I enjoy watching/listening to TED talks sometimes. Sometimes, they’re just engaging, or summarize someone’s research project in an interesting way, or provide someone’s personal insight into something I’m into. For example, there are so, so many mindfulness / acceptance TED talks and they all say the same thing!
However, I also remember quite a few years ago, reading a description of someone (probably a WIRED writer) who went to a TED conference (probably one of the earlier ones.)
I think ‘conference’ is important to put in scare quotes, because of two things. 1) the audience was largely invited and, possibly even if invited, had to pay a (trade conference large) significant fee to go, 2) there was a ‘vendor section’ which was full of breathless stuff that would get marketed to silicon valley tech influencer types. The general takeaway was that ‘you and i’ likely wouldn’t have been able to go (similar to how it would be hard to go to E3 or NAMM or something as a random person), and we weren’t the sort of people that were intended to go. You can kind of tell this during some TED talks when the presenters joke with/about the audience and their demographics.
As for standards, I recall TED has some, and TEDx is regionally organized (like a franchise) and basically takes whomever signs up.
