VANCOUVER --- It's a few hours before the official opening of this year's TED conference, and architect David Rockwell is showing me around the elaborate new theatre that houses the annual festival of ideas. A combination of Shakespeare’s Globe and the cozy amphitheater at TED’s original site in Monterey, California, it looks like the result of months of hard construction. But only a week ago, it was empty space.
At midnight, just as a dental conference held at the Vancouver Convention Centre broke up, a team of workers hauled in 8,200 packages of pre-cut beams sawed from local Douglas firs, as well as Steelcase-built seating for 1,200 and a huge mess of electronics. Rockwell -- whose previous projects have included The Disney Family Museum and the Dolby Theatre (home of the Oscars) -- calls this creation the culmination of his career, a 20,000-foot space for spoken word performance where no spectator is more than 80 feet from the lone soul on stage discussing black holes, exulting the Pantheon, sharing a gender change, rhapsodizing fecal microbes, doing magic tricks, explaining fireflies, or dancing on a bionic leg.
But the key thing, Rockwell says, was creating a space that felt like, well, TED. Even if his client, TED CEO Chris Anderson, hadn’t drilled this into him, Rockwell knew that this meant engendering both the frisson of spectacle and a feeling of community. He's a successful TED-talker himself. He did this in part by varying the seating -- armchairs, sofas, love seats, office chairs, and an inner circle of lean-back divans -- and then arranging these seats to make the audience part of the talk. "There’s no view of a speaker that doesn’t involve other people," Rockwell says.
Rockwell’s impulse to include the audience in the spotlight as well as the speakers underlies a continual challenge at TED. When TED began 30 years ago -- this year’s theme was looking back and looking forward to mark the anniversary -- it was a cloistered gathering that did not share its proceedings with the hoi polloi. This was a shame because, over the years, those talks grew in quality. But in 2006, it began posting its talks online, free. "I didn’t think the talks would work well online," says TED’s Anderson. Boy, was he wrong. Not only have viewers streamed hundreds of millions of TED talks, but the term itself has become a cultural phenomenon -- so much so that the actual event was at risk of being subsumed by the wild popularity of the talks offered free online.
This means every TED is two TEDs: the one in the room seen by around 1,000 people and the one potentially seen by millions thereafter. "The talks have a very long -- almost infinite -- tail to them," Anderson says. "It’s like they are filling lecture halls month after month, without the speaker having to do anything."
The All-Star Effect
The stakes involved are singular and dramatic. A few years ago, an unknown brain researcher named Jill Bolte Taylor spoke about how she became her own subject, examining the melting down of her mind during a stroke. Millions viewed the talk, and she got a book contract and an Oprah appearance. This year, Bolte was among 75 "all-star" performers from previous years who were called back to share short updates or new thoughts, and many commented on how their lives had become bifurcated narratives, a striving pre-TED existence and a life-long victory lap thereafter.
Sarah Key was an obscure poet before her 18 minutes on the TED stage. Now, she is in demand worldwide to share of some of that. "I mainly live out of a suitcase," she said this year. "I live in constant jetlag." One day, she was in Katmandu for an appearance and picked up the national newspaper to find her picture splashed on the front page. Another all-star, Susan Cain, spoke on her life as an introvert and her book exploded on the bestseller list. Now she is starting a venture-backed company to help shy people emerge from their self-imposed social exiles.
Even people who don’t need more fame understand the value of the online platform. Bill Gates has become a huge TED fan (this year he and his wife Melinda sat down for an onstage interview with Anderson, sharing pictures of their kids), and after crunching the numbers, he concluded that the conference offers a huge amount of exposure for the relatively brief duration of a talk. It’s an equation that can alter the trajectory of even experienced glitterati. Singer Amanda Palmer said that she is now more well-known for her blockbuster TED talk than her performing career.
No wonder, then, that giving a TED talk can be a code-ten stress event. Design maven Chee Pearlman, who helps in the conference planning, sometimes acts as a TED-whisperer, helping speakers ace their stints in the red onstage circle where they address the crowd. "They are often in abject terror," she says. Even Stewart Brand, who normally wouldn’t bat an eyelash at addressing a vast crowd at a rock festival, says that when he does TED, he drops two beta-blockers. This year, one speaker put it bluntly before launching her talk: “They ought to have a toilet on stage.”
Not surprisingly, speakers often painstakingly over-prepare their TED talks, turning their hotel suites into war rooms and not emerging until they stumble on the stage. To emulate the success of previous barn-burners, speakers sometime try to reverse-engineer the form. In part as a result, TED talks are often criticized as being too slick. Indeed, when some clips from early talks were screened this year on the TED stage, they seemed like episodes of “Bonanza” compared to the “Breaking Bad” of current TED talks.
So, coming only weeks after TED unveiled a new website to make online viewing even more powerful, the question was whether TED 2014 would be shadowed by its afterlife -- or at the least discombobulated by the move to Vancouver.
TED Triumphant
The answer was no. TED’s numerous critics will be furious to hear this, but TED 2014 (at least as I write this, with one day to go) is another triumph. The new theatre is only one of a number of factors that refocused the ephemeral but powerful experience of being at TED, as opposed to hosting a platform for a subsequent online performance. The new venue is roomier, with the halls featuring floor-to-ceiling glass views of the mountains of British Columbia. It’s roomy enough to accommodate speaker meetups between sessions, a huge improvement over the previous situation, where collaring a favorite TEDtalker was hit or miss. Also, on the second night of the event, TED arranged dinners where each speaker hosted a table of ten, another way to cut the distance between the stage and audience.
The programming was on the mark as well. Traditionally, TED agendas had been loaded with weepy evocations of deforestation, child warriors, accessibility problems, and self-improvement exhortations sexed up by a few slides of data. This year at TED, particle physics was the new global warming, to the degree that some attendees were actually griping at the elevated content. (Nonetheless, some classic tropes persisted: multiple talks featured pictures or evocations of the speakers as infants or geeky children, a perennial TED convention.) Some even took Anderson’s advice not to think of their talks as web setpieces, but opportunities to engage with the audience, betting that a strong real-time performance will translate to a good video anyway. In any case, if you blow a line, TED will fix it in the edit.
TED 2014 also benefited from Anderson’s increased willingness to schedule sessions that addressed issues virtually ripped from the headlines. When I spoke to Anderson a month before TED, he was clearly obsessed with working the NSA revelations into the program. He succeeded beyond all expectation, snaring Ed Snowden himself, who appeared via a telepresence robot. Two days later, NSA’s deputy director Richard Ledgett made a response via a much less dramatic, poorly performing conferencing system. TED also made some news with a timely, off-the-program conversation between Charlie Rose and Larry Page.
On the other hand, Anderson had been hoping to address another pressing issue: income inequality. A month ago, he hinted to me that TED would have multiple talks on the income gap, but those didn’t materialize. He admitted this week it was a shortcoming.
'Of Course, It's Elitist'
Too bad, because the fact remains that while attending TED is far superior to just watching talks online, the experience is limited to those who can afford its hefty registration fees. It costs $7,500, but that’s only business class. A first class "donor" ducat costs $15,000, which gets you perks like ringside seating in the auditorium. (Next year, the cost goes up to $8,500 and $17,000.) Even then, TED reserves the right to admit only people who meet its ill-defined standards of wonderfulness. That’s why TED is often charged with elitism. "Of course, it’s elitist!" says Bill Gates. “Call up an average friend and see if you can get him in!”
Nonetheless, Anderson says that the elitism rap is bogus. "I see it as a crowd-funded philanthropic enterprise," he says. Indeed, the business model of TED is philosophically at odds with views of at least some of its libertarian fans: tax the rich. Those huge fees not only pay for the conference but an entire TED industrial complex -- which includes not only the main event but a thriving Fellows program, about 2000 user-created TEDx events, a "Ted Prize" that bequeathes $1 million to fulfill an ambitious, if not unrealistic, wish of some do-gooder, and a series of animated lessons called TedEd. (TED itself is a non-profit company.)
But the foundation of TED will always be the talks. Everyone can eventually view TED talks for free online, but lucky attendees see them in an exhilarating and exhausting flow, some more memorable than others, but almost always engaging in some way. And every so often comes one with the promise of a new intellectual star being born, the next Susan Cain or Jill Bolte Taylor. One of my favorites this year was a talk by architect Marc Kushner, who responded a few months ago to an open call for someone who could relate the last 30 years of architecture in 18 minutes. His talk revealed the ideas behind various movements in the field and provided justification that we were entering a new golden age.
And yes, early in his talk, we saw a slide of him as a geeky looking kid.
