TED 2013

Ross Rosenberg

Published in

Ross's TED Blog

8 min readFeb 2, 2015

“The 43 Year Old (TED) Virgin”

or

“The (TED) Badge of Courage

In February of 2013, I attended the TED conference for the first time. Below are the highlights of this exceptional “bucket list” experience.

TED. What the hell is it? “Ideas Worth Spreading” is the official mission. “Technology, Entertainment, Design” are the initials. Also called, “Woodstock for Geeks”, the “Oscars for Smart People” and “a dinner party for hundreds of bright minds”. TED defies easy explanation but for me TED 2013 was: “adventure travel for my brain” and ultimately, inspired me to be more courageous.

A brief history: Although I read about the original TED conference as a teenager in the mid ‘80’s, I watched my first TED talk on-line in 2006 not long after Chris Anderson (TED’s curator) utilized the emerging web video platforms to bravely open up (for free!) the long secretive, mysterious and elitist TED conference to the global village. Although this “radical openness” was controversial (especially with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman), the content went viral, surpassing 100 million views by 2009 and 1 BILLION views in November 2012. Soon, TED’s bite-sized, 18-minute speeches became a powerful way of communicating complex topics, sharing passions and launching dialogues. Celebrities from every walk of the arts, science and business endorsed the talks and shared their own favorite talks and playlists; although not everyone is a fan. Since then, the TED franchise continues to grow and democratize, with the ultimate distributed empowerment of ideas being TEDx, where almost anyone can put on a TED conference in their local school, garage, theatre or military base.

In 2007, a TED talk by John Doerr changed my life (ok, my career). A venture capitalist crying on stage about global warming? Really? Maybe it was capitalist theatre but a bell was rung and a seed planted. A year later I found myself walking away from running a $500 million global business to join the solar industry. Ideas worth spreading, indeed!

The match to the flame: John Doerr’s 2007 talk on renewable energy

Fast forward 5 years and I became a TED devotee, sharing links to talks with friends and most profoundly my wife and kids, who innocently asked “Dad, why don’t you go to the TED conference?” As usual my daughters were wise beyond their years and through a serendipitous friendship with a long-time attendee, I found myself applying for membership on a cold February night in a hotel room in Frankfurt, Germany. After my application and expensive registration fee was accepted, I booked my tickets for LAX and soon the TED attendee book arrived in which I (absurdly) shared space with the likes of: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Bono, Jeff Bezos, Sergey/Larry and 1,400 other impressive people.

Ok, enough background. On to the 2013 experience: 5 days, 122 speakers, 7 musicians/dance troupes, 1 yo-yo champion, 1 virtual choir and 1,400 fascinating attendees.

Physically, the TED campus, set at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center (though moving to Vancouver next year) is built around 2 theaters and a beautiful football-field sized fountain (photos here). Multiple tents and unique spaces for collaboration, lounging and activities are every 50 feet or so, including: brainwave measurement, virtual sunglasses kiosk, sit in a Tesla, TED bookstore, and closed caption bean bag areas. Every area is fully stocked with drinks and snacks and breaks are catered by Wolfgang Puck; the food was off the charts including gourmet food trucks. The atmosphere is: SoCal relaxed and collegial yet under the surface is an intense marketplace of ideas. Conversations contain very little small talk; they go deep and impactful quickly. Canyon Ranch for the brain.

The attendees include concentric circles of: A’s (true celebrities, political, philanthropic, stage, song, art, screen and film –Bill, Bono, Al, Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, Meg Ryan, Goldie Hawn, Geena Davis, Paul Simon, John Legend, Phillipe Starck), B’s (as in billionaires: founder/CEOs of the world’s largest technology companies, hedge funds, venture capitalists and private equity firms– Bezos, Larry/Sergey, Marisa Mayer, Steve Case, Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Bill Joy, Ray Dalio ), C’s (founders and investors of companies on the cusp or recently public/sold and “volunteer” senior execs at the world’s largest tech firms — think Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Square, and employees #3–400 at Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple/eBay/PayPal, working cuz it’s fun and for no other reason), D’s (retired CEOs, diplomats, military leaders and inventors of really important technology like, say, the Internet, vaccines and gene-splicing), E’s (former/current TED speakers from all walks of life) and F’s (the rest of us: entrepreneurs, consultants, corporate execs, charitable foundation leaders, educators, product designers, artists, authors and scientists…the respectably accomplished, the merely talented, the intensely curious and/or the aspirational and ambitious. The main difference between the E’s and F’s, as far as I can tell, is courage. It’s a wide gulf. Don’t ask me how the hell you get into the D’s and above.

The 122 speakers I saw were broken up into 3 groups: 1) the main stage (TED talks, 18 minutes), 2) TED Fellows (group of extraordinary young people trying to change the world, recruited by TED to talk, future main stage speakers, 6 minutes) and 3) TED University (TED attendees who auditioned to give a speech).

My top 10 (ok, 17) 2013 main stage talks below:

· Sugata Mitra — Build a School in the Cloud — exceptional talk; won the TED prize ($1m) for his groundbreaking work revolutionizing how kids learn.

· Ron Finley — A guerilla gardener in South Central LA — funny and inspiring story

· Amanda Palmer — The art of asking — Amanda is a rock musician who launched her career at TED, with multiple performances on stage and at the evening parties.

· Shane Koyczan — “To this Day” for the bullied and the beautiful (must watch!)

· Adam Spencer — Hunting Monster Primes — Australian morning radio DJ, hysterical talk on being a math geek

· Joshua Prager — In Search of the Man Who Broke My Neck — heart-wrenching talk from American transplant in Israel

· Bono — Eradicating extreme poverty doesn’t have to be a dream

· Stuart Firestein — Celebrating Ignorance — another talk exploring how we learn in a world where all the world’s information is at the click of a mouse

· Meg Jay — Make the Most of Your 20’s — too late for us, but not for our kids

· Lawrence Lessig — Taking Back the Republic — Outstanding talk on how to change our political system

· Taylor Wilson and Jack Andraka — 18 and 15 year old prodigies who are re-inventing nuclear fusion and a cure for pancreatic cancer. Taylor also spoke at TED 2012 and Peter Thiel is paying him NOT to go to college

· Ajit Narayanan — Empowering Autistic Children

· Dan Pallotta — A new way to judge non-profits — founder of the AIDS Ride and Breast Cancer Walks

· Kees Moeliker — How a Dead Duck Changed My Life — hysterical talk about animal necrophilia (no, not making this up)

· Orly Wahba — The Magic Of Kindness — show Orly’s movie to your kids!

Show this to your kids!

· Eric Whitacre — Virtual Choir — 100 live singers on stage + 32 singers in 32 countries singing via Skype in unison. Also, watch his extraordinary 2011 talk

Best TED Fellows/TED University Talks/Discoveries (links to their inventions/breakthroughs)

· Eddie Huang — BaoHaus NYC, Taiwanese street food restaurant

· Ryan Holladay — location-aware music (Bluebrain)

· Jane Chen — low-cost baby warmers in developing countries (Embrace)

· Negin Farsad — hysterical Muslim comedian

· Paul Wicks — “Patients Like Me”: self-learning, personalized health care social network

· Myshkin Ingawale — urinalysis self-test mobile phone app

· Susan Kish — senior finance exec who taught herself how to code software (“If you don’t learn to code, you are taking a huge risk with your career”)

· ShaoLan — learn to read Chinese in 7 minutes (“Chineasy”)

· Ghislaine Maxwell — starting her own country to save the oceans

· Tony Tjan — “Hearts, Smarts, Guts and Luck” — how entrepreneurial are you? Take their self-assessment!!

· Harper Reed — CTO for Obama 2012 campaign; credited with huge contributions to the victory

Only at TED moments:

· Discussing geopolitics over dinner with Larry Brilliant (Google.org, small pox eradication, and Jerry Garcia’s doctor) and Robert Maxwell’s daughter who is starting her own country

· Conversation with former chairman of AMEX (featured in the 80’s tome “Barbarians at the Gate”) and Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and Kleiner Perkins partner

· Standing in line for free Pinkberry with Cameron Diaz

· Trying to keep up as a venture capitalist turned mountain climber training for the Seven Summits asks the advice of a Mayo clinic doctor who calls over a NASA scientist who trains astronauts to deal with thin air

· Peter Gabriel and Vin Cerf (“father of the Internet”) discussing the “interspecies Internet” (literally gorillas using the web)

· Meeting founder of Common Ground Kauai whom Kari discovered on Twitter

· Amanda Palmer and Beardyman inciting a “bean bag mosh pit riot” in a midnight performance in the lobby of a Westin