Name: The rise and fall of TED
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T22:31:35.000Z
Duration: 13 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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.

And for an entire generation, getting to speak at TED was basically like the Nobel Prize for forward thinking.

Yet today, TED pumps out even more content than it ever has.

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.

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.

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 Vandelbrot.

And if you were Alive in the 80s, you remember this guy because they talked to us 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 it was a financial disaster and Wisman would spend six 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.

Mormon 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

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 right or wrong, he had stumbled on the perfect formula.

Invite the most interesting people on earth and 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?

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.

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 Walt Ted stood for.

Wurman ruled with an iron fist until he started to get a bit older.

And at age 65 in 2000, he needed a successor.

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 Wurman 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.

He had tried to get them on mainstream media.

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 one of those was that famous one from Sir Ken Robinson talking about how schools stifle creativity.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 something 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.

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.