{"id":474609,"date":"2026-05-08T10:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/474609\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T10:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:34:14","slug":"inside-ted-the-conference-where-billionaires-fund-the-people-who-fight-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/474609\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside TED, the conference where billionaires fund the people who fight them."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking into a freezer box at the fall of the Roman empire. \u201cIt\u2019s right here,\u201d 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. \u201cThis is the volcanic ash.\u201d We\u2019re all crowding around to see it: the barely visible blur left by the triplet of eruptions that tipped a civilization into collapse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s not possible to contract a long-dormant prehistoric virus from drinking glacial melt.<\/p>\n

My ice chunk hasn\u2019t fully melted yet, but we have to wrap up here. It\u2019s 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\u2019s Malala Yousafzai, the world\u2019s youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She\u2019s 28 now\u2014it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But first: the big opening number. Last year, a robot<\/a>\u2014similar to the one that recently escorted Melania Trump to a press conference<\/a>\u2014helped 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\u2019s co-hosts Chris Anderson and Helen Walters, who, after much ado, are identified backstage. Hard pivot to Malala\u2019s talk. (She\u2019s investing in women\u2019s 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 \u201celiminate crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all so thrilling, so disorienting, so terrifying. It\u2019s all so TED.<\/p>\n

The conference launched in 1984, and 42 years later, the internet megabrand\u2019s 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: \u201cIdeas Change Everything.\u201d Attendance is by application only\u2014which helps TED create a culture \u201cwhere ideas can be freely exchanged\u201d a spokesperson says. Well, free after the cost of membership.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s sitting in the theater? Technologists you\u2019ve heard of. Brand strategists you haven\u2019t. Scientists. Climate activists. Random longtime \u201cTEDsters.\u201d A surprising percentage of attendees assume they\u2019ll live well into their 100s. A good share are actively planning for Mars colonization. And in the theater\u2019s 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 \u2026<\/p>\n

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\u2014scientists, artists, activists, and entrepreneurs\u2014as TED Fellows<\/a>, giving them visibility, coaching, and introductions to potential funders. Meanwhile its Audacious Project<\/a>\u2014a funding initiative that gives mature nonprofits the opportunity to pitch \u201cmoonshot\u201d plans to a coalition of philanthropists\u2014has 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<\/a> unsafe abortions, helping<\/a> governments in 20 countries prevent lead poisoning, or intercepting<\/a> 5 percent of the world\u2019s river-borne plastic before it reaches the ocean.<\/p>\n

This infrastructure is part of what made TED\u2019s recent leadership change noteworthy. Over the past two years, the organization openly shopped for what it called a new \u201csteward\u201d\u2014language that left the door open to a sale. Various media and tech players eyed the brand\u2014with 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?<\/p>\n

Then, last fall, after more than 80 inquiries<\/a>, TED opted not to sell. Longtime insider Logan McClure Davda\u2014who helped build TED\u2019s Fellow and impact programs before launching the Obama Foundation\u2014was named CEO, and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan is taking the reins from Chris Anderson as TED\u2019s \u201cVision Steward,\u201d with plans to lean into \u201clearning infrastructure\u201d under the new banner<\/a> of the Khan TED Institute\u2014a continuing education play to help people reskill to avoid A.I.-spurred obsolescence. Many breathed a sign of relief: Khan and TED \u201cshare so many values,\u201d Anderson says at a mid-conference podcast taping. \u201cHe spent his whole professional life building free knowledge for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>\u2014the MAGA-backing<\/a> \u201cSilicon Valley warlord<\/a>\u201d who pushed the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War\u2014had 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<\/a> was invited for a friendly Q&A after hounding Harvard\u2019s president out of office, and grievance-fueled media entrepreneur Bari Weiss<\/a> presented a rallying plug for her Substack. None are typical crowd-pleasers. All saw standing ovations.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/p>\n

TED2026<\/p>\n

What controversy will this year\u2019s 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\u2014the bone-density body imaging that costs $700 at Canyon Ranch\u2014were first come, first served. This year, attendees can sign up for free massages, red light therapy sessions, lymphatic drainage boots, and\u2014thanks in part to a partnership with LEGO\u2014partake in a series of analog \u201cadult play\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

No activity outshines the sheer joy of the people-watching. Rounding the corner, hey, it\u2019s the surgeon who implanted the world\u2019s first Neurolink. It\u2019s psychedelic mycology pioneer researcher Paul Stamets. It\u2019s Ann Patchett\u2014whom a Slack channel full of conference organizers are looking for, because as it turns out, the novelist loves her privacy so much, she doesn\u2019t own a cellphone.<\/p>\n

Across the next four days, the future unfurls: Neuroscientist Anil Seth says it\u2019s highly unlikely A.I. will gain consciousness. Ethicist Carissa V\u00e9liz warns that our societal obsession with predictions is ruining democracy<\/a>. 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<\/a> by NPR host Manoush Zomorodi). The freshly ousted president of Kosovo pops in for a debrief. And Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal<\/a> dishes about how he mentally prepped for the case that struck down Trump\u2019s tariffs. (It involved an improv coach.) Many standing ovations. Much note-taking.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Gattaca-esque suite of in-vitro fertilization embryo\u2011vetting tools will rank future babies by their genomes to help weed out human \u201ctypos.\u201d And the one by Forbes\u2019 Randall Lane<\/a>, self-proclaimed anthropologist of billionaires, about why the world needs them.<\/p>\n

Friday morning, before the conference\u2019s 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\u2019s 123Dough. They don\u2019t have coffee, but they do have Jeju Island\u2013grown \u201cRegenerative Organic-Certified\u201d black tea oxidized as matcha. They also have bread made from fresh-milled ancient grains that I\u2019m 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\u2019t say\u2014I\u2019ve never been to Davos\u2014but I can say this bread is a much-welcomed taste of grounding wholesomeness.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a week of emotional and intellectual whiplash, but I head into the theater feeling uplifted. And I should\u2014post-matcha, I spent 6.5 minutes barefoot in an immersive audiovisual \u201cuplifting\u201d guided breathwork program. But then, attorney and CNN political commentator Van Jones takes the stage.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll be buried on the moon, or on Mars. This new human civilization we\u2019re building here and now: \u201cWill it be human, and will be civilized?\u201d he asks. Or will \u201crobots with no hearts dominate human beings with no agency?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Staff
\n Big Tech\u2019s Climate Fight\u2026on Pause?
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

It feels strange, after all we\u2019ve 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 \u201dour terrifying and exhilarating future.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \n
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    They\u2019re Low-Paid. Big Companies Exploit Them. They\u2019ve Made All Your Favorite Viral Videos.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Successor Khan takes the mic next: This week, he saw that we\u2019re entering an era in which \u201cwe might lose our humanity, purpose, meaning, connection,\u201d he says. His silver lining: \u201cWe\u2019re starting to really appreciate those things.\u201d TED could be the \u201cnerve center\u201d for whatever comes next, he adds. If there were \u201ca Terminator- or Matrix-like apocalypse, the rebellion will be right here.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Does Khan realize\u2014he must\u2014that this theater wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s \u201cthe conference that brings together the people solving the world\u2019s biggest problems with the people creating them.\u201d The Palmer Luckeys and the Malalas.<\/p>\n

    I wonder how many people in this room are stirring the forces that will be ash in someone\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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