Why you should give away your most valuable assets with TED Chairman Chris Anderson

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With a variety of unique colors, interior finishes, accessories, and even wheel options, the ways to personalize your Range Rover Sport are nearly unlimited. When your time to lead arrives, you need a vehicle that rises to meet it. The Range Rover Sport. Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at RangeRover.com. Thanks for listening to WorkLife. Listen to and follow WorkLife with me, Molly Graham, on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa to play the podcast WorkLife on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks all in the Amazon Music app. Humans are really weird. We are wired to be generous, but a lot of us don't even know that. Like, it is a psychological fact that people who give away something end up being surprised at how happy that makes them. So 13 years ago, I published this article called Give Away Your Legos. And the point of the article was to help people that were experiencing rapid change and scale at work, what I had experienced during my time at Facebook and Google, understand what it felt like to go through that kind of change. And the whole point of the metaphor, give away your legos, is that in order to keep up with the change, in order to stay on top of that constantly changing thing, you need to give things away. You need to let go of the thing that you have been great at, the thing that you've built your whole identity around, and move on to something new. The interesting thing that happened was that I thought I was writing that article for people in the technology industry, people going through the kind of scale that I saw at Google and Facebook. But once it was published, I started getting emails from all over the world. I got emails from people in huge companies. I got emails from entrepreneurs in Africa, from teachers and doctors, people that I didn't write it for, people taking big career risks and talking to me about how hard it was to let go of something that they had built their whole career around in order to try something new. And it made me realize that letting go isn't a startup problem. It's a work problem and a human problem. The more I've spent time on it and thought about it, both for myself and in my work with leaders, the more I've realized that our instinct is to hold on. Our instinct is to try to control. Whatever made us successful, whatever we think is important, we want to hang on to it. Our gut says, don't let go of that because that's the thing that's worked for me. But what if that instinct is exactly backwards? What if letting go of what made you successful is the fastest path to more success? What if the most successful people, the ones who create the things that actually last, are the ones who've learned to let go on purpose, to give things away, loosen their grip, and trust that something better is on the other side? I'm Molly Graham, and this is WorkLife, where we untangle the messy human side of work. My guest today has spent 25 years proving that letting go is one of the best ways to build a giant global brand. Chris Anderson became the steward of TED in 2001. At the time, TED was a single annual conference, intimate, exclusive, beloved by a small community of people who felt lucky to be in the room. In other words, not very many people knew about TED at the time. But now, everyone knows about the TED Talk. One person, one idea, succinct and powerful. That format has now been watched billions of times in every country on earth. And the reason it exists the way it does, free, open, global, is because Chris made a series of bets that went against every instinct that most people would have. Every one of those decisions made people nervous. And every one of them made TED more successful than it had been before. At the most recent TED conference, I sat down with Chris in front of a live audience to ask, what does it actually take to let go of the things that made you successful? So, Chris Anderson, welcome to WorkLife. It's great to be here, Molly. Thank you. So, Chris, I'm curious. I want you to take us back because you had already sold a media company when you decided to buy TED. And TED obviously wasn't what it is today. Will you tell us what you thought you were buying? I first went to TED in 1998. And it was this much-loved conference by a small group of people. TED was technology, entertainment, design. Those three industries came together and they all thought it was a little bit weird, but amazing that they had so much to talk to each other about. I fell in love with it. I thought I'd come home. I thought, these are my people because people were excited to dream together. That was 1998. It was a couple of years later that the conference became available to buy and I was in a race with some of the other big media companies to buy it. And I didn't know how it was going to turn out. It felt like there was something special there because people who came absolutely loved it. And if you see something that people are really passionate about, that's your clue that there's something there that can grow. So it felt like something was going to happen. I had no idea what. Do you remember your first moment or one of your earliest moments where you were like, oh, this is what I'm doing here? I even think in the first conference, for all its faults, just seeing a speaker come on stage and nail it and just teach us something so profound. One of the guests at TED who I'd met earlier on urged me to invite this weird futurist called Juan Enriquez. And he actually became my first speaker at the very first conference. The first time I ran myself fully was TED 2003. And he just walked on stage and looked around and had the audience laughing and showed these insights about what was coming in the world of biology. And I just sat back and thought, these people are incredible. And you could see the excitement about this gift that he was giving everyone being absorbed. And a talk isn't just a talk. A talk is a moment when something passes from one mind into hundreds of other minds. That little vibration through the air that changes the sparks in their brain, that can change that person's life forever. Two decades later, I still think about biological possibility differently because of that talk that Juan gave back then. So this is the thing. When you see that happening, you know that some percentage of people are hooked and will come back. I love that. So one of the other themes that I really see when I look back over some of the sort of big moments that you led through at TED is a theme of letting go. And this is something that I've spent a lot of time writing and talking about because I think it's something that so many people and leaders are not very good at. But you seem very good at it. So I'd be curious to hear, do you think that that was a part of your leadership of TED? And if so, why was it important? So it was. And here's how it happened. I wish I could tell it as if it was a hero's journey, but these were the facts. I'd bought TED with a nonprofit, like I'd said, which meant that the whole point of what we were doing It makes it easier to persuade people. I mean, right at the time when we first gave away content, the success of the open-source software movement, for example, was an inspiration. Like, people who had been willing to open up their software and let other people contribute to it created this massive amount of value. And there were stories like this that were out there. The creation of Wikipedia was an inspiration of just, let the world write your encyclopedia for you. What could go wrong? Well, lots of things could go wrong, but something absolutely amazing could go right. And so, you know, you point to the success stories, and then people come along, and then every time something worked at TED, it made it easier to make the case the next time around. What do you think was the difference between the things that failed, like the things that you didn't let go of, and the things where you're like, you convinced the organization or got it through and managed to let go? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't fully know. In the case of TEDx, even though that was in many ways the hardest thing to do, to let go and let other people do the work, the fact that there were teams of people out there who were hungry and eager to do it made that easier because you could say, okay, you know, you do it. But I think any act of doing this does require a level of determination that you have to try and get as far down the organization as you can and know that the upside is potentially amazing. This episode is powered by AT&T Business. If you're running your own business, you know that the Sunday scaries are real. You're thinking about the invoices, the client calls, the inventory, the list that never actually ends. And honestly, we usually don't think about our internet or our phone service until it isn't working. Sometimes a simple glitch can feel like a total catastrophe. That feeling of powerlessness when your tech fails you is the worst. It's a reminder that our connectivity isn't just a bill we pay. 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An elegant 13-inch touchscreen lets you seamlessly navigate and control vehicle systems. And interior refinements like heated seating with a massage function mean comfort and luxury for every journey. Every detail of the Range Rover Sport has been engineered for impact. And its uncompromising design commands attention wherever it goes. With a variety of unique colors, interior finishes, accessories, and even wheel options, the ways to personalize your Range Rover Sport are nearly unlimited. When your time to lead arrives, you need a vehicle that rises to meet it. The Range Rover Sport. Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at LandRover.com. You were the CEO of TED for many years. And then at some point, you decided to let go of that. You decided that that was no longer the right role for you. Talk about making that decision and what that felt like. I think every time I've built a company, round about the time it got more than 150 people, which anthropologists will tell you is some sort of natural human community size or whatever. Our brains can very comfortably relate to 150 people. Beyond that, you have to put in systems. And I think I've been less effective as an organizational leader. And TED got bigger than that. And after a few years of that, it was like, I will do better if someone else can run the actual organization itself. And I'll be curator. I'll do a bit of dreaming. I'll, you know, do some money raising and stuff like that. Happily, I had the right person in the company who was ready to step up and take on that role at the time, a guy called Jay Hirati. And so that made it, that for me turned my relationship with TED, which was getting quite stressful, back into super thrilling again and fun. And, you know, he did the hard work and I got to pontificate, which is just perfect. It sounds like for you, that moment of letting go, you knew something wasn't right for you. Yeah. I don't like managing large numbers of people. But I love, you know, the process of putting on this event and this conference and working with speakers to try and help them express their ideas in the best. That part I loved and was good at with the team that had come together. So, yeah, so I basically carved out a weird job that wasn't, it wasn't just oversight. It was oversight, but then back in this curation role, it was a quite rich level of engagement. Yeah. So that was five years ago. You, I think, gave away the CEO role. And then last year, you decided to do the ultimate giveaway of giving away TED. It's such a rare thing for leaders to step out and to say, it's time for me to move on. Also in such a public way. Will you talk a little bit about what led you to know that this was the right moment? Well, part of the trouble is that I'd published this book, Infectious Generosity, which was trying to make the case for strategic generosity in organizations. In general, the principle of, in the connected age, take a risk. Give away the biggest thing you can imagine and be amazed at what happens next. And I was going, wait a sec, how does that apply to me? What else could I give away? So there was that in the back of my head. But also just the fact that the world of media is changing so fast. You know, back in 2006, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, and so forth. Often TED Talks would explode in virality and go. God, has been much harder to do that since social media algorithms basically, you know, ate a lot of people's attention. And so I'm looking at these amazing communicators on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and so forth, communicating in a spectacular way and knowing that at some point, it's better to bet on the next generation and let them see what they can come through with. It's just putting all the pieces together. It felt like this was a moment to have a lot of fun. The rebel in me likes taking a risk and it was a little crazy to put a note out there saying, okay, I've had my run with TED. Who wants it? The person with the best idea can have it. And that process has worked spectacularly better than I could have hoped. It's so interesting because like I said, I think lots of leaders struggle with this. But part of what I hear you saying is there was just the sense that I might not be the best person for this anymore. I might not be the person that can steward this through this next phase. Yeah, I think that's right. I think I felt I still had a role to play behind the scenes. I'm staying on as chairman of TED, of the TED Foundation. And already just in the few months since the torch has been passed, I've seen so much evidence that the next chapter of TED is going to blow away anything that's happened in the last few years. It's really, really, really exciting to see. I want to talk about feelings for a second, just because one of my experiences with giving things away and letting go of control is that it's not, it's often not easy. You may feel that it's the right thing, but that still can make you scared or territorial or have those moments where like, oh no, I made a mistake. And just looking back at both these organizational moments of giving things away, the videos and TEDx, but obviously also your own moments of giving things away and this moment that you're in of watching this organization that you've built to be stewarded by someone else. Will you talk a little bit about sort of like what that feels like? Humans are really weird. We are wired to be generous, but a lot of us don't even know that. Like it is a psychological fact that people who give away something end up being surprised at how happy that makes them. 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I've been wearing their convertible blazer and super-soft wide-leg pants on repeat lately. The fabric has this great combination of being genuinely comfortable while still looking polished. And the blazer is one of those rare pieces that actually ties a whole outfit together without trying too hard. Instant go-tos, both of them. They've also got beautiful 14K jewelry, home essentials, and denim worth trying. Make your summer wardrobe work smarter. Go to quince.com/worklife for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/worklife for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com/worklife. Okay. So we're gonna go ahead and go to audience questions. Go ahead. Hi, Pankaj. Chris, you have passed the torch. But what is your vision for TED 2036? What would you like the future to be at TED? I mean, I passed the torch, so it really doesn't matter. I mean, look, what was so exciting about discovering that Sal Khan was willing to be the vision steward going forward is that we share so many values. He spent his whole professional life building free knowledge for the world in a way that taps more neatly into the educational curriculum than TED's type of knowledge does. But it's the same values. The internet was made to share knowledge freely. So from that start point, I trust him to do what he wants to do. Yeah. Will you... This is moderator's privilege. Will you just talk for one second? You had a lot of choices, sounds like, last summer, between different organizations that were interested in taking over TED. Will you talk a little bit about some of the hardest parts of that decision and just what made you know that Sal was right? When we put out the open call for who would be the next steward of TED, it was like, we need someone who can carry forward the values that TED really cares about, invest in growth, not give in to commercial interests, et cetera, et cetera. We were deluged. More than 100 companies and organizations put themselves forward, and it was really, it was kind of wild. I had no idea so many people cared. And it was very tempting to go where the big checks were being waived. You know, there were people willing to put nine-figure sort of sums into TED and to really grow it, and, oh, you could be this even much bigger global influence and so forth. Ultimately, what won the day was a desire to hold to the core values. Like, the risk of a conflict between shareholder interests and the ideas that matter most at this moment, it was just very hard to wriggle ourselves away from that and to believe that someone with the big check wouldn't end up themselves in a kind of conflict of, you know, someone's going to need payback at some point. And so we decided that the nonprofit route was the right way to go. And of the nonprofit options on the table, Sal was by far the most compelling. Love it. So we've talked about so many of your radical experiments, but I'd love it if you could do a deep dive on audacious because at $1 billion, TED's sort of becoming one of the largest philanthropies in the world. And I'd love to get your sense of where TED is uniquely suited, what ideas you take on and which you don't, because you're in plastics, ocean, abortion, health. And do you see synergies across the global TED community, Audacious, TEDx? Do those all hook up at some point? So just some context. In the early days of TED, we introduced a TED Prize that gave what eventually became like a million dollar prize to one recipient for their wish to change the world. And that was beautiful and worked, but there was, you know, there's a limit to what you can do, even an incredible social entrepreneur, there's a limit to what they can do with a million dollars. And TED was gaining scale and there were people in the community with much deeper resources. And so the time came when we thought, you know, we could convene a group of donors and put projects in front of them, but how? The problem with philanthropy for a lot of donors, if you really get the truth out of them, is that it often comes across as boring. You know, it's sort of worthy, boring, but please don't, I don't, you know, I don't have the time and emotional energy to listen to this. From the point of view of the social entrepreneurs, their life is hell. They spend, these are heroic people who've devoted their lives to trying to make change in the world. And we expect them to spend 70% of their time raising money, one bloody, frustrating meeting after another where they get rejected. So it's a terribly broken system. So really the audacious project was, well, why couldn't you, what would it take to make philanthropic projects sound really exciting and actually raise a lot of money in one go so that they don't have to lead these miserable lives of just raising money instead of actually changing the world, which is what they're meant to be doing. And so the audacious project was, okay, let's try and do this. Tell, ask the social entrepreneurs, what is the biggest thing your team could actually achieve if money was no object? Dream your biggest dream. Make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And then to the donors to say, boy, do we have something exciting to show you. We're not going to give you anything bad. We're going to give you carefully selected out of hundreds of projects, 10 that are mind-blowingly bold and have been tested for credibility and so forth. And it turns out that when you do that, magic happens. And so once a year now in the audacious project, we select down to 10 projects that are asking for a lot of money. It's typically of the order $100 million, $50 to $100 or sometimes more over several years. And we bring together 30 or 40 families and they spend two and a half days working extremely hard, looking through these projects, watching mini TED talks of the founders in action and asking questions, et cetera, et cetera. And at the end of it, clock's ticking. It's okay. Before anyone goes, are we going to support these or not? And this process has broken the sort of logjam and so that like the last few times we've done it, huge amounts have been raised. This last one, just over a billion dollars was committed in basically in the last hour and a half of a two and a half day process. It's mind blowing to see and it's so inspiring to see. It's like, I am so, I understand the resentment out there and the anger against billionaires and how evil they are and all the rest of it. If you could see these billionaires in action, they are passionate about getting this right. They are determined to give back and they are generous and they give away more money than they've given away in the rest of the year often. And then they shed tears of joy because it was inspiring. And so there's something going very right here. And I think there's so much more that this can do because as the amount of private capital builds up in the world and as the needs in the world build up, we just, we can think much more imaginatively about how to change the future and how to apply that capital in a really important way. It's actually one of the things I'll be spending more time on in my next chapter is on the audacious project. Since this is your retrospective moment, what are two or three of the most surprising or incredible things that you did not see coming when you showed up the first day at a TED in the last 25 years that really still leave an impression with you? Goodness. I mean, I didn't see online video coming for one thing. That was, you know, and that's, that's changed everything that we can do. And I guess just in the sort of world of, well, I didn't see the crushing disappointment of technology that happened, I would say roundabout, you know, the sort of rise of social media and some of the things that followed from that. My own, I've always been, I'm optimistically by nature. I've been a techno-optimist. I really believe that the internet fundamentally could bring the world closer together. You can see everyone in the world, you know, like surely everyone's circle of empathy is going to expand. Our sense of we will get, will get bigger. And to see something like the opposite of that happen over the last 10 years has been, did not see that coming. Horrible. And yet an even bigger sock to the face has been AI. I just, you know, my, like all of you have ChatGPT moment. And then since then, the pace of change in technology has dwarfed by an order of magnitude what we got used to with the march of Moore's law. To the point that it just, I can, And it is, in a sense, bigger than what you are. You are one of the lucky ones, and it's easy to forget that and, you know, don't forget that. That is the most beautiful thing. Well, Chris, I just want to say, I'm in lots of ways very new to TED, but I feel like I'm part of a family now. And on behalf of everyone in this room, and I think everyone that has been touched by TED in a variety of ways over the last 25 years, I think we feel like the lucky ones, that you took your vision and invested it into this community, your time and your energy and your stewardship. And we're so grateful. Thank you, Molly. You're kind. Thank you. Work Life is a production of TED and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter. Ban-Ban Chang is our story editor. Mixing by Hansdale Shi. TED's executive producer is Daniela Bologreso. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Highlash, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lott, Tonsika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy. If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my Substack, Lessons. I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening. This episode is sponsored by Range Rover Sport. Life moves fast, and when the world around you feels like it's changing a mile a minute, you need a vehicle that helps you rise to the challenge. Dynamic by design, the Range Rover Sport combines ultimate luxury and unbridled agility for a powerful drive filled with the latest innovations to keep you and your vehicle connected. An elegant 13-inch touchscreen lets you seamlessly navigate and control vehicle systems. And interior refinements like heated seating with a massage function mean comfort and luxury for every journey. Every detail of the Range Rover Sport has been engineered for impact, and its uncompromising design commands attention wherever it goes. With a variety of unique colors, interior finishes, accessories, and even wheel options, the ways to personalize your Range Rover Sport are nearly unlimited. When your time to lead arrives, you need a vehicle that rises to meet it. The Range Rover Sport. Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at LandRover.com. 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