“There are a lot of people that actually want to learn about things when they go out at night,” says Amanda Simson, co-founder of the free, New York based lecture series FRED.  Inspired by the trend of creative, quirky lectures popularized by TED, Amanda, Matt Keesan and Tara Cronin decided that what was missing were talks that were free (tickets to TED talks can run into the thousands, though videos are free online) and also more community-based.  So FRED was born, dubbed “Ted talks with your friends,” and have featured topics as diverse as the physics of magic and why bad writing happens to good people.  As I learned when I attended a FRED talk last spring, people want to do more on a Saturday night than drink beer and eat pizza, they want to do it while being inspired.

I was buzzed in to the unassuming building that hosts many of the Brooklyn-based FREDS, a bed and breakfast started by my former classmate Catherine Lacey Booth and her roommates called 3 Bed and Breakfast or 3B&B.  3B&B is so named because it offers only three rooms.  The co-op directors live next door and offered to host FRED in their capacious living room. As I passed by the pile of soggy snowboots in the doorway I was surprised that so many people had made the trek to a talk on, for one, the history of children’s clothing, in the midst of yet another New York blizzard.  I shuffled in quietly, accepting a beer from Lacey and finding a spot near the back.

The crowd don 3D glasses for a presentation. Photograph courtesy of FRED Talks.

What struck me immediately was the sense of rapt attention.  Unlike a bar, there aren’t neon signs and screaming co-eds jockying for your attention (only the occasional soft buzz as another latecomer straggled up the stairs).  We piled onto couches or sat cross-legged on the floor.  There were about 50 people in the room, which was fast becoming humid as our clothes began to dry. The presentations were part performance, part lecture and part casual discussion, presenters often stopped to ask a friend to corroborate a story or help read aloud from their power-point presentation.

This seemingly casual atmosphere might mask what is really going on here—a subtle but powerful evolution in learning.  FRED democratizes expertise, an assumption of wisdom that has long been a cornerstone of traditional academic education. While many of us met in graduate-school programs, some of us were also pretty fed up with the academe’s top-down structure, and the idea that learning was passive, or that wisdom was automatically conferred along with a degree. Here, the people we knew and admired had a chance to get up and talk about whatever interested them most.  The FRED talks mimic the way we learn in our natural environments: through collaboration and about topics that genuinely obsess us.

In fact, FRED is not so much creating a new tradition in education as reviving a traditionally American way of learning. Community-sponsored talks like FRED and TED started in 19th-century America, as a way for people in rural areas to gain an education.  The Naropa system established meeting houses across the United States, and booked traveling speakers like Victoria Woodhull (the first American woman to run for president) to lecture there.  These lectures were hugely popular, featuring speakers who were passionately engaged with the academic issues of their day but who did not necessarily have degrees. The Naropa program later help create the foundation for the first public education system in America.

These casual lectureships, run by passionate amateurs, are no longer the norm in education.  But the popularity of community-oriented talks like TED and now FRED show a growing desire to capitalize on the resources within our own circles of friends and family. When I gave Amanda a call to see how FRED was progressing, I discovered that the series has grown more popular and people are even starting to create their own spinoff FREDs.

FRED Founders: Amanda, Matt and Tara. Photograph courtesy of FRED Talks.

MYOO: Amanda, how did FRED get started?

Amanda: Well, it’s been something that a friend of mine, Jonathan Levine, and I talked about doing for years, we were in graduate school at the time. We had gone to this event called the Secret Science Club and they were really crowded, there were a few times we actually couldn’t get in, one of the talks was given by a Nobel Prize speaker. We thought that our friends, who were all graduate students, could do probably just as good of a job speaking on their favorite topics as the professors, partly because we would probably take it more seriously.

Then the financial crisis happened, and my friend Alyssa who has a PhD in computer science and works in the finance industry was explaining everything that was going on with the financial crisis to me one night at a bar, and at that point I thought, “I wish I could have all of my friends sitting here listening to you right now, because nobody understands what’s going on, and this would be so great – so valuable.”

Originally we were going to host them at a bar, like my original talk with Alyssa, but then Matt and Tara pushed me to do it and they also had offered to host them at their apartments. It would never have happened without them. Now we rotate between apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

MYOO: Could you explain how FRED works?

Amanda: It’s people getting up and talking about things they’re interested in for twenty minutes, and then fifteen minutes of question and answer. We’ve also had a a few that are discussions – coordinated discussions. Actually we spend much more time standing around talking about the presentations, drinking beer and eating pizza.

I ask my friends and my friends of friends if there’s anything they want to talk about, and for some reason a lot of people want to do this; they actually want to present something. Frequently it’s something they’re already working on, but I’d say about half the time it’s just something they’re interested in and want a reason to talk about.

For example, my friend Scott who was an engineer really got into the founding fathers; he started reading a ton of books about it and he just wanted to talk about it. It was the kind of thing he would always bring up when we were out in social situations. So it was perfect – this gave him  an opportunity to actually put some pieces together and get all his thoughts in order, and to have people listen to him.

MYOO: So it still keeps a bit of that original bar feel?

Amanda: [laughs] Yeah, it’s a little bit of a party feel, but the focus is definitely the talk. My perfect vision of it is that when we take a break for pizza and beer people are actually talking about the presentations and they’re excited and they have ideas about them.

MYOO: So I was going to ask what you think were the most popular ones, but actually what do you think were the most successful ones in terms of that perfect vision you were describing?

Amanda: It’s not necessarily the best presentations that create the most discussion. A stand-out one was the panel we had on Occupy Wall Street where we had a bunch of people from OWS answer questions, and that was like a seven minute presentation just followed by the panel discussion. Usually the Q&A is about 15 minutes or so, but I didn’t actually cut this one off until it had been maybe 90 minutes – maybe two hours.

MYOO: Oh my gosh.

Amanda: Yeah, it went really, really late. So that was really good. Also, one of my favorites was one on magic that we had recently. Alex, a physicist, talked about some of the math behind the magic and did some incredible tricks.

Click here for Fred Talk: The Physics of Magic

MYOO: So it sounds like people approach these topics from unique angles.

Amanda: Definitely. I’d say that almost every single presentation somebody has their own view or twist that they’re adding to the story.

MYOO: Do you have any kind of manifesto for FRED?

Amanda: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean we’ve never sat down and explicitly said what our mission statement is. There are definitely a few things we’ve decided we will always do, and one is to keep them free, and another is to keep them small and community-oriented; so I’ve had a lot of people who wanted it to have it move to bigger spaces and have it basically have it become a talk similar to Nerd Night or some of the other big ones.  But the unique thing about FRED is that it’s really about your friends and your friends of friends.

We have talked to other people about doing their own FRED. So that’s then the next step – we actually had a set of talks that happened in Portugal this last month. A girl who’s been coming to FRED here who’s from Portugal, she studies at NYU, decided she wanted to start one in Lisbon. So that’s called Zédos Talks, and if you go to their website it’ll say “this is what TED is, these are our friends in New York, FRED, and this is what they’re doing, and this is our version of FRED in Lisbon.” My parents have even been talking about doing one. So I feel like other FREDs can definitely happen. I mean we’re not going to control content or anything like that; it’s more like an idea people can use.

MYOO: So what should people do if they want to start their own FRED?

Amanda:  What we’ve been doing is posting videos after each talk on our website. We’ve decided that anybody can have their own FREDand then if they want they can send us the videos and we’ll post them too.

MYOO: It sounds like you’ve been getting some positive feedback about the talks, with people wanting to create their own talks. What kind of things have grown out of FRED, in terms of feedback you’ve gotten or people who have found those talks helpful for other things?

Amanda: People have found different uses for the talk. Some people are talking about their work, and they’re can use that as preparation for a presentation at a conference.

One guy I know, Mark, who did a talk on solar energy, did it for us right before he did it at a conference. And then like with Abby [Rabinowitz], the talk on why bad writing happens to good people, it was just something she wanted to talk about, but then went on to do more talks on this after FRED. For Alex, the magician, he’s publishing a book on magic and he’s using parts of the video for promotions.

There’s a lot of things going on in New York that are similar, in that they’re lecture series like Nerd Night and Secret Science Club and there’s a science series at Cornelia Cafe and I think there’s a social science series here on the Upper West Side, cafe science, cafe art. But I don’t know with those there’s as much of an emphasis on discussion and creative community around. I think it’s much more like, you know, bring an expert to talk about interesting things and people can show up at a bar and listen. But I think there’s a lot of that going on. There are a lot of people that actually want to learn about things when they go out at night.

Click here for Fred Talk: Understanding the Universe Through Cryptozoology

View more videos over on the FRED Talks YouTube Channel.

—Tana Wojczuk is a culture critic and an editor at MYOO, follow her @tanawojczuk and read more of her work at tanawojczuk.com.