TED, which started in 1984, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The acronym that has become ubiquitous with public speaking stands for technology, entertainment, and design — three topics that it still explores at its annual conference in Vancouver. Yet, there have been new topics too: politics, agriculture, philanthropy, environment, and business, to name a few.
Head of TED and long-time host Chris Anderson came to the organization in the late ’90s. Since then, he’s helped transform the platform into a global powerhouse for ideas. In 2006, the talks went online: a whole new audience could tap into the ideas community. Then in 2008, he challenged conventional wisdom and open-sourced the TED formula to allow communities around the world to hold regional events. That gave rise to more than 13,000 TEDx conferences globally.
Now, nearing three decades in the convening business, Anderson is at a different junction. In a world flooded with conferences, how can TED continue to stand out?
This year, TED included some strong, and controversial, voices: Bill Ackman, Bari Weiss, and Scott Galloway, for instance.
It was something slightly new for TED. Could TED be the place to have civil disagreements and debate? Cyndi Stivers, long-time TED attendee turned TED curator, transitioned to Director of Curation this year. She put it quite aptly.
“The intention was to have a diversity of opinion, because there are so few places where we can do that decently now. There’s this feeling and question of where do we have civil dialogue any more? TED could provide a neutral zone where some of this can be explored.”
It was an experiment of sorts. Anderson who hosted much of the conference was watching the community reaction to see, if indeed, their hunch was right. It was, he says:
“I think the reaction has been really strong this year. So I think we’ll continue. What we’ve tried to say is, look, we are a nonpartisan organization. There’s a lot of division out there. Along with our main focus of showing what technological — and scientific — possibility looks like, especially around AI, we’ve got to embrace the controversial issues that have real consequences and importance in the culture. And we have to try and do so in a way that has viewpoint diversity. And most importantly, find a way of listening respectfully, with curiosity. The audience seems to have been totally willing to do that. We should continue to try and carve our way carefully down that road.”
Thus, even amidst times plagued with bad news, Anderson remains hopeful. He is, after all, a man who has been advocating for solutions and dialogue for decades. A former journalist who started his career reporting from the Seychelles, Anderson’s career is rooted in media. He noticed early-on that disasters and bad news often got more attention than the more inspiring pieces.
But his own experience with TED suggests the opposite: there’s still appetite for optimism and “good” news. He tells the story in his own TED talk just before the launch of his book, Infectious Generosity.
“We gave away the TED brand and thousands of volunteers around the world gave their time, their energy, and their talent to producing TEDx events.” He reports that 200,000 TEDx talks were created, which have led to more than one billion views annually.
Stivers recalls that momentous decision to share TED with the global community: “Everyone said to Chris, ‘You're out of your mind. You know, people give you thousands of dollars to come see this!’ But he was confident that it was for the better.”
Yashraj Akashi, the curator and founder of TEDxGateway, one of TED’s largest offshoots, was inspired by these talks online, and decided to bring it to India. That was over a decade ago. Today, it welcomes more than a 1,000 guests at each event and has become the go-to TEDx for the Indian subcontinent.
Many attendees have been coming to TED for years, if not decades. Mumbai-based Vishal Gondal, founder and CEO of GOQii, came to TED first in 2009.
“I was captivated by the prospect of early insights into future technologies and ideas, alongside the chance to interact with incredibly intelligent individuals. It's an environment that humbles you with the breadth of knowledge and the eagerness of people ready to help and inspire change,” he says.
While he’d love to see even more global voices at TED, it’s the community at their events, he argues, that still holds the biggest draw for him. “It's not just a conference. It's a tribe of like-minded individuals focused on positivity and profound global change. As an entrepreneur and a college dropout, I see my time at TED as crucial. It serves as my annual five days of intense learning, offering me insights and education that continue to shape my professional and personal growth.”
Missouri-based Andy Kanefield runs consulting firm Dialect, and first read about TED in the 1990s. But didn’t end up going till 2003 — the year that Anderson took over. “There were about 1,000 people rotating between a 500-seat theater and a simulcast room set up by Herman Miller,” he recalls. “It was more tightly centered on technology, entertainment and design with academics sprinkled in on a vast array of topics. Sometimes, I do miss the early days. It was less polished.”
That said, Kanefield has been coming since. “TED is just a lightning rod for ideas and energy. It’s such a positive group of people coming together to learn and share.”
So can this convening of solutions-minded folks break through the negativity?
Anderson hopes so. In his talk, he said: “I am sick of how mean the world is…I think the pendulum needs to swing, and the pendulum may indeed be swinging.”
He, Stivers, and the TED team are continuing to find a middle ground where optimism has a home, and disasters are met with solutions. Four decades later, the focus is not just on the most cutting-edge tech, which in 1984 was the debut of the Apple computer (featured at TED!), but also asking a poignant question: how do we have respectful discourse about conflicting ideas? That’s the real innovation.