Tom Rielly | From Dial-Up to TED Talks: A Global Journey in Tech and Activism
Tom Rielly, a pioneering figure in the LGBTQ+ community and founder of the TED Fellows program, joins Patrick Evans and Randy Florence for a compelling conversation on Big Conversations, Little Bar. With over 34 years of involvement in TED Conferences, Rielly shares insights into the evolution of TED and the importance of fostering diverse voices through the Fellows program. The discussion delves into Rielly's journey from Silicon Valley entrepreneur to a leader in promoting innovative ideas and social change. Listeners will also learn about the impact of technology on the LGBTQ+ community and how it has shaped modern communication. This engaging dialogue highlights the power of ideas worth spreading and the necessity of empowering the next generation of thinkers and creators.
Takeaways:
- Randy Florence emphasizes the impact of high-speed internet in transforming online experiences, facilitating new possibilities.
- Tom Rielly shares that he founded the TED Fellows program to recognize exceptional young talents globally.
- The conversation highlights how technology has empowered LGBTQ+ organizations through innovative solutions and support.
- Randy Florence reminisces about the early days of the internet, recalling the excitement of dial-up connections.
- The importance of community and collaboration is reiterated as key to the success of TED events.
- Randy Florence discusses how humor played a vital role in his TED Talk performances, enhancing audience engagement.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- McCallum Theater
- PlanetOut
- Digital Queers
- Adobe
- Aldus
- Quark
- Microsoft
- FedEx
- TED
Transcript
On this episode.
Tom Rielly:And the web actually took more time than people think it did. It took about, I don't know, five years. But the key thing was getting high speed Internet.
That was a minor but still important milestone because that changed everything. Like, we had to use them from, like, from modems, Right?
Patrick Evans:So I remember the dial up modem I had at home just to get email.
Tom Rielly:Right.
Patrick Evans:Very exciting.
Howard Hoffman:From the coveted corner booth in a little bar at the center of the Coachella Valley universe. Welcome to another big conversation with Patrick Evans and Randy Florence, presented by the McCallum Theater.
-: Patrick Evans:Thank you, Howard. We are here, back in our favorite corner at Skip Page's Little bar in Palm Desert, California. Big Conversations Little Bar.
My name is Patrick Evans and I'm joined by my good friend and probably the greatest podcast co host since they invented the medium, Randy Flores.
Randy Florence:It would have been inappropriate for me to say it, but it's. It's pretty good that you did. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Patrick Evans:Don't want to, you know, leave all the heavy lifting to you right now.
Randy Florence:I'm old and my back's bothering me because.
Patrick Evans:Because you are always. You're not only the co host, but you're the research department for Big Conversations Little Bar.
Randy Florence:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Patrick Evans:He comes in well prepared, and I come in.
Randy Florence:You should say that at the end of the interview, not at the end.
Patrick Evans:Well, we'll find out how well prepared. And we are really delighted to have a gentleman who really is known nationally and internationally, but calls Palm Springs home. Tom Rielly is with us.
Tom, thank you for being here.
Tom Rielly:It's my pleasure. And it's cool to see this little bar.
Patrick Evans:It's a cool little bar, I should note, by the way, a big thanks and a shout out to the McCallum Theater, our presenting sponsor. The season is just about to get underway.
If you've not ordered your season tickets, do so@mccallumtheater.org they support big Conversations Little Bar. We support them. And they are the artistic backbone of the community. So we love the McCallum Theater.
Randy Florence:We do love the McCallum.
Patrick Evans:I love them again.
Randy Florence:Well, we can stop now.
Patrick Evans:Okay, that's great. Thank you. It's been a great week.
John McMullen:I love McCallum, too.
Patrick Evans:And it's unanimous. That's our producer, John McMullen. All right, Tom, I want to start here. You are a TED Fellow. Is that the correct terminology?
Tom Rielly:Actually, I founded the TED Fellows program you found.
Patrick Evans:So you were the original Fellow, Right, Exactly.
Tom Rielly:I pitched it to my boss and said, I want to create a program where we recognize super genius young people from around the world. And the smart thing I did is I went and raised a million dollars in advance. So when I went to him, I already had the money.
And he's like, okay, well, that makes it a lot.
Patrick Evans:That makes it easy, very easy, doesn't it?
Randy Florence:Steve Martin has an old joke about telling a writing a book how to be a millionaire and not pay taxes. And step one is get a million dollars.
Patrick Evans:That seems almost necessary. All right, so I know what TED talks are, but I'm not sure I really understand the whole concept of what TED is and does.
And so clearly you can tell me.
Tom Rielly:I think I probably can. It's really founded around the idea of ideas worth spreading or sharing. In this case, it's now sharing. They just changed it.
And the idea is it originally was a conference where you bring people together. They pay a lot of money to go. We have people speak on the TED stage. They're often amazing, very inspiring.
gger over the year. I went in:So it's been 34 years, and I'm the only one who's been that long, continuously even.
Patrick Evans:Where does the name come from, Tom?
Tom Rielly:Well, some people say it stands for technology, Entertainment and design, but we've long since like FedEx abstracted its Ted. Right. So some people still use it with those nouns, but I don't very much got it, so.
Patrick Evans:But it's become a brand unto itself. You mentioned FedEx. Like, now no one says Federal Express, but we all know what they mean. And so TED is kind of.
Tom Rielly:That's right.
Patrick Evans:People just say a TED Talk, and we automatically know what they mean. And so how did you get involved?
Tom Rielly: Well, back in:And it was $3,400. And somehow I was like, maybe we can get work to pay for that scholarship.
And so my boss and I came and I was like, every single thing I'm interested in is here. I love this. I want to be part of this. And I've never missed a conference since then.
Randy Florence: n. So where were you prior to: Tom Rielly:That's a good question. So I started a for profit corporation, a startup, a Silicon Valley startup with venture capital and everything called PlanetOut.
ran into the dot com crash of: Randy Florence:I lived in Silicon Valley during that time. It was a lot of fun.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Patrick Evans:Randy crashed several companies right then and there.
Tom Rielly:Yes, absolutely. So did I. And the thing about being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley isn't you don't know what you're really doing at all.
And the idea is to make as good guesses as you can to stay alive to go to the next round. But it was a very difficult time, and I think it taxes your character. Like the worst parts of your character will come out.
But doing my own startup was great. And before that, I had also an LGBT thing called Digital Queers, which was. Well, John was part of it.
We, we had folks in our group that raised money from Silicon Valley employees to give money to national LGBT groups that had nothing. They had nothing. And we kind of went over and we called them beauty makeovers because we would do everything for them. So that's a long story.
But anyway.
Randy Florence:Well, during the dot com time, there wasn't very much advancement for LBTQ and that kind of thing. You were still way behind the curve. So where was the impetus for you to really get started and start pushing that?
Tom Rielly:Well, because I was working in companies that were part of the Macintosh scene and Macintosh Computer. Yes, yeah. And I was a fanatic. I mean, absolutely fanatic. And I just got this energy. It was like being Johnny Applequeer going out.
Patrick Evans:And I read that story. Completely wrong.
Tom Rielly:Right, exactly. And we were able to make a huge difference.
And we also taught members of the elite of the LGBT community how to use this technology for you, because the right wing was starting to get their act together about it. But anyway, we were able to make a big difference really fast. And the most important thing is we could only do so many beauty makeovers.
Randy Florence:But.
Tom Rielly:But then everyone saw the other organization, saw what they're doing, and said, okay, well then I need to invest in that.
And so all of a sudden, within just a few years, every LGBT organization not only had brand new tech, but they had an IT department and a budget, and it was awesome.
John McMullen:Can I jump in here? Because I think Tom is severely underselling his involvement with this.
He was Definitely one of the marketing minds that was in high demand in Silicon Valley. And he brought together tons of his friends who would come to Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
And we would have these parties each year that we would raise funds. And this was the organization Digital Queers, which he and his friend Karen Wickery co founded and operated for several years.
And the idea was, is at that time a lot of people, people in those religious right organizations, were working very actively to put their technology to use and to use things like email to do a whole new level of outreach to their, you know, to their followers and to get people to support their causes. And what Deque represented, at least to me, is somebody who came into it as being an attendee at a Macworld Expo.
Back then in the: Patrick Evans:And is this because people were throwing up roadblocks so they couldn't. They meaning anybody. If you were developing an organization to support, very often that's done as a result of something that's not happening.
Tom Rielly:Right. Well, here's the roadblock. The leaders didn't believe that this was going to be valuable for them. At the beginning, they sure changed their minds.
But at the beginning, the first group we did is called the National Gay and Lesbian Task Words now that it now has T and B in the, in the name, but so we raised all this money, like I don't know, 50,000 the first time and then 25,000 on top of that at one, you know, just one party. And this party, by the way, was also a place where I thought you were gay and oh my God, you're totally cute.
And like, lots of social components happen. But what we did is we went to see the NGLTF Day. We were supposed to put it in, put this stuff in.
One of the board members came and said, tom, can you come talk to the board? And I said, yeah, sure, of course. Like, well, we have some concerns about putting in this technology. We don't know what, what's going to happen.
And I said, well, yes, you don't, but okay, I have an idea. And I said, look, let us put it in the way.
We want to do it for you and if you change your mind, we'll come back, I'll take pictures of everything, we'll come back and put it all your old stuff the way it was before. And the week later, they called and said, we need RAM upgrades. And I was like, we've won.
Patrick Evans:You know, so what. What kinds of technology were you supplying?
Tom Rielly:Good, good question. So Macintosh computers, laser writers, legal software from John. He gave us PageMaker, and I want to say InDesign. But what. What's the design software?
John McMullen:Oh, there were several.
I mean, companies like Adobe and Aldous and Quark and Microsoft, you know, people were basically getting all the applications that are used by a lot, a lot of businesses to do everything from word processing and running spreadsheets to databases to being able to do photo and page layout stuff and desktop publishing and so on and so forth.
Tom Rielly:This was totally empowering for them when they realized the whole point of this was not to help the organizations, the whole point of it was to help the organizations help their constituencies. 10, hundreds of thousands of people, they could all of a sudden do, you know, mailing lists and stuff. And by the way, this is an email time.
There's no web and still do a lot.
Randy Florence:Yeah, that was a pretty crazy time back then.
king, working in an office in: John McMullen:Well, I remember.
I remember because I still have probably in a box in my garage in Cathedral City, a T shirt that was one of the proud calling cards for the organization Digital Queers that boasted, we're here, we're queer, we have email.
Tom Rielly:And that was inspired by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists association, who had, we're here, we're queer, we're on deadline. But that became. People responded so well to that that we just. We used it, like, forever.
Randy Florence:Where did this passion come from? What was it in your youth or your life that got you to the point where you had the interest in getting involved with something like that?
Was there a path?
Tom Rielly:Well, I like to say that sexual sublimation got me where I am today.
Randy Florence:You wouldn't be the first one in this booth that said that, right?
Tom Rielly:No, exactly. I was through all of this. I was never getting my sexuality. I mean, I was openly gay. But negotiating with your family is something different.
And so I was really motivated by this idea of making things better. And then I was kind of, I guess what I was good at is just kind of like looking at stuff and saying, how do these things fit together?
And I'm not trying to sound immodest, but that's what I did.
Randy Florence:No, it sounds like you. You're pretty much utilizing both sides of your brain for all of this.
Tom Rielly:Well, I'm lucky. Who else gets the opportunity multiple times to do this?
We have even now a new LGBT thing called Chaotic Guide, which is the Chaotic Guide to LGBTQ Moving image. You can get to that from our website. We just did that as a little project because we just thought it would be cool.
And most lists on the web of queer movies are just like a list without curation. And what we did is only stuff that was really good and not judged by me, by the film historian Jenny Olsen.
Randy Florence:Did I see that? You were in the movie My Bodyguard?
Tom Rielly:You did that?
Howard Hoffman:That movie meant something to me. So how did that whole thing come together?
Randy Florence:Well, at my high school, I went to this high school called New Trier High School. It's well known. And Margaret and Bruce Dern and Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston all went. And so they had a prominent theater program. Really prominent.
I was part of that. And I got.
One of my theater teachers said, you know, these directors are coming to town, or director and a producer coming to interview kids, possibly for a movie. Do you want to do it? And I was cheeky. I was like, yes, of course I do.
And the way that I got the role was by telling John Wayne Gacy jokes to the producer. I was 15. I was.
Randy Florence:I've never used that.
Tom Rielly:I was very precocious, and we were in Chicago, so. But I basically made them laugh, and so they.
Patrick Evans:Do you remember some of the jokes?
Randy Florence:No. I wish I could. I wish I could at least use.
Patrick Evans:Some good serial killer jokes.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, yeah. Humor is a big whole part of my life. It's just. It. It's my natural mode, and I enjoy making people laugh.
Randy Florence:Is it cathartic?
Tom Rielly:Yeah, absolutely.
Randy Florence:So. So you're in this movie, which was a pretty big. I mean, for any kids who had been bullied growing up, that that movie really meant something.
Tom Rielly:I'm one of the kids who gets bullied in the film, by the way. Go ahead.
Randy Florence:I remember the character. I was. I saw the picture of it. Did you any wish to continue on that path after the movie?
Tom Rielly:I absolutely did, but I ran up against a brick wall. My dad, he was vulgar and beneath me, and, you know, would. Would conflict with my academics, and he refused to let me do it. Maybe from this.
From today's point of View, I might have known how to manipulate him to let me go, but, yeah, unfortunately, I was not able to.
Randy Florence:That had to be hard.
Tom Rielly:Oh, yeah, it was very hard. And, you know, I think I was pretty bad, but I think that I could have gotten a lot better with a little bit of training.
Randy Florence:What did he want you to do, dad?
Tom Rielly:Go to Harvard and study foreign policy? Because that's what he did.
Patrick Evans:That's not a bad choice.
Randy Florence:No, that's not a bad choice.
Patrick Evans:It's not a bad choice. But where did you come upon your passion for the technology side of things? And when did you start to see.
I think you clearly saw the power of that technology before a lot of other people did.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, I think that's fair. Well, I was not a nerd. I was not a tech person at all.
Tom Rielly:That super surprises me because most of the people I know today who are Mac aficionados are. They start out as nerds.
Tom Rielly:Yeah. God bless them. Here's what happened. I was seduced by Steve Jobs. Like, literally.
Patrick Evans:Not physically.
Tom Rielly:Not physically. Damn.
Randy Florence:We were getting.
Tom Rielly:I know.
Randy Florence:It really is a good story.
Patrick Evans:Sorry we keep distracting you.
Tom Rielly:No, no, it's fine. So the Mac.
When I was at Georgetown, the Mac came out, and I figured out, without even having one or touching one, just by reading magazines about it and stuff, that it was one of the most important things that would ever happen in the entire world, ever. And, of course, I think you can arguably say that that was probably right.
Randy Florence:Well, it's 100% true.
Tom Rielly:And so it was the seductiveness of Steve Jobs that got, you know, he was kind of cute, that kind of kind of got me into it, and then that it all built from there. But once again, I was not a techie, and. But I became a techie because of the Mac.
Patrick Evans:When did you get your first get your hands on a Mac and began to realize that your prediction was true?
Tom Rielly: I got my hands on it in:I actually transferred from Georgetown to Yale because Yale was in the Apple University Consortium program, where you could get by max for half off. So I moved. It's true.
Randy Florence:Can you still get that deal?
Tom Rielly:No. Damn it, no. They were betting that, you know, you.
Tom Rielly:Could, but you had to get into Yale.
Howard Hoffman:Well, okay, never mind.
Randy Florence:So they were breading. They were betting on people who got stuff from that program would grow up and be interesting, important people. And it actually worked. It just.
It took a while, but. So I was obsessed before I even had A Mac. I was obsessed with it and then I started learning everything I could learn.
Randy Florence:And then Steve kind of went a different direction right around that time, didn't he? The, the next computer. Did you have any involvement in that company?
Tom Rielly:Not involved with Next. I respected it. But the problem is when you make an education computer, then it's $10,000. That's a hard, hard rope to ho. I think. No I wasn't.
But he did. John Scully did fire him. I think it was in 85, 85 or 86.
Everyone's still at the time and even now I think he's one of the greatest leaders of all time. Even. Even though he was very difficult.
Randy Florence:Were you close enough at all to see the different sides of him?
Tom Rielly:I only met him two or three times. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's fair to say that I knew him well.
Patrick Evans:How did you meet him?
Tom Rielly:Oh, at a Mac trade show. But you know, already we know that he'd Invented the Apple II 2 Plus. Yep, two E2C and the Mac. And that was a pretty impressive record.
Randy Florence:Oh, it's incredible.
Tom Rielly:I never cared about any of those computers except the Mac.
Randy Florence:That's the only computer I've ever had at home.
Tom Rielly:And the reason, the reason why is because you could look on the screen and there's a picture and use your hand and move your hand on this mouse and move on the picture. And it just made total sense to me because I'm really more of a artistic kind of person.
But yeah, anyway that's, he was the jumping off point for me for sure.
Patrick Evans:And when did you start to see the possibility? You talked about it.
It was a time you were involved in organizations, you were helping them with things like email and databases and that sort of thing. But then suddenly there was the web and the power of these tools became exponential.
Tom Rielly:That's right. So the second, you know, so there was the PC. We will give IBM the PC as an important, important invention. Well, Commodore. Yeah, exactly.
And then the Mac was the tectonic change. But then the web was even more important than that.
And what really mattered is if you put a Mac together with the web and then you would be like to 100, the amplification of what you could do would just go up so much. And the web actually took more time than people think it did. It took about I don't know, five years.
But the key thing was getting high speed Internet. That was a minor but still important milestone. Cuz that changed everything. Like we had to use them from like from modems, which.
Patrick Evans:Right, So I remember the dial up modem I had at home just to get email.
Tom Rielly:Right.
Patrick Evans:Very exciting.
Randy Florence:I ordered Christmas presents one year off of Prodigy on. On dial up.
Tom Rielly:You were really.
Randy Florence:I'm really old masochistic. I think a bunch of those ended up at being delivered to the house like in mid April and stuff like that.
Tom Rielly:Right? Yeah. Prodigy wasn't my favorite.
Randy Florence:No. And you had to pay to get on the web back then. Remember you had to buy the software.
Tom Rielly:Just so you could. You had to do that with AOL as well. You didn't have to buy the software, but you had to buy it for this service.
AOL was also very, very important because it took the. The web and like packaged it in an easy to use way that, that helped people and that was. It was constructed for the non high speed Internet world.
Right.
Patrick Evans:And that was why we ended up with, you know, my middle class household got web because of aol.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. I mean that. So did I. So did I.
Patrick Evans:You know, that was just the way it was done.
Randy Florence:I want to get into the TED Talk thing. So.
Tom Rielly:Sure.
Howard Hoffman:I thought that's where we were at.
Patrick Evans:First and then we went.
Randy Florence:Yeah. And then we circled and I brought him back.
Patrick Evans:Now we're back.
Tom Rielly:Yeah. All right.
Patrick Evans:To TED Talks.
Randy Florence:So I was a little nervous sitting down because I watched an 18 minute video of you ending one of the TED Talks with your. Your final.
Tom Rielly:It makes no sense at all. There's no context. You weren't there. There's no reason why you would understand it. But there may be a couple things that are funny.
Randy Florence:Watching you walk around the stage pulling up different props, it was fascinating to me. So talk a little bit about how what that role was, what you were actually doing at the end of those TED talks and then how that started.
Tom Rielly: ut at the very. Eventually in:And then the night before I was telling him jokes upstairs in the Marriott and he was like, oh my God, you've got to do these downstairs. And he had his assistant help me render them on overhead projector material. Which is.
We came up with this notion, which we did for 13 years, which is that the lowest tech version of what had happened was Funnier. So, anyway, I got up there and I told these jokes, and I got a standing ovation.
And I wasn't planning on it, but we wrote these jokes, like, the few hours before the end of the conference, and it was awesome. And then they asked me to do it again, and I was very goofy about it. I didn't want to be like, some formal slide humor.
We did use slides, but at the service of jokes, but lots of prop humor and, you know, a little bit of risque humor, I think.
Randy Florence:How did it go over with the attendees you got a standing ovation on?
Tom Rielly:They loved it. They loved it.
Randy Florence:Were people eventually looking to be one of the ones that you talked about or that you called out? Did that become a badge of honor?
Tom Rielly:That is a very insightful comment. I don't know if anyone's ever asked me, but it's 100% true. The speakers would get frustrated with me if I didn't make fun of them.
Randy Florence:So they're literally doing things to get your attention.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, exactly. And then. But I also use. I would use it to create cathartic moments for speakers who had been assholes and stuff. I would take the piss out of them.
Not in a totally mean way unless they were really deserved it, but for the most part, just doing that. And the whole. The whole process is like, you go to Target and get a bunch of stuff and make it the night before.
Patrick Evans:I'm curious. I mean, I'm not.
I've seen a couple of TED Talks, but, like, someone comes in and uses the stage and they're just a total asshole, and then you get to pick on them about that.
Randy Florence:You want that job?
Patrick Evans:Like, what? Give me an example of that. Someone utilizing their TED Talk to be a jerk.
Tom Rielly:Sure. The physicist at mit, really brilliant woman, but she was really abrasive in the presentation, and people were, like, not liking her. Her book.
I made a slide of it, and it was. That was pretty mean. She. She was. She was. She was mad.
Patrick Evans:Oh, she got mad.
Tom Rielly:But almost never. They got mad. They almost were like, I deserve that. You know, And I. And I never. My goal was not to slam people. My. My goal was to make people laugh.
Patrick Evans:Right.
Randy Florence:And you mentioned before we started recording that at one point, you kind of had to stop that because the whole PC thing and there were things you just couldn't talk about.
Tom Rielly:That's actually not true. I retract. I was starting the TED Fellows program, and I couldn't do both. And I.
And I basically had to say one or the other because it was really, really stressful on site. And I just couldn't. I just couldn't. And I. And I chose my new program.
Randy Florence:Were people waiting for it? Were they disappointed the first year when it didn't happen?
Tom Rielly:They're still. They're still disappointed. You know, it's been more than 10 years and people still, like, ask. I really liked it when you did block. And it's so sweet.
Randy Florence:You know, one of the things that I hear often from people is TED talks that just impacted their life. It was so important. You have examples of some of those that had an impact on you.
Patrick Evans:Not that physicist girl.
Randy Florence:No, not the. Not her.
Tom Rielly: Talk of all time. That was in:He was chair of the psychiatry department at Yale University. And he got up and he told this story about this kid, this man who had issues. Basically. This guy had been.
Had an amazingly important job, wonderful wife, lovely house, lovely children. And he started getting depressed. Like, really hardcore depressed. Like can't, you know, like, sleep out in the gutter.
His wife left him and, you know, you can have sympathy for her. Basically, he was like, living in the gutter. And this guy with a big, big career. I always tear up when I tell the story.
So there were some doctors nearby, and they would step over him on the way to work. And one of them, a young resident, was like, why don't we cure him? We know how to cure him. We'll use ECT and electroconvulsive therapy.
And the people at their hospital didn't want them to do it because they're like, if it doesn't work. And the guy was just like, let me try. And they're like, you know, what is there to lose? Right?
So he tries this series of ECT and the patient gets better really, really fast. By seven days, he was functioning in the world. By a month, he was perfect.
Randy Florence:Wow. Sounds like flowers for Algernon.
Tom Rielly:It does, yes. And then he said the patient was me. And I was like, oh, man. Yeah. And it's true. True story. And he recently died. I have great affection for him.
And he's one of the most popular doctors. You know, he got his. Got everything back. He's the chairman. He. Until he died, he's the chair of the psychiatric, the department of psychiatry.
He got a house, he found a new wife, and he got everything back.
Patrick Evans:That's a remarkable story.
Randy Florence:Have you ever seen any. Just total disasters up on stage?
Tom Rielly:Oh, yes.
Randy Florence:Any examples it's all the same life.
Patrick Evans:It's the same woman.
Tom Rielly:Okay. There's several. One of them on stage that's most interesting is Ray Kurzweil, who. He invented the Kurzweil synthesizer.
And he was a pioneer in AI, basically. And he has apparently some gender dysphoria issues.
And he brought in this gigantic rig on the stage that he would puppet this Ramona, his doppelganger.
Patrick Evans:And it was like an alter ego.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, but like physical.
Randy Florence:Okay.
Tom Rielly:And it just. It was like excruciating because it was risible. But he's a genius. I mean, he's done so many amazing things. I'm not dissing him at all. It just.
This one didn't.
Randy Florence:But it was over. Everybody's.
Tom Rielly:Well, it just didn't. It was too early. I mean, if you. Five years later, doing digital puppets is, you know, a little bit more common. Let me see if I can. Okay. Oh, my God.
Patrick Evans:Well, you guys were doing digital Cool Queers ten years before that. So digital puppets can't be.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, exactly. Digital puppets. Digital queers with digital puppets in their hands. I'll tell you, the ex boyfriend of one of my best friends.
I'm not going to tell you his name because it's not nice. He was going to do this performance piece on the stage and he came up and he couldn't do it. He couldn't. He couldn't get started.
And in the end, he sat down on his. But. And the audience was so with him. Like, they so wanted him succeed, but it didn't. It didn't work. And he. So that's. That's. Those are some examples.
Randy Florence:Yeah. So was he like performance art or something? Is that what he was trying to do?
Tom Rielly:I don't even remember.
Randy Florence:Nobody knows.
Patrick Evans:It didn't work that. That much that it didn't work. We're going to take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, our presenting sponsor, the McCallum Theater.
But we're going to have our continued conversation with Tom Riley right after this from the McCallum Theater.
McCallum Theatre Spot VO: The McCallum Theater's: allum. The McCallum Theater's: Patrick Evans:Tom Riley and we're digging into the world of TED conferences. And. But I want you to tell me a little bit about the TED Fellows program which you founded. We touched on it at the beginning.
Tell me how you put that together and why. And you really kind of devoted a lot of your resources at the time to do that.
Tom Rielly:Well, I grew up in a nuclear family of six people, three of whom were Fulbright scholars. Wow, that's pretty unlikely.
Patrick Evans:You guys have good genes over there.
Tom Rielly:And if, if, you know, if they hadn't been full bright scars, I wouldn't exist. Like. So they, they met in. My mom and dad met in England. And then my sister also was a Fulbright Scholar. Wow.
Patrick Evans:My sister was a half bright scholar, but that's a whole different story, Right?
Tom Rielly:Exactly. And I knew a lot about fellowship programs from that world. There's a dad had fellowship programs.
He was on the board of the Bosch Fellowship in Germany. And so I was at TED and I was like, there's not enough young people coming to the conference.
What if we try to find some super genius young people from around the world who were exemplary and heterogeneous? Many, many fellowship programs are everyone's, you know, a business person or everyone's a lawyer or a doctor. And that's not what I wanted to do.
And I wanted the weirdest people I could find. And then what would happen when we put all those people together?
That's what they call the most important benefit of the program is the other Fellows, but also for them to have an ability to address the TED audience. And a lot of good things have happened because of that.
Randy Florence:I mean, that's got to be just an unbelievable goal for somebody to set to actually get on a stage and do it. TED Talk. Your dad didn't want you to be an actor. Did he get a chance to see what you put together later in life?
Tom Rielly:I mean. Yeah, I mean, I explained it to him. I don't. He hasn't come to the conference, but he did. He did come to ted. My mom and my dad both came to ted.
Randy Florence:Yeah. Did they get to see your end of the show skit? Your satirical thing?
Tom Rielly:No. No, I don't think. I don't. I don't think so. I don't think the timing worked out, but I was lucky that they got to see what I do. Yeah.
Randy Florence:Yeah.
Randy Florence:That's very cool.
Randy Florence:Yeah.
Patrick Evans:Was your dad finally appeased the. Even though you didn't go into Foreign affairs, when he saw what you're doing in the world of Technology.
When he saw how much you had harnessed all these things to, to move the world in a really interesting direction, was he?
Tom Rielly:Well, he, I would say that he doesn't know the details of it all that much. I mean like he, I've explained it to him, I've showed him presentations and, and stuff, but I would say he's happy with my trajectory.
Yeah, it took him a while.
Randy Florence:Yeah.
Patrick Evans:Oh, my dad always, for years when I was working in television, my dad would always, always ask me when I was going to get a real job.
Randy Florence:Yeah, I, I don't remember any of my dads asking me that question.
Tom Rielly:I think I just, I hate, I hate such patronizing comments because anyway, don't get me going off, but people trying to crush people's dreams and my dad wasn't actually trying to do that. Except for the movie.
Randy Florence:Except for that was.
Tom Rielly:Which he certainly was so felt with fellows.
We have now 341 fellows from over 100 countries who we bring them to conference, we pay for them, they get a chance to appear for the most part and it changes their lives. And if they speak, they don't always speak anymore, but they always did when I was in charge of it.
Then stuff would happen, like Chris Sacca, famous VCs would come up to him afterwards and say, I want to fund your business, I want to donate to your ngo. And they make these relationships which stay around for a long time. It's so great because everyone's like, oh, you're giving to them.
And I think you are so not understanding what we're doing.
They are giving to us and we should listen to them and obviously ignore them at our peril because these are people who are going to invent the future, who are inventing the future.
Randy Florence:Think of how many of those people you've been able to see over the years because of your involvement in ted.
Tom Rielly:Yes, and I have a pretty good eye for picking people.
Patrick Evans:So that was my next question. How do you select these? Say you wanted to put a room full of the weirdest people you could find.
Randy Florence:Weird.
Patrick Evans:Brilliant. So how do you find them?
Tom Rielly:So up until recently it's been an open application process, but it's now a nomination process. But basically through that process we find a bunch of candidates and then research the heck out of them. And we're so lucky about the results.
And you know, one of, one of the fellows, Shivani Soroya, is a financial services for the developing world entrepreneur and she's raised, I think her company's worth a billion dollars and It. The first time she talked about it was on the Ted Fellows stage.
The director of the Color Purple, the movie that came out, Ted Fellows next director of the next Star wars movie is Ted Fellow. And then it just goes on and on. There's.
Patrick Evans:Well, I hope he's better at it than Rian Johnson.
Tom Rielly:It's a she.
Patrick Evans:A she.
Tom Rielly:It's a she. And she's from Pakistan.
Randy Florence:Wow.
Tom Rielly:She's an amazing person. She's already won two Oscars, so I think she's going to be.
Randy Florence:She's probably made it.
Tom Rielly:Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, there's just. There's so many social justice people and so many education reformers and. And then crazy inventors.
One of the guys, when he was 16 or 15, before I. Before we picked him because he had to be 18, made this tool called Vetigel, which it's basically meant for a soldier.
If they get an IED blowing their whole side open, they have about 12 seconds to live. And this is this gel that the other soldier injects.
And in 10 seconds, it will close the wound and it will survive the helicopter ride to the military hospital, even though it's really like. Like that.
Randy Florence:Holy cow. How old was this?
Tom Rielly:Sixteen, I think. He had the idea when he's 15 or 16. Holy cow. But he was 18 when we took him in the program. I mean, I. In his case, I was so amazed. I.
He was in Business Week, and I just called him and said, you have to apply. Which, no, we would do that.
Patrick Evans:You'd see these things and just catch your eye.
Tom Rielly:But they have to get in. They have to.
Patrick Evans:You know, I'm sure the vetting process is vigorous.
Tom Rielly:Oh, my God, it's so incredibly vigorous.
Patrick Evans:And Randy, we're out.
Randy Florence:Oh, shoot. Can't spell Ted.
Tom Rielly:Anyway, so there's. There's multiple levels using both the staff and also the fellows themselves. They. They vet the other folks, and it's really hard to get in.
Patrick Evans:So when you founded this, you. You had kind of come up with the idea and raised all the money to do it, right?
Tom Rielly:Well, not all of it.
We since made raise a whole bunch more money, but I figured the best way to get your boss to say yes to a new idea is to say that you've already paid for it and that. So that's what we did. And I raised the money from some prominent philanthropists, and Chris was like, great, go for it.
Patrick Evans:You're damn good fundraiser.
Tom Rielly:Yeah, I've raised a lot of money in my life, like at least 30 or 40 million.
Randy Florence:Wow.
Patrick Evans:Wow.
Tom Rielly:Something like that.
Randy Florence:That's pretty good. Hey, we got to move on to a short thing here that we do at every episode and you get to play a part in it.
Patrick Evans:It's our Rapid round.
Randy Florence:It is. It's time for the big conversations Little Bar Rapid Round. We ask our guest five key questions.
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Well, you ready for some quick questions?
Tom Rielly:I am. Just if I go too long, just tell me.
Randy Florence:Oh, you won't be able to go too long.
Tom Rielly:All right.
Patrick Evans:We ask very simple.
Randy Florence:These are really easy. Dogs or cats?
Tom Rielly:Cats.
Randy Florence:They first one to say.
Patrick Evans:I think he is our first cats guy.
Randy Florence:Should we continue?
Randy Florence:Absolutely.
Randy Florence:Okay.
Randy Florence:Continue chats first. You said you've been in. In the valley about four years now.
Tom Rielly:Yes.
Randy Florence:When you have visitors, come in. What's one one of the first places you like to take them to see the windmills. Ah. And you're able to tell them the whole story of all of that.
Randy Florence:Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
Patrick Evans:He's our first windmill guy, too.
Randy Florence:That's right. You can recommend one book to a college graduate.
Tom Rielly:1.
Randy Florence:What would it be?
Tom Rielly:Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Payton.
Randy Florence:Check that one out. Friends or Cheers, which was your favorite show?
Randy Florence:Terribly. I never watched either.
Tom Rielly:Neither one. So it was a. It was a tie.
Tom Rielly:It was a tie. They both lost.
Randy Florence:You can wear one color for the rest of your life.
Tom Rielly:Purple.
Patrick Evans:What you're wearing today?
Randy Florence:Yes.
Randy Florence:A little bit in there. There you go.
Patrick Evans: -: Randy Florence:So what's coming up for you?
Tom Rielly:Well, end of the year, always lots to do. We're waiting to hear about a grant that multiple millions of dollars which is always makes you feel good when they say yes.
Randy Florence:Yes.
Patrick Evans:I wouldn't know. I'll bet it does.
Randy Florence:Call him.
Tom Rielly:Right. Getting ready for Thanksgiving with my mom and trying to figure out what am I going to do for Christmas. A valid solution Is nothing.
Randy Florence:And then I really love the way your mind works.
Tom Rielly: hen we move. We move into TED: Howard Hoffman:Are there themes to each one of the Teds?
Randy Florence:Yes, they're on the websites. I can't remember.
Randy Florence:Okay.
Tom Rielly:What they are, but yes, like the Bold and the Beautiful was one. Yeah, I can't remember all of them.
Randy Florence:Well, listen, I've learned enough about it that I want to start checking them out. I'll be disappointed not to see you at the end of it talking to the crowd.
Patrick Evans:Well, this has been. Honestly, I don't know that we've had a guest that I really ever felt like I was not keeping up with until you.
I'd like to pick your brain a lot more.
Randy Florence:Well, the whole TED thing was just fascinating.
Patrick Evans:I know.
Randy Florence:You know, it's kind of one of those things that's out there and everybody talks about it, but now I know what it is.
Patrick Evans:Yeah, I feel the same way. We had someone who made it who did a TED Talk.We did a Jason Tate follow up.
Tom Rielly:Look at YouTube at Ted Ed. So Ted Hyphen Ed. Or you can just look it on our website. Okay. It's our program for young people from 7 to 30.
Animated lessons about all kinds of different subjects. And they're. They're amazing. They're truly amazing.
Randy Florence:I'll check that out.
Tom Rielly:Thanks Ted.com. do you have children?
Tom Rielly:Yeah, we both have children, but these are grown ups.
Randy Florence:I have 13 year old granddaughters who will probably be very interested in this.
Tom Rielly:I have a four year old granddaughter named Lorraine who's William's daughter. And it gives me so much joy to be a grandfather.
Randy Florence:Oh, it's the best.
Tom Rielly:It's the best. It's, you know, none of the discipline, all of the right.
Howard Hoffman:The moment my granddaughters were born, I told my son I already liked them better than I liked him.
Tom Rielly:Right, of course. Well, no, of course. Used. You're used to him, like whatever. And how, how old are your kids?
Patrick Evans:19 and 16. Both girls.
Tom Rielly:Good, good kids.
Patrick Evans:Great kids.
Tom Rielly:Good.
Tom Rielly:Our oldest is on the dean's list and honor student at UC Santa Barbara.
Randy Florence:Mine are not in prison, so we're both doing pretty well.
Patrick Evans:Vesta gets straight A's, but she may still get arrested. We don't know. She's our wild child.
Tom Rielly:Yes.
Randy Florence:Tom, thank you so much for joining us.
Patrick Evans:Tom Riley, our guest on this week's edition of Big Conversations. Little Bar. Thank you. John McMullen, our producer. Thank you to the McCallum Theater, our presenting sponsor.
Please patronize as many of their shows as you can. They're always giving you some wonderful cultural opportunities. My name is Patrick Evans.
On behalf of my co host Randy Florence, we thank you and be sure to subscribe and listen on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
Howard Hoffman:Thanks for joining us on this episode of Big Conversations.
Little Bar Recorded on location at Skip Page's Little Bar in Palm Desert, California, the center of the Coachella Valley Universe, and Presented by the McCallum Theater online at maccallumtheater.org this program is a production of the Mutual Broadcasting System. All episodes are available from bigconversations, little bar.com and most major podcast portals, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify.
