What is the TED Conference?
TED’s mission is “Ideas Worth Spreading” and while its initials stand for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, the talks span a broad range of topics across the arts, sciences, humanities, psychology, medicine, business, philosophy and geopolitics. TED talks are meant to educate, inspire, challenge, entertain and whet/quench the curiosity appetite in 5–18 minute bite-sized chunks. At their best, TED talks make complex topics seem accessible, tell compelling stories and are, quite simply, world-class public speaking. As the Economist recently observed, “TED has done more to advance the art of lecturing in a decade than Oxford University has done in a thousand years.”
TED’s global reach continues to grow: 100,000 talks have been viewed or heard nearly 11 billion times at a current clip of 3.2 billion per year, 700+ TED-ED animated lessons were viewed 600 million times in 2017, 23,000 TEDx events have been staged, 30,000 people have translated TED talks into 110 languages, $22m in TED Prize money awarded and $250m in “Audacious” prize money to come.
If that weren’t enough, TED has gone forth and multiplied, spawning sub-brands such as TED Global (held on Copacabana Beach in Rio in 2014), the TED Prize (a $1 million grant to pursue an earth-shaking goal), TED Women,TED Salon, TED India, TED@, TED City, TED Talks Education, TED Youth, TED University, TED Fellows (1,000 young applicants for 20 coveted spots),TED-Ed (450 animated lessons for school age kids with 120 million views to date), TED Radio Hour and TEDx, local, independently organized events (more than 12,000 so far and 10 new events held each day!), just to name a few.
Put simply, no global platform for disseminating new ideas has ever existed on this scale.
Here’s a great 5 minute intro to TED:
A brief history: Although I read about the original TED conference as a teenager in the mid ‘80’s, I watched my first TED talk on-line in 2006 not long after Chris Anderson (TED’s curator) utilized the emerging web video platforms to bravely open up (for free!) the long secretive, mysterious and elitist TED conference to the global village. Although this “radical openness” was controversial (especially with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman), the content went viral, surpassing 100 million views by 2009 and 1 BILLION views in November 2012. Soon, TED’s bite-sized, 18-minute speeches became a powerful way of communicating complex topics, sharing passions and launching dialogues. Celebrities from every walk of the arts, science and business endorsed the talks and shared their own favorite talks and playlists; although not everyone is a fan. Since then, the TED franchise continues to grow and democratize, with the ultimate distributed empowerment of ideas being TEDx, where almost anyone can put on a TED conference in their local school, garage, theatre or military base.
The unavoidable consequence of all this success, of course, is that the bar for what makes a “great” TED talk keeps going up. TED doesn’t take the easy road to keep quality rising, however. They work hard to coach accomplished subject matter experts to become tight, well-rehearsed speakers instead of seeking out the world’s best speechmakers. The result is an important authenticity missing from the typical highly-paid speakers circuit. Outstanding TED talks combine unexpected insights, deeply personal stories, humility/humor and the rare brilliance of making technical, nuanced and (often) controversial topics easy to understand.
The “ripple effect” of putting 100+ amazing speakers and 1,500 influential and highly connected attendees (present company excluded) into a hothouse environment for 5 days is astounding. Each year, from the TED stage, start-ups are founded/funded, ideas are patented, musical careers are launched, schools and hospitals are built, bills are introduced, laws are changed, charitable funds are raised, and kickstarter projects are kickstarted. Take a passionate and deeply well-informed advocate, combine with an urgent and important issue, stir in an ounce of brilliant oratory, add a pinch of global instant digital distribution and bake for 5 days with some of the most ambitious, committed, wealthy and well-connected people on the planet and you get a change factory. At TED, “ideas worth spreading” don’t stay ideas for very long. Each year, dedicated, accomplished and rigorously studied people toiling in relative obscurity are given a voice on the TED stage and many experience the exhilaration of their ideas getting endorsed, funded, advertised, sponsored and catapulted into the global village. For the lucky ones chosen to stand on the red circle, a speaking gig at TED is winning the awareness lottery and it often literally changes their life. Just ask Will Potter, who went from a beat reporter at a city daily newspaper to globally recognized civil liberties advocate…or Adam Foss, an assistant district attorney in a tough Boston neighborhood whose TED talk on reforming the criminal justice system landed him an audience with President Obama and the platform to help oust abusive prosecutors across the US…or Deb Roy, formerly a graduate researcher at MIT who became the Chief Scientist at Twitter, all because of a TED talk about his infant son learning how to speak. The (not so) secret of TED is that it’s equal parts discourse AND entrepreneurship (broadly defined).
TED’s custom-designed “pop-up theater” in-the-round integrates so seamlessly into its surroundings that you almost forget there may have been an insurance seminar in the room just a week before. Endless floor-to-ceiling glass looks out onto views of towering mountains across the water as sea planes glide in for a landing. The setting alone makes you feel like something epic is about to happen.
The theater’s beauty is a fitting match for the gorgeous production quality of TED talks; painstakingly rehearsed oratory, giant high-def screens with retina-quality display resolution, perfectly-tuned acoustics and a tightly choreographed dance of images and film. It is beautifully orchestrated, world-class elocution and audience engagement. TED understands how to use light, sound, staging and presentation to immerse its audience in talks so effectively you may forget you are learning about particle physics or laser oncology.
TED is designed to facilitate the collision of 1,500 diverse, bright, accomplished people from 57 countries to exchange ideas, connect intellectual dots, expand each other’s minds and, ultimately convert ideas into impact and action. While TED may conjure images of a room full of people passively absorbing an 18 minute talk, it is an exceptionally immersive, tactile and participatory place: attendees experience these brain-stimulating encounters in bean-bag simulcast rooms, musical workshops, in line at gourmet food trucks, at virtual reality experiences, etc.
A week at TED has always defied easy explanation and is far more than a “conference”. To make the journey to Vancouver is to enter an idealized version of intellectual life. It’s baseball fantasy camp for nerds: you rub shoulders with your creative and entrepreneurial idols, join a self-selected group of people obsessed with translating knowledge, curiosity and passion into high-impact action, mainline the pure, undiluted version of expert knowledge and have more high-intensity neuron-firing conversations in an hour than most of us have in a year.
Emerging from the intense speaker sessions, TED attendees spill out of the theater into social breaks, interactive exhibits, gourmet food truck lunches and evening parties to debrief, debate and discuss the content and cross-pollinate with the speakers and 1,200 of their closest friends. The ethos is decidedly low-key and overtly anti-networking, yet you can almost feel the neural fireworks going off in the crowd. A random group of 4–5 people chatting in the hall can easily contain: 1) the CEO/Founder of an social networking app with 100 million users, 2) the head of cancer research at Sloan-Kettering, 3) a former member of the British House of Lords who now works at 10 Downing Street, 4) the leader of a “green school” in Bali and 5)the Athletic Director of University of Michigan who just retired as the Chairman of a Fortune 500 company. While one attendee dismissed the conference as “the dork Olympics”, it’s hard not to walk around TED feeling, um, like you may not have fully reached your potential.
The atmosphere at TED is West Coast relaxed and collegial, yet under the surface is an intense marketplace of ideas. Conversations contain very little small talk; they go deep and impactful quickly. TED attendees self-select into a conference that contains almost zero direct connection to their day jobs but which allows them to think broadly about the world for 1 week each year. It is an unusual paradox: attendees represent some of the most successful and accomplished Type A people on the planet (the kind of place where 25–35 year olds have nametags with titles like: “Retired”, “On Sabbatical”, “Investor” or “Philanthropist”, where people almost apologize for not having attended Stanford), yet they seek out a “brain-spa” like atmosphere where creativity and passion define the hierarchy, not money or fame. For 5 brief days, the 1% (celebrities, CEO’s, billionaires, politicians) bow at the feet of academics, physicists, police officers, starving artists, astronauts, scientists, designers, teachers, troubadours, social workers, a “cross-cultural psychologist who speaks 9 languages” and activists, all of whom are filled with contagious passion. Incredibly refreshing!
Attending TED is like visiting a strange and foreign land where the language, the currency, the culture, the nourishment, the customs and most importantly the value systems are literally mirror images of your home “country”. Passion trumps stability, courage wins over tribalism and conformity, persistence is valued over expediency, globalism beats provincialism, mild Asperger’s is better than extroverted and highly socialized, mistakes of commission beat mistakes of omission, fear of missing opportunities replaces fear of being wrong, embracing risk trounces managing risk. In short, the “bizarro world” version of my daily life. Imagine a week where you only hear “I am excited about…”, “I dream of…”, “I am creating…”, “I am discovering…” instead of: “I’m worried about…”, “I’m scared of…”, “The problem is…”. Refreshing!
At its heart, TED asks participants the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Afraid of being wrong, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of standing apart from the crowd, afraid of a lack of predictability in your life. As astronaut/Bowie cover artist Chris Hadfield reminded us in his 2014 TED talk, fear ≠ danger, yet we live our lives as if they are one and the same.
TED attendees include concentric circles of: A’s (true celebrities, political, philanthropic, stage, song, art, screen and film –Bill, Bono, Al, Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, Meg Ryan, Goldie Hawn, Geena Davis, Paul Simon, John Legend, Phillipe Starck), B’s (as in billionaires: founder/CEOs of the world’s largest technology companies, hedge funds, venture capitalists and private equity firms– Bezos, Larry/Sergey, Marisa Mayer, Steve Case, Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Bill Joy, Ray Dalio ), C’s (founders and investors of companies on the cusp or recently public/sold and “volunteer” senior execs at the world’s largest tech firms — think Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Square, and employees #3–400 at Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple/eBay/PayPal, working cuz it’s fun and for no other reason), D’s (retired CEOs, diplomats, military leaders and inventors of really important technology like, say, the Internet, vaccines and gene-splicing), E’s (former/current TED speakers from all walks of life) and F’s (the rest of us: entrepreneurs, consultants, corporate execs, charitable foundation leaders, educators, product designers, artists, authors and scientists…the respectably accomplished, the merely talented, the intensely curious and/or the aspirational and ambitious. The main difference between the E’s and F’s, as far as I can tell, is courage. It’s a wide gulf. Don’t ask me how the hell you get into the D’s and above.
One big difference between TED and many other conferences is that the speakers are highly integrated into the social fabric of the week; they grab snacks and conversation with interested attendees during breaks, they are available for dinner at organized events, they debate other speakers in the halls (there were no less than 5 experts on exoplanets this year), they rock out to the bands that play the TED evening parties, etc. This creates an even broader sense of community and facilitates the kind of “idea alchemy” I described earlier.
“Conference” is really not the right word for TED. A typical conference facilitates networking, TED facilitates impact. At a conference, the attendees supplicate to keynote experts; at TED the audience is just as “impressive” as who is on stage. Conferences differentiate themselves through narrow specialization; TED celebrates the dynamism of multi-disciplinary learning and the neural fireworks that result from systems thinking.
But don’t take my word for it…come to Vancouver next year and check it out yourself! Apply here: https://ted2020.ted.com/
