and welcome to another exciting edition of Authors at Google.

We're originating today from our wonderful Google Chicago

office.

[APPLAUSE]

Round of applause.

I will be your presumptive moderator for the day using

the zeitgeist word of the day.

I'm Jim Lecisnki, and our guest today

is with us, Chris Anderson.

Chris is the curator of the TED conference

and has been since 2002, following

a long and successful career in the publishing industry.

We'll talk a little bit about that today.

Chris has developed TED into a global platform

for identifying and disseminating

ideas worth spreading.

Welcome, Chris.

[APPLAUSE]

So great to have you with us.

I wonder if maybe we could get started,

if you'd tell us a little bit about your background.

I mentioned the publishing.

How does a philosophy major and publisher

come to lead and transform one of the world's

great digital brands?

CHRIS ANDERSON: Definitely a long, twisting journey.

I was a journalist originally, actually,

when I first came out of university,

and I made the mistake of buying one of the early computers.

It was like a Tandy TRSAT clone.

And I was awed by this thing.

I kind of completely fell in love with it,

and to cut a long story short, a few years later,

I found myself working at one of the early home computer

magazines, and I loved that.

And then I decided, this isn't so hard.

Let's publish one.

So I started a company, published a magazine.

Bizarrely, it worked, and then this thing took off.

And so the publishing part was just

building lots and lots of these nichey hobbyist magazines that

were deeply boring to everyone, except the people they

were targeted at, who kind of loved them.

And so we had this philosophy.

Our complete logo was actually, "Media with passion."

And that's always been my mantra as an entrepreneur

is look for the passion.

If you can find something that people are really

passionate about, that's your clue

that there's something there, that this is kind

of the proxy for potential.

And so when I first came to TED in 1998, TED was back then,

it was actually started in '84.

Nothing on the internet, of course.

It was an annual conference.

That was it.

And I went there in '98.

It was bringing together Technology, Entertainment,

Design, TED, and I fell in love with it.

I thought, I've come home.

And what I saw was this passion.

People were so passionate about it.

It was like, this is my best week of the year.

And I thought, why is this your best week of the year?

But that was the clue.

And so when there was a chance to buy TED from its founder--

he was 65-- and I leapt at it.

And so that happened in 2001, and the journey since then

has been a wild journey of its own.

But that's how I got there.

JIM LECINSKI: Great.

And we'll talk about that journey since then.

In some sense, it's been said that it

was the power of what was then new media back in 2006,

online video in particular, that really gave TED its boost.

Would you say that's the case?

CHRIS ANDERSON: That's absolutely the case.

When I bought it, I bought it with a nonprofit,

a foundation I had.

And so the intention was always, it

felt like there was all this inspiration.

It was supposed to be for the public good somehow,

but how could you let out the knowledge

that was at this private conference to the world?

And our first attempt to do that was on TV,

and TV wasn't interested.

These are lectures.

They're lectures.

They're kind of boring.

Lectures are boring.

Now I didn't actually listen to them,

because they weren't boring.

But they weren't interested.

And so yeah.

So when this weird technology called online video

with its shaky little kittens and all these other things

happening came along, we thought, wait a sec.

Maybe we could, as an experiment,

put some TED Talks up.

Probably won't work.

They're too long for the internet,

and you're not going to be there live.

It's on video.

To our amazement, these things went viral,

and so that was the moment, 2006,

when we decided we had to flip TED on its head.

We're no longer just a conference.

We're a media organization devoted to sharing ideas.

JIM LECINSKI: And so let's build on that a little bit.

You described what TED stands for, T-E-D, but how would you

talk about its meaning, its purpose?

What does the brand stand for?

CHRIS ANDERSON: It stands for the bringing together

of knowledge in ways that people can understand.

The world's really complicated, and most of the time,

we go deep.

You have to know something well to have a chance of succeeding.

You dig deep.

You learn your speciality well.

And that's how most things operate.

That's how most conferences operate,

most university courses, whatever.

That's what you have to do.

But there's a place for context to actually understand

the world we're in.

You need to go broader than that.

And actually, lots of other things

happen when you bring together knowledge from different areas.

You get the catalyzing of new ideas.

You get the possibility of collaboration,

and so I think that's what hit me suddenly

was why Ted had a role to play.

There's just not much of that happens.

And so if you can persuade people to come together

from these different fields and explain something

they're passionate about in ways that other people

can actually understand, that, I think, that definitely

over a few days, for example, that had the effect of selling

these spots in your brain.

And you just thought of stuff that you

hadn't thought of before.

And so that's what it stands for.

JIM LECINSKI: We'll come back and chat

a little bit in a second about the power

of how those talks are built on understandable ideas.

But I want to pursue-- you mentioned the word

collaboration.

Most of our audiences has not had the pleasure

of actually attending the conference when they were

in Long Beach or now back in Vancouver,

so could you maybe paint a little picture about not just

the speakers on the stage that we

can see by watching the video, but it's

a full four-day collaboration event with the dinners.

And can you maybe paint picture of what

happens during that week?

CHRIS ANDERSON: Sure.

So yeah, it's four and 1/2-ish days.

There are basically 12 main sessions of TED.

Each session is an hour and 45 minutes,

and it's five to six speakers, plus other little performances

and things thrown in there.

So it's quite fast-moving.

What's unusual about TED is that everyone sees every speaker.

It's one track.

And that doesn't usually happen, but it is the whole point of it

is you are supposed to be exposed to stuff you had

no idea you were interested in.

And it's become a truism at TED that the session that you

think is going to be most boring is the one that blows you away.

And so amazingly, people do commit

to coming to each session, and that

means that you can have a shared conversation in the corridors

after.

And the collaboration is not really something we stage.

It just happens that the combination of that exposure

to these different speakers and ideas,

it sort of sparks things in people,

and weird projects emerge out of it.

JIM LECINSKI: Yeah.

Now is it the case-- I had heard that you discourage or don't

allow digital devices or live tweeting or cameras

or these kind of things in the room?

Is that the case?

CHRIS ANDERSON: That is the case.

Apart from the back two rows, where

people can tweet if they want to, or in the simulcast spaces.

But in the main theater, we say no, because all of life right

now is this attention war, and talks are weird things.

They often take a while to build.

To share a really big idea or something that really matters,

you sometimes have to build context.

You have to go through, gosh, 90 seconds, where

it's a little bit challenging or boring for a minute.

If people-- because I've just got to check my email,

just for this moment.

They miss a couple of key context things, they're gone.

And then the talk never lands.

And once more, the five people behind them

are sort of annoyed, and it's sending a signal that this

isn't that interesting.

So everyone else decides it's not that interesting.

You are, right now, you are a super organism.

You're all actually, although you're not

fully conscious of it, you're feeding off each other.

You take cues from each other.

And that's what happens in a lot of things.

So we try to have a different contract

from the normal contract.

Audience, you're actually going to give your full attention

to this speaker for 18 minutes.

Speaker, you're going to work bloody hard for several months

to produce the talk of your life and make it worth their while.

And that's the deal.

JIM LECINSKI: You know I actually

asked that question as just a not-so-subtle hint

to our audience today.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I'm actually stunned,

because I thought coming to Google, of all places,

you guys would all be coding and whatever.

You're all so brilliant, you can multitask your way

through this.

No problem.

JIM LECINSKI: There you go.

So maybe tell us a little bit about the simple question

of who gets to do a TED talk.

How do you decide?

CHRIS ANDERSON: In principle, it's simple.

It's someone who's doing amazing work that other people need

to know about, and the rest is detail.

And so it's hard to decide who those people are.

We get 10,000 suggestions a year from people around the world.

We have a curation team.

For a conference, we're trying to weave

a sort of mix of people together around a theme.

This year's theme was dream as in big, bold dreams.

But there's no algorithm to it yet.

Please don't invent one just yet,

or we'll be out of business.

It's a sort of-- because we want, with the program,

to-- and I think a lot of events fail to do this.

We want to poke at every different part

of people's minds.

It can't just be about something analytical or storytelling,

what have you.

There are different parts of minds

engaged when you start to go to the aesthetic

or to someone's inspiring story, or to here's

a really complex scientific issue that we're tackling in.

There's energy that comes from that,