-
這是屬於各位的會議。我想各位有權知道在這個交替的時期,瞭解為各位照顧這會議的我這個人。讓我拉張椅子。
我想,大概是兩年前在這裡我得到一個結論,我覺得這或許是奇怪幻覺。我可能下意識相信我當時是商業菁英。「未來」這家公司我花了十五年時間經營,這是家雜誌出版公司,不久之前才上市,市場認為它市值二十億美金,這個數字我其實不太明白。我最近創辦了另一本《商業2.0》,這本雜誌比電話簿還要厚,在網路泡沫中推波助瀾。(眾人笑)
我還擁有一間網路公司40%的股權,正準備上市,可能又值幾十億美金,而這一切都是白手興家。十五年前,我是個常被嘲笑的科學記者,被笑的原因只是因為我說:「我想創辦自己的電腦雜誌!」十五年後,市面上有過百本電腦雜誌,兩千多名職員;那是令人興奮的時代,當時是2000年2月。
我想我的創業生涯圖表感覺有點像是摩爾定律:一路往右邊攀升,永遠沒有止盡!應該一定如此吧?但後來我大吃一驚。相當諷刺的這家網路公司名字叫雪球,是最後一家上市的消費網路公司。一個月之後NASDAQ爆破,我也陷入一年半的生意折磨。我親眼看著我所創造的一切崩壞,看起來似乎這一切都要衰亡,十五年的努力全都付諸東流。這實在是超級痛苦的!
我們花了八年的血汗與眼淚才成長到350名員工,這是我在商業上非常驕傲的成就。2001年2月,一天之內我們就資遣了350名員工。在這慘劇結束之前,我們資遣了1000人。我覺得很痛苦,眼睜睜看著自己的淨值下滑:一天摔落一百萬美金,持續了十八個月。比這更糟的是我的自尊幾乎都跟著蒸發了。我頭上頂著「輸家」的標記走來走去。(眾人笑)
展開英文
收合英文
-
以下為系統擷取之英文原文
This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit. So, I'm just going to grab a chair here.
Two years ago at TED, I think -- I've come to this conclusion -- I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion. I think that I may have believed unconsciously then that I was kind of a business hero. I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It was called Future. It was a magazine publishing company. It had recently gone public, and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy pumping hot air into the bubble -- (Laughter) -- and I was the 40 percent owner of a dot com that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. And all this had come from nothing. 15 years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said, "I really would like to start my own computer magazine." And 15 years later there are -- there are 100 of them. And 2,000 people on staff and -- it was just such heady times. The date was February 2000. I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law -- ever upward onto the right -- it was going to go on forever. I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise.
The dot com, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell. I saw -- I watched everything that I'd built crumbling. And it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing. And it was gut wrenching. The first took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees -- something which I was very proud of in the business. February 2001. In one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was finished 1,000 people had lost their jobs from -- from my companies. I felt sick. I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months. And, worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating. I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "LOSER." (Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing?
-
回頭看來,最讓我難過的,比任何事都難過,是我到底怎麼竟讓自己的人生跟事業綁得這麼緊!最後,我們還是挽救了「雪球」跟「未來」,但那時我已準備好要進入人生下一階段。
長話短說,於是我就來到這邊。我提到這段故事的原因,是因為我和房間內的許多人都聊過,大家都經歷過類似的暴起暴落,特別是過去幾年情緒的起伏,這是一個大大大的過渡時代。我相信這會議可以對我們發揮重要影響,讓我們前進到人生下一個階段。下一年度的主題是:重生。
展開英文
收合英文
-
Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball but, I was at that point, ready to move on, and to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster -- emotional rollercoaster -- in the last couple years. This has been a big, big transition time, and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage, to whatever's next. The theme next year is re-birth.
-
同樣是兩年前在TED,Richard和我同意了TED的未來走向。我想也是因為這個原因,我在那時候...重新開始我在經營企業時忘記的事──我開始閱讀。我發現當我忙於在商場互爭長短時,好多領域都已經有了天翻地覆的變化:從宇宙學到心理學、演化心理學、人類學,這一切都改變了,甚至探討我們作為物種,我們作為星球的思考模式都改變了,讓人感到無比興奮。最讓人興奮的是──我想Richard Wurman比我要早二十年左右已經發現這一切都是彼此相關──這一切都是彼此相關,互相連結的。我們經常討論這件事情。
我一直想著要舉個例子。法國戴高樂總統的夫人;有人問她「你最想要的是什麼?」她說:「一根陰莖。」你仔細想一想,其實這相當正確!我們都想要一根老二!喔,英語是「快樂」或其他(眾人笑) 。啊對了,那邊作日語口譯的人辛苦了。(眾人笑)(鼓掌)
展開英文
收合英文
-
t was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED. And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus. I started to read again. And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest -- cosmology, to psychology, to evolutionary psychology, to anthropology, to -- you know, all this stuff had changed. And the way in which you could think about us as a species, and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting. And what was really most exciting, and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did, was that all this stuff is connected. It's connected. It all hooks into each other.
We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this, just one example. Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously asked once, "What do you most desire?" And she answered "a penis." And when you think about, it's very true. What we all most desire is a penis. Or, you know, "happiness," as we say in English. (Laughter) And something -- OK, good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) (Applause)
-
但即使像快樂這麼基本的事物,二十年前這個討論的話題,只出現在教堂、回教廟或猶太教堂。今天你可以提出有許多像TED這樣的問題,議題變得更有趣。你可以問在生物化學方面如何帶來快樂?神經科學、血清張力素等等。你可以討論快樂的心理成因是什麼?是自然、還是營養,還是目前的狀況?各種各樣的研究讓人驚訝不已。你可以把它當作電腦運算的問題,或是人工智慧的問題。為什麼?你是否需要把某種快樂模式輸入讓電腦正常工作?你也可以當作是地緣政治的話題:為什麼這星球有十億人因為太過貪婪而一點也不高興?而幾乎其他的所有人,不管他們有多少錢,就算只有兩美金也一樣,平均來說卻幾乎都是快樂的?或者你可以用演化心理學的角度來看:難道是我們的基因變出的花樣讓我們如此行為?是否寄生在腦袋以便讓基因生存下去?我們是否集體幻覺的受害者?還有很多的可能性。
展開英文
收合英文
-
But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it which are really interesting. You can ask about what causes it biochemically; neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff. You can ask what are the psychological causes of it? Nature, nurture, current circumstance? Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing. You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem. Why -- do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have, whether it's two dollars a day or whatever, are almost equally happy on average? Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing. Why would our -- did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate? Are we the victims of a mass delusion? And so on, and so on.
-
要瞭解像快樂這件對我們這麼重要的事情,你必須要往所有可能的方向研究。除了TED之外,我不知道有任何其他地方,你可以詢問這麼多問題,從那麼多角度切入。Richard所說最意味深長的:「要瞭解一切,你必須先從小處開始,從周遭的每個小地方開始。」
在這三天,你會慢慢發現為什麼我要聽這些無關重要的東西。第四天結束時,你的大腦活躍起來。你興奮,充滿電力、活力十足;這是因為這些不同片段組合在一起。這是大腦全體驗,就像是心靈的全身按摩。(眾人笑)照顧到每個心靈器官,是真的。
展開英文
收合英文
-
To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered, other than TED where you can ask that many questions, in that many different directions. And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: To understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits. A little bit about everything that surrounds it. And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of trying to figure out, why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff? And at the end of the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and it's because all these different bits have been put together. It's the total brain experience, we're going to -- it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage. (Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is.
-
好啦,說夠了,告訴大家你到底要怎麼作吧。好的,來吧,這是TED的願景。
第一:啥也不作,既然沒壞,我們就不改。亞瑪遜創辦人Jeff Bezos曾經跟我說:「Chris,TED實在是很棒的會議,你真的要做得很爛才能搞砸它!」 (眾人笑)
所以,我稱呼自己為TED的監護人是有原因的。我在此承諾不會改動讓TED特殊的核心價值:真相、好奇心、歧異度、不推銷、不打官腔;沒有見風使舵,沒有平台,只單純的追求在任何地方跨學系的有趣事物。這絕對不會改變
第二:我明年邀請的講者令人難以置信。TED運作的時間表棒極了;我剛離開每月截稿的雜誌業呢。我們有一整年的時間,希望稍後能讓各位看看。明年已經有二十五位左右的講者答應了。我們的社群給予很大的幫助,我們這社群真是太棒了。我們可以聯絡在美國每個有趣的人物,如果不是這個星球。是真的。
展開英文
收合英文
-
Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? So, I will. Here's the vision for TED.
Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me, "Chris, TED is a really great conference. You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad." (Laughter) So I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms. Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are represented here. That's not going to be changed at all.
Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year. The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines. There's a year to do this and already, as I hope to show you a bit later, there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year. And I'm getting fantastic help from the community -- this is just such a great community and combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet. It's true.
-
第三:如果可以,我想找到辦法讓TED的經驗可以伸廷到一整年。一個主要辦法是引進讀書會。過去幾年閱讀救了我,我希望能夠把這禮物傳送。你報名參加TED2003,每六周會收到溫馨的包裹,裡面有一兩本書,以及說明為何與TED有關:可能是由TED講者所寫的。所以我們可以讓對話持續一整年,第二年回來繼續這情感和智慧的旅程。我想這棒極了。
第四,我想介紹Sapling基金會,TED的新主人。這就是說是TED的所有收益都投入Sapling的目標。我想,更重要的是這裡實踐和展現的意念都是基金會可用的意念,因為這裡的協同效應很厲害。在過去幾天,已經有那麼多人討論他們關切的議題以及他們熱愛的事情。這都可以改變這世界:把這群人結合在一起,某些我們的信念。會議可以募到的款項和意念,我真切相信這樣的結合隨著時日會造成改變。
我對此感到非常興奮。事實上,我覺得這是我這輩子最興奮的時刻。我將會全程參與這長跑;如果各位願意和我一起攜手走上這旅程,我會感到非常榮幸。
展開英文
收合英文
-
Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit. And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club. Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's a gift that I would like to pass on, so when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED. They may well be by a TED speaker and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey. I think it will be great.
And then, fourthly, I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new owner of TED. What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. And, more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here, are ideas that the foundation can use because there's fantastic synergy. Already, just in the last few days, we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people together -- some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can raise and the ideas -- I really believe that that combination, will, over time make a difference. I'm incredibly excited about that. In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything, ever in my life. I'm in this for the long run and I would be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me.