Chris Anderson on the Power of TED

I first met today’s guest, Chris Anderson, 20 years ago at a gathering that, at the time, was small and rather unknown. It was called the TED Conference. Chris thought he could turn TED into something big. I thought he was a hopelessly optimistic dreamer. As so often happens, I was wrong.

ANDERSON: I certainly felt, okay, I now know what I am going to be doing. There is so much potential here. 

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

I’m fascinated by success stories, cases where somehow an idea takes off and goes from nothing to being part of everyday life. TED talks are a great example of that phenomenon. How many TED talks have you watched? I’ve probably watched 100. The vast majority of guests in this podcast have given TED talks — I’ve given two. How did Chris Anderson make TED talk such a phenomenon? I want to find that out today.

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LEVITT: Other than Wikipedia maybe, I can’t think of another website that’s been devoted to content generation that’s had as big and as positive an impact on how people think as TED.com. The most watched videos have over 70 million views. And every year there are over 3 billion views of TED Talks. It is just an incredible success story.

ANDERSON: Well, thank you, Steve. It’s lovely to be here. And, yeah. No, it’s — when things go viral, it’s very thrilling. It’s pretty cool.

LEVITT: Now, when things succeed the way TED has, they acquire this air of inevitability after the fact. But I was around TED pretty early on, 20 years ago was my first exposure, and I can credibly say that nobody at that time had even the slightest hint of what TED would become. TED was just a conference back then. Admittedly, an incredibly smart and fun conference, but a tiny little thing held once a year with maybe 600 attendees. And if I understand the history correctly, other than you stepping in to run it around 2000, 2001, TED would have just disappeared. Is that right?

ANDERSON: I don’t know what would have happened actually. The founder of it, Richard Saul Wurman, was 65 — he wanted to sell it. I was very lucky to step in and be the person who got to buy it, basically by promising not to ruin it or ever commercialize it or anything like that.

LEVITT: Am I allowed to ask what kind of price tag was on the conference at the time?

ANDERSON: Well, it moved twice. When I was running a media company just before the dot-com bust — that company, which published Business 2.0 and many other magazines, bought it from Richard Saul Wurman for $14 million. Then we had the bust and so much pain. I had to let go of half the workforce, like a thousand people. I decided I had to leave and the one thing I was desperate to take with me was TED. I didn’t have the money to buy it, that had all gone in the bust, but I had set up a foundation earlier when times were good, and so that was able to buy TED out of the company. Of course, all media prices had crashed in the interim. So 6 million I offered, 6 million they couldn’t improve on from anyone else. And that was how my little foundation ended up with TED. And yes, looking back on it, it was a pretty good philanthropic investment as it turned out.

LEVITT: Oh, pretty good? My God, what an amazing investment of $6 million. It’s really interesting to me that initially, you were just an attendee of the TED conference, and you found it so inspiring that it made you want to drop everything else and devote your professional life to it. That’s the sign of a great product, one that’s so fantastic that the consumers of the product become obsessed by it, don’t you think?

ANDERSON: A hundred percent. That’s actually been my — from a business point of view, that’s been my mantra throughout is track passion. It’s not your passion. Don’t follow your passion. Look at where people are really passionate about something because that’s a proxy for possibility and growth. The street is very good at tracking metrics that look backwards. But when you look backwards at who’s bought a book or a magazine or a TV show, the piece you’re missing is: Did they just casually look at it or did they actually care about it a lot? Because if they cared about it a lot, then it’s going to grow. It’s — you’re going to be able to renew people. You’re going to be able to do all the things that you want to do. Just from a media entrepreneur’s point of view, coming to TED was like, this is the ultimate demonstration of deep passion. People told me things like, “This is the week in my year that I carve out first of all.” You don’t hear that a lot.

LEVITT: Now, going back to that idea of passion — there was a time, it’s hard to remember, when nobody could figure out how to make any money on the internet. And my sister Linda, who was not really a natural entrepreneur, she was the first person I ever met who knew how to make money on the internet. She was part of a soap-making group. And these people, the soap makers, they were incredibly passionate about what they did. She noticed that if you wanted to buy fragrance oils to put into your soaps, you had to buy a really big jug even though you’re only making a little bit of soap and you just needed a little tiny vial. And she said to us, “I’m going to try to sell soap oils, fragrance oils, over the internet.” And we all said, “Oh my god, that’s the stupidest thing ever. You don’t know anything about business.” And the company, 30 years later, is still doing a brisk business taking really big jugs of fragrance oils, pouring them into little tiny ones, putting a nice label on it, and reselling it to people who are passionate about what they do.

ANDERSON: There you go. It can be done. At that first TED, one of the first people I bumped into was this very excitable guy with a huge laugh called Jeff Bezos, who had some mad idea about selling some books online and trying to make some money. He was an exciting person to talk to, for sure.

LEVITT: Hopefully you invested.

ANDERSON: I actually didn’t until later when Amazon was public. I never invested in it as a private company. Didn’t have a chance, was not offered the chance.

LEVITT: My first contact with the TED conference was in 2004 when I was a presenter. And this was before Freakonomics. Nobody really knew about me or my work and I didn’t get many invitations. I’d never heard of TED and I was a young academic. I had done exactly one kind of public speaking, and that was 90-minute seminars presented to other economists. I’m embarrassed to say, I didn’t prepare at all in advance for TED. I packed my usual set of academic slides, probably a hundred of these academic slides, and I put them in my suitcase, and I planned on spending a few minutes the night before figuring out what to cut to get from my usual 90-minute talk down to 15 minutes. And thank God, the flights were such that I had to arrive a day early. And I decided, since I was there, to peek in on a couple of talks, just to see what the venue and the audience was like. When I did that, I was overcome by complete terror. These TED presenters were so good. You cannot imagine how low the standards were in academic economics. I had never seen people on stage with style, with ideas — well rehearsed. These were performances. And this huge, boisterous crowd. I had only planned to watch one or two of the talks — I stayed the whole day studying the presenters, trying to imagine how I was going to recreate myself as a speaker by the next day. And I actually stayed up most of the night trying to craft something that wouldn’t leave me totally humiliated. I know these days you and your team work intensively with speakers to make sure they shine, but it was much less hands-on back then, unless I’m just making this up.

ANDERSON: Well, it was much less back then. We didn’t know really what we were doing. And it’s to your credit that you pulled it off. There’s a debate actually at TED to this day about what is the right mix between preparedness and in-the-moment — like, you could have electrifying things happen when things are a little rough around the edges. And sometimes that’s the best possible thing. But in an era when most talks could go and be seen by millions of people, most speakers now want to think about every word and so forth. We’ve tried to find a way of combining really good preparation, but getting people past the point where they actually sound like they’re reciting — like talks still want to seem fresh and alive and you want to sound like you’re thinking out loud is the case, I think.

LEVITT: I’ve never talked about this TED experience, and even though it was 20 years ago, it’s so burned into my memory. So the next morning there’s a quick microphone check, and I spend a minute on stage getting a feel for things in the empty auditorium. I had a deathly fear of public speaking growing up, and the only way I had learned to overcome it was to completely disassociate from myself. I have created a stage persona — someone who is not the real me — and I’m able to send the stage persona out onto the stage to do my public speaking. It’s a very clear distinction in my head — I snap into this stage persona right before I go on stage, and the normal me just disappears. It’s turned out to be a really effective mechanism for coping with the stress of presenting.

ANDERSON: I’ve never heard a speaker frame it exactly like that before. Introverts often find really good ways to make it on stage because they’re in control of the moment in a sense. I’m introvert myself. I’m occasionally stressed by being on stage, but I’m less stressed by that than by having a random conversation at a party with people I don’t know very well.

LEVITT: Dubner and I will sometimes go and do public speaking, and Dubner’s Mr. Outgoing and talking up all the people backstage and I just sit there and don’t say anything. And I think that the hosts are always terrified of what’s going to happen when I go on stage, but when I go on stage, I’m just a little bit different. I’m sure you have little or no recollection of my talk that day. It was almost 20 years ago, and I’m sure you can’t possibly remember who introduced me and who invited me on stage. It was Jacqueline Novogratz, who would later become your wife. And we had never discussed my introduction. As I’m preparing to go on stage, I hear it for the first time. And Jacqueline mentions the usual accomplishments and awards, and then she began to talk about the death of my son Andrew as she tried to paint a fuller picture of me.

ANDERSON: Oh my goodness.

LEVITT: And the wounds from his death were still quite raw at that time. And hearing him discussed, I snapped out of my stage persona. And suddenly I was back to regular Steve. And I couldn’t find a way to snap back into it. So as I took the stage as regular me, which I hadn’t taken a stage as regular me in a decade, terrified of public speaking, in front of a huge crowd trying to give a speech I’d improvised overnight — on top of all that, I had no idea what stage lights are. They shine in your eyes so brightly that you can’t see anything. All I could see was the front row. And as I look at the front row — sitting right in the middle is Goldie Hawn, and next to her is a Buddhist monk, and he’s all dressed up in red and yellow garb. Goldie Hawn and that monk saved me that day because they both had such beaming, loving smiles on their faces that it somehow made me feel safe.

ANDERSON: So everyone listening to this has to, the instant you stop listening here, go and Google Steve’s TED Talk and you can see this moment. You won’t regret it.

LEVITT: I went back to watch it. I haven’t watched it in a decade, and you see me come on stage, and I’m doing, like, complete jibber jabber. I’m bumbling around in the worst possible way. And then if you watch, you can see the exact moment where I’m able to flip the switch back to stage-persona Steve, and then suddenly everything changes. And in the end, it was a pretty good talk, given what I was up against, I think.

ANDERSON: I can’t wait to tell this to Jacqueline tonight. Brilliant.

LEVITT: That’s a long story, but it hints at the intensity of giving a TED Talk that many speakers feel. At the time, it was just a talk to 600 people. But let’s shift focus to how it went from being this cool little entity to being such a societal force. It started, really, I think, with you unsuccessfully pitching the TV networks on a TED TV show, right?

ANDERSON: So TED is owned, as I mentioned, by a non-profit, which means that you’ve got a duty to the public interest. You can’t just pallet around at an elite conference. so we were trying to figure out: how could we let the magic of TED out into the world? TV turned out not to be interested, knowing with a great certainty that public lectures were inevitably boring. And so it wasn’t until the magic of online video came along. That seems like a mundane technology in a way, but it is actually a profound technology. For centuries, the only way that humans could scale ideas was through the written word. You’re a scientist, you can write a paper, eventually may write a book, people got to know about it that way. That was how knowledge was shared. But the most powerful form of human communication evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of a human opening their mouth and looking at other humans and people hearing their tone of voice and looking at the expression in their eyes. There’s so much biology in human-to-human communication that just isn’t there in text communication. So for the first time, that can scale. Obviously it could through television, but not any individual having the ability to go online and potentially reach out to many others. It’s profound. It started out as kitten videos. And certainly for us, it put us in this dilemma. What do we do now? Because the moral thing to do was to give away our content. We’re a non-profit, and there were people out there in the world who could benefit from it. The business thing to do seemed to be, don’t do that. You’ll destroy the conference. Don’t give away your main asset. But it was this experience, Steve, that got me just really coming to believe that in this connected age, the rules have changed so radically. We went ahead and started releasing content. And to our surprise and delight, it not only went viral and got a lot of views out there in the world; it boosted the conference.

LEVITT: The thing that’s so amazing to me — I mean, it wasn’t like you were a natural site that had a lot of traffic. What kind of web traffic did you have when you had this brilliant idea to post these videos?

ANDERSON: A few hundred people came to the site basically to see when the next conference dates were or something like that. There was no reason to come to the site.

LEVITT: You don’t seem as amazed as I am about how this took off.

ANDERSON: Oh, oh, we were.

LEVITT: You haven’t had as many failures as I have trying to get people to pay attention to things. But it really is incredible. It was completely organic. It started from nothing. If you track the growth over time, my hunch is it’s been growing, internal rate of growth of 100 percent a year, 200 percent a year for 25 years. It’s incredible.

ANDERSON: Yeah, for the early years, it was definitely growing at that rate or more. Timing is everything. The things that take off online really take off. Once you’re known for being the site where those talks happen, this flywheel turns and you’re able easily to recruit better speakers. They give, arguably, better talks because they actually prepare, Steve. You know, the cycle turns. We were definitely right place, right time. We had an archive, and we quickly brought in extra cameras so that we got more like a cinematic sort of feel to the talks. Early on, we had this big, grand intro saying: “Once a year, people gather to share their deepest ideas. No one has seen what happens there until now.” So there was that sort of secret of: we’re letting the magic out. But the main thing was that some of the initial talks we shared were just really good. Sir Ken Robinson — Hans Rosling gave one of those early talks who changed the way a lot of people thought about public health. He actually managed to make statistics interesting. So much serendipity. Someone would have taken off in this place. It might not have been us. Someone would have got value and then they would have had the same dynamic, I think. But we were there right time, got lucky, and off it took. I certainly felt, okay, I now know what I am going to be doing. There is so much potential here.

LEVITT: Even to this day, I feel uneasy about the fact that later my TED Talk was posted online and now has 4-million views. I think, ‘Damn, if I had known it would get 4 million views, I would have tried a lot harder. I would have done a little bit of real prep.’ It’s interesting that I’ve always felt a little bit ashamed of what I did at TED because I didn’t know it was for history.

ANDERSON: Tell people the title of the talk just so that they know.

LEVITT: I think the official title is “The Freakonomics of Drug Dealing.” Although I think you sterilized that, because I think the actual title, if you were sitting in that room, was something like, “Is Thug Life Happy Life?” Which was my attempt, in the wee hours of the night, to create something that wasn’t really stale and academic.

ANDERSON: You have an instinct on how to grab people’s attention. That story of how someone confronting the choice of being a drug dealer or something else — it was completely fascinating. It’s not a talk you expect from an economist. It’s not an accident that it got those 4 million views.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Chris Anderson after this short break.

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LEVITT: Okay, so there was another step you took at TED that was far more radical than posting the TED Talks — was taking a step that I remember thinking was utterly stupid. And that was launching what’s called TEDx. Can you describe what the TEDx concept is?

ANDERSON: We were getting approached by people to say, “We like TED. Could you bring it to our part of the world?” And we were stressed by these ideas, because it’s really hard to put on a conference. And so we eventually started saying, “We can’t, but you could.” And so TEDx was giving people a free license to put on their own TED event. The x was intended almost as an asterisk to say, “X: self organized.” And we did an experiment with a few and they turned out okay, and so we turned on the tap. And suddenly hundreds and then thousands of these events were being held around the world. There were some rules that people were supposed to sign up for to adhere to the format, but we did not control which speakers came. We did not control how they were trained or anything like that. And so there was every possibility for terrible things to happen. And just occasionally, they did. But it built into our strategy and into my understanding of how this online connected world works now. The overwhelming story was that when you let go of control, things got better. People took so much more effort. It became worthwhile for them to invest their time, financial risk, to recruit a whole team and try to make something great, because it was their event. You can take a crazy risk and give away something big and be absolutely amazed at what comes back. Because we’ve always been told: give and you shall receive. We know that there is this sort of reciprocity in how human societies go. But usually that has happened between a couple dozen people or maybe 150 or whatever the magic number is. But now, it can happen at truly incredible scale. There’s probably 60,000-plus people volunteering their time, no cost to us, to put on amazing TED events. And they are delivering 25,000 videos a year — some of which are not very good, but many of which are really strong. And many of the best TED speakers came up through TEDx. The original justification of this was: we’re a non-profit, we’ve got to do the right thing. But when you apply the benefit of hindsight on it, you would say, “This is the most brilliant business strategy you could do because I have 10 full-time people in New York who are overseeing a media operation that is 3,000 global TEDx events, 25,000 videos, a billion views a year, and so on.” We’re in an era where generosity and strategy actually belong in the same sentence. Some people will hear that and disagree, but I think it’s profoundly and importantly true now because we’re in an existential battle for the future in my view, Steve. The world is mean and it’s getting meaner and I don’t like it. And I think a lot of people are scared. We need every weapon in our armory to nudge better behavior, behavior that is giving and sharing. There’s amazing things that can be shared online — not just knowledge — joy. And when we stop and think for a minute about our experience now, we’re sitting in this cornucopia of amazing free stuff that simply wasn’t imaginable or achievable 20 years ago. We have completely forgotten how extraordinary that is and we’re kind of blasé about it. But it is a really astonishing development. When you view it through the lens of generosity, it’s quite a beautiful thing. At any rate, it certainly transformed TED’s strategy.

LEVITT: The ideas you’re talking about now are captured in your new book. It’s called Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading. And can I tell you, this is a book that could only be written by a die-hard optimist. Because essentially it’s a blueprint for recreating society based on the principle of shared generosity and collaboration.

ANDERSON: Doesn’t sound very likely, does it? It’s like, “You jerk. How stupid can you be? Have you seen the world? Have you read a headline? Who are you kidding?” But that actually is the strategy. I’m persuaded. I’m persuaded that there is a pathway there that is interesting and different from the way that we have thought about generosity in the past.

LEVITT: Your emphasis is on what you call “infectious generosity.” What makes generosity infectious?

ANDERSON: Infectious generosity is just generosity that leads to a spread. It leads to a ripple effect of some kind. So typically it leads to a chain of other acts of generosity. That has always happened, I think, throughout history. I mean, the reason, the instinct for generosity evolved, is because people could be kind to each other, confident that that kindness would come back. The cost to the giver is frequently less than the benefit to the receiver. If this idea was more widely embraced, more people would commit to figuring out what is the way that they can be generous. There are many circumstances where a single act of generosity can spread. It can go viral, it can be shared among a group of people in ways that were harder to do before. And I discovered just lots and lots of stories of people who are doing exactly this. And there’s a playbook you can learn from. And I’ve I found it both inspiring and persuasive.

LEVITT: What scares you the most these days? If the world is an awful place in 50 or 100 years, what do you think the reason will be?

ANDERSON: I think it’ll be that humans haven’t figured out how to stop hating each other. As you noticed, I’m a born tech optimist, and I really believed that the world was getting better, that the technology was helping, the internet was helping. The experience of the last 10 years has been the opposite of that. It’s been crushingly disappointing and terrifying. My narrative around that is that social media algorithms — they weren’t designed to be evil, but they have turned out to tap very effectively into our lizard brains. And they’re turning us into lizards. And it’s terribly destructive. When different people in different parts of the country or the world, look at each other and they just see someone to loathe, we’re in real trouble and we are doing this to ourselves by not fixing this problem. We are telling ourselves these stories about each other that bring out the worst of us. Solving the biggest problems requires cooperation across huge numbers of people. We are sabotaging that superpower. And it’s potentially catastrophic. It may stop us from figuring out climate. It may stop us from figuring out artificial intelligence. If we could solve this problem of division, I’m convinced that we can figure out a way to make the future exciting and wonderful. But this part, right now, it’s existential for me. When you see people get involved in these wars online, you’re not seeing humans reasoning with each other there. You’re seeing poisonous darts being thrown at each other to undermine and show why other people are disgusting and untrustworthy. And that’s why I wrote this book, Infectious Generosity. It’s meant to be a battle guide to taking that on and trying, for God’s sake, to find some way of reclaiming the internet.

LEVITT: Now, as I read your book — maybe because of my training as an economist, maybe because I’m jaded in general — I repeatedly find myself thinking that your vision is just not going to happen. But what I kept on coming back to is, look, you made TED happen in a way that I never could have believed. And you’ve also done this thing called The Audacious Project, which again, in this spirit, has been far more wildly successful than I ever would have imagined. Can you talk about The Audacious Project?

ANDERSON: The Audacious Project is trying to apply some thinking about infectious generosity to the realm of actually raising money. And I guess it started out by observing two things. One, that the people who have devoted their lives to non-profit work, I view them as some of the world’s greatest heroes because I do think there are so many problems that can’t be solved through the marketplace. Like, why should any given problem be solvable by creating a product that can be sold at a margin? It’s obvious to me that there are many problems that can’t be solved that way. The people who are willing to devote their lives to doing that are to be admired. And what we make them do is spend 50 percent or more of their time raising money. It’s a brutal and horrible process.

LEVITT: Often small amounts of money.

ANDERSON: Small amounts of money! There are no venture capitalists equivalent who have big pooled sums of resources. There’s no IPO that they can do. So they go to one possible donor after another. It can take 10 meetings, even from a single donor before they’ll actually write the check. The check will often come with conditions. And so this is a process for grinding people down and for making their dreams smaller than they should be. But then on the other side of the equation, you have donors — some of whom want to do really big things and want to give back, and because most of the people in the non-profit sector are a bit ground down, what they hear from them are projects that sound boring. And that’s a tragedy too. So The Audacious Project was an attempt to right both of these at the same time, starting by saying to changemakers, to social entrepreneurs, “What is your biggest dream? Make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” Turns out that most of them have amazing answers to that question. And so The Audacious Project tracks probably now like a thousand big ideas a year. We can’t do much with most of them. We try and find 10 that are credible. There’s a team there who can build them, and then you take these ten plans and you bring them to donors — a group of donors, not one. Not one. So you break the sort of toxicity of that one person with all the power kind of dynamic.

LEVITT: So you actually get the donors assembled in one place and pitch them on the ideas, or how does it work?

ANDERSON: Yeah, so many of these donors I’ve got to know through TED, and others I’ve got to know — you know, word has spread on this one. So we actually pull them together ahead of TED at a private retreat, and we present the ten projects and say, “Hello, friends. The clock is ticking. You have a chance to be a hero here. Find the projects of these 10 that you love. Spend time, dig into them, get comfortable, understand them. And then at the end of the retreat, you’re going to decide whether to support them or not as a group.” And the amazing thing that happens is infectious generosity. Someone is persuaded and will say, “I’m in.” And the next person says, “Well, okay, I’m in too.” And ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, in less than an hour, you can suddenly raise huge amounts of money. The last time we did this, the total amount raised in that final hour of the retreat was just over a billion dollars, which was pretty thrilling. And — people cried. They loved it.  

LEVITT: Of the things you’ve tackled with The Audacious Project, is there one that’s closest to your heart?

ANDERSON: Many of them, they divide into ones that are solving a particular problem. Let’s provide the funding to deworm a hundred-million children. You’ve got these crazily low-cost procedures, less than a dollar per treatment, that can get rid of these worms that otherwise cripple and ruin a kid’s life. So there’s those that take a known problem and just address it, but at scale. And then there’s others that are more about possibility. They’re more scientifically oriented. We funded the Environmental Defense Fund to create this satellite, a single thing the size of a washing machine can circle the Earth, and detect in detail where the methane emissions are coming from. Methane is as big a problem in the short term for climate change as CO2. Has a massive global warming effect until it breaks down. And so knowing where those leaks are is hugely valuable.

LEVITT: These methane leaks, they’re so crazy, because these point sources of methane are leaking enormous amounts into the atmosphere. It’s just somehow — it’s laziness or lack of information. I’m not sure what it is that makes the big petrol companies that are responsible for this not doing anything about it. But my God, when I heard about the idea of the satellite, I thought, that’s the kind of thing we need that we never get in philanthropy, which is just a big idea that you have to be an insider to understand that it’s possible and you need real money to do it. And I’m super excited to see how that works out.

ANDERSON: Good. Thank you, yeah. No, we had another one with Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureate who discovered CRISPR, the gene-editing technique — after nearly a decade of thought about how best to use it, she is now trying to create a new science essentially on how to edit microbiomes. So not individual bugs, but microbiomes. They drive so many things, and if you could figure out how to edit them so that you can change their behavior in a predictable way, you can solve diseases like asthma and you could do things like — again, it’s another way of addressing methane for, funnily enough, by editing the gut microbiome of young calves. It’s a one-time treatment and then you have calves that instead of producing on this methane, they no longer do it. Scientific possibility is hard to get funding from the traditional sources. You tend to get funding for a specific scientific grant, but something that says, “This could create an incredible number of possibilities, it looks super promising” — harder to get funded. And so I get very excited when The Audacious Project allows people to come together and say, “Okay, go and build something amazing.”

LEVITT: You mentioned, I was surprised to see it in your book, was what you called a Manhattan Project for climate change. A Manhattan Project is probably the exact wrong phrase to use now, post-Oppenheimer — but I went around for about a year trying to pitch that exact idea to billionaires because my own view is, if we’re going to have any chance at fighting climate change, we should be taking the top 200 scientists in the world across a bunch of different disciplines, bringing them together with a sense of freedom and an urgency to try to solve these problems. Climate change is interesting because it’s so clearly interdisciplinary. It’s obviously going to take some mix of physics and chemistry and biology to really tackle it. And I made a tiny bit of headway in that direction. I just could never get it going. But, you’re so much better at this than me. Have you tried seriously to launch something like that?

ANDERSON: We have explored it a bit, and we haven’t quite found the right combination of people. The key thing actually is finding the right leader. Who’s our Oppenheimer?  

LEVITT: I think Nathan Myhrvold should be Oppenheimer. I’m not sure he’d be willing to, but I have a sense he might — I’ve talked to Nathan. He’s interested.

ANDERSON: Well, okay, this is exciting to me. Let’s continue this conversation, because with all these things, it’s getting the pieces to slot together. Is it just scientists? Or is it also — for these ideas to be rolled out at the speed that they need to, you need brilliant entrepreneurs who can spin out and actually build companies off whatever idea we’re talking about. You need policy advocates, you need storytellers, you need investors who are willing to be bold. But I agree that it probably starts with the research because although many of the issues about how to solve this are out there, there are still riddles. We both know that interdisciplinary science is capable of generating unexpectedly powerful and wonderful things.

LEVITT: And I think this is one place where the market is absolutely the wrong mechanism. What do we do now? An individual scientist has an idea about how they might do carbon capture. So they go and get a patent. They have some small little underfunded entity that tries to build something below scale. It’s completely the wrong spirit. You want the ideas in the public domain. You want capital flowing in huge amounts to the best ideas. You want the ideas able to percolate. But instead the market is creating this bifurcated, siloed, ineffective, slow approach, which is just, to me, totally wrong.

ANDERSON: You’re exactly right. A lot of the financial world is geared for technology development. And to scale a tech company is fundamentally not very capital intensive. To scale companies that are about changing what we take from the earth and how we build things — we don’t solve climate without really changing infrastructure and industry and atoms at scale. For those companies to scale, at some point, you have to build your first commercial proof, your first commercial plant. That is often something like a hundred million-dollar bet. And it’s too much for most venture capital, it’s too risky for project financing. So there’s this terrible problem right now where there are so many companies that you and I both know about that could play a huge role in shaping the future, maybe saving our collective future, but are stuck in this valley of death. Paradoxically, the ones that succeed, the return on the investment put into them is going to be 100x, 200x, or more because these companies will be huge in the future.

LEVITT: The other problem, I think, with the market approach to this is that even if one of these companies succeeds, they’ll probably be able to capture only one one-hundredth of the social good that they do. And in that spirit, they’re not being invested nearly heavily enough because it’s obvious that they won’t capture most of the benefit. The benefit will go to the world, not to the entrepreneurs, which is not a bad thing. It’s just, we need a different means of financing in a world in which you can’t be the one that captures the rents that are generated from your insights.

ANDERSON: Yeah, there are some companies where there are spectacular actual financial returns. Any clean energy, especially clean baseload energy, is still an unsolved problem. Solar and wind are becoming super cheap, and they can scale massively, but how you power the rest of the grid when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing, is unsolved, and presumably some combo of geothermal, nuclear, hydro needs to be massively ramped up. The companies that do that will actually make a ton of money, but they are stuck in this Valley of Death at the moment.

LEVITT: So your hope is that society will move to a level of generosity on par with what the major religions have proposed. So tithing or giving 10 percent of income, which is a JudeoChristian concept, or in the Islamic tradition giving away 2.5 percent of wealth each year. Now if that were done then there would be trillions of dollars of giving, enough to run a thousand Audacious projects every year. So that’s your dream, right?

ANDERSON: Yes, it is when it comes to financial giving. To be clear, a lot of the book recognizes that most people aren’t in a position where they can give away a lot of money financially. There’s plenty of other ways to be generous, starting with just playing a constructive role online and not assuming evil intent and all those good things. But in this financial area, which I am passionate about, I do think there’s just amazing under-explored possibility if we simply adopted the religious standards that religions sought to impose. Most people who are no longer religious, I don’t think we want to think of ourselves as adopting lower moral standards. We think some of what religions demand was stupid, but the basic idea of looking after other people and doing your part, being a net contributor to the world instead of a taker — most of us want to, I think, sign up for that. So I ended up saying, “How about we circulated this as an idea among people who basically are living reasonably comfortably and want to play their part?” Just commit to the higher of 10 percent of your income or two-and-a-half percent of your net worth. And we’re off. We will raise as much philanthropy as the world could possibly spend if we did that. 

LEVITT: Can I tell you where a good place to start is in making this really tangible? It’s with the ultra-rich people who have signed the Giving Pledge. So signees commit to give away at least half of their net worth over the course of their lifetime or at death. 200 and some ultra-rich people have signed this pledge, collectively pledging to give away $600 billion, at least according to Wikipedia. I got interested in this and my team recently collected data on what these signees are actually doing philanthropically. And it’s shocking. It is shocking how little they’re giving away. We ran the data. The median signee of the Giving Pledge, by our calculations, is not giving away 2.5 percent of their wealth, which is what you are urging them to do. They’re giving away 0.3 percent of their wealth. They’re giving away one tenth of the wealth that you think is the appropriate level. And this is also in a time period when their wealth has just been exploding, because the asset markets have been doing so well. And the other thing that is really shocking to me is that if you look at their giving before they sign and after they sign, there’s no change in their giving. They make this pledge, and they continue to behave in a way which is completely at odds with any notion of fulfilling the pledge. It seems to me like you and your community might be able to put enough pressure on the Giving Pledge signees that they would actually change their behavior. Imagine a high-profile New York Times piece laying out the true facts. I think that you could embarrass the billionaires into giving in a way that seems appropriate in your lens. What do you think?

ANDERSON: So this is a huge issue and I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve had conversations with Bill Gates and other members of that community. The first and most obvious conclusion is one of deep annoyance and disgust and, of course, it’s all hypocrisy. No intent there. There’s another possible response though. What I have concluded is that there is solid intent there to give back, but effective philanthropy at the kind of scale that is needed is extremely hard to do well. It really is. It takes a lot of time and thought. There’s huge potential for unintended consequences. And the other thing that is a problem is that there is no time date on that pledge. It’s basically during your lifetime. And it is perfectly consistent to sign that pledge, not to do anything immediately, but to start thinking and planning. And most of them would say that is exactly what they’re doing. I agree with you, though, that that isn’t quite enough. And one reason why I have this two-and-a-half percent pledge in there is just to supplement that as a long-term goal with a short-term goal that says, “I will, each year, pledge to give away a percentage of some kind of my net worth.” It doesn’t have to necessarily be two-and-a-half. It could start lower and go higher. But just that very act, it moves someone to just put the extra time in. 

LEVITT: I think on the billionaires we need a two-pronged strategy. You’re going to be the good cop and you’re going to try to inspire them about how wonderful the world is. And I’m going to try to get the New York Times to write an article that says, “Hey, these guys said they’re going to give away their money, but they’re not doing it.” So I’ll be the bad cop, you be the good cop, and I think, hopefully together, we can make something happen.

ANDERSON: That could be fun.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with the head of TED, Chris Anderson. After this short break, Chris gives his best advice for public speaking.

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TED talks showcase fantastic public speakers, and I know Chris Anderson has a lot to say about what makes a public talk not just great, but truly amazing.

LEVITT: Let’s talk about your other book you’ve written. It must have been eight or nine years ago. It’s called TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. It is easily the best book I’ve ever read on public speaking. I so wish that book had existed when I was in my early 20s trying to learn how to speak in front of audiences. It’s really an amazing book.

ANDERSON: Wow. That’s nice of you to say.  

LEVITT: You can’t be surprised by that. You know it’s an amazing book.

ANDERSON: Public speaking is a terror for a lot of people and it is hard to get right. And part of my motivation for writing it was to fight the notion that there is a formula. I really don’t think there’s a formula. One of the downsides actually of having talks spread online is that people try to crack a formula and they look at what other speakers are doing and copy them and it, and then it somehow comes over as not authentic. I think the number one rule that you want to hold in mind when you’re giving a talk is to think of it as a gift. We usually think of it as the opposite. We’ve got an opportunity, we can play our cards, we can argue for our platform, our company, our organization, ourselves. And audiences see through that in a nanosecond and are irritated by it. Whereas, if you reflect on the incredible fact that we’re a species that can transfer a little pattern of neurons from one speaker’s mind, you can literally reshape and spark the recreation of that same pattern in the audience. And that pattern is powerful enough because it’s called an idea, to reframe how that person may think of the world and what they may dream about in the future, and what they will decide to do.  

LEVITT: I think the idea about authenticity, which you emphasize throughout the book, is such an important one. I remember when I was first getting started, after Freakonomics came out, I was getting all these invitations where people wanted to pay me to come and speak, and so I had a lecture agent. And they were sensibly nervous about me going out and embarrassing them and myself, so they hired a speaking consultant, an expert. And that person said, “I do not understand why — you do every single thing wrong — but audiences like you. I think your only hope is never wear a tie, never stand behind a podium, and remember that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.” And I don’t understand why I come off as so vulnerable, but there’s something about me that when I’m on the stage, everyone feels sorry for me, and they really want me to succeed. They root for me because I seem so pathetic on stage. For me, that’s my magic formula of speaking is being pathetic and vulnerable being able to just be myself.

ANDERSON: You’re the Brené Brown of economics, I love it. Here’s one reason why vulnerability matters. Our brains are precious to us. Most of the time, you want to be really careful about what you let in to do some rewiring. We’re right not to look at every billboard we see or every whatever and go, “Oh yes, that must absorb, absorb.” No, we’re mostly skeptical. In many ways, the first job of a speaker is to try to get permission to lift that skepticism so that you have a chance. Because we reciprocate with each other. The simplest strategy is you disarm first. So if you go out there with no tie and no podium, you just say, “Look, here I am. This really matters to me. I think I’ve got something important to share. Can we be friends?” That sort of feeling gives you permission to then seed some stuff that opens people up.  

LEVITT: I mentioned earlier that I had a son, Andrew, who died when he was one year old. And your daughter Zoe, she died when she was 24. And I’m so sorry for that. Reading what you and others have written about her, I have such a vivid image of her in my head. Only if you want to, I’d just love to hear you tell a couple of your favorite stories about her. I think it’s so important that we create this living spirit around the people who are close to us.

ANDERSON: Thank you. Yeah, no, I’d be happy to. I’d be happy to. It’s, of course, every parent’s nightmare. It’s an unimaginable thing when you lose a child. And the, the way I coped with it — first of all, you understand why belief in heaven happened. It’d be so comforting to think that you were going to see her again one day. For me, where I got comfort was just from a determination to carry her spirit forward. And the reason that was easy to do is because she had so much spirit. She was a wild child in some ways, often not super easy to parent. But she was so full of life. She was super generous. Friends who got sick, she’d be showing up there in the hospital and just sitting by them, making them laugh. She dressed in big colors, just lived that sort of outsized life. And I think one of the beautiful things about the age that we’re in is that we can carry someone forward in a much more real way — obvious things like pictures and video, but their social media presence and all the emails they’ve written. And in Zoe’s case, two things I’ll say. One is you can actually see her spirit. There was an amazing magician who came to TED called Lennart Green. He’s a Swedish, incredible sleight of hand card magician. And he asked for a volunteer and Zoe was that volunteer. So she’s up on TED’s stage for about 15 minutes of that talk. Go for the magic and come delighted by Zoe’s smile, which you won’t forget. You won’t forget. But she was also a diver and on her gap year, she learned to scuba dive quite well, became a teacher, and we decided to do a memorial. So people put money into a Zoe memorial fund and we did a few things, but the most memorable thing is we funded an underwater sculpture, done by a TED Fellow, actually. It was like a twisted metal giant DNA molecule, like a twisted helix. But when you put that under the sea with a slight electric current going through it, it attracts — slowly attracts coral and other sea life. And because it’s got that electric current wired into it, there’s a webcam there, and so you can see it. So if you go to zoecoral.com, z-o-e-c-o-r-a-l-dot-com, there’s a link there. When I need peace, or joy, or reflection, or I’m missing her, I’ll go there and just marvel at just how amazing life is. Fish, growing numbers of fish are swimming around that thing and it’s beautiful and it stands for life. And Zoe’s name actually means life in Greek. It doesn’t bring her back and it — but it’s a way of turning a terrible thing into what for me is sometimes, just sometimes, a joyful thing. The stories that we tell ourselves matter so much.

LEVITT: One of the things I find remarkable about your relationship with Zoe is I tried to get my own children interested in anything that I do, and I never succeeded once. The fact that Zoe went to TED every year and participated is really interesting to me. I wonder what it is you did in your parenting that made what you do attractive as opposed to repulsive.

ANDERSON: I don’t know — TED is pretty appealing, Steve. It wasn’t that hard.

LEVITT: Probably is more appealing than economics. It’s probably true.

ANDERSON: She didn’t necessarily like the same speakers as me. And in her last month, she had this amazing plan to produce a TV show involving TED and it’s a shame that thing never could happen.  

LEVITT: One thing I found interesting about my own grieving process is that when my son died, it was only negative, only pain. And that pain swamped the memories of his life. But over years, maybe more realistically over decades, the pain has receded. But the good, the joy of his life has survived. So now, 20-plus years later, when I think of my son, I only think of the joy and the wonder of his life. Does that fit your experiences?

ANDERSON: I think it does.

LEVITT: Have you been surprised at all by the grieving process?

ANDERSON: The stories we tell shape who we are. Every experience we have, when you repeat it, it’s a kind of muscle. And if your deliberate attempt with your son — when did you lose your son, Steve? How long ago?

LEVITT: So it was in 1999, so a long time.

ANDERSON: You had an extra decade on me of this. If you decide to find the joy in that life, and when you think of him, you focus on that. And for me, deciding to carry Zoe forward and carry forward her generosity and sparkle. We’re habit forming creatures and that becomes the thing that we associated. So even though — and I’m sure you still feel this as well — that of course there are moments of just intense loss. But no, there very much is a feeling of this is the daughter I was so lucky to have. She did incredible things, she brought so much joy, and and I’m happy I’ve been able to remember her in a way that I think she’ll be proud of.

You can learn more about Chris’s daughter Zoe at Zoecoral.com. That’s Z-o-e-c-o-r-a-l.com. We discussed two of Chris’s books today: His book on public speaking is TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. His most recent book, published in January 2024, is called Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading.

LEVITT: Now is the point in the show where we bring on my producer, Morgan, and we answer a listener question.

LEVEY: Hey, Steve. So a listener named Jack was listening to a past episode with philanthropist John Arnold, and at the end of the episode you asked John if he thinks the world will be a better place in 50 to 100 years. John isn’t sure what the future is going to bring and he’s a little worried. It’s generally thought that we are in a better place now than we were a hundred years ago — than we were 200 years ago. It’s also generally thought that progress happens in these big swings. Something sets us back as a society and then the outcome of that is innovation and progress. Our listener Jack is wondering if we may not see the same trend of progress continue into the future because we are moderating society a lot more now. There’s a lot of market regulation and a lot of policies in place so that we don’t see these really big downturns like we did in the past. So, do you think that moderation is impeding progress?

LEVITT: I think that’s a great question. It’s a hard question because I’m not sure anyone knows or understands the complex process by which progress is made or societies disintegrate. Here’s my own view — I think Steve Pinker, it’s his view also. Progress happens slowly and incrementally and it’s punctuated by big negative events, wars and earthquakes, crop failures, plagues — things that set us back. The question is, are those necessary to the process or are they getting in the way? And my own view is that the better institutions that we have now — so, rule of law, an educated populace, scientific know-how — all these are protecting us from those really bad events. And in my model of the world, which might be too simple, that’s only good for progress because I don’t really believe that horrible things happening are better in the long run. I think that the destruction that happens — you spend a lot of time and effort just getting back to where you were. I think we should only be optimistic that the kind of institutions and regulations we have are working for the better.

LEVEY: So the biggest disruption to modern society we’ve had recently was Covid, obviously. What do you think the impact of Covid was on society?

LEVITT: Mostly I would say Covid was bad. Many people died. It was completely disruptive and people suffered greatly from it, but there were a few good things that came out of it. The mRNA technology for vaccines got accelerated. We got better at doing remote calls and remote work, which has been really helpful. But all in all, I don’t think there’d be many people who’d say, “Yeah, I’m glad Covid came. That was really good for society.” Necessity is the mother of invention. I think the costs of these bad events is almost for sure bigger than the benefits. So I stick with my own view of the world, which is: if we can avoid bad things and just take this steady march to progress, we’ll end up in a much better place in the long run than with these wild fluctuations when terrible things happen.

LEVEY: Jack, thanks so much for your question. If you have a question for us, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

Next week we’ve got an encore presentation of one of my all time favorite episodes. It’s my conversation with economist Sendhil Mullainathan. And in two weeks, we’ve got a brand new episode featuring guest Ingrid Newkirk. She’s the founder and C.E.O. of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA. And I am certain we’re going to have a fascinating conversation.

NEWKIRK: While that was happening, I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m going to die and that’s the end of my activism.’ And I was really furious. And so I thought, ‘Is there anything I could do to carry on when I was dead?’ And I thought, ‘Yes, you can. You could give a part of your liver to whoever is the president of France at the time to protest foie gras.’

As always, thanks for listening and I’ll see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey with help from Lyric Bowditch, and mixed by Jasmin Klinger.  We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at PIMA@Freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

ANDERSON: With your permission, I’m not going to put that in the next edition of the book.