Carmel’s Sunset Center was the latest venue for the iconic meeting of minds.

While the BBC and PBS came into town recently and whipped up a feeding frenzy of publicity and social media sharing for their Big Blue Live broadcast, another gathering of famously renowned people was in town, meeting less conspicuously.

Ideas worth spreading, Technology Entertainment Design, millions and millions of online talks… TED. The TED fellows came to Carmel.

The nonprofit hosted more than 200 TED fellows from 39 countries in a retreat of workshops, peer mentoring and networking at Asilomar Conference Grounds Aug. 26-30. They kept it low key to give the scientists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, musicians, activists, programmers, etc. – all of whom applied to get into the exclusive but growing club – time and space to propagate connections and projects without distraction.

The retreat, called Swimming Against the Tide and sporting a summer camp theme, also rounded them up last Thursday for a field trip to Sunset Center in Carmel for an exclusive all-day session of TED Talks that was more accessible.

The event sported a wry sense of humor thanks to fellows director and founder Tom Riley – dressed in a scouting uniform, maybe as a shout-out to the Boy Scouts of America finally ending their ban on gay leaders – who introduced the day’s 15 star presenters.

Those included Ethiopian-American singer, songwriter and producer Meklit Hadero, who spoke in a composed, confident clip about how the sounds around us are a spontaneous symphony – the traffic, office lights, wind, especially birds.

She talked about Hungarian scientist and musicologist Dr. Peter Szöke’s recordings The Unknown Music of Birds, about John Cage’s revolutionizing 4’ 33’silent concert performance, and about making lentils one day and the pot lid spinning around on the stove making a rhythm that she later turned into a song. Then she played the song.

“The natural world can be our cultural teacher,” she said. The audience cheered their gratitude.

For 20 years, Patricia Medici from Brazil has been working to conserve her country’s population of endangered tapirs, known as the “gardeners of the rainforest” for spreading seeds of fruit they eat. She chronicled a litany of enemies, the biggest of which are poaching, development, roads and deforestation. She ended with a sentiment that seemed maternalistic, and broader than her own calling: “This animal deserves to be cared for. They need me. They need us.”

Cameron Benson Hunter, 16, from England, was invited to the TED Talks as a guest. At the break, he took liberty with Medici’s idea.

“Tapirs are not the most endangered, and not the most important animal,” he said. “We have to work on the trees first. We need to rescue the forest first to rescue the tapirs.”

And that illustrates one of the obstacles that ideas must survive in order to be deemed worth spreading: contrary ideas.

There would be no discord, though, with Lee Mokobe, a slam poet and activist from South Africa who happens to be transgender. He powerfully recited verse about silence, careening over topics like his childhood mutism (“I let silence stage a sit-in in my mouth”) and finding his voice again like Maya Angelou (“We stumbled upon speech like refugees”).

At the lunch break, the fellows were given time to find like-minded fellows by peeping at each other’s badges, which listed their name, titles or vocations, country of origin and interests.

Among them were Joe Landolina, who started a biotech company in New York that makes a gel that stops traumatic bleeding in 10 seconds.

“We call it smart biomaterial,” he said. “It’s made from small pieces of algae. Like little Lego blocks.”

He said he founded his 32-person company, for which he’s looking for an 80,000-square-foot office space, five years ago as a student at New York University. He is 22 years old.

Dictionary editor Erin McKean, a TED fellow who also attended Carmel’s talk as a guest, gave her own TED talk in 2007, the last year the big TED conference happened in Monterey.

“I didn’t know enough to be nervous,” she said. “It changes your life.”

After the break, Chris Anderson, TED conference curator, expounded on how it changes not only the lives of TED fellows, but that of the world.

“Your goal is not to be charismatic or to entertain,” he told his newest fellows. “It’s to build ideas, piece by piece, in people’s minds, that can change the future. Ideas can’t be pushed into people’s minds. They have to be invited.”

This was training for how to shape ideas, find suitable soil and nutrients, plant them, cultivate and grow them, until they bear fruit in the real world.

“The reason you are a TED fellow,” Anderson continued, “is we thought you have an idea that, if they were widely known, the world would be a better place. What I really want to say is, ‘Thank you.’”

Big Blue Live, shot here on the Monterey Peninsula and its bay, will reverberate in the public consciousness. Count on the TED Talks in Carmel to also make an impact. One that’s less splashy, but every bit as consequential.

The Carmel TED fellows talks will become viewable in the coming days and weeks at www.TED.com