Carole Cadwalladr reports from the coolest conference on Earth that attracts a vast web audience

It’s a confusing place, the world of TED. Not just because that for an event which prides itself on its cleverness, it has a name that makes it sound like some sort of football jock, but because, one minute you’re listening to a talk about how an artificial brain is just 10 years off completion and the next you’re thinking, oh look there’s Cameron Diaz. And then, in an unscheduled departure from the timetable, Gordon Brown walks on to the stage.

Even more confusingly, he receives not one standing ovation, but two! They cheer. They applaud. They, actually, whoop. But at TED, I discover, all things are possible – including a belief in an infinite number of parallel universes, in one of which Brown is the most popular man in Britain.

Truly, anything is possible in the universe known as TED. You might see flatscreen TV with no wires, no plug, nothing – one of the first public demonstrations of wireless electricity by Eric Giler. Or a British inventor, Michael Pritchard, turning sewage water into drinking water with a simple plastic bottle which he claims could save two-and-a-half million children’s lives a year. Or you could be queuing up to get into the talk on nuclear fusion (coming to a reactor near you by 2030, according to the British physicist Steven Cowley), and Meg Ryan will step on your toe.

Strange and very confusing, then. Because TED isn’t named after a US football jock, it actually stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, which was the meat of its business when it was set up, in California in 1984 – heady days which saw the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer. Now, however, it has a far wider, more implausible remit. It aims to bring together ideas that it hopes might just change the world. It’s the kind of rampant hubristic ambition which is all very well in the Golden State, but this is Britain. We do not whoop. We do not holler – although, just possibly, we’re starting to learn.

Because TED came to Oxford last week in its new form, TEDGlobal, an event that will be held annually and costs $4,500 (£2,700) just to attend; accommodation is extra. Even then you need to be invited, or put yourself through a rigorous application procedure, including an essay question, and a system of mysterious positive vetting all designed to ensure you are “curious, creative, playful and open-minded”.

Which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Or at least Freemasonish. Yet everybody who comes to TED loves TED. Apart from a lone British journalist, although even he admits on the last night that he might quite like it. Even a guerilla operation calling itself Bil – which complains that the “unwashed masses” are kept out through the exorbitant price, loves TED – so much so that it hosted its own fringe event, “an open, self-organising alternative to TED”.

Because what TED excels in is amazing ideas, brilliantly presented. And the selection process is all part of what has gone into making it into what has been called “the coolest conference on Earth” and “a Davos of the mind”, although it has also been called “a cultish talking shop” – by the Times, last week – a fact which exercises the man who calls himself its “curator”, Chris Anderson, and who at various points asks the audience if it’s cultish enough for us. It is, actually. Because you do have to be inducted into the TED way of doing things, which someone describes to me as “the conversion process” – all talks are exactly 18 minutes long and there are never any questions from the floor. And it’s all so intense – packed bursts of talks and ideas and strange synthy music from the likes of Imogen Heap for 10-12 hours most days. And that’s before the parties begin.

In 2005 I attended the TEDGlobal prototype which was fascinating but undeniably elitist. One year later, they put all the talks online and it has become a global phenomenon. More than 300,000 people a day watch a TED talk; a hundred million a year. Since February, the numbers have been doubling. Thousands now watch the entire conference on live-streaming. A brand new translation software has seen 150 volunteers translate 1,000 talks into 150 languages in just a couple of months. Ideas, it seems, are the new rock’n'roll. And TED is its Woodstock.

What it’s done, remarkably, is to turn nerdy, unknown academics into worldwide superstars. A Swedish professor of global health called Hans Rosling has become the Susan Boyle of the academic world. “How many people did he reach before?” asks Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED. “Maybe he had 150 students a year? Now he’s reaching millions. It’s transformed the nature and concept of what it is to be teacher.”

Anderson says it has taken them all by surprise. “We weren’t sure the intensity of the live experience would translate to a four-inch screen, but it just took off and we realised we shouldn’t be thinking of it as a conference any more. It was about ideas spreading. The real audience is online. It’s changed everything.”

In 2005, I listened to speaker after speaker talk about the Creative Commons and how if you open something up to the masses they perform amazing, unprecedented feats. And, in just four years, it is what has happened to TED.

Three months ago, it launched TEDx, self-organised TED events that use the talks as the basis for a live event, and now it’s taken off in 300 cities, from Antananarivo in Madagascar to Kuala Lumpur, and even, later this summer Sheffield, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds (tedxnorth.com). Anderson, an Englishman who made his fortune as a media entrepreneur, founding Future Publishing which at its peak owned 130 magazines and employed 1,500 people, says that he suspects it’s that “something is missing from the media diet. Beyond ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, and celebrity tittle-tattle, people want to learn new things.”

It’s true, it’s addictive learning new things at TED. There’s Garik Israelian, a spectroscopist who explains why he believes that we will find signs of extraterrestrial life within 10 years. Then there’s Rebecca Saxe’s remarkable talk on the RPTJ region of the brain which, if targeted with a magnetic pulse, can actually change people’s moral judgments.

“Don’t you have the Pentagon calling?” Anderson asks her.

“I do,” she replies. “I just don’t take their calls.”

Then there are the coffee breaks when you find yourself talking to someone such as Peter Vermeersch, a political science professor from Leuven in Belgium, who got 50 poets to rewrite the EU constitution in verse, Steve Truglia who is planning to parachute from outer space, or Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, or one of the TED Fellows, a group of extraordinary young people from around the world who are sponsored to attend including Frederick Balagadde from Uganda who has invented a micro-fluidic chip which could bring HIV diagnostics down from $65 to $10.

But actually, the celebrity tittle tattle’s not bad either. Jonathan from the BBC says he saw a woman walking down the street “and of course I’d have had absolutely no idea who she was except she was wearing a great big name tag on her chest which said: CAMERON DIAZ.”

It’s no wonder the celebs love it. They are the least interesting people in the audience. I completely fail to spot the fact that I’ve been sitting next to two supermodels (Petra Nemcova and Karolina Kurkova). And although there’s a frisson when Oxford physicist David Deutsch walks into the room, Meg Ryan can hang out in Costa Coffee completely unmolested. There’s probably nowhere else on Earth that’s quite as levelling as being a celeb at TED. Even in prison, Paris Hilton managed to upgrade to an executive cell; at TED, if you register late you’re going to be staying in a college room in Keble even if you’re the head of a charitable foundation and married to a multi-billionaire hedge-fund manager, as happened to one woman I chat to.

“I had to carry my suitcase up two flights of stairs!” she says. “I thought I was going to die!”

The competition among speakers is so high that even the British celebs with vaguely intellectual credentials don’t cut it at TED. Alain de Botton pulls it off, but Stephen Fry just hasn’t prepared. At TED it’s not just about what you say, but how you communicate it to the audience, and preparation is key.

“It’s too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation, and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach,” says Giussani. “It really puts pressure on them.”

And it works. Not just in the room, but out in the big wide world. The very first person I meet at TED, beaming like a very small child who has just been given a very large ice-cream, is a firefighter from Sacramento called David Dolson IV. He wants to set up an international burns camp sharing knowledge about best practice in burn treatment and has watched every single TED talk online.

“My buddy introduced me to them and you watch one and it’s a domino effect, you want to watch them all. And so I did. And it just really inspired me to want to do something, you know?”

I do know. Because it’s what everybody says all of the time. David paid more than $6,000 to come to TED out of his own pocket – “and we’re some of the lowest-paid firefighters in the country” – but he’s loving it. So is Maria Popova, a Bulgarian blogger, and a huge TED fan (“Really – they could cut off my left leg and I’d still love it”) who raised the money to come via her followers on Twitter in just six days.

James Purnell, who resigned from the cabinet last month turns up on a day-pass on Thursday. He says he has downloaded dozens of the talks on to his iPhone “and I’m probably even going to pay with my own money to come back next year”. An MP! Paying for something! It’s nothing short of a revolution.

Anderson is always saying that TED is about the exchange of ideas. Ideas Worth Sharing. And if Hollywood stars love TED, then TED returns the favour. The production values are impossibly high. Vast amounts are spent getting it right and the programming shows a Robert McKee-like grasp of plot, triumph over adversity being the Tedster’s favourite.

Elaine Morgan, now almost 90, gives a gripping account of her life-long quest to prove that her theory that humans are descended from an aquatic ape. She has been dismissed as a nutcase for years, but both David Attenborough and Daniel Dennett have recently come around. Most movingly of all, however, is Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier who was smuggled out of Sudan by a British aid worker, Emma McCune, and who is now a rapper. He sings a song called “What would I be if Emma McCune never rescued me?” and it’s impossibly emotional. Hardened CEOs break down and weep; a TED lunch half an hour later immediately votes to give him €10,000 (£8,600).

But then there’s a Dragon’s Den element to TED. The TED Prize, for starters, which awards $100,000 to three people every year to carry out “a wish”. And I’m chatting to Giussani, when Pritchard, the water purifying man, rushes up to him.

“Thank you so much, Bruno! There was me saying, no, I’ve never heard of TED, I haven’t got time, well, humble pie all over my face. It’s been absolutely amazing.”

He had no idea what TED was, he says, “and then I looked online and saw Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and thought, bloody hell. And I practised and I practised and I practised and now I’ve got major foundations coming up to me and saying they think it’s fantastic”.

When I speak to Elaine Morgan, she says in a cracked voice: “I’ve been struggling to get this idea across my entire life, and then to have this reaction! Well, it’s amazing.”

It is, and it’s life-changing not just for Emmanuel Jal, who might finally get the money for the school he wants to build in Sudan, but for those who watch it too. Even Carole Stone, the queen of networkers (“I have 40,000 people in my database”), tells me she has decided to change her life: “I’ve got to do something! I thought it was enough to put people together. But it’s not!”

Then there’s Andy Hobsbawm, who was my TED pal in 2005 and shared my delighted non-comprehension of a David Deutsch talk. I went home; he set up a non-profit foundation, Do The Green Thing. “I had a TED epiphany,” he says. “I just heard all these speakers talking about climate change and I thought what can I do?”

Jesus, Andy, I say. I’ve managed to go to the pub a couple of times. But that’s ideas for you. You never know where they might land. And at TED they’re gushing from the 50 speakers and the 700 audience members, and from there, out on to the internet, and off to everywhere else, landing where they land.

Most viewed

Among Ted’s “most favourite” talks:

Ted 2006: Sir Ken Robinson makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity and champions a radical rethink of our school systems.
www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Ted 2008: Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few would wish for: she had a massive stroke and watched as her brain functions – motion, speech, self-awareness – shut down one by one.
www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Ted 2006: A Swedish professor of global health, Hans Rosling, debunks myths about the “developing world”, a talk that culminates in him swallowing a sword.
www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

A brief history

TED is owned by a non-profit foundation and devoted to “ideas worth spreading”. It now includes science, culture and development. At its main conference in California, speakers have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. TedGlobal will be held annually in Oxford, and the talks posted online at ted.com.

What they said in Oxford

• “We’re going to build a realistic model of the human brain within the next 10 years … and if we build it right, it will speak.”

Henry Markram, director of the Centre of Neuroscience and Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland

• “Spectroscopy can change this world. In 15 to 20 years we will discover a spectrum like ours and an Earth-like planet.”

Garik Israelian, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

• “Batteries suck! 40 billion disposable batteries are being thrown away each year.”

Eric Giler, CEO WiTricity, who demonstrated a TV powered by wireless electricity.

• “Eighty per cent of the global trade in food is controlled by just five corporations.”

Carolyn Steel, architect and author of The Hungry City

• “Ipod liberalism” doesn’t exist. “There’s an assumption that if you give people enough connectivity and enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow. It doesn’t.”

Evgeny Morozov, fellow of the Open Society Institute, New York, originally from Belarus.

• “The World Health Organization estimates between 150 million and one billion people would see their lives change if they had glasses.”

Joshua Silver, professor of physics of Oxford University, and inventor of self-adjusting glasses that require no optometrist.

• “People say, ‘I like the theory but I think it’s wrong because everyone I talk to says it’s wrong and they can’t all be wrong.’ Well, yes they can!”

Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape

• “The next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don’t think they are greedy, think they are vulnerable and in need of love.”

Alain de Botton