1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,000
This is your conference,

2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:09,000
and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period,

3
00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:12,000
about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit.

4
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:14,000
So, I'm just going to grab a chair here.

5
00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:30,000
Two years ago at TED, I think --

6
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:32,000
I've come to this conclusion --

7
00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:35,000
I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion.

8
00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:41,000
I think that I may have believed unconsciously,

9
00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:47,000
then, that I was kind of a business hero.

10
00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:53,000
I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It's called Future;

11
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:55,000
it was a magazine publishing company.

12
00:00:55,000 --> 00:00:57,000
It had recently gone public

13
00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:01,000
and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars,

14
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:03,000
a number I didn't really understand.

15
00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:09,000
A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0

16
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:11,000
was fatter than a telephone directory,

17
00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:14,000
busy pumping hot air into the bubble.

18
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:16,000
(Laughter)

19
00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:22,000
And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom

20
00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:25,000
that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more.

21
00:01:25,000 --> 00:01:28,000
And all this had come from nothing.

22
00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:33,000
Fifteen years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at

23
00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:38,000
when I said, "I really would like to start my own computer magazine."

24
00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:42,000
And 15 years later, there are 100 of them

25
00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:48,000
and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times.

26
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:51,000
The date was February 2000.

27
00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:54,000
I thought the little graph of my business life

28
00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:56,000
that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law --

29
00:01:56,000 --> 00:01:58,000
ever upward and to the right -- it was going to go on forever.

30
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:04,000
I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise.

31
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:10,000
The dotcom, ironically called Snowball,

32
00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:13,000
was the very last consumer web company to go public

33
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:24,000
the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell.

34
00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:30,000
I watched everything that I'd built crumbling,

35
00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:32,000
and it looked like all this stuff was going to die

36
00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:35,000
and 15 years work would have come for nothing.

37
00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:37,000
And it was gut wrenching.

38
00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:44,000
It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees,

39
00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:47,000
something which I was very proud of in the business.

40
00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:51,000
February 2001 -- in one day we laid off 350 people,

41
00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:56,000
and before the bloodshed was finished, 1,000 people had lost their jobs

42
00:02:56,000 --> 00:03:00,000
from my companies. I felt sick.

43
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:06,000
I watched my own net worth falling

44
00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:11,000
by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months.

45
00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:15,000
And worse than that, far worse than that,

46
00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:18,000
my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating.

47
00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:24,000
I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "LOSER."

48
00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:25,000
(Laughter)

49
00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:29,000
And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back,

50
00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:33,000
is how the hell did I let my personal happiness

51
00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:36,000
get so tied up with this business thing?

52
00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:43,000
Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball,

53
00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:47,000
but I was, at that point, ready to move on.

54
00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:51,000
And to cut a long story short, here's where I came to.

55
00:03:51,000 --> 00:03:57,000
And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations,

56
00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:02,000
that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster --

57
00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:04,000
emotional rollercoaster -- in the last couple years.

58
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:08,000
This has been a big, big transition time,

59
00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:15,000
and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us

60
00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:18,000
in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever's next.

61
00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:21,000
The theme next year is re-birth.

62
00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:25,000
It was at the same TED two years ago

63
00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:29,000
when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED.

64
00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:33,000
And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that,

65
00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:38,000
I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus:

66
00:04:38,000 --> 00:04:41,000
I started to read again.

67
00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:46,000
And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games,

68
00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:51,000
there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest:

69
00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:57,000
cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology

70
00:04:57,000 --> 00:04:59,000
to ... all this stuff had changed.

71
00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:04,000
And the way in which you could think about us as a species

72
00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:08,000
and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting.

73
00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:10,000
And what was really most exciting --

74
00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:15,000
and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did --

75
00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:19,000
was that all this stuff is connected.

76
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:22,000
It's connected; it all hooks into each other.

77
00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:24,000
We talk about this a lot,

78
00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:27,000
and I thought about trying to give an example of this. So, just one example:

79
00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:33,000
Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president,

80
00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:37,000
was famously asked once, "What do you most desire?"

81
00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:39,000
And she answered, "A penis."

82
00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:44,000
And when you think about it, it's very true:

83
00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:47,000
what we all most desire is a penis --

84
00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:50,000
or "happiness" as we say in English.

85
00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:59,000
(Laughter)

86
00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:08,000
And something ... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room.

87
00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:10,000
(Laughter)

88
00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:13,000
(Applause)

89
00:06:15,000 --> 00:06:19,000
But something as basic as happiness,

90
00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:22,000
which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion

91
00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:25,000
in the church or mosque or synagogue,

92
00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:29,000
today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions

93
00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:32,000
that you can ask about it, which are really interesting.

94
00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:34,000
You can ask about what causes it biochemically:

95
00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:37,000
neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff.

96
00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:41,000
You can ask what are the psychological causes of it:

97
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:44,000
nature? Nurture? Current circumstance?

98
00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:47,000
Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing.

99
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:52,000
You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem:

100
00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:54,000
do you need to incorporate

101
00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:59,000
some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly?

102
00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:03,000
You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms

103
00:07:03,000 --> 00:07:07,000
and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet

104
00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:13,000
are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness,

105
00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:15,000
and whereas almost all the rest of them,

106
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:19,000
regardless of how much money they have -- whether it's two dollars a day or whatever --

107
00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:22,000
are almost equally happy on average?

108
00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:29,000
Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing:

109
00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:33,000
did our genes invent this as a kind of trick

110
00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:37,000
to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized,

111
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:40,000
to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate?

112
00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:42,000
Are we the victims of a mass delusion?

113
00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:44,000
And so on, and so on.

114
00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:48,000
To understand even something as important to us as happiness,

115
00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:51,000
you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions,

116
00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:57,000
and there's nowhere that I've discovered -- other than TED --

117
00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:02,000
where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions.

118
00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:05,000
And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about:

119
00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:09,000
to understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits;

120
00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:11,000
a little bit about everything that surrounds it.

121
00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:13,000
And so, gradually over these three days,

122
00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:15,000
you start off kind of trying to figure out,

123
00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:18,000
"Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff?"

124
00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:20,000
And at the end of the four days,

125
00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:25,000
your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited,

126
00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:28,000
and it's because all these different bits have been put together.

127
00:08:28,000 --> 00:08:30,000
It's the total brain experience, we're going to ...

128
00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:32,000
it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage.

129
00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:33,000
(Laughter)

130
00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:38,000
Every mental organ addressed. It really is.

131
00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:42,000
Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right?

132
00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:45,000
So, I will. Here's the vision for TED.

133
00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:52,000
Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it.

134
00:08:53,000 --> 00:08:56,000
Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me,

135
00:08:56,000 --> 00:08:59,000
"Chris, TED is a really great conference.

136
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:02,000
You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad."

137
00:09:02,000 --> 00:09:04,000
(Laughter)

138
00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:15,000
So, I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason,

139
00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:17,000
and I will promise you right here and now

140
00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:21,000
that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with.

141
00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:30,000
Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit,

142
00:09:32,000 --> 00:09:35,000
no bandwagoning, no platforms.

143
00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:42,000
Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies,

144
00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:43,000
across all the disciplines that are represented here.

145
00:09:43,000 --> 00:09:45,000
That's not going to be changed at all.

146
00:09:49,000 --> 00:09:51,000
Number two: I am going to put together

147
00:09:51,000 --> 00:09:54,000
an incredible line up of speakers for next year.

148
00:09:54,000 --> 00:09:57,000
The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic

149
00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:01,000
after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines.

150
00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:03,000
There's a year to do this, and already --

151
00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:05,000
I hope to show you a bit later --

152
00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:10,000
there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year.

153
00:10:10,000 --> 00:10:13,000
And I'm getting fantastic help from the community;

154
00:10:13,000 --> 00:10:16,000
this is just such a great community. And combined, our contacts

155
00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:22,000
reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet.

156
00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:24,000
It's true.

157
00:10:24,000 --> 00:10:31,000
Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way

158
00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:34,000
of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit.

159
00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:39,000
And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club.

160
00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:45,000
Books kind of saved me in the last couple years,

161
00:10:45,000 --> 00:10:48,000
and that's a gift that I would like to pass on.

162
00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:53,000
So, when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package

163
00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:56,000
with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED.

164
00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:58,000
They may well be by a TED speaker,

165
00:10:58,000 --> 00:11:01,000
and so we can get the conversation going during the year

166
00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:07,000
and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey.

167
00:11:07,000 --> 00:11:09,000
I think it will be great.

168
00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:14,000
And then, fourthly: I want to mention the Sapling Foundation,

169
00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:16,000
which is the new owner of TED.

170
00:11:17,000 --> 00:11:19,000
What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED

171
00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:25,000
will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for.

172
00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:34,000
And more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here

173
00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:39,000
are ideas that the foundation can use, because there's fantastic synergy.

174
00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:41,000
Already, just in the last few days,

175
00:11:41,000 --> 00:11:44,000
we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about,

176
00:11:44,000 --> 00:11:46,000
that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world,

177
00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:50,000
and the idea of getting this group of people together --

178
00:11:50,000 --> 00:11:52,000
some of the causes that we believe in,

179
00:11:52,000 --> 00:11:55,000
the money that this conference can raise and the ideas --

180
00:11:55,000 --> 00:12:00,000
I really believe that that combination will, over time, make a difference.

181
00:12:00,000 --> 00:12:01,000
I'm incredibly excited about that.

182
00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:10,000
In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything ever in my life.

183
00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:12,000
I'm in this for the long run,

184
00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:17,000
and I would be greatly honored and excited

185
00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:19,000
if you'll come on this journey with me.