Enlarge / Chris Anderson (left) doing drone stuff. (credit: Chris Anderson & 3D Robotics / WikiMedia Commons)
This week, we’re serializing another episode of the After On Podcast here on Ars. Our guest was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine for twelve years—until he did something quite unusual for an editor and started a high-profile, venture-backed startup. Specifically, 3D Robotics—which played a genuinely historic role in the rise of consumer drones (if a phenomenon that young gets to have historic players).
Chris Anderson doesn’t have the background you might expect from someone with his résumé. For one thing, he dropped or failed out of multiple schools when he was young. For another, he played bass for R.E.M. (and there’s something of a twist to this fact—but you’ll need to hear to our conversation to find out what it is). We’ll be running this interview in three installments this week. You can access today’s installment via our embedded audio player, or by reading the accompanying transcript (both of which are below).
Today, Anderson and I open by talking about his path from being a bohemian layabout to studying computational Physics at Berkeley, and finally to the pinnacle of the magazine world. We then discuss how a weekend LEGO Mindstorm project with his kids led him cobble together a very early consumer-class drone. Doing this led him to discover the emerging realm of homebrew drone makers. Their online community fascinated him, and he soon became a leader within it.
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