Whether you have seen the fas­ci­nat­ing and often mind expand­ing videos posted online, or have been lucky enough to go in per­son, you prob­a­bly know about TED.  If you are like me (incred­i­bly inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy but not really will­ing to spend thou­sands of dol­lars to go to a con­fer­ence), check out TED’s cooler-yet-nerdier lit­tle brother BIL on the Queen Mary March 2-4th in Long Beach, CA.

BILder’s (as we like to call them) come from all around the world to share ideas, give talks, per­form live music, teach classes, net­work, brain­storm ways to fix the world…whatever! That’s the beauty of BIL, what it is and what it will become is com­pletely up to the BILders them­selves — theres no con­crete agenda.  It is what you make it.

It’s kind of like this

Last year was my first BIL expe­ri­ence, and I can hon­estly say it set the tone for the rest of my year in the most pos­i­tive way pos­si­ble.  I met BIL co-founders Simone Syed and Reichart Von Wolf­sheild when I hosted the after-party for the Los Ange­les pre­miere of Tran­scen­dent Man — Ray Kurzweil’s fea­ture doc­u­men­tary about the Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity. I was demo­ing Ancient Lasers tracks for the sin­gu­lar­ity folks that night and they asked me if I wanted to play at BIL.

Once there I met some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple I have ever been graced to know.  I spend alot of time around peo­ple that don’t really share the same inter­ests as me in my daily life, so it was so refresh­ing to hear phrases like “machine learn­ing”, “brain hack­ing”, and “nanobot foglets” being thrown around in casual con­ver­sa­tion. I got to meet Burn­ing Man guru John Hal­cyon, Life exten­sion author Aubrey De Grey, lifestyle blog­ger extra­or­di­naire Judd Weiss, the folks from the Sin­gu­lar­ity Uni­ver­sity…The list goes on.

Aubrey de Grey Speak­ing at BIL 2011

After BIL, we all kept in touch and I per­son­ally know more than a cou­ple new star­tups and other projects that were born from the con­fer­ence and the con­nec­tions it facil­i­tated.  Its incred­i­ble to think about how much has hap­pened since last year and how many new friends I made.

This year Ancient Lasers is per­form­ing with spe­cial guest Max Luga­vere from Cur­rent TV Sat­ur­day, March 3rd at 8pm.  Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Bev­erly Hills, life exten­sion­ist author Aubrey de Grey, CEO of Vir­gin Galac­tic George White­sides, XCOR co-founder Doug Jones, and many many more.

BIL 2012

I highly rec­om­mend com­ing to check it out, I promise you wont leave empty-headed.