PopTech Videos: PopCasts

Practicing “identity correction” – the Yes Men target large corporations that put profits ahead of everything else. Getting inside the system, and impersonating business leaders, they smuggle stories out to the world to expose big business wrong-doing.

Having spent two years living in squatter communities across four continents, urban ethnographer Robert Neuwirth finds people living lives of complexity, challenge, and surprising resiliency.

Writer Suketu Mehta glimpses our possible urban future through the lens of the vastly contrasting lifestyles in Mumbai, the biggest, fastest, richest city in India, and with a population of 21 million, larger and more crowded than many nation states.

Join polar scientist John Priscu – and his autonomous robots – as he takes us miles below the Antarctic ice to search for living organisms that may have been cut off from the rest of the planet’s ecosystem for millions of years.

Four years ago, Frank Warren walked the streets of DC at night, handing out self-addressed postcards to strangers, soliciting their secrets. Watch as the creator of the wildly popular blog PostSecret reveals some of the hundreds of thousands of secrets shared by people from around the world in those four years…including a few of his own.

Come along as the brilliantly acerbic David Rakoff takes the PopTech audience on a hilarious journey through our nation’s quest for culinary perfection and other cultural excesses.

K. David Harrison discusses how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. Watch as he details efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide.

Ecologist, author and lifelong fisherman Carl Safina is fighting to wake people up to the fact that fish are going the way of the buffalo. In this eye-opening Pop!Cast, Safina paints a grim portrait of the impact we’re having on the Earth’s oceans and what we need to do to turn the tide.

Filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson went to Rwanda with a chilling question: is it possible to forgive the person who killed your family? Hear the stories of reconciliation she found while making “As We Forgive,” which documents how confessed murderers and genocide survivors are partnering to rebuild Rwanda.

After spending years in Africa fighting AIDS, TB and cholera with the W.H.O., Gary Slutkin returned to Chicago and had an epiphany: the violence plaguing his hometown exhibited all the signs of an infectious disease. Learn how he’s applied epidemiological principles to reduce shootings and violent crime in inner-city Chicago neighborhoods by as much as 75% through the CeaseFire approach.

2008 PopTech Fellow Eric Dawson launched Peace First to address sky-rocketing youth homicide rates. Peace First has already reached 40,000 children and families in five states, and is changing school cultures – teaching students the conflict resolution and peacemaking skills critical to create a safe learning environment.

Suzanne Seggerman is Co-founder and former President of Games for Change, a non-profit which seeks to harness the power of video games to address issues that include poverty, education, human rights, global conflict and climate change. Suzanne was previously a Director at NYC-based think tank, Web Lab.

2008 PopTech Fellows Chip Ransler and Manoj Sinha are key principals behind Husk Power Systems (HPS), a for-profit company that’s created a proprietary technology to cost-effectively convert rice husks into electricity. HPS delivers electricity – and dramatically improved lives – to India’s “Rice Belt.”

2008 PopTech Fellow Abby Falik is the founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year (GCY), which aims to institutionalize a global service “gap year” for young Americans between high school and college – fundamentally transforming how they understand and act on their responsibilities as global citizens.

2008 PopTech Fellow Erik Hersman is an innovator and technologist advancing the use of technology as an empowerment tool in the developing world. He is a co-founder of Ushahidi – a free, open source, Web / mobile-based platform capable of crowd-sourcing, sharing and mapping crisis information in near real time.