When I was 18, I spoke at the flagship TED11 conference in Monterey in 2001. I argued for the human exploration of Mars, a talk which in retrospect wasn't anything special other than for the relative youth of the person delivering it.

TED was practically unknown back then because the founder wasn't interested in publicising it widely and because we didn't have good streaming video yet. As a result, my uni was extremely unimpressed by me taking time off to visit it (but there's a TEDxCambridgeUniversity now). It also meant there was less incentive to play to the crowd, so while there were still some "inspiresting" talks like mine, you'd also see Matt Groening show off a preview of the Futurama pilot and complain about the laughable notes he received from Fox executives.

But that didn't mean there was no incentive. I arrived a day early and didn't have anything to do, so I wandered to the lobby and saw Sergey Brin and Larry Page. We went out to get a sandwich with a couple of other people and talked about games and tech and shit. When we walked back we saw Jeff Bezos in a Subway. And if I recall correctly, my talk was after a Nobel prizewinner and before Herbie Hancock. The point is that with such an influential audience, it almost seems wasteful not to hype up your shit in the hopes of getting investment or making connections or whatever.

I was too young to realise this. If I had, I should've just begged the Googlers for a job and rode that rocket to the moon. But what I did get out of the experience was something far more valuable: the realisation that even the richest and most famous people are just people. And events like TED? They're fun in a way. I wish everyone had the chance to see what it's like. But there's no point in organising your life around trying to get in, as many seem to do. It's just not worth it compared to the other things you can do with your life. Even doing a successful TED talk is inferior to making a successful career or building a worthy app or writing an important book.

I barely remember any of the talks at the conference. Maybe that's because I was knocked out by a deadly combination of jet lag and my first and only ever migraine, but frankly, they just weren't that impactful. What's had a more lasting effect on my life was the thing that got me to the conference in the first place: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and his later books, which converted me to socialism. Of course, there weren't any 18 min talks arguing for socialism at TED11.