Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. Last week, TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha gave us his recap of the TED2019 conference and offered key takeaways from the most interesting talks and provocative ideas shared at the event.
Under the theme, “Bigger Than Us,” the conference featured talks, Q&As and presentations from a wide array of high-profile speakers, including an appearance from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was the talk of the week. Anthony dives deeper into the questions raised in his onstage interview that kept popping up: How has social media warped our democracy? How can the big online platforms fight back against abuse and misinformation? And what is the internet good for, anyway?
“…So I would suggest that probably five years ago, the way that we wrote about a lot of these tech companies was too positive and they weren’t as good as we made them sound. Now the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction, where they’re probably not as bad we make them sound…
…At TED, you’d see the more traditional TED talks about, “Let’s talk about the magic of finding community in the internet.” There were several versions of that talk this year. Some of them very good, but now you have to have that conversation with the acknowledgement that there’s much that is terrible on the internet.”
Image via Ryan Lash / TED
Anthony also digs into what really differentiates the TED conference from other tech events, what types of people did and should attend the event, and even how he managed to get kicked out of the theater for typing too loud.
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Danny Crichton: Good afternoon everyone, this is Danny Crichton, Executive Editor of Extra Crunch. Thank you so much for joining our conference call today with TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha. We’ll be talking about all things TED Conference, Vancouver, media, even the new “Avengers” movie and we’re going to have a special sneak preview of how Anthony got kicked out of the theater at TED because he types too loud.
So let’s get started. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us.
Anthony Ha: Thank you for having me.
Danny C.: Set the scene really quick, because I think we hear TED and we watch a video every once in a while, but there is actually a conference that’s a multi-day experience. What was that like?
Anthony H.: Right, so, TED for a lot of people is just this website or a podcast where you go for these different talks. That’s how it existed to me, because this is the first time I went. It’s important to distinguish between TED, the main conference, and TEDx which are all these smaller satellite events.
This was the TED where I think the stereotype (which is fairly accurate) is that it’s sort of like Davos for the Silicon Valley set. That it’s all these startups and large tech company CEO’s.
I was going through my materials, I don’t think they released an exact attendee count, but I would say there’s probably between one and two thousand people, $10,000.00 a ticket. As a journalist, you don’t have to pay that.
The format is in the course of a day, there will probably be anywhere from one to four sessions… I think on the first day there’s just one and the last day there’s just one, but the other days it’s anywhere from three to four sessions. Each one has about five talks each. Each of those talks is anywhere from five to 20 minutes.
I think they’re trying to break up the formula a little bit because there have been more Q&As and demos. I think most people have this idea TED where somebody goes on stage and gives this formulaic “Let me tell you how I’m changing the world, here’s the one thing I’m passionate about.” All of which are good things, but have become these very overexposed ideas. They are trying to mix up the formula a little bit.
Danny C.: For our readers, why should they be paying attention to TED? It’s always been there. It’s been around for a long time actually, at least a decade, as far as I remember. What makes it newsworthy, what makes it interesting?
Anthony H.: I mean this is definitely something that I wrestled with a bit. It’s the first time TechCrunch has been invited.
Anthony H.: Henry Pickavet our Editorial Director. We have a lot of editorial titles at TechCrunch, it’s hard to remember exactly what they-
Danny C.: Title inflation.
Anthony H.: Exactly. I think essentially, for us it was this idea about this conversation amongst this fairly, (I mean this is sort of a loaded word and I mean this with scare quotes) “elite group” and the idea of “What are they talking about”.
In fact, on the first day there was this talk by journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. And it fortuitously happened to be the day they announced the Pulitzer winners and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer for her coverage of the UK side of the reporting around Cambridge Analytica.
She very explicitly addressed this idea, she used the phrase, “The Gods of Silicon Valley”, and she talked with Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and I mean that’s the crowd that sort of shows up.
Sometimes they speak, sometimes they don’t. This year, Jack Dorsey did actually do an on-stage interview. But this driving a lot the conversation among them.
In fact, one of the instructions they give us is that we’re not supposed to talk about who’s attending the event, unless we explicitly get permission.
Danny C.: The actual attendees, right?
Anthony H.: Yeah like an “Oh, I saw this famous person getting coffee next to me.” You’re not supposed to do that.
But what Carole did, she did say that she’d heard from somebody that, Sergey Brin, somebody she named specifically in her talk, was sitting in the overflow room as she gave this talk. And Facebook is one of the sponsors of the event, and apparently, they were very unhappy with that.
So there’s a sense that even though a lot of these are, to use another overused phrase, “Evergreen talks”, that aren’t necessarily news per se, they drive a lot of the conversation, both with what happens on stage and the conversation that happens off stage.
Danny C.: It’s curious, because this was also the first year that TechCrunch was invited to Davos. Why are journalists suddenly a part of these events? They were these conclaves layered with white and gray smoke but now they seem to be opening up a little more. Why do you think that is?
Anthony H.: I think there is a couple of different elements. In general, I think there’ve been journalists at TED before, but I get the sense that their presence is growing. There’s an element of, if you have an event, you want it to feel like “Well you’re not here, why are you not here?”
If the conversation is just limited to the people there then, and this is certainly with our own events, there’s the question of why do we invite a whole bunch of other journalists there, and do we want them there too? … Then in some ways we let them break some of these stories because, or at least we, not necessarily let them, but it’s not a bad thing if suddenly the big headline on Tech Meme or wherever.
At least in the case of Davos and TED, I think there’s less news in the sense of somebody going on stage and making an announcement. But they still want to create that sense of driving the conversation and especially in the case of TED, there’s a little bit of a sense that it’s maybe a slightly older franchise. Everyone knows what it is. You still need to be there, so you create a little bit of that buzz.
I think that TechCrunch specifically seems like a great fit for TED in the sense that there is that sort of tech audience, even if not all the talks are tech-focused. In general, I’ve noticed that at TechCrunch, it feels like a lot of organizations are a little worried about seeming a bit stodgy and so one of the ways they try to combat that is to come to TechCrunch and say, “Hey, we’re tech-focused, we’re tech-driven, we care about innovation.”
So I think this is probably a little bit an extension of that.
Danny C.: So if you’re stodgy and old, you just get a blogger and problem solved.
Anthony H.: – I think, sometimes it’s a good idea, sometimes it’s a bad idea. It’s almost always is something that works for us. It’s something that is part of the reason why some of the doors that maybe weren’t opened at TechCrunch when I started a few years are open now because of that trend.
Danny C.: This seems to be the first year where there was a lot of big news. There’s stuff from the New York Times, TechCrunch and a bunch of other places. I guess most of it was focused on Jack Dorsey. What happened? Were you in the audience?
Anthony H.: I was in the audience. So Jack Dorsey spoke on the second day and he did a Q&A on stage, which again, is breaking with that format, and I don’t know why that was the case.
There were a couple of Q&As, and I got the sense that it was a mixture of, “this is a topic where the Q&A is better serving the content” versus just somebody going on stage and saying whatever they want. Then probably, maybe because it takes less time for a busy tech CEO to just go on stage and do a Q&A versus preparing a 20-minute talk.
The tone of it had sort of been set by this journalist I mentioned, Carole Cadwalladr, who gave a talk the day before. It was basically about misinformation on social media, particularly on Facebook but she addressed these other platforms as well.
She made the argument that essentially, this isn’t just as I think Jared Kushner said in an interview today, it’s not just a couple of Facebook ads, it’s actually undermining our democracy. Whether or not you believe that, though I mean she certainly made the best version of that argument.
And I did my best to distill that into an article on TechCrunch again to say, “This is what that argument is. For the people who feel this way, this is essentially how you make that case.” Then the very next session the next morning is Jack Dorsey.
He comes up and they ask him a lot of questions
Danny C.: Who’s they in this context?
Anthony H.: It’s Chris Anderson.
Danny C.: Okay, so the organizers of the event?
Anthony H.: Yeah, two of the organizers of the event. Chris Anderson is one of them, but it was the organizers of TED.
I assumed they’d sort of see it the way we see it, which is in the editorial lens it’s not just a puff interview, asking what’s been cleared with PR ahead of time. It’s let’s ask the questions we want to ask.
In fact there was this really interesting metaphor that Chris Anderson used at one point which was, “The reason why people are so frustrated with Twitter and with Jack”, because I mean, Jack has sort of been doing this media tour, this almost apology tour, saying, “We’re listening, we’re going to do better.” He’s been doing this on and off for several months now.
Apparently, as of yesterday, it extended to Donald Trump. He was back behind closed doors meeting Donald Trump. But here, people don’t seem very satisfied. The way Chris Anderson explained it was, this argument that, “Twitter is like the Titanic and everyone complaining about it. All of these people are in steerage on the Titanic and they’re saying, there’s an iceberg up ahead, turn this ship around,” and Jack Dorsey is saying, “I hear you, that’s a very good point,” and he goes back to the bridge and he’s very calm, and nothing happens.
The passengers, again this is Chris Anderson’s phrase, are shouting, “Turn this fucking ship around,” and nothing is happening. Dorsey’s argument was essentially that it is happening, but it requires a fundamental re-thinking of Twitter. A changing of the dynamic of how Twitter works instead of just applying all these band-aid solutions, which certainly have been rolling out in smaller upgrades. The big fix is going to be a fundamental re-thinking of Twitter and that’s not something that happens quickly.
It’d have happen slowly and deliberately to figure out what the correct strategy is. Essentially the way he outlined it was this idea that Twitter needs to be re-orientated instead of this idea that I follow you Danny, or I follow whoever. It’s basically, you follow a topic, you follow Starbucks for example and you would just see all the conversation around, regardless of who you follow.
That seems, like not necessarily a fix for toxic behavior or language, but he argued that a lot of it is that this account orientation is basically has created this situation where it’s about attention. Saying the most sensational thing so that it will get re-Tweeted. Here instead, it’s more about conversations and contributing to conversations and you think that will lead to a healthier Twitter.
Danny C.: I saw something recently where there was a discussion that Instagram was really not about photos but about likes. That it’s really about the hearts you get. I think the same thing is true absolutely on Twitter where reasonable tweets just sort of get lost in the ether and the person who just says the loudest things gets heard the most.
What I thought was interesting, also in the last year, was this criticism of technology.
TED, traditionally, was this very positive “everything is up onto the right hockey stick”. I just have all these memories of watching TED videos over the years and in the last year, we had Shoshana Zuboff with her surveillance capitalism book. We now have Cadwalladr talking about the Gods of Silicon Valley.
What does all this mean? Is there an answer from TED? Because TED’s supposed to give us answers and ideas that matter, that are good ideas…
Anthony H.: I think that a lot of the times its sort of driven by this broader meta-narrative. So I would suggest that probably five years ago, the way that we wrote about a lot of these tech companies was too positive and they weren’t as good as we made them sound.
Now the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction, where they’re probably not as bad we make them sound. I don’t necessarily believe they’ve actually destroyed the idea of a working election. They’ve probably done damage to it, certainly. But it’s not like this group of greedy, moron technocrats who are just ruining everything. I don’t think it’s quite that bad. I do think there are these certain broader conversational shifts.
What that means is that it’s very, very difficult to tell a story that’s not part of that narrative and it can feel sort of wrong. There’s this quote that’s been quoted back to me several times that I think Erin Griffith wrote in Wired, where she said, “You just couldn’t write a positive startup story at this point, there’s just no interest in that.”
Now if you read techcrunch.com, you know that’s not true. But I think there’s more of just a sense of, and this takes many forms and the kind of company you’re talking about. While this much of this is long overdue, is just that you have to ask harder questions.
There are the stories that are genuinely negative and those are very important. I’m glad those are coming out. But there’s also the way it colors the tone of so many of the other articles.
At TED, you’d see in any talk, the more traditional TED talks about, “Let’s talk about the magic of finding community in the internet.” There were several versions of that talk this year. Some of them very good, but now you have to have that conversation with the acknowledgment that there’s much that is terrible on the internet.
You can’t just say, “It’s great” in the same way that I think, when I profile a startup now I’m definitely speaking much harder, and I think you’ll agree, that this is much overdue. I’m being much harder about what are the questions the skeptics are going to want answered? What are the questions the critics are going to want answered? And let me make sure I get a real answer to those questions. Or at least get them on the record that they’re not going to answer those questions.
Rather than just not mentioning it and then having a very positive TechCrunch article and then somebody later on says, “Wait a second, why didn’t we talk about privacy? Why didn’t we talk about the cost or what have you?”
I think that’s part of the story. What’s happened on this meta-level is that all these different companies that are very different but have technology involving the internet, they’re all getting along together, but Silicon Valley has ruined everything and that was true, that was part of the conversation here.
Which again, is very strange since presumably many of those people were in the room, and I think in many cases, are wondering this themselves. They’re thinking, we had this vision of what it could be, or what these products would do. Presumably, they thought they were going to make a ton of money and the ones who were there, probably were mostly successful in that. Now we’re grappling with that question of, “What have we done? What have we rocked and how can we fix it moving forward?”
Danny C.: Yeah, there were a couple of other parts, obviously Dorsey got the most news attention, but you enjoyed some of the other presenters.
Anthony H.: Right, I would say in terms of that genre of “let’s talk about the beauty of the internet,” There was an actor named Rafael Casal and he gave this talk about the idea of online mobs. I think that’s a really interesting phenomenon and I think I’ve probably been part of an online mob in the sense that you Tweet, talking shit about somebody.
We’ve got this idea that an online mob is a bad thing. I think that he made the argument that he was part of this Twitter protest, for lack of a better word, when there was a recasting in a show, where basically they cast a black actor in the lead and then two weeks into his run, they announced they were going to cast Mandy Patinkin in the role instead. There was a sense that they hadn’t even given this guy a chance before they cast a famous white person instead.
There’s this whole protest around that and I think Rafael Casal talks about the experience of actually watching that and feeling like, “Oh, this is terrible. I didn’t want anyone to be fired.” The show eventually closed down and I’m not sure how much of that is a direct response but certainly, you could probably draw a line, that’s when the buzz around it turned bad.
I mean he was like, “That’s not what I wanted, I just wanted to register the fact that I was unhappy with this decision. I wanted to see this decision that people made – see Broadway producers make different decisions.”
Then he talked about, earlier this year, tying it all back to ‘The Avengers’, because it always comes back to ‘The Avengers’. There was this poster for the latest ‘Avengers’ movie, ‘End Game’ and I might not be pronouncing it correctly, but Danai Gurira who is on ‘The Walking Dead’ and has a role in ‘Black Panther’, has a role in the new Avenger’s movie, but is not on the poster.
Many people were sort of like, “Why? Oh, of course, the Black woman gets left off the poster.” So, Disney and Marvel apologized and then they issued a new poster. It was done fairly quickly and his argument was basically, you can draw a line from, not necessarily that specific protest, but the idea that with this messy, angry online protest, eventually what comes out of that is companies will recognize that there is genuine anger there, there’s genuine concern and now they will actually respond to it.
One of the things said was this idea that, obviously these conversations are not good for nuance, what they’re good for is volume. It’s like taking the idea, these platforms are still good for taking communities that are generally not heard, that are generally not part of these discussions, in some cases like around the Oscars and really turning up the volume on that. It made me think about the idea of an online mob in a really different way.
One other one that I can mention was this guy, Ivan Poupyrev, who is a scientist with Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects Group, ATAP. He was showing off this technology that was basically a little device that can be put in a jacket or other item of clothing and basically turns it into a smart piece of clothing.
The way he showed that off on stage, he was actually swiping, he wore a jean jacket. Google was actually partnered with Levi and they’ve released this as a product. It’s called Jacquard but spelled J-A-C-Q-U-A-R-D, I think?
He was swiping backwards and forwards in his presentation, which is one of those things where you’re like, “Why would you want to do that?” “Is that really solving a problem that anyone had?” But it certainly, was a cool demo and I think it was really about a vision of like, “Hey, if we want to rethink interfaces and you want more things to be inter-connective.”
If we wanted to do that, the key is to actually embed these things into more and more everyday devices rather than just building all these expensive devices for people to buy that are separate and would theoretically be your one super fancy internet connected shirt. Again, I don’t know that I want that but instead, just making a relatively affordable device that can be included in every shirt instead.
Danny C.: I have a reader question from a member named Min, who asked; “What’s the right demographic for this event? Who both attends and does not attend the event?” Like who is it intended for and then maybe, who’s actually showing up at the front door?
Anthony H.: Again, this is a purely anecdotal answer in terms of who I saw there. I would imagine that actually it’s probably the closest that I’ve seen to where the aspirational audience, in the sense that this is who the organizers will tell sponsors and journalists who the event’s for and who’s actually there, where it’s pretty close to a perfect. Where that Venn diagram looks like a circle. A lot of famous people were walking past me. Again, I’m not supposed to say who they are but I can say on the flight home, I was told that Al Gore was on my flight and I’m pretty sure he was coming back from TED.
Again, Sergey Brin was in the audience and you see a number of different CEOs and frankly, there was definitely a thought in my head of, “We’re going to get more of these people coming to disrupt.”
I think it’s the idea, you have a lot of money and are fairly well off and have some sort of platform or ability, whether that’s monetary or technological or just in terms of being famous. You’re going to expose yourself to these ideas… the slogan of the conference was, “Ideas Worth Spreading.”
Their goal was to have it be, people who can help spread those ideas. I think it was probably a bit older than a lot of tech conferences but not like just finance.
When I think of an older audience, I think of finance guys in suits, and it wasn’t that. It was definitely a fairly diverse audience. I get the sense, just in terms of the conversation, that they were probably very deliberately tried to have more people of color, more women and I think it seems to have paid off.
There were no times where I felt like, and I’ve been in many events, where I’ve felt like I looked around and it was all White and Asian people, and that was not the case here.
Danny C.: There was actually a question from a member named Lisa who asked how the break down between males and females, both on stage and off stage, how did that seem to go?
Anthony H.: Right, well, I mean you’re asking a guy right? I think that almost inevitably a guy would say, “It seemed even.” Then you count it and it turned out it was like 70% men to 30% women.
All I can say for certain, is that it didn’t feel like it … I’ve been at many events that feel like they skew male and skew white. That certainly felt like the case here, but it felt significantly less the case. That it did feel like they were taking strides at least, towards having a genuinely diverse audience, if maybe not economically, but at least in terms of race and gender.
Danny C.: Another reader question from Adam who asks “What’s the experience like in person versus watching it online? Is it a totally a different experience?” Is it basically the same as watching on their site? Is it different than watching it in person than being in your bedroom?
Anthony H.: Right, so I mean, there’s also kind of a couple of different layers of remoteness as well. So there’s literally in the theater. And this is going to be a good opportunity for you to tell about how I got kicked out of the theater.
There’s being in the theater, then there’s in the conference center because there’s a lot of televisions all around the conference center where there is a feeling of, “Oh even if you’re doing something else, you can watch the thing that is happening and what’s happening on the stage on these big TVs. Then there’s watching at home.
I would say it makes less of a difference than you would think in that I think a lot of times people write their talks and give their talks in a way, knowing that the vast majority of their audience is going to be watching at home.
Which I think is true, I mean that gets some Disrupt speakers and all that. There’s an awareness that, “Don’t just do this for the people in the room, do this for the broader audience.” I think there’s a degree to which there’s an excitement about a famous person on stage, that it’s more exciting to be in the room with them than watching on your television screen. I think there’s also a degree, of it being about the audience and the fact that you get a better sense of how the audience responds.
For example, on the first day when I was trying to decide what I would write about and Carole Cadwalladr gave her talk and I thought it was a very good talk and very relevant. When I was deciding, I was leaning towards writing about it but then to see the entire room stand up and give her a standing ovation, that sort of colors the way you think about it.
It is interesting, then there are many people, including most of the journalists, who, as I learned, after I was kicked out, don’t go into the main theater because one of the rules in the main theater is that you’re not supposed to have any screens.
No digital devices except in the last of three rows. Which I, I’ll just tell the story now, because it’s not very long. I had several times had already got some nasty stares and I knew that [no screens] rule and I would always sit in the back, but I would take notes. Not because I wanted to check my email but because the best way I can take notes is on my keyboard.
But I’m also a very loud typer so I got some nasty stares. Got some people who in fact confronted me who said, “You’re not supposed to be typing.” And I said, “No, the rule is the last three rows.”
I’m sure I made a lot of friends that way. Then at a certain point, one of the ushers just came up to me and said, “Do you mind leaving?” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “Yeah, no, you’re just very loud. Everyone is staring at you and you’re distracting from the talk. If you want, you could also type less.”
Which I tried to do. I tried to just only type the sentences of the quotes that I knew I might use. But that just struck me as a very stupid way to take notes. I ended up going, getting kicked out of the theater, so I just left.
I talked to the other journalists and everyone was like, “Oh yeah, we don’t go into the main theater, usually we just watch from outside.” Which then begs the question; “Why are we even here? Why did I fly from New York to Vancouver, if I’m not physically going to be in the room? I think there’s still something about even if you’re not watching it in the theater, still being in the convention center, that there’s a different vibe.
I think a lot of the tech people tend to watch outside. Then they can check Twitter or check email and do other things while watching the talk.
But there’s this sense of there’s still a conversation happening around it like when somebody says something controversial or does a really cool demo, everyone kind of looks at each other and they’re like; “Oh, have you seen this? This is amazing right?”
In terms of getting the feeling of “Oh, this is what’s exciting and what’s not”, I think being in the room is good. But I think the content, you’re getting almost all of it by watching the videos.
The one other difference is that TED has a strike record where they only very slowly release all the videos that they shoot. So for example, the Jack Dorsey talk didn’t go up until the day after.
There’s an element of, if you want everything you have to be there or you have to make a deal. I mean TED has a deal that it shares the live stream with certain partners but otherwise you could potentially, especially for the non-marquee talks, you could be waiting six months before it’s online.
Danny C.: I think that’s kind of one of the models of these conference calls, right? It’s actually, if you’re not in the room, there’s still a lot of data in the atmosphere, right? How are people responding to this?
Last week we had Brian and Lucas on robotics and our Sessions event, they talked about what was going on there. We had Ron Miller and Fredric Lardinois who was at Google Cloud Next the week before and there of course you’re going to watch all the talks on Google’s website or whatever but actually having people walking the floor is going; “No one understood what the hell they were talking about, all the vendors were like ‘Huh? I don’t like this announcement’,” or whatever. That feeling of being there, I think, is the power of still going.
What else was interesting? What was going on outside the conference? Were you part of any of the essential functions or whatever?
Anthony H.: I did not, I have to be honest that I was told beforehand that part of our strategy of covering events now is to try and make sure that we’re still online and writing about things. So when there was downtime, I will tell you this, one of the things about the event, it has the best workspaces. I feel like usually, when you go to a conference, you’re used to the idea that you’re going to be crouching in the corner with bad WiFi and barely getting anything done.
Here they have almost office space, with amazing Wi-Fi, probably better Wi-Fi than the office we’re in right now. Most of the time when I wasn’t actually in a talk or at a party or something like that, I was usually at a desk trying to do some actual work.
I would say that certainly, there’s a lot of socializing. There are food trucks and there’s parties and things like that. I think more than anywhere else, there is this sort of idea of anyone can start a conversation with anyone else.
I remember on the first day, I actually had this thought that I would grab lunch very quickly and go to this meeting I had to go to. I was used to the fact you sit down at the table, you’ve got your phone or a book or whatever and you just focus on that and then five minutes later you can leave.
But somebody immediately started talking to me and then somebody else thought they recognized me. It was a different person but so then there’s this sense of just everyone’s is sort of talking to everyone else.
I would say, if anything, I was surprised at how the tone wasn’t that different from how it’s been in the past. There are people on stage saying like, “The internet is this existential threat. Democracy, we’ve really got to turn the Titanic around.” But then the day to day conversation didn’t actually feel that different. It felt like a bunch of people that just sort of know each other, talking, wheeling, dealing.
At one point when I was working, one person was on a sales call on the table next to me, which I did not particularly enjoy. I mean, maybe I had calls which people didn’t like listening to either, fair enough! There wasn’t this sense of … on stage it was sort of doom and gloom. In the halls it felt closer to, I don’t want to like make it sound too glib, but it felt closer to business as usual.
Danny C.: Got it. That’s interesting because you’re leading into the final question I have. Ben asked, and I’m not sure you’re going to be able to answer this; “Could you stack rank the quality of this year’s conference versus past years.”
Anthony H.: Oh yeah, unfortunately, I can’t because it was my first. My experience of every other tech conference is presumably the same as most listeners, which is that I’ve seen select talks online but have not sort of been there like this.
Danny C.: How planned are things? Are things being grouped? Because they’re trying to do these sessions, they’re trying to make these package deals. Is there some intentionality in terms of; “We knew this was going to be super controversial, or it was going to trigger conversations during the rest conference,” or is it just sort of luck of the draw?
Anthony H.: I think it is probably a mix. In a sense, what I would like to do and how I would like to structure the day is that one Session comments on the one after it and all of it flows together very nicely. That you start the day and you end the day with somebody strong to make sure that everyone is there and there is availability of when people are actually going to show up.
This year there was this broader theme called ‘Bigger Than Us.’ There’s this consideration of broad bucket and then each session had a theme. There were themes like ‘Mystery’ and ‘Truth’ and there it was grouped into an extent, and I’m sure there was some awareness of like, “If we put Dorsey early on, that can sort be part of driving headlines for the rest of the week.”
Hannah Gadsby gave a talk at the end and maybe like, “Well, if she’s going to be on 30 let’s put her at the end, probably the very last speaker because that’ll get people to stick around.” So there’s some element to that, I think.
Danny C.: Got it. Any other thoughts before we sort of wrap up here?
Anthony H.: No, I mean, I’m glad I went and I feel like summarizing it is always doing it a little bit of simplifying it a little because there was so much going on. Trying to say that there was one thing. There were people talking about Astronomy or about Oceanography. The experience is much broader than that but obviously, in the course of a call like this, you try and focus on things you can generalize about.
Danny C.: Mystery and free will.
Anthony H.: Right, right.
Danny C.: Another very open talk. Well, thank you so much Anthony Ha, a TechCrunch writer based here in New York City, talking about TED.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, everyone, in the audience and online. If you ever have any comments or questions, feel free to direct them at me; danny@techcrunch.com or Anthony at anthonyha@techcrunch.com.
Always up for or having a conversation with our members. Thank you so much, have a great day.
Anthony H.: Thank you.