Susan Cain is a lawyer and negotiations consultant. She is also an introvert who has noticed that institutions like business and education are stacked against people like her. So for the past seven years she has been writing Quiet, a book on that subject which was published earlier this year. She knew that to promote it she would have to undertake something difficult for introverts: lots of public speaking. She braced herself for “a year of speaking dangerously.”
Her dream venue was scariest stage of all: TED. Over the past few years, a TED talk has become for intellectuals and artists the equivalent of what Johnny Carson’s couch once was for comedians. Like winning an Oscar, writing the great American novel, or getting a front-row seat at a fashion show, doing a TED talk is now an aspirational peak for the thinking set.
So as intimidating as it was, Cain sent information about the book to the TED-cretariat in New York that picks the speakers for the annual conference. They asked for a record of her in action, and she sent them a video of a session where she coached negotiation tactics.
She was in.
Cain’s talk, worked over with TED’s CEO and master of ceremonies Chris Anderson, followed a number of cherished TED conventions. She framed an issue that tugged heartstrings by setting it within a personal story, one that cast introverts as underdogs shackled by calm and rectitude in a world where insecure bigmouths always get promotions. She showed vulnerability, further winning the audience to her side. Her graphics were well-coordinated, and she had numbers to back up her arguments.
One of Anderson’s suggestions was to align the talk with the TED2012 theme of “Full Spectrum” (which signifies an effort to jazz up the talks by dramatic enhancements, multimedia, or broader perspectives). So she adopted his idea that she employ a prop, walking on stage with a suitcase full of books, to signify a love of reading that set her apart from the madding crowd.
In a trope that would be often repeated by TED2012 speakers, she gave a callout to an inspirational family member. (It was her grandfather, a beloved rabbi, but others would speak lovingly of unforgettable parents, children and siblings.)
The introvert aced the talk.
But the kudos Cain got from the audience at Long Beach Performing Arts Center last Tuesday will only begin her rewards. That TED talk was not only crafted for the 1,500 people with big wallets who attend the elite conference, but many millions who view TED talks, free, on the web and through apps on a variety of devices (viewed by 700 million to date). To the world at large, TED is not an annual gathering where people drawn by the talks spend four days in each other’s company, but a deep collection of videos bound by that conference’s motto, “Ideas Worth Sharing.”
Cain’s talk will now be watched easily hundreds of thousands of times, and it will be her virtual calling card for years.
This is a result of a bold move that Anderson (not the Chris Anderson who is editor in chief of Wired) and his team made in 2006. Instead of regarding the talks as cloistered jewels reserved for privileged TED-sters, the nonprofit organization decided to distribute them widely. Later, the TED idea was further expanded by a system by which outsiders could run their own mini-TEDs, (TEDx), creating not only a feeder system for the main event, but further spreading of the meme of a TED talk.
“We had this amazing opportunity not to be a conference, but a platform,” Anderson says.
The bet has paid off: Despite the knowledge that all the talks will eventually be available online, the actual conference gets bigger every year. When Anderson made his decision TED was held in Monterey, California, which had an auditorium with a capacity below 500 — a few hundred more people watched from “simulcast rooms.”
It is now in Long Beach, with an auditorium that holds 1,500. Anderson claims that no matter how much he stretches attendance there are still 1,000 people waving checks, begging to get in.
When the conference went to Southern California, some veteran TED-sters fretted about a loss of its intimacy. Anderson admits that the event is a little more impersonal. Yet it has kept its essence, largely because TED has managed to maintain the sense of community among attendees.
Though diverse in some ways the TED audience is linked by shared values. Nothing describes it better than two questions one speaker posed. Asked whether they were religious in a traditional sense, the crowed raised only a smattering of hands. Asked whether they were spiritual, almost everybody shot their hands skyward. Not a Santorum crowd.
Probably not a Romney crowd, either. Economically, TED-sters are privileged — it’s a place where the well-off can mingle with the rich — but when polled whether they should be taxed more, they clearly tilt more toward Warren Buffett than Grover Norquist.
Still, the ubiquity of TED talks online has had some effect. A number of people told me they spent less time in the auditorium, focusing instead on the unique opportunities for networking and socializing. The TED audience is high-flying, loaded with names that often have their own Twitter hashtag. But in the relaxed atmosphere, even well-known attendees are fairly approachable. So TED is a Super Bowl of schmoozing. (My personal highlight this week: At dinner one night someone nodded to the empty chair beside me and asked, “Is this seat taken?” It was superstar conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.)
Most of the attendees understand, though, that if you’re not in the auditorium, or glued to one of the screens around the venue showing the stage, you risk missing that one unheralded appearance that becomes the talk of the conference. This year the breakout was a charismatic public interest lawyer, Bryan Stephenson, speaking about social justice for young criminal defendants (inspirational relative: his grandmother).
Stephenson is 52 years old and though he has been honored widely, he is not a celebrity. But when that video goes online, all of that that will change. His 18 minutes at TED will tranform his life.
Anderson does worry that the power of the platform can change the nature of TED in real time. “You have this huge motivation to be a star,” says Anderson. “People are putting in unbelievable amounts of time. The danger is that it can become formulaic, that people don’t talk to this audience.”
In an attempt to thwart that effect, Anderson tried a few tricks to shake things up this year. These were met with mixed success. One notable flop was “The Dinner Party” — a session where a group of people sat around a table listening to a set of speakers, each of whom joined the party for some stilted chatter. Another session called “The Trial” had speakers present while a “jury” sat on stage and voted whether their theses were convincing. (Sociologist Sherry Turkle exhaled a visible sigh of relief with the unanimous verdict that her concern about excessive social networking wasn’t overblown.)
Next year will be the most daring trick of all — an American Idol-style competition for the TED stage that will fill over half the program slots with speakers bypassing the traditional evaluation channels. We got a taste of that this year when one speaker actually gave a TED talk about wanting to do a TED talk and then figuring out how to do it. The meta was deafening.
Ultimately, the success of a TED talk is about what the speaker delivers. The TED crowd gets off on jaw-dropping new information, exposure to new gadgets and breakthroughs, alarms about planetary threats, entertainment that exposes crazy-good talent (this year’s hit: comic/mimic Reggie Watts), and above all, something that lifts the mind beyond the everyday and into a stratosphere where human potential exceeds boundaries. They want to be awed — if the word “wonder” were a trigger in a drinking game, the entire TED community would be soused before lunch. And they are most awed when the speaker’s narrative and personality is itself an uplifting endorsement for the human spirit.
While Anderson urged this year’s speakers to deliver talks with “full spectrum,” TED really works best at a narrow bandwidth: the low-bitrate magic of a magnetic personality conveying a vital, or even a merely novel, idea with passion and wit, like poet Billy Collins — who charmed the audience with his self-effacing manner and devastatingly witting verse. (“Billy Collins didn’t prepare anything, believe me,” says TED’s June Cohen, who shares hosting duties with Anderson. “He just got up there and talked.) A hilarious Chip Kidd talking about designing books. Or John Hockenberry invoking the concept of “intent” in design, using his wheelchair as example and symbol.
After a relatively choppy first day, this year’s TED won over its crowd, as it always seems to. The geek section of the program was particularly well-curated, with a folksy MIT professor touting battery breakthroughs and Darpa head Regina Dugan showing off a robot hummingbird.
And TED wouldn’t be TED without sounding alarms of various environmental and social catastrophes. A day after a former Greenpeace director basically read us a CO2 death sentence, global-warming icon James Hansen, giving his first TED talk (what took so long?), trotted out his charts and graphics to seal the deal. Then, like a crème brûlée whipped up by Sweeney Todd, an acting troupe performed a hokey Capitol Steps-style song cycle that could have been called “Climate Change, the Musical.”
But TED2012’s most dystopian vision came in a video conceived by Ridley Scott and directed by his son Luke. This clip — which has a whiff of the famous Apple 1984 commercial — shows the 2023 version of TED. It is held in a vast coliseum, maybe the size of the Dallas Cowboys’ grotesque new stadium. Marching out on what looks like a buffed-up rigging for a U2 concert, the speaker is a megalomaniac industrialist firing up an audience — of maybe 100,000 TED-sters.
Is that mega-expansion Anderson’s plan? He laughs at the prospect. “That won’t happen,” he says.
But, he concedes, with its following on the web and beyond, TED already exceeds that grand scale.