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I’m looking into a freezer box at the fall of the Roman empire. “It’s right here,” glaciologist Alison Criscitiello says, pointing to a nearly invisible gray smudge behind the glass, on a 5-foot-long, 1,550-year-old bisected cylinder of ice. “This is the volcanic ash.” We’re all crowding around to see it: the barely visible blur left by the triplet of eruptions that tipped a civilization into collapse.
It’s Day 1 of TED2026 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a couple dozen conference attendees from around the world are pressing their ears to water glasses, listening to the prehistoric crackle-pop of bubbles being liberated from small shards of ancient ice. Criscitiello hauled them off a glacier herself, and now she and National Geographic explorer M Jackson are dispensing them, like candy, from a Ziploc, while assuring us it’s not possible to contract a long-dormant prehistoric virus from drinking glacial melt.
My ice chunk hasn’t fully melted yet, but we have to wrap up here. It’s nearly time to join the rest of the 1,700 or so attendees and file into the theater for the opening talk of the $10,000-a-ticket, weeklong event: It’s Malala Yousafzai, the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She’s 28 now—it’s been more than a decade since she wrote I Am Malala, about speaking out against the Taliban as a teenager and surviving being shot at point-blank range for it.
But first: the big opening number. Last year, a robot—similar to the one that recently escorted Melania Trump to a press conference—helped kick off the show. This year, as hype music plays, two intelligent camera drones lift off and circle the theater, narrating their quest to locate, through facial recognition, TED’s co-hosts Chris Anderson and Helen Walters, who, after much ado, are identified backstage. Hard pivot to Malala’s talk. (She’s investing in women’s sports.) After Malala, hard pivot again: The session includes not one but two talks from drone company CEOs on how their flying robo-spies can surveil utility grids to stop wildfires, or support cops and “eliminate crime.”
It’s all so thrilling, so disorienting, so terrifying. It’s all so TED.
The conference launched in 1984, and 42 years later, the internet megabrand’s beating heart is still an annual brick-and-mortar conference. Here, dozens of talks are recorded and trickled out over time. Curators choose speakers from around the globe based on one public-facing criteria: “Ideas Change Everything.” Attendance is by application only—which helps TED create a culture “where ideas can be freely exchanged” a spokesperson says. Well, free after the cost of membership.
Who’s sitting in the theater? Technologists you’ve heard of. Brand strategists you haven’t. Scientists. Climate activists. Random longtime “TEDsters.” A surprising percentage of attendees assume they’ll live well into their 100s. A good share are actively planning for Mars colonization. And in the theater’s front rows are the low-key VIPs. In any given year, that might include billionaire venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who was also an early Tesla and SpaceX backer and longtime Elon Musk ally, or Uber co-founder Garrett Camp. In recent years the VIPs have been Musk himself, Sam Altman, MacKenzie Scott, Bill Gates …
Billionaires play a critical role in the TED ecosystem. With their help, the conference can put its money where its mouth is, as the patron saint of world-changing upstarts. Each year TED anoints a small cohort—scientists, artists, activists, and entrepreneurs—as TED Fellows, giving them visibility, coaching, and introductions to potential funders. Meanwhile its Audacious Project—a funding initiative that gives mature nonprofits the opportunity to pitch “moonshot” plans to a coalition of philanthropists—has raised over $1 billion in each of the last two years, in an epic Robin Hood operation for a handful of large-scale projects on climate, health, education, and criminal justice: The Audacious recipients here this year are taking this brief break from their work preventing 16 million unsafe abortions, helping governments in 20 countries prevent lead poisoning, or intercepting 5 percent of the world’s river-borne plastic before it reaches the ocean.
This infrastructure is part of what made TED’s recent leadership change noteworthy. Over the past two years, the organization openly shopped for what it called a new “steward”—language that left the door open to a sale. Various media and tech players eyed the brand—with its four decades of cultural cachet, 100 million aggregate social media followers, and Rolodex of Bezoses and Ballmers. Rumors of acquisition offers swirled: Saudi sovereign money? A major music-festival operator?
Then, last fall, after more than 80 inquiries, TED opted not to sell. Longtime insider Logan McClure Davda—who helped build TED’s Fellow and impact programs before launching the Obama Foundation—was named CEO, and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan is taking the reins from Chris Anderson as TED’s “Vision Steward,” with plans to lean into “learning infrastructure” under the new banner of the Khan TED Institute—a continuing education play to help people reskill to avoid A.I.-spurred obsolescence. Many breathed a sign of relief: Khan and TED “share so many values,” Anderson says at a mid-conference podcast taping. “He spent his whole professional life building free knowledge for the world.”
Values-driven as it may be, TED is no place for snowflakes. Amid the world-leading conservationists, creatives, and rare-disease drug developers, Palmer Luckey—the MAGA-backing “Silicon Valley warlord” who pushed the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War—had a prime spot last year, giving his talk in his token Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops beside a 7-foot-tall autonomous weapon. The year before, billionaire Bill Ackman was invited for a friendly Q&A after hounding Harvard’s president out of office, and grievance-fueled media entrepreneur Bari Weiss presented a rallying plug for her Substack. None are typical crowd-pleasers. All saw standing ovations.
TED2026
What controversy will this year’s program hold, I wonder, heading into Day 2. And what comforts? In the loop outside the theater are food trucks, buffets, and more than half a dozen Vancouver-area coffee, tea, and matcha pop-ups serving unlimited boutique offerings. Last year, complementary DEXA scans—the bone-density body imaging that costs $700 at Canyon Ranch—were first come, first served. This year, attendees can sign up for free massages, red light therapy sessions, lymphatic drainage boots, and—thanks in part to a partnership with LEGO—partake in a series of analog “adult play” installations. There are pottery wheels and a derby car racetrack for tiny cars carved from zucchinis. Between blocks of talks, attendees partake in activities from the glacier show-and-tell to an iNaturalist BioBlitz in Stanley Park to a field trip to the local Renaissance faire. By night, people gather at cocktail parties or scatter to prebooked dinners, themed to important topics like truth, and women, and geopolitics (featuring Al Gore).
No activity outshines the sheer joy of the people-watching. Rounding the corner, hey, it’s the surgeon who implanted the world’s first Neurolink. It’s psychedelic mycology pioneer researcher Paul Stamets. It’s Ann Patchett—whom a Slack channel full of conference organizers are looking for, because as it turns out, the novelist loves her privacy so much, she doesn’t own a cellphone.
Across the next four days, the future unfurls: Neuroscientist Anil Seth says it’s highly unlikely A.I. will gain consciousness. Ethicist Carissa Véliz warns that our societal obsession with predictions is ruining democracy. Physiologist Keith Diaz tells us sitting all day is slowly killing us (but swoops in with a data-backed solution, laid out in a new book by NPR host Manoush Zomorodi). The freshly ousted president of Kosovo pops in for a debrief. And Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal dishes about how he mentally prepped for the case that struck down Trump’s tariffs. (It involved an improv coach.) Many standing ovations. Much note-taking.
Some talks reverberate, for better or worse. Like the one by the founder of biotech start-up Orchid, who read off notecards with a too-big smile on her face about how her company’s Gattaca-esque suite of in-vitro fertilization embryo‑vetting tools will rank future babies by their genomes to help weed out human “typos.” And the one by Forbes’ Randall Lane, self-proclaimed anthropologist of billionaires, about why the world needs them.
Friday morning, before the conference’s final session, I scoop a pile of organic, plant-based jelly beans into a branded reusable snack pouch at one of the myriad healthy snack stations and make my way through the caffeine-seeking hordes to my go-to, a pop-up for Yaletown’s 123Dough. They don’t have coffee, but they do have Jeju Island–grown “Regenerative Organic-Certified” black tea oxidized as matcha. They also have bread made from fresh-milled ancient grains that I’m told can be traced to ancient Egypt. Is TED the last place in America where billionaires and activists still break bread together? I wonder, as I bite into a slice spread with delicious ricotta. I couldn’t say—I’ve never been to Davos—but I can say this bread is a much-welcomed taste of grounding wholesomeness.
It’s been a week of emotional and intellectual whiplash, but I head into the theater feeling uplifted. And I should—post-matcha, I spent 6.5 minutes barefoot in an immersive audiovisual “uplifting” guided breathwork program. But then, attorney and CNN political commentator Van Jones takes the stage.
Van Jones talks for what seems like a very long time. One day, he muses, his children might open a holographic interface and use biotech tools to design his grandchildren. When his children pass away, he continues, maybe they’ll be buried on the moon, or on Mars. This new human civilization we’re building here and now: “Will it be human, and will be civilized?” he asks. Or will “robots with no hearts dominate human beings with no agency?”
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It feels strange, after all we’ve been through, to wrap the week listening to Van Jones cope. But then, it felt strange to see Malala bookended by celebrations of the future of surveillance-drone innovation. So I embrace the TED of it all. And as is his talent, departing vision steward Anderson ties it up in a bow, with a nod to ”our terrifying and exhilarating future.”
Successor Khan takes the mic next: This week, he saw that we’re entering an era in which “we might lose our humanity, purpose, meaning, connection,” he says. His silver lining: “We’re starting to really appreciate those things.” TED could be the “nerve center” for whatever comes next, he adds. If there were “a Terminator- or Matrix-like apocalypse, the rebellion will be right here.”
Does Khan realize—he must—that this theater wouldn’t contain the Rebel Alliance? It would contain the whole rebellion. Like, both sides. As comedian George Civeris quipped on a TED stage this week, it’s “the conference that brings together the people solving the world’s biggest problems with the people creating them.” The Palmer Luckeys and the Malalas.
I wonder how many people in this room are stirring the forces that will be ash in someone’s ice core 1,500 years from now. In the meantime, TED2027 dates have been announced. After a decade here in Vancouver, next year it moves stateside, to San Diego, where its Robin Hood ops will carry on.
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