TED Talks: What's the big idea?

Lectures by prominent thinkers and interesting mavericks under the TED banner are now a global phenomenon. But what goes on behind the scenes? John Walsh joins the brainy roadshow

http://s1/bmiddle/4aea7dd5gb1f07bd8e570&690Talks: What's the big idea?" TITLE="TED Talks: What's the big idea?" />

Cloistered away from the boiling inferno of Marrakech's medina quarter, in a hotel barely a scorpion's scuttle from the fire-eaters and snake-charmers of the Jemaa el-Fna square, Ralph J Wilms of Zurich Business School is standing on stage pretending to be a microbe. He holds a bottle of disinfectant over his grizzled head, squeezes the lever and recoils from the chemical mist as though in mortal, or microbial, pain. The audience watches with a mix of amusement and admiration: they enjoy a speaker who salts his insights with special effects.

The purpose of Ralph's talk is to explain that we have bombarded our systems for too many years with pesticides, and are now obliged to take nutrients and vitamin supplements to balance what we've lost. He wants to convince us of the importance of micro-organisms, using every rhetorical weapon at his disposal. "Only 10 per cent of a body's cells are human!" he cries. "All the rest are microbes! What's sitting before me in this is room is a bunch of microbes!"

Ralph is an ideal choice to give one of the TEDTalks, as they're known worldwide. He's a German social science graduate drenched in Shaolin Buddhism. He teaches the practical application of eastern philosophy to commerce. It's because of him that hard-nosed Euro-capitalists go on courses entitled "The Power of Mind" and "The Evolution of Consciousness". Ralph is a living emblem of connectedness in an intellectual milieu that holds connection to be the key virtue of the 21st century. Bringing together East and West, arts and science, body and spirit, history and the future are central to the TED philosophy. The audience takes it very seriously, even Ralph's odder pronouncements ("One of my friends, who is an Eskimo shaman, says microbes are the grit in the soul...")

I'm at TEDx Marrakech, a symposium of inspirational talks, an international exchange of cultural and scientific ideas, a kind of festival of positive thinking. In the course of one day in Marrakech, 12 speakers will have 18 minutes each to give "the talk of their lives". The talks will be filmed and posted online, and some will be watched by five or six million people worldwide.

TED started life in 1984 in Monterey, California, as a single conference exploring new ideas in Technology, Entertainment and Design (note the initials). It spawned annual conferences in Long Beach and Palm Springs, went transatlantic with TEDGlobal in Edinburgh and became a non-profit-making world enterprise. Like-minded groups of environmental or technological thinkers could organise talks under the TEDx name, provided they observed certain rules: You can't use a talk as a promotional vehicle for your products. You mustn't charge audience members more than $70. Talks mustn't be longer than 18 minutes, because people can't concentrate beyond that. And you're required to show three films from the TED library. Suddenly, everyone was doing it: talks on astrophysics and ants, zoo management and Zen, monotheism and Muslim stand-up comedy. The 18-minute talk became as hot as the three-minute single. Check out TED.com and you'll find 900 recorded talks, from Des Moines to Durban: a free world library of "Ideas Worth Spreading".

Delegates arrive at the Riad el-Fenn hotel on a Friday afternoon. A score of them bond over lamb chops. Here's Phil and Anna, a British brand-and-marketing tycoon couple; they're big fans of the Grateful Dead, whose leader, Jerry Garcia, died 16 years ago. Here is Tim Morris, Her Majesty's Ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco, 6ft 5ins of imperturbable calm and polite interest (though he'll tell you, off the record, how the professional diplomat gets rid of drinks-reception bores). Here's a 30ish German hotelier who's ridden his Harley down from Spain by way of Rabat. Here's a Californian entertainment lawyer urgently telling a blonde woman he's just met about his personal life.

And here is Vanessa Branson, owner of the Riad el-Fenn, and co-host of the weekend talk-a-thon with Bernd Kolb, a former "software architect" at Deutsche Telekom, and his wife Andrea. Recently returned from the conflagration at her brother Richard's dream home on Necker Island, Ms Branson is hosting and feeding the delegates, while the Kolbs underwrite the cost of the technology and flying in the speakers. Why was she doing it? "Though I'm not a creative person myself, I enjoy creating a forum in which other people can be creative," she says.

The theme chosen by the organisers is "The West-Eastern Divan" – the title of a work by Goethe, inspired by a Persian poet. It hurls the speakers into a wave of metaphorical connections between oriental and occidental. Radha Moali, a French-Algerian who gave up a career in market finance to deal in "responsible tourism", talks about his project of "dialectical miscegenation", translating classical Arab texts into European languages and vice-versa, in the hope of forging hitherto-impossible understanding.

A German composer Uve Mullrich showed footage of his Fata Morgana being played by Western orchestras, Indian dancers, Chilean Pan pipers, Moroccan bouzoukists – music as the lingua franca of East and West.

Elisabeth Sahtouris, an evolutionary biologist from New York and a member of the impressive-sounding World Wisdom Council, imagines the universe as a keyboard with matter in the bass notes (the West) and spirituality in the treble ones (the East) with North Africa handily located in the middle. She calls for "a new cosmology" in which the world proceeds by cooperation rather than by competition and draws loud cheers.

Other speakers ignore the main theme, to bring news from elsewhere. Heather Cameron, a Canadian-born, fast-talking Berlin University professor explains why she'd founded Boxgirls International, empowering young girls from Nairobi to South Africa by teaching them self-defence, and "self-actualisation". Thiemo Gropp from Pforzheim, co-founder of the Desertec Foundation, explains how the desert can harness enough solar energy to supply a city's needs for a year; everyone could help, he says, build the world's first global power plant. But he never explains how you get the stored energy from (say) the Sahara to (say) the Horn of Africa.

During a coffee break, in the Riad's cool leafy piazza, speakers and delegates chat urgently and, as if in some nervous reaction to the prevailing seriousness, levity breaks out. "I simply must get myself an Eskimo shaman," said a banker from London. "Did you notice," said the blonde from lunch, "that every single country the composer took his music to was a major drug centre?" We laugh before going back in and soberly re-taking our seats.

The TEDx logo on screen is a pressure cooker, with a valve for letting off steam.

Jon Ronson, the Welsh author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, sidles on stage in the furtive, round-shouldered manner of Peter Falk in Columbo and delivers a brilliant talk on how to spot a psychopath. "There are 100 people in this room. One person in 100 is a psycho. That means there's one psycho in this room. Or more. Psychopaths love going to talks about psychopaths." He has a checklist of ways to spot a nutter – and most of the criteria apply, Ronson pointed out, to CEOs of US companies: "Capitalism at its most ferocious is a pure expression of psychopathy."

Sir David Chipperfield, awarded this year's RIBA Gold Medal, asks "Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?" and decides it was because "architecture seems to be something that happens to us".

In the day's strongest performance Clive Stafford Smith, the Cambridge-born human rights lawyer and legal director of Reprieve, delivers a spittle-flecked rant about "The Injustice System" as he's found it in the US.

Out of 170 men on Death Row in New Orleans, he's found 70 per cent have been wrongly arrested. The "Crimestoppers" cash-for-tipoffs system is regularly abused by cops ringing in, claiming someone was a villain, then arresting them and pocketing the money. The audience gasps. "How many of you are against the death penalty?" he asks. Every single hand goes up. "You realise you wouldn't be allowed on a jury in the States," he grates, "you Commie pinko liberals."

Then the actress and singer Jana Pallaske appears. She stands by the lectern and says... nothing. And then nothing. And still nothing. Her face shines (with nerves? perspiration? moisturiser?) and the audience watches her, intrigued. Finally she speaks. "Why," she asks, in a shaky voice, "are we so scared... to be human beings? Something in me said yes to come here and share, but why... [dramatic pause]... am I so scared... to be me?"

Whereupon she marches off down the aisle and returns with a hula-hoop while the intro to Led Zeppelin's "Over the Hills and Far Away" fills the speakers. With the eyes of the TED-watching world on her, Ms Pallaske danced ecstatically while her hoop twirled around her body, and neck, across her torso, around her waist and hips, then up to her neck again.

It was the rare sighting of an authentic hippie chick, circa 1971. "I didn't do that to impress anybody," she explains. "Just to drive away that fear." Some of the audience silently reply: it's not fear we're feeling, love, just a need for lunch.

It is, I think, a very TED moment, bringing some New Age mysticism to the urgent discussions of climate change and survivability. Not everyone approves of Jana's breathy nonsense, nor of Ralph Wilms's microbe obsession, nor Jon Ronson's psychopathic fun. But it is wonderful to experience the crazed variety of subject and treatment you get when you ask thinkers from all over Europe and Africa to talk about their world in 18 minutes.

By the time Pinky Lilani hits the stage at the end, we are exhausted by archipelagic thought, dialectical miscegenation and freedom from fear.

A Calcutta-born cookery specialist and entrepreneur, she organises awards for women and runs motivational courses in which senior managers cook meals together. Lilani is a miracle of directness: "In cooking, I've found that if anything goes wrong, a little coriander makes everything all right." It is a metaphor – that coriander is a herbal equivalent of kindness. "You've never had a perfect day," she says, "unless you've done something for someone that they can never repay."

So she makes us spicy Bombay potatoes right there up on the stage: onions, cumin, coriander, mustard seed, chilli powder, tomato, salt, sizzling away – an unrepayable kindness to a hungry audience.

Behold: the West-Eastern Divan. It isn't, perhaps, the most profound thing we have been offered all day; but it was certainly the most welcome.