Yeah, Right, Everybody But You Got One

This is the shirt that launched a thousand lies.  OK, I’m exaggerating for the sake of literary allusion. It was maybe a dozen cases of mistaken idenTEDy.

www.mondonation.com allows you to complete the sentence “i believe”  and put it on the back of a t-shirt.  I got a long-sleeved pink one that says “i believe heaven is a ted conference that never ends.” I wanted it to say “I believe Heaven is a TED Conference that never ends,” but that’s not what mondonation.com wants to believe I believe.  They insist on all lowercase letters. Instead, they’re doing the capitalizing. The company seeks to make a profit “while being environmentally sensitive, ethical, and socially conscious.” 

I also ordered the short-sleeved green one you see in the picture. That’s my back, distorted because I leaned forward and hunched my shoulders so my TED pal Kokoe could get a good shot. Kokoe once did a TED U talk on the subject of living on a commune, based on his experiences living on a commune in Tennessee.

It wasn’t The Farm, though. Many people have heard of The Farm, in Summertown, Tennessee, led by the legendary Stephen Gaskin (www.stephengaskin.com).  The Farm was often called a commune, but the people who lived there described it as a spiritual community.  In the 1970s,  The Farm modeled many “far out” concepts that are now mainstream: home births attended by trained midwives, vegetarian cuisine, soy dairy products, solar energy, charter schools, self-sufficiency, publishing their own books,  and more. Stephen got busted once because someone was growing, er, sacramental plants in addition to the other crops.

In one of his many books, Stephen wrote something to the effect of “This is the chapter where everybody said I should mention the names of all the cops who [shared the sacrament] with me, but I won’t,” and that’s the whole chapter. Ditto another chapter for journalists. When I read that “chapter,” I was hurt.  I was a journalist who did many, many stories about The Farm, and I never saw, smelled, or suspected a thing. I thought I was a better reporter than I apparently was, and Stephen apparently felt more, uh, spiritually connected to other journalists.

Anyway, in the spirit of Stephen Gaskin, this is the blog post where I won’t name the names of the TEDsters who told me they saw the “i believe planet earth should be rechristened ‘ted’ and curated by chris anderson” shirt everywhere and wondered why they didn’t get one. 

Somebody told me he was the only person who didn’t get one like that – everybody but him got one, he saw them everywhere he went in Long Beach. He got a black one and everybody else got a green one. I said, “Gee, that doesn’t seem right. I’m sorry.”

I overheard two people talking about how that shirt was only for TED Hosts. (TED Hosts didn’t get special shirts. We got little blue “Host” tags to hang on our name badges, and a lovely dinner at L’Opera on the night before TED, and the joy of having a reason to talk with anyone and everyone as we tried to make them feel welcome and included.)  One woman complained to me that she was the only Donor who didn’t get one in her Donor gift bag. (There was a Donor gift bag?)

Anyway, perhaps there were TEDsters who thought they saw that t-shirt everywhere, even though I am pretty sure I own an original, and I wore it on a single day.  If you were one of the people who complained that you were the only one who didn’t get yours, well, you are so not busTED.

The city of Long Beach seems to have the art of wooing conventions down cold. I mean, warm. The welcoming banners are decking the lampposts. The taxi drivers have been briefed on who’s coming. Even after three TED conferences, I felt like a stranger and a newcomer in Monterey, where TED was born and lived for a quarter of a century. Here, everyone’s a newcomer. I like that because it’s in perfectalignment with my theme for 2009: RESET.

Jeff Immelt, CEOof General Electric,explained it in a speechin November:”This economic crists doesn’t represent a cycle.It represents a reset. lt’s an emotional, social, economic reset.” That’s right! Stop waiting for things to “come around.” Stop waiting for things to get back to “normal.”It’s a RESET. Are you ready to join those of us who arecreating the new “normal,” whatever that may be?

The”formerly entitled” withMarie Antoinette mentality are headed for the figurative guillotine, and the doomsayers of Davos didn’t seem too happy about it. But there wereothers at Davos whoreached for the reset button, and some of them will be arriving at TED today.

It’s time for TED – on “reset.”