TED's Rise: A Money-Losing 1984 Debut, Free Videos and the TEDx Fallout

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TED, short for Technology, Entertainment, Design, began in 1984 when architect Richard Saul Wurman and broadcast designer Harry Marks staged a conference in Monterey, California. The lineup included early demos of the compact disc and the Apple Macintosh and a talk by Benoit Mandelbrot on fractals, yet the event lost money, and it took six years to attempt TED2 in 1990. In 2001 Chris Anderson's nonprofit Sapling Foundation bought TED for six million pounds, and in 2006 June Cohen, after television networks rejected a TED show, put a handful of talks online for free.

By January 2007, 44 talks had passed 3 million views, and by 2011 combined views topped 500 million. The episode explains why free videos raised the value of a $6,000 ticket and how a Creative Commons no-derivatives license kept control of the brand. TEDx, founded by Lara Stein, reached five events a day in 133 countries by 2012, with unpaid speakers, along with TED-Ed, the TED Prize and the TED Radio Hour with NPR. The later half covers the criticism: Sarah Lacy on elitism, flagged TEDx talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, the Nick Hanauer tax talk, and Nassim Taleb and Benjamin Bratton on the format itself.

• Writers on the TV show Elementary could not use the TED name and invented a parody spelled D-U-G instead.
• Graham Hancock's TEDx talk promoted DMT as a way to contact supernatural beings, and TED moved it to a blog with cautionary framing.
• Chris Anderson told Nick Hanauer in 2012 that his talk on taxing the rich was too partisan, while a Forbes writer challenged the data it used.
• Nassim Taleb called TED a monstrosity that turns scientists into circus performers.
• Benjamin Bratton of UC San Diego argued that 18-minute talks create an illusion of progress; Anderson answered that a talk is meant to be the spark.