He sits behind a desk rather than pacing around a stage, but the power of his message is not diluted. Pope Francis has made a surprise TED talk, beamed from the Vatican to Vancouver, calling for leaders to act with humility and tenderness.

The first pontifical TED talk, which lasted 18 minutes, featured Francis dispensing advice to politicians and leaders of big business, as well as talking about his own background as the son of migrants.

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a media organisation that posts talks from its annual conference online for free. Since 2006 the lectures have been viewed cumulatively more than 4.6bn times.

Speaking in Italian and seated in front of a pleasingly cluttered glass bookshelf, Francis starts by wishing his audience “good evening – or good morning, I’m not sure what time it is there”.

Saying he is “thrilled” to be taking part in the annual TED conference on the theme of The Future You, he adds: “We can only build a future by standing together, including everyone.”

In his encounters with the old, sick, migrants and prisoners, he says: “I often find myself wondering, ‘Why them and not me?’” Coming from a family of Italian migrants who made a new home in Argentina, “I could have very well ended up among today’s ‘discarded’ people,” he says.

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Francis called for solidarity to overcome a “culture of waste” that has affected not only food, but people cast aside by economic systems that rely increasingly on automation.



“How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion,” he said.

He concluded with a direct message to people in positions of power: “The more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you and ruin the other.”

The pope also quoted an Argentinian proverb: “Power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach. You feel dizzy, you get drunk, you lose your balance, and you will end up hurting yourself and those around you if you don’t connect your power with humility and tenderness.”

But the future of humankind “isn’t exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies … The future most of all is in the hands of those people who recognise the other as ‘you’ and themselves as part of an ‘us’. We all need each other.”

TED talks have grown in popularity since they went online in 2006. According to Fortune magazine, “what began as an annual conference of ideas about technology, entertainment, and design … is now the intellectual equivalent of kale: nutritious, oddly addictive and part of the shared consciousness among a certain set”.