TED’s Chris Anderson on the lessons of listening

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You know TED. Black stage, red accents, wireless mic, one speaker. Billions of views each year. TED is more than a conference now; it’s a meme: “Thanks for coming to my TED talk” closes Tumblr and Twitter posts. Chris Anderson is the guy that took TED from tiny conference to global juggernaut. Today, he’s TED’s chief curator and the host of the TED Interview podcast. But I wanted him on the show for something specific — his success with TED relied on answering two questions this podcast has left me obsessed with: 1. How do you convince an audience, or even yourself, to listen openly to what’s being said? 2. How do you find ideas, research, and activists that the media is otherwise overlooking? In this conversation, Anderson offers a visual I love: "the steel door of skepticism" that can slam down on us when we know we don't want to listen to what we're about to hear. How to get control of that door is a topic worth meditating on, and it's the focus of this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	First, sweet tarts dare to combine sweet and tart, but they didn't stop there.
0:06.0	Now they've combined soft and bouncy to bring you new sweet tarts, gummy fruity splits.
0:12.0	A uniquely delicious dual-sided gummy with one side that's sweet, and the other side that's tart.
0:19.0	But entirely smooth and squishy.
0:22.0	A powerfully perfect combo.
0:24.0	Sweet tarts dare to combine.
0:28.0	Support for this podcast comes from Slack.
0:31.0	You have to get your work done.
0:33.0	But what if you and your team could do it better?
0:35.0	Slack is a productivity platform that connects all your team members together instantly.
0:40.0	It's built to help your team with a host of features, like huddles for quick check-ins and clips for recording and sharing video.
0:46.0	Slack also makes it easy to search and find the right information you need.
0:50.0	You can even integrate the apps you use in your normal workflow, like your calendar or product management tools.
0:56.0	So you stay focused on the work that matters, and get more done.
0:59.0	Learn more at Slack.com slash productivity.
1:03.0	For an idea to spread, for it to move from one mind to another.
1:08.0	You have to be open, and the decision as to whether that steel door of skepticism slams down or opens up is therefore of huge consequence.
1:27.0	Hello and welcome to the Clanchon on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:32.0	I've been thinking a lot lately about actually two things that led to today's conversation.
1:37.0	One is on this podcast.
1:39.0	I think a lot about how to find guests, right?
1:41.0	How to find people who maybe not only you haven't heard from, but that I haven't heard from.
	...

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