TED talks are free online. So why does a ticket still cost $10,000?

The most elite, and the most open

On the afternoon of April 27, Alphabet (Google) reported earnings. Neither of its founders — CEO Larry Page nor president Sergey Brin — was at headquarters in Mountain View.

Both were at the Vancouver Convention Centre, at the annual TED conference.

Brin was talking with people at a round table on the waterfront side of the building, politely avoiding the eyes of everyone who came over to introduce themselves. Not far off, Joe Belfiore, the Microsoft vice president in charge of Windows design and software, walked quickly into the hall.

The last session of the afternoon was about to start and most of the audience was already seated. A day earlier, Steven Spielberg had arrived at about the same hour and got only an empty seat in the back row. Among those who came early and sat up front were Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter and Uber, and Mark Bezos, younger brother of Amazon's founder (this volunteer firefighter once gave a very funny TED talk).

All of them have been fixtures at TED for more than a decade. No wonder that World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, closing a talk about an investment plan for poor regions, waved an arm at the audience and said: "Those of you sitting on trillions of dollars in cash — come talk to us!"

This year's conference was the biggest TED has ever held, with 1,800 people attending. Leave aside the sponsorships from Google, Microsoft, Lululemon, BMW and other big names (they are not allowed into the talks themselves) and the tickets alone brought in more than $20 million: the cheapest tier was $8,500; 487 people paid $17,000 for a Donor ticket, which lets you line up earlier; and 65 people bought Patron tickets at $250,000 for five years.

The tickets are not easy to get, either. Buying one means answering five questions online — "How would your friends describe your accomplishments?" "What are you fanatical about?" — and then leaving the contact details of two references so TED can run a background check.

Next year the base ticket goes to $10,000 and the second tier to $25,000.

What does all that money buy?

Like every conference with a high bar to entry, TED is a good place to meet people. Badges spell out name, title and company. The biggest stars in the room are the speakers; many of them are known only inside their own field, and the moment they step off stage strangers start coming up to talk.

The organizers built in icebreakers. Monday's lunch came as a picnic basket for six, and you could only collect one if six of you went together. Between sessions, pairs of attendees could take a BMW-sponsored electric car for a drive around Vancouver and talk.

There were themed dinners every day — some open to anyone who signed up, some by invitation, some hosted by companies or individuals. A small circle divided into smaller circles.

TED even built an app for it, TEDConnect, where you can look up this year's speakers and attendees and message them. Roughly, LinkedIn for TED ticket holders.

What sets TED apart from other expensive conferences is that its audience spends most of the day not networking. They are actually listening. Nearly every session had more than 1,400 people in their seats.

They watch the same 5-to-18-minute talks as the hundred million-plus TED viewers around the world — Elon Musk was the exception this year, with a 40-minute conversation.

What is different is the density. These 1,800 people sat through 111 talks in four and a half days, 28 hours in all counting the links between them.

"You have to train for TED. You exercise every day and you eat a lot." Silicon Valley angel investor Chris Sacca told QDaily, at a party the night before it began, that TED is the most punishing conference he goes to. He hasn't missed one since 2005.

Over the next four and a half days you could find Sacca in his baseball cap in the front row with his wife, Crystal Sacca, at nearly every session.

TED prepares for the marathon. Each morning attendees could pick yoga, running or tai chi, with a coach to get the blood moving — one morning there was a 4:30 a.m. hike to watch the sunrise.

If the main hall feels confining, the lounges outside the theater are full of big screens carrying the live feed.

The snacks are unusually plentiful and unusually healthy: cricket energy bars, salmon jerky, kale chips, seaweed snacks labeled non-GMO. Even the desserts are marked gluten-free. The two coffee bars are independent brands from Vancouver and Seattle. All of it free.

In the whole venue, only the odd red bottle of Coca-Cola reminds you that you haven't wandered into a hipster fantasy.

None of which is enough to take the strain off. A law-firm partner who has come eight or nine years running said that by the fourth day he could no longer remember what had been said on the first two. More than one attendee said that while swapping contact details with someone they realized the two of them had already talked, two days earlier.

It isn't hard to see why. The information comes too fast, it jumps between fields, and nearly every talk is built to move you.

TED sets one big theme for the year and a smaller one for each session of six or seven talks. But any two talks may have nothing at all to do with each other.

Chess champion Garry Kasparov looked back on losing to IBM's Deep Blue as the human brain's "last line of defense." The members of OK Go came out together to explain how they dream up their hit videos.

The computer scientist Stuart Russell followed the logic of artificial intelligence through the ways it can go wrong — worst case, a household robot cooks the cat for dinner.

Tim Ferriss, author of the bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, laid out his method for facing down fear and coming back from thoughts of suicide. Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel laureate in medicine, explained how different behaviors change telomerase, and with it how long you live. The executive director of the ACLU spent ten-odd minutes on stage making fun of Trump by way of Renaissance paintings.

This may have been the year with the fewest animals on the TED stage. Nobody let loose a jar of mosquitoes, nobody led out an ox and asked the audience to guess its weight, nobody brought out a live camel while presenting an archaeological find. But one man strapped jet engines to his arms and flew like Iron Man — the test footage he played could go straight into the next Iron Man film. And someone had a robot dog bring him a can of drink.

So why sit through so many unconnected talks, one after another?

Chris Anderson took up that question in 2002, at his first conference after taking over TED. "For the first three days you keep asking yourself, 'Why am I listening to all this stuff that has nothing to do with me?' By the end of the fourth day your brain is humming and you are elated. It's because all those fragments have fitted together. It is entirely a brain experience — like a deep massage for the mind."

Before Anderson, TED was smaller and cheaper, invitation only, and its speakers came from the three fields in its name: technology, entertainment, design. Bezos and Gates were regulars.

During the internet bubble, Anderson made billions of dollars on technology and business magazines. When it burst he left the magazine company he had founded, bought TED in 2001 and set about running it as a non-profit.

Fifteen years later the conference has grown from three and a half days to four and a half, and from fewer than 40 talks to more than 100.

The TED talk as everyone now knows it — heavily rehearsed, no longer than 18 minutes — also took shape under Anderson.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube. That same year, TED put its videos online.

The free videos then displaced the conference as the thing most people mean by TED. They have now been watched 6.1 billion times, 2.5 billion of those in the past two years — and that excludes the huge number of unauthorized, untrackable plays.

Megan Smith, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and a former Google executive, complained years ago that "TED is now so prepared. It's good in terms of saving everybody's time, but there's not as much raw information."

She is right. A TED talk usually carries less than a one- or two-hour conversation at an industry conference. That is also why videos of industry conferences never take off.

As last week's piece on how TED talks get made described, every talk's subject is settled well in advance and goes through at least two rehearsals, with Anderson reviewing them himself.

The talks have a fixed rhythm now. Even the video Pope Francis sent from the Vatican this year opened with a joke about jet lag and, halfway through, taught the audience with a plain image: "Power is like gin on an empty stomach. It makes you dizzy, drunk, unsteady." The Pope does not usually speak that way.

Controlling quality, tightening the information, saving the audience's time — that is why people buy tickets year after year. Even when the subject isn't interesting there are at least jokes, and it doesn't run long.

When your audience has paid that much and will sit in front of you for five days, the worst thing you can be is boring.

TED's team prepares the conference the way a magazine staff prepares an issue, except the publishing cycle is not daily or hourly. It plans a year at a time.

The result is a carefully programmed show. Everyone who takes the stage — entrepreneur, civil-rights campaigner, scientist, writer, movie star — delivers their ideas as a performance.

Even CEOs who are used to standing on stage selling their companies talk about something else at TED. In 2003, a Jeff Bezos who still had hair went up to discuss what the internet bubble had in common with a gold rush. Last year Travis Kalanick was indeed selling Uber as a way to change the world, but he started from the jitney, the ride-sharing service regulators killed a hundred years ago.

All of it takes a long run-up. For one video from the Pope, TED spent more than a year talking to the Vatican, explaining its style and its audience.

The room and the reach of the videos are both part of what draws speakers. Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who used data this year to show living standards across income levels worldwide, sold her company to Google in 2007 — because Larry Page had sat in this same audience and watched her father-in-law, the global health expert Hans Rosling, speak.

Jerry Lin, who worked for years on cancer detection at Johns Hopkins, is chief scientist at the genetic testing company Natera. At midday on the first day of the conference he went on stage to describe his breakthrough in detecting cancer through DNA. Natera's stock began to climb. On the third day, the paper behind the talk appeared in Nature. By the close of that day the share price was 20% above where it stood before he spoke.

While each talk is underway, 12 cameras in the hall record the speaker's every move. A theater director cuts the feed and sends it to a meeting room outside marked TED Management, where the editorial board watches.

That board of 12, Chris Anderson among them, decides from the speaker's performance, the audience's reaction and how timely the subject is which day each talk goes up on TED.com.

The site posts only five videos a week. Since roughly 90% of last year's talks made it online, the conference that just ended will keep TED.com supplied for months.

Nobody really comes to understand a field from a ten-minute talk. But they learn that something exists which they had never thought about, and that can be a start.

Andreas Weigend, a data scientist and Amazon's former chief scientist, has been coming for years. As the conference closed he told QDaily that the talks about data had left him cold, but the Pope's video had him interested.

That reaction is common. This audience enjoys being dropped into dense information it knows nothing about. After an exhausting, exhilarating week, many of them booked for next year.

One man who has come seven or eight years in a row said it is like a holiday.

It is not a holiday everyone can take. One speaker joked that "children have to choose their families now — you can't be born poor."

In the media center, a reporter watching the feed said, "Everyone here chose pretty well."

Apart from the staff, almost everyone in the hall looks at least 40. Most are executives at companies and non-profits, family-fund managers, investors, lawyers — high earners.

Aside from speakers, who get in free, you see few academics, even though their talks are the most watched of all.

That follows from an $8,500 ticket.

The conference is TED's main source of money — far bigger than donations or publishing, close to two-thirds of total revenue.

Beyond the flagship event there is TEDGlobal, held mostly in Africa, and TEDWomen, on women's issues. Tickets to those run into the thousands of dollars too.

As TED has grown, video production and bandwidth, the million-dollar annual prize, the TED Fellows program that trains young speakers — all of it needs more money. Most of it comes from the conference.

This is TED's contradiction. What it makes is entirely open, given away to a global audience, a good share of whom are still in school.

What pays for it comes from an elite that is no longer young and is mostly white.

That group was young when TED started. The founders and executives of Amazon and Google were in their twenties and thirties when they first showed up. Twenty years ago nobody knew whether Bezos's company would survive, and the two Google guys celebrated a funding round at a fast-food counter. Now they sit near the top of the global rich lists and travel by private jet.

That may also explain why the conference's tone never varies. Refugees, terminal illness, dictatorship, massacre, the limits of technology — whatever the subject, the talk lands in the same place: work at it and the world gets better; if I could do it, so can you.

TED's audience may not touch the programming, but you will not feel anything in that hall other than optimism.

It is the feeling at the end of a Spielberg movie. There is more than one kind of film worth watching.

Tom Reilly, TED's director of community, does not think the audience shapes what speakers choose to say. Most speakers are there for the first time, he said, and have no clear idea who is in the room.

Meanwhile, TED is trying to change who sits in it.

Its fellows program takes 20 or 30 people a year and, with more intensive coaching, puts young people who have done real work but have never spoken in public on the main stage. Most of those speakers are not white.

This year was the first with a non-English session: seven speakers in Spanish. The Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan came to speak as well; later this year he will work with TED to bring it to India as a television show.

From 2018, TED will sell a small number of $5,000 tickets to young people who have never been before.

Whether any of this works is not yet clear. But TED does hand a stage to voices that rarely get one. Anjan Sundaram, a reporter recently back from a war zone, is one of them.

Sundaram does not cover what is hottest — the Middle East, Afghanistan, North Korea. He covers what nobody else does: the abuses in Congo and the Central African Republic, two African dictatorships. He is writing his third book. Some of the people who took the photographs in his talk have since been shot dead.

At the party the night before the conference ended there was, again, the conspicuously healthy food, a band and beer. Sundaram was there.

Asked what he makes of a conference full of businesspeople, Sundaram said he knows most of them do not really care about killings in Africa. He is glad anyway: the organizers thought the subject mattered enough to put on stage, and speaking here always gets his reporting in front of more people. "Anything beyond that, I'll treat as winning the lottery."

Cover image / TED