Before Chris Anderson bought it in 2001, the TED conference was like a hip indie band only the in-crowd knew about. It was cool, small, had incredible buzz, and always sold out its small-ish venue. An unabashedly for-profit jam, TED had never posted a video online (it was too early for that), and happened once a year in Monterrey, California.

What a difference a decade and a half makes. TED videos are now viewed 2.5 billion times per year, and volunteer-organized TEDx events – many of them far larger than the main conference – take place somewhere on our planet ten times a day. And TED no longer funnels earnings to an owner, but pours every dime earned by its cash cow of a main conference into spreading ideas, free of charge, to anyone and everyone on Earth.

Chris has strategized, managed, and overseen TED’s extreme makeover. We discuss it, Chris’s remarkable personal story, how evolution wired humans to transmit ideas via charismatic oratory, and much more in this week’s edition of the After On podcast. You can hear it by searching “After On” in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:

Links to interviews with other thinkers, founders, and scientists can be found here, with topics including Fermi’s Paradox, quantum computing, drones, the dangers of superintelligence, synthetic biology, consciousness & neuroscience, augmented reality, and more.

Though I’ve known Chris for decades and have spent hundreds of hours in conversation with him, I learned quite a bit from this interview. Read the rest

This'll save you a lot time going forward. Read the rest

"Now that doesn't sound important, and it's not, but if I repeat it three times I'm making you believe that is important."

"Let's look at a picture of the planet for no reason. It's nice isn't it. That's where we live. What happens if I put some words over it? How about a number? What if I pose a question? By doing this, I've now made you think that I know what I'm talking about."

(via DIGG) Read the rest

In this 20 minute video, Princeton computer science prof Andrew Appel lays out the problems with Internet-based voting in crisp, nontechnical language that anyone can understand. Read the rest

Piketty's bestselling economics book is seismic, a vital infusion of data into the ideological debate over economics -- but it's also 700 pages long. Read the rest

Alan writes, "Why privacy matters' is Glenn Greenwald's talk to TED in which he makes the argument that we are not obligated to make ourselves harmless; rather, we need to be able to express ourselves unwatched." Read the rest

I gave a talk last month in Cambridge at the Tedxoxbridge event called How to break the Internet, about how urgent it is that the Internet is fundamentally broken, and why we should be hopeful that we can fix it. Read the rest

Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, explains what's wrong with TED—at a TEDx event in San Diego. "My talk is about TED: what it is, and why it doesn't work." [via Gawker] Read the rest

Some TED talks give me the feeling of a stoned college conversation. Seems that CollegeHumor agrees. Please enjoy "High TED Talks." Read the rest

Larry Lessig presented at TED his new project, an effort to curb the corrupting influence of money in American politics with a reform to campaign finance.

The Harvard Business Review has an interesting look at what has happened as TED Talks has expanded to ever-wider audiences and (in doing so) has lost control of its own brand. It's also an excellent object lesson in why slapping the TED logo on something doesn't make it true. Read the rest

Here's Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group (whence the kids' programming language Scratch comes) doing a TedX talk about the role of programming in education.

'Virtual Magician' Marco Tempest blows it out of the water with this augmented card routine recently posted at TED.

Here's an absolutely inspiring TED Talk showing how "self-organized computer science courses" designed around students building their own PCs from scratch engaged students and taught them how computers work at a fundamental level.

The New Yorker's Nathan Heller looks at five of the most popular TED Talks of all time and uses them to explain why, exactly, this series of public lectures is so much more popular than all other public lecture series. Read the rest

Massimo Banzi is the co-creator of the popular electronics prototyping system called Arduino. He spoke at TEDGlobal 2012 about the cool things people are making with Arduino.

Massimo Banzi helped invent the Arduino, a tiny, easy-to-use open-source microcontroller that's inspired thousands of people around the world to make the coolest things they can imagine -- from toys to satellite gear. Because, as he says, "You don't need anyone's permission to make something great."

Massimo Banzi co-founded Arduino, which makes affordable open-source microcontrollers for interactive projects, from art installations to an automatic plant waterer.

Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination at TEDGlobal 2012 Read the rest

Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who defends poor African-American people caught in the US justice system. In this incredible, moving, inspiring TED talk, he discusses the way that race and injustice are entwined in the US legal system:

In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice

(Thanks, @gnat!) Read the rest