Jordan Ehrlich, senior and vice president of TEDxIU, answers questions about this year's TEDx event, which is scheduled to take place Oct. 26 at the IU Auditorium. Questions and answers have been condensed for clarity.
INDIANA DAILY STUDENT: What is the difference between the popular TED Talk conference and TEDx?
EHRLICH: That is the complicated thing. And it’s not that complicated, but I always have fun kind of explaining it.
So, TED is an annual conference that happens once a year, and it’s huge. You know, they are their own huge organization and then to reach even further, they license out the ability to host what are known as TEDx Talks. So, you are still affiliated with the TED brand, but it’s known that when you add the 'x' that it’s not the official TED organization running it; it’s a licensed agreement with other independently organizing people.
IDS: What are your responsibilities as vice president of TEDx?
EHRLICH: What I do is I will guide the actions of the directors of different teams. So I work closely with curation and marketing, more of the creative aspects of the organization and event.
I pick up tasks when I see them because as the vice president I feel like I should have some of the most responsibility, so I take on as much as I can, and then I guide other team members to fill out what I might not be able to accomplish that fits more of their specialization.
IDS: When will the speakers for this year’s event be announced?
EHRLICH: We’re selling tickets Sept. 5, and we’ll also release as many speakers as we know on that day, which right now is around 6.
IDS: So is TEDx considered a club since students can get involved?
EHRLICH: We’re making it more like a club because we’ve implemented these things called 'salons,' which are really cool discussion events where we host a couple TED Talks under a theme, and then anybody from the public is welcome to come to them.
We rent out a room somewhere on campus, usually in the International Studies building, and we watch these TED Talks, and since there’s typically only around 50 or 60 people who show up, we can engage in really cool and exciting conversations with people one-on-one, giving their input on those ideas or sharing other references or articles that they’ve heard of. So it’s really kind of just like a thought-chamber, I guess. And it’s really cool because people get really excited about what they’re talking about. It’s free so anyone can come, and we have them every two weeks.
IDS: What does the theme for this year’s event, “Uncharted Waters,” mean?
EHRLICH: Right now, 2017, there are a lot of new political developments, there’s a lot of new ideas being shared in the world and there’s a lot of new technologies, and all of these could change the direction of the human race.
It’s as if we’re a ship sailing on the ocean, and we don’t know if there’s going to be a new world on the other side. We’re kind of just hoping that there’s going to be something great there. So, that said, we wanted to bring in people to talk about sustainability and is the Earth even going to be around in so much time or is it going to be inhabitable, as we know it?
We wanted to bring in people talking about virtual reality because that’s a new development. You know, how do we navigate things that we never really thought deeply about navigating before?
IDS: Why should people be excited for the TEDx event?
EHRLICH: I think the main draw for me to go to an event like this upcoming one Oct. 26 is that it’s always really exciting to be around a bunch of people who come together to learn more. We’re in school, we’re forced to learn for class, but for people that go out of their way to buy a ticket and say I want to learn from someone really inspiring and really cool that I haven’t heard about before, and to meet up physically and have the opportunity to talk to other like-minded people, that’s a really exciting thing to come to.
IDS: This is only the third year for this event. What are the goals for TEDx going forward?
EHRLICH: This is kind of a lofty goal, but I would love to sell out the auditorium year after year, or at least get 95 percent capacity year after year because then that shows me that people actually are really interested in hearing speakers talk about interesting new developments. So if we could have our brand recognized across campus, to stay sustainable moving forward, that would be really exciting.
