TED Radio Hour

A trumpet is more or less a trumpet. A clarinet is a clarinet. But violin or a viola... they are different. More like living breathing things. Hand crafted from wood, from a tree. Every one is different. And, you know the story. Antonio Stradivari, was the master. Some say the greatest violin maker to ever live. The Stradivarius is one of the most powerful and expensive brands in the world. And certainly, the guy made really nice instruments. But how nice exactly...

If you thought Daft Punk was saying something about a Mexican monkey when they were actually singing "up all night to get lucky" — you're not alone. There are more than five million searches for lyrics on Google every day...

In a lot of ways, the job looks the same as ever — the brown truck, the dogs, the lady coming out to apologize about the dogs. Underneath the surface, though, Bill Earle's job as a driver for UPS, has changed a lot. When Bill started back in the '90s, he was a guy out there by himself, alone in a truck on an empty road. UPS was a trucking company. Today, it's a technology company. Every step Bill takes, every mile he drives, is tracked. His truck is a rolling computer...

When a famine swept through Somalia in 2011, it was hard for aid workers to get food distributed. Most of the country was too dangerous for non-Somalis to do the work. Instead, the United Nations looked at satellite images of camps filling up with tents and dispatched locals to deliver the food. A local industry around distributing aid and sheltering the poor sprung up. On today's show, we visit a country with almost no government, but a lot of entrepreneurs...

On today's show: How we got from dim little candles made out of cow fat, to as much light as we want at the flick of a switch. The history of light explains why the world today is what it is. It explains why we aren't all subsistence farmers, and why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers. (And, yes, people who do radio stories about the history of light.) The history of light is the history of economic growth — of things getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

Note: Today's show is a re-run. It originally ran in March, 2013. Sometimes your success depends on how your competitors behave. People judge you not just by your product, but by the product that your rival down the street makes. This is a problem for Lou Caracciolo. He's trying to make high-quality wine, from grapes he grows in New Jersey. But Jersey wine already has a reputation — and fancy isn't it...

When a car is sold in the United States, the safety features on that car — the airbags, the bumper — they are built to US safety standards. There is a different set of standards in Europe. To sell a Jeep Wrangler in Europe, Chrysler has to redesign and replace a bunch of seemingly random parts of the car. The Europeans have the same issue. The new Volkswagen Golf R is driving on the autobahns in Berlin, but not yet in the US...

There are over 100 million websites ending in .com. But new options for website names are becoming available. Not only is there .com and .gov .edu, but now .ninja has been added. Also .bike, .plumbing and .cool. In all, over 1000 new ‘top-level domains’ as they are called will be added.   Today on the show, what happens when you just create a whole bunch of real estate out of nowhere? We meet some of the new land barons with big dreams. And a guy who worries, it’s just going to be a big mess...

Millions of tax cheats never get caught. And the IRS seems powerless to stop them.  This isn’t just a problem in the U.S. American taxpayers are Dudley Do-Rights compared to people in some other countries. On today's show, we head to some of the cheating-est places on earth to bring you tales from some of the roughest, toughest tax collectors around. These guys have tricks, tax collector mind-games, that they play to get people to do the right thing.

After today's show, you'll be ready to design a tax on marijuana, pick a law school, and explain centuries of inequality — and the hottest book in economics — without having to read a page. For more on these stories, see: * What's The Best Way To Tax Marijuana? It Depends On What You Want * Comparing Law School Rankings? Read The Fine Print * Mystery Of Mounting Inequality Might Find Answer In Brand-New Tome