TED Day Two - Part 1

Hey guys, good morning. It's Tom here from the TED conference. So I'm going to do a very quick wrap-up of day 2 for you. I'll be reading from my notes. So let me get started. The day kicked off with legendary venture capitalist John Doerr doing a session that he started off by saying he's really scared. And what he's really scared about is global warming, climate crisis. When somebody like John Doerr says he's really scared about something, you know, you should pay attention. He recounted a story about a dinner party at his home one evening and his 15-year-old daughter. People were going around the table talking about their points of view on global warming, and his 15-year-old daughter, when it got to be her turn, said, "You know what, Dad, your generation cause this problem, what are you going to do to fix it? Kind of focused his mind, I think. So he had become energized about the— no pun intended— about the global warming crisis after last year's TED conference when Al Gore presented his brief about climate crisis, which became An Inconvenient Truth. Presented that live last year here. So Dorr went through his four— what he thinks are four steps that can make a difference. Companies matter. He cited Walmart and their commitment to go green in their own company. Remember, Walmart is the number six trading partner with Canada— with China. Making a commitment to go green also means making a commitment to, let's put it nicely, lean on their suppliers. So there's tremendous leverage in them, as well as, by the way, they are the— their energy usage is the largest of any private consumer in the United States, which is pretty significant. Number 2, individuals matter. He's again cited Walmart's commitment to selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs, you know, those ugly kind of curlicue things which really do make a significant impact on CO2 emissions. Number 3, policy matters. Talked about California and their— the AB 32 legislation, which will have a significant impact on CO2 reductions here in California. Number 4, there's a potential for radical innovation, which of course, there's tremendous, tremendous economic benefit to be had by creating products that will save energy. He's afraid that even after all that, we still don't have enough going on. He kind of got emotional at the end, talking about wanting to pass the world on to his daughter. And she was there and it was a pretty emotional moment. Second speaker in that first session— these sessions are 8, these speeches by the way are 18 minutes long each. Second speaker was Robin Chase, she's the founder of Zipcar and talked a lot about this. And you know, we have at least one YouTuber who I know is a Zipcar user, I think it's Savvy Symbiont who does that and I was a little as a New Yorker going, "Well, why should I use a Zipcar?" which is kind of like, you know, you can rent cars by the hour and it's a very interesting system. 100,000 members, 20,000 cars in 7 cities, wireless kind of a reservation system that allows you to rent cars by the hour or by the day. And Robin Chase was the founder of it and it's made an impact in those 7 cities. And she talked about the The coming changes in the way we think about charging people for using cars. Right now, you pay a carbon tax by virtue of your gas— you pay a gasoline tax. There are gonna be some changes in the way things happen. If you take a look at all of our UK London people know that there's this congestion pricing in London. You pay extra money to drive your vehicle into London during prime hours. Time, if you will, and that's gonna happen in a lot of US cities coming up for sure. So she started a new company called GoLoco, G-O-L-O-C-O, which is a ridesharing kind of a company that also looks like it's gonna have an impact. Another really good talk. Ngozi Okon— I'm sorry, Okonjo-Iweala was the next speaker. She was a former Nigerian Finance Minister. She spoke eloquently about the fact that, you know, people always talk about AIDS, poverty, conflict, and disaster in Africa. She says there's a lot, a lot of people are not talking about what's changing, the opportunity, African countries taking charge of their own destiny, and African countries looking for partnership. There are clearly, there were several references to the fact that thinking about Africa as if it were one massive thing is a big mistake. There's tremendous changes going on all over Africa, and she cited lots of those changes going on in Nigeria. There's a new documentary that she suggested that we take a look at, and it's a documentary called Africa Open for Business. TED Global this year will be in Africa. I won't be attending that in Tanzania, but there's an awful lot going on. That was a terrific speech. The next speaker was Reeves, R-I-V-E-S. Reeves is a very interesting fellow. He's a poet and a performance artist, I guess. And he did a terrific segment on the phrase "four in the morning" and talked about songs in which Four in the Morning appears and did a very funny kind of a juxtaposition of all sorts of events of Four in the Morning. Reeves cannot be captured without watching him. When the TED Talks go up, you have to take a look at Reeves. He's hilarious. Next speaker up was Larry Lessig. Larry Lessig, you know, is the really, I guess, the founder of Creative Commons, which is the licensing approach, which frees up material to be shared in non-commercial ways. There are levels of Creative Commons licensing. Go take a look at creativecommons.org, either one, .org, .com. And Lessig did a great job of portraying the history of copyright and of protectionism Starting with John Philip Sousa, who was pretty upset about the talking machines, you know, talked about property rights. He used to not be able to fly over someone's farm because, you know, they— that was a trespass. And that was changed before the internet, you know, there was all the— before the internet, before There was an awful lot of conflict about radio as well. The whole idea that playing songs on the radio was going to be taxed by ASCAP, which was, you know, the artists' union, essentially. They undertook what kind of sounded like extortionistic practices to raise prices in the early '30s, That led to the formation of BMI, which really allowed songs to be played for much more reasonable prices. And Lessig was making a very impassioned argument about the fact that, you know, if we are criminalized— if he showed some clips, remixes, many of which are familiar here on YouTube, in which he said, look, if we're criminalizing our kids, if we're criminalizing people for remixing and mashing up and being creative, we've got a problem. Not just because of what we're doing around limitations for the music, but also because of what we're doing around criminalizing— what we're doing around creating a generation of people who think, well, if this law is stupid and I break it, what other laws are stupid? And and should be broken. Of course, I thought a pretty powerful argument. Next, next up was Erin McKean. Erin McKean is a lexicographer. She's a dictionary person. She also is the author of a blog called dressaday.com. She's a very, very witty and just upbeat, bubbly woman. I'd seen her before at PopTech. And she talked about the dictionary. She, she, she talked to— she used the metaphor of a ham butt, of a ham, you know, a big, big large ham. And, you know, her, her mother used to cut the butt off the ham to put it in the pan. And, and they would say, why did you do that? And say, I don't know, my, my mother did it. And they called her grandmother up and said, why did you do that? She said, well, I cut the butt off because The pan was too small. And what she was doing was making the analogy between the pan and dictionaries and the fact that there are a lot of words that we cut out of dictionaries because dictionaries, when they were paper, weren't big enough to have all the words in them. Not because the words were bad. She said, I'm not a traffic cop— lexicographer as traffic cop, good words, bad words. In fact, what I want to do is I want to fish. I want a big net, and I want to go in there, and I want to get all the words that I can. Into my dictionary. And in fact, I want you to help me to get words. She kind of wants to open source the dictionary and to have people, you know, put in words that they find that are used in things like magazines, and never mind online and blogs and so on, and to put those words into a big dictionary, kind of a big online electronic dictionary. She wants the paper dictionary book to be as outmoded as the 8-track tape. Pretty nice metaphor there. Next up was Jonathan Harris, who was an interesting internet artist and storyteller. He's created some things that are impossible for me to describe verbally but are tremendous kinds— he's written programs that go out to blogs and search for feeling terms, people, you know, "I feel" kind of terms. And his work was, again, the name of that project is the We Feel Fine project. His, again, this is something you have to see I can't really describe it very well. Just Google Jonathan Harris and I'm sure you'll find, uh, you'll find some more about him. Uh, up next was Ted Sargent, who is called the Boy Wonder of Nanotech. And you know, this is another one of those great, uh, TED moments where, you know, you're looking at something and you know that it's amazingly important in terms of the kind of potential that this science has that's being presented. Don't necessarily understand all of it. You don't have to understand all of it. All you do is to see that, for example, where today we make all of our computer chips out of silicon, which has to be perfect and therefore has to have a tremendous amount of energy put into it, he's suggesting that what we do is we need to be able to make our chips out of something else. And he's got all kinds of less-than-perfect semiconductor kinds of products that he wants to use to do that. So another very, very forward-looking TED Talk. Up next was Nathan Marvold, who is one of the smartest people in the world, along with Paul Allen and with— Bill Gates, of course, he's one of the prime movers of the foundation of Microsoft. And he now, he was answering the question, what do I do? And he does a lot. He does archaeology, he's an inventor, he creates, wants to create a new kind of nuclear reactor. He cooks, he created a special kind of cooker to cook ribs. He was on the world championship barbecue ribs team. He's involved in search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He does dinosaur explorations. He's a photographer, and he had a great series of pictures showing whale sex that he had actually viewed on— I forget where, but he was out there watching whale sex, and it was actually kind of funny. Okay, well, I'm going to stop there. That's the end of part of session 1 of day 2 at TED, and I'll pick up with session Session 2, um, in another video. So take care, guys. I don't want to make this crazy long. It's already long enough. Bye.