One of the greatest privileges of co-curating TED isn’t just getting to work with incredible speakers, but also talking with those in the audience. Danny Hillis gave a sobering presentation, “The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B,” at TED2013, detailing his concern at the exponential growth of the Internet, and the need for a back-up plan should all else fail.

Who better to respond to this idea than the system’s so-called “Father,” Vint Cerf, who I knew was in the audience? Vint (who just this morning accepted the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his ground-breaking work on the Internet) agreed to answer a few questions about Danny’s talk from the stage. In the process, he gave the TED audience his perspective on the continued evolution of the system he helped design, and provided us with both a fascinating history lesson and his own manifesto for what to do now. Here’s an edited look at what he told us.