It takes a lot to start an ideas festival like the TED Conference in spring 2024 with a panel discussion between a Palestinian and an Israeli negotiator. Not only that the expectations at this annual summit of the notoriously curious and believers in the future are completely different. The standard format of the conference is the quarter-hour long “TED Talks”, dense lectures that then have a second life as viral videos on the Internet. The roots of the conference lie – as the abbreviation TED for Technology Entertainment and Design reveals – in this typically American West Coast mix, somewhere between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.