talk on body language by the social psychologist Amy Cuddy (15.7 million views).
By letting his employees give mini TED Talks on what they were working on, Mr. Anderson was allowing for what Alain de Botton, in his 2009 TED Talk (2.9 million views), called “a kinder, gentler philosophy of success.”
When Mr. Anderson finally took the floor himself with tousled hair in an untucked black button-down and jeans, he appealed to virtue by raising the question, “What are we building today that honestly is going to impress historians in two thousand years’ time?” It could have come straight from the playbook on “practical wisdom” outlined in a 2009 TED Talk by the psychologist Barry Schwartz (1.9 million views).
At 57, Mr. Anderson, the British former magazine publisher and Internet entrepreneur who took over the organization in 2001 and built it into a multimedia colossus, is in many ways the embodiment of his famous ideas organization. Like the TED Talks millions love, and some love to rip apart, Mr. Anderson is high-minded but sometimes inaccessible, forward thinking to the point of “whoa,” and so earnest it can be easy to smirk.
But as the 30th anniversary TED Conference this month in Vancouver, British Columbia, approaches, Mr. Anderson, forever mild-mannered, is quietly celebrating all he’s accomplished with those three red letters, even as some sniff that the organization has become the Starbucks of intellectual conglomerates.
What began somewhat modestly in 1984 when the architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman summoned 300 friends and colleagues to Monterey, Calif., to discuss Technology, Entertainment and Design, now has more angles to it than a Mandelbrot set. Part of Mr. Anderson’s nonprofit Sapling Foundation, the organization has two annual conferences (this month’s includes 1,200 attendees from 42 countries), the free online collection of more than 1,600 TED Talks viewed nearly two billion times, a $1,000,000 TED Prize, a TED Fellows program and global education initiative, TED digital books, the TED Radio Hour and thousands of TEDx events in more than 150 countries (talks are translated into more than 104 languages).
Imitated by many, even the annual retreat in Maryland for House Republicans this winter featured TED-style speakers. By helping turn under-the-radar “thought leaders” like Salman Khan, Daniel Gilbert, Brené Brown and Sir Ken Robinson into best-selling authors and lecture-circuit Godzillas, the TED stage has replaced Oprah Winfrey’s couch as the platform most likely to thrill one’s publicist, publisher, accountant and mother-in-law.
This month’s 65 main-stage speakers include Bill and Melinda Gates, the tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte, the astronaut Chris Hadfield and Sting, as well as illusionists, jugglers and at least one firefly expert. All will speak on a range of topics for 18 minutes or less, as per the guidelines Mr. Anderson established. Al Gore, who first spoke at TED in 1996, said: “Every time I have a feeling that TED has come so far that it is about to jump the shark, it doesn’t. Instead, it renews itself.”
Not everyone thinks that way. Lately, Mr. Anderson has spent nearly as much time defending his operation as he has running it. A simmering backlash that began hilariously a couple of years ago with the “Onion Talks” web parodies featuring videos like “What is the biggest rock?” and “A future where all robots have penises” turned plain nasty with a New Republic piecetwo summers ago by the critic Evgeny Morozov that called TED an “insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering — a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity.”
Thomas Frank wrote an essay in Salon last October with the headline, “TED Talks Are Lying to You,” in which he discussed the perils of turning “innovation” into an industry. Then in December at an independently organized TEDx event in San Diego, Benjamin H. Bratton, an associate professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, used his moment on TED’s round red rug to talk smack about TED itself.
In a presentation as coolheaded as it was incendiary, Mr. Bratton called TED “a recipe for civilizational disaster,” pointing to the tent-revival nature of the talks, the unquestioning faith in technology and what Mr. Bratton called a “dumbing-down” of complex science and scholarship. Spreading ideas via short orations adds up to little more than “middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” he said. Although the video of Mr. Bratton’s talk is unlikely to find a home on TED.com, it has been viewed more than 250,000 times on YouTube. “It was a nerve waiting to be struck,” Mr. Bratton said by telephone.
A month later in New York, Mr. Anderson sat in a glass-walled conference room after the staff meeting. In person, he is less imposing and certainly shyer than the Yoda figure in a Nehru jacket on the TED stage. “I’m terrible at the kind of conversations that are normally expected in a social environment,” he said. (Susan Cain, whose 2012 TED Talk on introversion has been viewed nearly eight million times, said of Mr. Anderson, “He’s an introvert, I’d say, definitely.”).
He also seemed tired. “The number and variety of projects we have going at any one time can be a shock to the system,” he said. Assembling the TED convention hall in Vancouver is among those. The David Rockwell-designed amphitheater is being constructed with thousands of laser-cut pieces delivered by 50 trucks and set up over four days this month.
In recent weeks, Mr. Anderson has been blasting back at TED’s naysayers. He comments on threads critical of TED on Reddit and Gizmodo and he wrote an essay in The Guardian in January, explaining why most complaints about TED are based on misconceptions. TED is not leftist propaganda nor corporate-sponsored misinformation, he said. And because TED is a nonprofit, nobody is getting rich off the $6,000 conference fees that many like to bring up. As for the dumbing down of Internet content, Mr. Anderson smiled wryly and said: “Compared to what? Hilarious cat videos?”
The son of British medical missionaries who grew up in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, Mr. Anderson said he spent much of his childhood “reading, observing and lying out, looking at the stars and thinking about ideas.” After studying philosophy at Oxford, he turned to journalism, writing about the convergence of video games and computing, before moving to the publishing side, where he tried pushing print into the future. His magazines like Business 2.0 came poly-packed with CDs to give readers an interactive experience before the Internet took hold. “Back when tech magazine issues were thick, Chris’s were the thickest,” said a longtime colleague, Tom Rielly, the director of the TED Fellows program.
With fortunes made and lost and made again in publishing, Mr. Anderson purchased TED with the idea that it would “change minds and maybe the world,” he said. That required an act of what Mr. Anderson likes to call “radical openness” by allowing the public access to the once-cloistered confab. “Giving the talks away vastly multiplied the impact of TED,” Mr. Anderson said. “Suddenly, everyone was your marketing friend, and Facebook and Twitter became extensions of what we were doing.”
The educator Mr. Robinson said he “would have worn a different shirt” had he known his would become the most popular TED video of all time. On a Saturday morning at TED in 2006, he switched speaking times with the pastor Rick Warren to give a 19-minute talk (“O.K., I went a little long,” Mr. Robinson said) on how schools are killing creativity. The presentation went fine.. “My wife said afterward, good but not your best,” he said.
A few months later, Mr. Anderson put a video of the talk on TED’s website; more than 25 million people have viewed it since it went online in June 2006. “We thought, O.K., the videos might find a home with a small, geeky audience,” said June Cohen, executive producer for TED Media. Today, the vast library of talks is viewed an average of 1.9 million times daily.
“So much of the attention wars that we all are immersed in are dominated by idiocy, triviality and shouting,” Mr. Anderson said. “So, finding someone who can make a case and make it clearly in a way that’s exciting and has a chance of being heard and being spread and acted upon, I mean that’s a huge win.”
It certainly is when things go right. Ms. Cuddy mostly wanted to get through her TED Talk at TEDGlobal 2012 in Edinburgh. Ms. Cuddy, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, was in excruciating pain from what turned out to be a gallbladder attack. But the 21-minute presentation she mustered on how “faking” body language associated with dominance can improve a person’s self-image turned an academic argument into a viral blockbuster. The video has logged nearly 16 million views, putting it in the Top 5 of all TED Talks.
In the aftermath, Ms. Cuddy said she keeps a file of marriage proposals from strangers, and two shelves laden with fan offerings. “One is for normal gifts,” she said. “The other is for strange, creepy and confusing gifts.”
The wider effect has astounded her. Dozens of studies are being conducted to test hypotheses that evolved from discussions with people who watched the talk. “I’ve heard from political candidates, trial lawyers, young gay people coming out, political refugees, elementary school kids, Olympic athletes, homeless people, physicians and surgeons dealing with impostor syndrome,” she said, “all saying that power posing changed their lives in significant and positive ways. I’m not religious, but it feels a little bit that way.”
That response is no accident. The process of preparing a speaker for a TED main-stage appearance is painstaking. Mr. Anderson and his team work for months with presenters to make even the most curious topics (gastric brooding frogs, anyone?) “human, relatable and often emotional, so it lights people up,” said Ms. Cohen, who also hosts TED conferences onstage.
Add to that multiple camera angles, Hollywood lighting, meaningful close-ups, crisp sound, poignant audience reaction (“whatever it takes to make it look like it wasn’t filmed from the back row of a high school musical,” Ms. Cohen said) for a viewing experience aimed at an online audience “exquisitely vulnerable to distraction.”
Speakers sometimes bristle at the control TED exerts over content. At last year’s conference in Long Beach, Calif., the sex researcher Christopher Ryan shared some provocative theories about the challenges of human monogamy. During a rehearsal the day before his talk, he was told to remove a slide with a joke about primate genitalia. “As I walked offstage, a tech guy said, ‘You’re getting Silvermaned,’ ” Mr. Ryan said.
He was referring to the 2010 TED Talk by Sarah Silverman, in which the comedian jokingly referred to adopting a “retarded” child. That quip prompted a Twitter feud between Ms. Silverman and Mr. Anderson, who called her talk “godawful” and vowed never to put the video on TED.com (it’s on YouTube). “TED is many things, and humorless is generally one of them,” Mr. Ryan said.
TED’s new website, rolling out this spring, is aiming for style points. It adds chic white space but also footnotes, links to further readings, discussion boards and updates on TED speakers (the 14-year-old boy who built the windmill in Malawi is graduating this year from Dartmouth). A growing number of TED-ED clubs help young people give their own TED Talks, and the new TED Institute is bringing a “TED-like environment” to corporations with daylong events modeled after the conferences. That custom-curated production costs $1.5 million a company.
If Mr. Anderson has learned anything from TED, it’s that the future is never exactly as one imagines. Not just about those long-promised jetpacks but about life in general. Mr. Anderson lives in the West Village with his wife, Jacqueline Novogratz, the chief executive of Acumen Fund, which finances social causes.
He has two grown daughters from a previous marriage. His oldest, Zoe, a student of neuroscience and an avid diver, died in 2010 of carbon monoxide poisoning on a visit to England. The TED community rallied to preserve and name a coral reef in her honor. Mr. Anderson said he also draws strength from TED’s collective wisdom.
“The talks around happiness and generosity, immersion in nature and social connections and all the rest of it — those are the ones that I think benefit all of us in radical and positive ways,” he said.
Mr. Anderson looked through the glass walls as employees were gathering for another meeting. “Star Trek” is a popular theme around the office, and there was a whiff of Kirk as TED’s commander sat back in his chair, a much higher-power pose than earlier.
“We don’t know what the final destination is, but we are guided by a philosophical and deep belief in the power of good thinking, the power of good ideas,” he said. “With TED, the end of the talk should not be the end of the idea, but just the beginning.”