When TED Talks premiered, in the summer of 2006, my role was to lay the foundation for what would become a Peabody Award winning collection of ideas and inspiration from TED’s roster of authors, architects, rockstars, astronauts, knights, and Nobel laureates.
TED had been around since 1984, as an exclusive, live event. TED toyed with bringing its talks to tv in the early 2000s so everyone called it career suicide (for TED and for me) when I came on board and suggested putting them online, instead. I built and ran TED’s video department, overseeing everything we did with video for nearly seven years, and, by the time I stepped down, more than 1000 episodes were watched and shared almost a billion times... online, on planes, on tv, too... even in outer space.
I went from from nobody knowing where I worked (at first), to being accused of having the best job in the world (once I’d left). As I transitioned out, my last business cards simply read: “Film Director at Large.” I loved those cards.
My most memorable TED moments involved speakers: spending the night in a hotel room with a brain in a jar; riding in a helicopter to deliver laptops to kids liberated from terrorists; staging a rooftop sword fight between two actual knights – Sir Ken Robinson and Sir Richard Branson – since that’s what knights do; and chatting on the phone with actual, weightless astronauts (hurtling 200 miles above the Earth at 17,000 mph – because that's what THEY do) to remotely direct a shoot aboard the International Space Station.
If you reload this page, you can shuffle through some of my favorites (because people often ask): J.J. Abrams, Nicholas Negroponte, Isabel Allende, Stephen Hawking, among others...
Backstage: a look inside TED Talks. Two looks.