The rise and fall of TED
In this video essay, Michael Girdley chronicles the trajectory of TED from its 1984 inception by architect‑turned‑information designer Richard Saul Wurman to its 2025 status as a largely irrelevant brand. He describes Wurman's original vision of an elite, tightly curated conference that combined technology, entertainment, and design, highlighting early highlights like a compact‑disc demo and a talk by Benoit Mandelbrot. Girdley then details how Chris Anderson bought TED in 2001, put all talks online for free in 2006, and leveraged the internet’s hunger for high‑quality video, leading to viral successes such as Sir Ken Robinson’s 75‑million‑view talk. The essay explains the 2009 launch of TEDx, its rapid global expansion (44,000 events, 233,000 talks), and the resulting erosion of curation as local organizers varied widely in quality, allowing pseudoscience and fraud to slip through. Girdley critiques TED’s shift toward commercialization—ticket prices soaring to $12,500–$25,000 and the conference becoming a networking arena for the ultra‑wealthy—while noting that speakers remain unpaid. He connects this to broader changes in audience attention spans, citing research that the average online viewer’s switch time fell from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 45 seconds today, making the 18‑minute TED format ill‑suited to a TikTok‑driven ecosystem. The narrative continues with TED’s 2024 politicization (TED‑P), featuring speakers like Barry Weiss and Bill Ackman, internal resignations, and a pivot toward AI‑centric, trade‑show‑like content. Girdley concludes that TED has lost its core insight—that great ideas are rare and must be meticulously curated—resulting in a brand that no longer carries prestige, with former badge‑of‑honor status fading from resumes. The video ends with a call for comments and a cross‑promotion to a related video on brand dilution.
Chapters
TED Talks once helped define our entire culture. In fact, the one in 2006 by Sir Ken Robinson is one of the most watched lectures of all time. 75 million views. And for an entire generation, getting to speak at TED was basically like the Nobel Prize for forward thinking. It made you— put you on the map. Yet today, TED pumps out even more content than it ever has. Over 233,000 talks. And unfortunately, the brand feels basically irrelevant. Nobody says, hey, I'm a TED speaker, and with a straight face and is proud of it. And in fact, for many people on social media, the idea of doing a TED Talk is kind of a joke. They'll make long posts and be like, oh, thanks for attending my TED Talk. And it's basically just like a tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole thing. And representative of the brand is basically nothing today. Oh, and if you're curious and a fan of this channel wondering why I'm back in the drainage ditch, we're doing something about TED. Well, it rained last night. I can't walk in the park. It's too muddy. So TED's journey to eventual irrelevance where it is today started with one man's curiosity and his own ego. Richard Saul Wurman was an architect turned information designer who believed he could create the world's most ultimate intellectual dinner party. And in February 1984, he co-founded TED, standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, with co-founder Harry Marks. That first conference was kind of amazing. It had an early demo of a compact disc. It had an early demo of one of the first Apple Macintoshes and a talk on fractals by famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. And if you were alive in the '80s, you will remember this guy because they talked a lot about fractals back then. The whole thing was visionary. Like it was basically a Woodstock for forward-thinking technology and ideas. The only problem was, uh, it was a financial disaster and Wurzman would spend 6 years before he would try again. And when Worman brought TED back in 1990, something clicked. Back then, conferences were pretty staid and formal and all that kind of stuff, suits and lame panels of people just basically telling industry jargon over and over again. Worman brought it in, made it all casual, and made it about the ideas. And in a genius move, he curated two things heavily, the format and the speakers. And he would basically require you to speak everything in 18 minutes. And if he didn't understand something personally, he would interrupt your talk to get you to say it better. He ruled the whole thing with an iron fist. He was the ultimate curator of both the culture and the activities of TED. Famously, he went on stage during Nicholas Negroponte's talk, a famous head of the MIT Media Lab, and cut off the dude's tie with scissors. It's basically like going to Dick's Last Resort and eating. But ultimately, like, that kind of cultural czar can really shape an event, and that's what happened here. And right or wrong, he had stumbled on the perfect formula: invite the most interesting people on Earth, put them in a room together and let them share what they're most passionate about. By the way, people ask, how do you become a great conversationalist? Two tricks. Number one, listen like crazy. Number two, figure out how to party or an event, get somebody talking about what they're most excited about. Those two things will make that you are considered one of the best conversationalists in the world. And the good news, you don't even have to say much. You just listen. Over the coming years, TED would become basically an invitation-only cult of the most, elite kind of visionary minds from Silicon Valley and beyond, talking about tech, design, and all the stuff, well, TED stood for. Wermin ruled with an iron fist until he started to get a bit older. And at age 65 in 2000, he needed a successor. Enter Chris Anderson. He's a British-born American entrepreneur who had built a magazine empire during the dot-com boom and cashed out before everything went wrong. In 2001, he took his nonprofit foundation called the Sapling Foundation and spent $14 million to buy TED. Anderson had a vision that Worman couldn't have imagined. Basically, he wanted to use TED as a platform to promote ideas to the world. And under his leadership in 2006, TED took a huge gamble. They put all the talks online for free. He had tried to get them on mainstream media. TV networks had rejected the idea. Who wants to watch 18-minute videos? Too long, too boring. Like nobody, nobody got time for that in the age of watching Seinfeld reruns. So TED just decided to go direct to consumer and they posted 6 talks early on. And one of those was that famous one from Sir Ken Robinson talking about how schools stifle creativity. It was perfect timing. By 2012, all of the TED content had crossed 1 billion views. It became such a cultural icon that when Ridley Scott released Prometheus that year, they basically had a fake TED Talk in it set in 2023. In other words, like people saw that the ideas being promoted by TED were not only the future now, but also a future format to influence culture and how we thought. The genius of TED at the time was it started at a time when the internet was really hungry for content. In 2006, things like YouTube and the different video sharing sites were just getting started. Uh, blogging was still a thing, but it was really tough to know what to watch. And even then, it was even— there wasn't much out there. Um, so TED was perfect to bring high-quality content in a world that was ready for it. And it was also positioned super well for the world that was to come. The magic of TED was the super duper curation that they did on everything. You could trust TED as a brand. If something was put next to it, you knew it was going to be really good. I mean, they had Sir Ken Robinson and all this crazy stuff that was just so good, and they were perfectly positioned for the world that would come. But then they made a fateful decision. But before I tell you how that happened, here's a quick word from our sponsor.
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Remember, Chris had been highly motivated to share all the TED ideas as much as possible. His vision was to get all this out in front of as many people as he could. So TED decided to let not only the headquarters, which was running the TED flagship conference, run the playbook. They wanted to run the TED playbook, well, everywhere. In 2009, they launched a thing called TEDx, which was basically the formula for organizers on a local basis, whether here in San Antonio or other places, to run their own version of the TED Conference in their own town. At first glance, it would be great. You would democratize ideas, you would spread information globally, and as a big platform, well, you could get more of the interesting stuff out there. I remember back in the 2010s, TEDx exploded, and it wasn't just here, it was other places as well. There were 44,000 events, 233,000 talks would eventually get put online. Basically every city, no matter how big and how small, ended up having a TEDx. But it's important to remember what the internet was like starting in the 2010s. We had gone from an era in which there just wasn't that much on the internet and something like TED could be highly valued just because it was there, to a world in the 2010s where the internet started to get filled with so much stuff that all of us didn't even know what to watch or read or look at. YouTube, blogs, podcasts. Suddenly there was more stuff getting published than any individual could consume in a lifetime. What the world needed in 2010s was a level of curation. We needed to know where to spend our time and have a brand that we could trust around it. Unfortunately, TED was doing exactly the opposite. It was flooding the world with more TED Talks. So remember this moment for later on in the story. It's going to prove pretty fateful. But here's the problem that always tends to come with scale. When you grow quickly, it's tough to maintain quality standards. And when they put the idea of curation in the hands of local TEDx organizers, Some were really meticulous and kept high standards. Some not so much. Anyone with a copy of PowerPoint and a projector could organize a TEDx. There was very little curation of the curators. So a lot of the events started to come up with pseudoscience. You know, people like eating bird poop, curing cancer and stuff like that. Like you just saw some crazy stuff going on. Famously in 2014, Elizabeth Holmes, you know, the one of Theranos fame who defrauded all those people with pseudoscience and lies. Well, she had pitched her whole business at a thing called TEDMED. Well, it was part of TEDx. The TED format, which was 18 minutes of, you know, highly scripted presentation. It worked really well for great ideas like Sir Ken Robinson. It worked just as well for pseudoscience and frauds. In fact, it got so bad that in 2013, a comedian went on board of one of the TEDx things, bluffed his way in, showed up in a costume like a Roman gladiator or something, started talking about crazy ideas like SodaStream will do for soda what 3D printing did for assault rifles. Just total gibberish. The tough part is nobody slowed down to say, hey, I think this is BS. The audience bought it and applauded. The Onion caught on to it. Harvard Business Review. Like, people were seeing this. It was impossible to miss it if you were at TED. Meanwhile, something was changing for TED itself, the fame original conference that had built the brand originally. Prices started to go crazy. It was $12,500 for an individual to attend. And if you wanted to be donor status, in other words, get right behind the red velvet rope, it was $25,000 for a conference. In 2023, one attendee wrote about their experience attending TED that year. Wasn't about the ideas. Wrote about the billionaires that they met, a 30 Under 30 founder, this rich person, that rich person. It was suddenly becoming an event of networking for the rich and powerful. All those videos they were putting out were just marketing to get people to pay up to come to an expensive conference and hang out with fancy people. And like most conferences, the speakers would speak for free. They weren't paid while the attendees were sitting there paying $12,500 for a seat. Behind it, the world was also changing. Remember, in 2006, our brains were radically different than they are today. People were comfortable sitting down and watching multiple hour movies and heck, an 18-minute video talk. Well, that felt like an easy thing to consume. A researcher in UC Irvine actually has documented this, this trend in our brains. She basically went through and in 2004 studied that it took around 2 and a half minutes for the average viewer of something online to switch the content they were looking at. Uh, by 2010, so I'm roughly paraphrasing the numbers here, it was like 75 seconds. Today, the number is like 45 seconds. In other words, TED was putting out something that required you to be patient for a world with no patience whatsoever. In a world of TikTok today, your typical user takes 1.7 seconds to decide what to swipe on. A TikTok, a TED Talk? Well, that'll take up to minutes just to get to their point or their thesis. Heck, there's more than 1.7 seconds of clapping at the beginning of most of those talks. And content has really gone K-shaped. That's where it basically splits into one end and the other end. And where you have now is you have deep dive podcasts like Joe Rogan that will go for 3 hours, or one of my favorites, the Acquired podcast that goes for hours deep diving on companies. And then you have tons of things on TikTok that are 12 or 18 seconds long. In the middle is kind of a dead man zone. Well, I guess except for these videos that tend to be about 15 to 18 minutes, but I'm in the drainage ditch, so yolo. And suddenly TED is stuck in the middle, too short to go as deep as people want in some of those podcasts and longer videos, and too polished to be really felt as authentic. So while the world was changing, tastes were changing, and formats were changing, TED was staying still and the rest of the world was moving on. Then in 2024, something else happened to the brand. It was basically became TED-P, which is they added politics to the whole thing. In January 2024, they brought in Barry Weiss and a guy named Bill Ackman as speakers, which are like, okay, cool. Well, the problem is both of those folks have ideas, but they're mostly ideas that show up in politics. And like you've seen with other brands on this channel that have waded into culture wars and paid the price for it, that's exactly what TED did next. And a number of fellows, people were helping choose and put on the organization's events, Uh, they resigned in protest asking, why are we going this direction? At the same time, the event in 2023 started to bring on things that were great as technologically demonstrating things that other people were selling. In fact, the top 3 talks that year were about generative AI. The organization that was once heralded as one bringing great ideas from folks like Ken Robinson, Simon Sinek, Brené Brown, and folks like that, and causing you to think differently about everything no matter where you were, started to feel like a politicized industry trade show, which nobody wants to go to that. So that brings us to where we are today in 2025. The conference is moving from Vancouver to San Diego, its longtime home. Heck, the weather is great. If you're going to sell $12,000 tickets, might as well do it in a place that's beautiful like that and set up for great conventions. But what's changed with the whole thing is TED used to be this place that could change people's minds. And wherever you were, industry or out of it, politics or apolitical. Like it was a place to be better about yourself and things like Sir Ken Robinson, all that kind of stuff. Like terrific. But today it's basically a brand that's a shadow of its former self. There's the obvious mistakes here, you know, wading into the culture war, getting, you know, basically so much into the money that you forget things. But I think they fundamentally forgot this insight that great ideas are rare and there is so much value in taking great ideas and curating those for the masses. And somewhere along the way, TED lost that idea and with it ended up destroying their whole brand. And today, like, I don't know anybody that's really high-powered that puts the idea of being a TED speaker as a badge of honor on their LinkedIn profile or their resume anymore. And 10, 15 years ago, that was a different story. And in today's world where the internet and everything is just filled with so much slop that you don't know what's valuable, there's so much money to be made in making sure people can trust you and provide really high-quality content. Day after day. All right, let me know what you think about Ted in the comments below, uh, and if you enjoyed this video, let me know. The feel-good messages encourage me to make more of these, and we'll catch you next time. See ya. Oh, and if you enjoyed this video about the danger of diluting your brand, check out this one I did on Subway. It's fascinating. See ya.
