TED

“People don't believe it, but most TED speakers are introverts. That they don't walk into a cocktail party and shake hands with every single person.”

“You know, Ted is for sale right now. Maybe you should buy that. Is that for real? Yeah, it's for, I think it's public knowledge right now. They're shopping it around and he's going to give it, I think he's going to give it away to whoever is going to be the be…”

“We worked with the TED conference for probably 10 years, and we, it was expensive when they first called Adam. It was a very big decision for me to donate, you know, 2000 bottles and you know, pay for the shipping and all of that”

“Chris Anderson, who is the head of TED, and I think still is said, oh, and one thing, Angela everyone else is gonna get a teleprompter, but not you. You have to memorize your talk.”

“All of the five talks surrounding mine, they all had between, you know, 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000.”

“And what disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks, and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so …”

“And my perception is that TED has been captured kind of from the bottom up, like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values and the in inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values.”

“Ted's original mission represented in their tagline was ideas worth spreading. So there's supposed to be a forum for interesting, worthy ideas that they're going to spread. And here they're doing the opposite. They're basically sandbagging the views and they d…”

“That Chris could have stopped this very easily. I mean, this is a failure of leadership. What he needed to tell these employees is, look, our mission is to be a platform for spreading interesting ideas. And we can't treat this speech differently than any other…”

“They tried to get me to pay 50,000 dollars a year, 25,000 dollars a year for like a five-year package to go to the event, and I was like, yeah.”

“I went to Ted for 12 years. I started going to Ted, I think, 2007, and I felt pretty disappointed over the last couple of years. And I actually spoke to the CEO of Ted and said, I'm not going to go anymore because so much of this, the talks became kind of soci…”

“I stopped going to TED, because I thought the content went to shit, and it basically got overtaken with, like, social justice talks”

“And so my doing that, just going to Ted and probably spending 30 K on, on tickets for three years, I think it ended up resulting in 10 or twenty million dollars of revenue for my various businesses.”

“Ted used us for their, as they pivoted to a virtual you know, Salesforce is a big client doing events around the world for their teams. We did a really huge event for St. Jude's prom, a virtual prom that they did a few months ago.”

“Some of the first bigger corporate orders that we received were CEOs and founders of companies that had, had attended TED, and they actually wrote to us from the TED conference.”

“And so in a couple years ago, Shonda Rhimes was one of the TED speakers, and she wrote into, you know, info at Swell Bottle herself, and said, oh, hi, I'm Shonda, and I just got a Swell Bottle at the TED conference, and she purchased Swells for all six of her …”