Does TED Still Make Sense?

The TED2025 conference was held in Vancouver , Canada , last week .

It's run by a non-profit organisation that’s studiously apolitical, and so Donald Trump's name remained conspicuously absent from speeches and official materials.

TED 's overarching conference themes tend toward the abstract and grandiose, but speakers are expected to bring the discussion down to manageable intellectual scale.

Deja Foxx overcame teen homelessness to become a “trailblazing activist and content creator” Jackie Lebo is a multi-hyphenate creative” from Kenya .

Avni Patel Thompson has created no fewer than three startups that use AI to “make modern parenthood easier” The overall flatness of tone didn’t help: TED ’s ambitious self-conception.

The TED Loop was the brainchild of Life Calling , a US -based non-profit that "envisions a world of profound human connection" The Loop also featured a “creative collective lounge,” where attendees were asked to mark up a large block model of the word Inspire with “a message for a stranger” This kind of spa-poster language surrounds you in TED-world, making it sometimes feel as if you're at an intellectually upscale self-help retreat.