Enjoy, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

@Bill_Gross at Twitter

Tuesday, TED University

1. Arrived at #TED. Have been hosting monthly best of TED talk lunches at Idealab with great response. Would love feedback from others who have tried this.

2. You can cut the excitement in the room with a knife where #TED U is about to begin on Tuesday afternoon!

3. Helen Walters from BusinessWeek writes about #TED’s influence and growing digital reach. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2010/id2010029_313090.htm

4. #TED University has started. Great talk by Catherine Mohr about how to look at embodied energy in all areas of life, and in a new home. www.301monroe.com

5. Dan Kraft on the future of medicine predicts a $100 genome soon – jokes that your own genome will be in your #TED gift back in a few years.  Maybe he’s not joking…

6. Phil Zimbardo at #TED U talking about how people become heroes. The general population is at the center of the bell curve, and villains and heroes are the outliers. http://heroworkshop.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/new-zimbardo-research-a-survey/

7. Cindy Gallop at #TED U – imagine if every good intention could be turned instantly into action.  Launching new website IfWeRanTheWorld.  Change the world for the better one “micro-action” at a time. http://www.designglut.com/2010/01/cindy-gallop-on-ifwerantheworld-com/

8. Wired Magazine posts article about how #TED makes strange bedfellows. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/ted-conference-2010/

9. Why are babies so cute?  #TED U talk about how this cuteness is necessary for survival.  Strong nurturing response comes from visual trigger.

10.  #TED U – How to capture great moments in photography – “Keep your eyes roving all the time, work to capture surprising, wonderful moments.” “Capture what something looks like, and also what it FEELS like.”

11. Rob Cook of Pixar arguing against the Kurzweil “singularity” in 2045 – “it underestimates what we don’t know about what makes humans human.”  “If you want to appreciate the richness of human intelligence, looking at artists is a good place to start.”

12.  Standing ovation at #TED U for musician Robert Gupta.

13.  Derek Sivers on becoming a leader – the first follower is what turns a lone nut into a leader.  A leader has to stand out and be willing to be ridiculed.  Regard your first followers as equals. http://sivers.org/ff

14.  Omar Ahmad at #TED U recommends sending a paper letter once a month to elected officials you want to influence.  Probably not a bad idea.

15. For copyright purposes, YouTube analyzes 100 years of video every day.

16.  Kindergartners beat MBA’s at the “marshmallow and spaghetti” challenge because they iterate, and they are not trying to be CEO. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/~/media/Documents/launchpad_activities/spaghetti_challenge.ashx

17. Manu Prakash giving talk on how to walk on water – how pond-skaters can move at 1.5 meters/second. http://www.me.gatech.edu/hu/Research/Hu08_Bush.pdf

18.  Watching a heartbreaking video showing how the Taliban is training young boys in school to become suicide bombers.  To make them dangerous, they take away everything in life and promise them all this and more later in paradise.

19.  Keith Ferrazzi – “that other person over there just got promoted because the boss likes him… well no shit!”  Relationships are critical.  To start a relationship, vulnerability is not your kryptonite, it’s your superpower.  Use your humanity and your insecurity. http://www.keithferrazzi.com/

Wednesday, Session 1: Mindshift

20. Chris Anderson at opening moments of first #TED session – “The last year was disappointing and the world needs a re-start!”

21.  TED Talk #1, Dan Kahneman – “happiness is mainly being satisfied with people we like, but there are several cognitive traps that make it hard to evaluate happiness.”  We think of the future not as a vision of the future but as anticipated memories. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/s923773.htm

22. Poverty researcher Esther Duflo on how to measure the cost-effectiveness of poverty-solving – you get an extra year of school attendance for only $3 by de-worming. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/24124/

23. Jake Shimabukuro, Hawaiian Ukulele virtuoso got a standing ovation for his amazing performance of Ave Maria and Bohemian Rhapsody. http://mashable.com/2010/02/11/interview-jake-shimabukuro/

24. Can we eat to cure cancer? William Li from Angiogenesis Foundation. http://www.angio.org/

25.  Philip Kaplan showing Blippy – credit card where everything you buy is streamed to your friends.

http://gigaom.com/2009/12/22/blippys-philip-kaplan-on-the-last-frontier-of-private-info/

26. Frank Drake on why other civilizations haven’t visited us – “it’s too expensive!”  Also talks about using the Sun (or any star) and an enormous telescope because of its gravity-based light-bending properties. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=785

27.  Meg Ryan introduces this year’s TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver who goes on to give fantastic speech on healthy eating. His comment on schools, “if you don’t have knives and forks in school, then you are endorsing fast food!” http://www.tedprize.org/jamie-oliver/

28. Jamie Oliver’s wish-to educate every child about food-to inspire families to cook again, to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

29. Sheryl Crow just invited Thomas Dolby out on stage to play with her.

Thursday, Session 4: Reason

30. Michael Spector on science and myth – “be skeptical, ask questions, but when you get the proof, you need to accept the proof!” http://www.michaelspecter.com/ We have leaped not only into the arms of big pharma, we have also leaped into “big placeba!”

31.  Sam Harris gave an amazing talk on the price in human suffering of being open-minded. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/universal-morality/ “What does voluntary mean in a community where when a girl gets raped, her father’s first impulse is to murder her out of shame?”

32. Funny TV ad for Nolan’s Cheddar Cheese just shown to big laughs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xK9qv611sU

33. Michael Sandel – we need better political debates – we need to discover the lost art of democratic argument. http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/12/michael-sandel-on-justice

34. Chris Anderson is begging Moot to not have 4Chan users take down TED.com.  He’s asking them to be nice.  Moot – “the reason my parents appreciate the site 4Chan is that they don’t understand it!”

35.  Kevin Bales on slavery, 27 million around the world. Slavery begins with “want a job?”  If someone is destitute, that is the first step.

36. Kevin Bales, “There is a complete collapse in the price of human beings.  This is driving the explosion of slavery.”

37.  Kevin Bales, “Slavery is on the edge of being extinct, but we need to push it over the edge and give it the boot.”

38. Kevin Bales, “Total cost to lift the world out of slavery, $10.8B, or what we spend on pretzels!”

39. Kevin Bales, “If we can’t use our intellectual power to end slavery, then are we truly free?” http://www.tonic.com/article/ted-2010-kevin-bales-end-slavery/

40. Stewart Brand quoting David Mackay during nuclear debate, “I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear, I’m just trying to be pro-arithmetic.”

41.  Jane McGonical – “so far we’ve spent 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft game. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100212/lf_afp/lifestyleusitinternetvideogamested_20100212200433

42. The average young person growing up in the US will spend 10,000 hours playing online games by age 21 – the same amount of time spent in school.

43. Amazing dance group League of Extraordinary Dancers www.theLXD.com

44. New Bing maps that integrate Photosynth are just amazing.  www.bing.com/maps/explore you need to install Silverlight.

45.  Nathan Mhyrvold shows amazing laser-based mosquito-zapper to address malaria.  Better than spraying, awareness, nets. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl4rrYsXja8

46. Nathan says shooting mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers is the “pinky-suck” moment – like Austin Powers.

47.  Nathan says mosquito wing motor continues flapping even after they kill mosquito and as it’s falling to the ground.

48. Andrew Bird is making some magical, musical experience. Wow!

49. I’m so lucky to be at #TED.  It’s not really fair.  I see all the TED envy on Twitter.  I wish everyone could feel this shared experience.

50. Andrew Bird is stunning everyone!

51. Andrew Bird is exhibiting first-hand the “reckless curiosity” which he just proclaimed that the world needs now.  So meta!

52.  Andrew Bird gets a standing ovation for creating ethereal magic!

53.  Wolfram – run all possible cellular automata simple rules lead to amazing thing.  When he first saw this, it was a shock to him.

54.  Wolfram – “nature is just sampling what’s out there in the computational universe, and just sometimes, we get surprising beauty.”

55.  Wolfram Alpha – goal is to be a serious knowledge engine to answer questions, starting first with 2+2 and then getting harder.

56.  Gary Flake from MSFT is showing new “pivot” tool to be able to visualize patterns in data.  Radical new visualization power.  http://www.getpivot.com/

57.  Gary Flake visualizing every single Wikipedia page – showing “insights” that can be uncovered from patterns and connections.

58. Gary Flake encouraging us to extract information from patterns in data. A peek here: http://bit.ly/2r3H3F

59.  Seth Berkley talking about an important vaccine. More on Seth Berkeley at Huffington Post here: http://bit.ly/bTqAJj

60. Pivot, Alpha, new MSFT maps demo all show the re-migration of hi-computational power back into applications to make them exciting again.

61.  Andrew Bird “what the world need now is reckless curiosity.” What the world needs now are more artists like Andrew Bird. BG

62. Nexus One demo of Google Translate – like the Rosetta Stone in your pocket!

63. Al Gore said representatives came up to him in Copenhagen and said, “the World now has one problem and it’s YOUR United States Senate!”

64. #TED U my wife was getting ready for a dinner party, and asked, “do you like my hair?” Damn, this is exactly the dilemma of Google in China.

65.  Gary Lauder gave a great, clever talk about how to save time/money/resources @ stop signs with new type of yield.http://bit.ly/9VmQ4t

66. Very funny video shown at #TED University about a weatherman freaking out at the terrible weather report.http://bit.ly/bWZ1G8

67.  The carbon footprint of our online habits presentation at#TED University http://bit.ly/dBMDLE – typically about 1-2% of total carbon usage

68. Ann Marie Thomas talking about / lamenting that kids don’t get enough of a chance to build things – how it really unleashed imagination.

69. John Underkoffler talking about new interfaces for the future – gesture – the OS IS the interface.

Friday, Session 8: Boldness

70. Video of Demo that John Underkoffler is showing at#TED that is online at MIT http://bit.ly/cB5KE7

71. Very interesting 2 see dramatic new speed of evolution in user interface – multi-touch, iPhone, Wii, accelerometer controllers, gesture.

72.  Google entered China operation in 2006, & Sergey felt things improved, despite censoring, speaking @ #TED, but things started going downhill, particularly after the Olympics.

73.  George Church from Harvard, pioneer in genome sequencing, his documentary film about personal genome here:http://bit.ly/eZS5W

74.  I find it striking that Sergey was on stage @ #TED talking about the huge China censorship / issue and people are tweeting about his shoes!

75.  The promises we make to children should be sacred.#TED speakers Mike and Dave from KIPP.

76.  Dare to be Different MTV Commercial showed at #TEDcan be seen here: http://bit.ly/bbcGxl

77.  @BillGates is about to speak at #TED-can’t wait to hear what he has to say. He has the most breadth and depth of knowledge I have ever seen.

78. @BillGates “if you could pick one thing to reduce the price of to reduce poverty it would be energy for half the price and no carbon.”

79.  CO2 = People x Services x Energy x CO2 per unit of energy, this is the equation that we need to take down near zero. Bill Gates at #TED

80.”If you gave me one wish over the next 50 years, it would energy for 1/2 the cost and no CO2, that would be my wish.”@BillGates at #TED

81.  “All the batteries on Earth can store less than 10 minutes of the world’s electricity needs.” @BillGates @ #TED.

82. Bill Gates believes we have 20 years to invent and 20 years to deploy – that’s sort of the deadline we have to solve this crisis.”

83. A molecule of uranium has about a million times more energy than a molecule of coal - @BillGates @#TED

84. Bill Gates – The rich can afford it. We can all pay 5x more for our energy and our lives won’t change, it’s the other 2 billion that would suffer.

85. Temple Grandin is speaking now at #TED. Here is an interview with her on NPR with Ira Flatow http://bit.ly/5cD8E

86. Here is a link to Bill Gates’ slides from his energy presentation at #TED on Friday. http://ow.ly/17cm6 The video should be available soon.

87. “The electricity industry spends less on R&D as a percentage of revenues than the dog food industry!” – Nate Lewis, Caltech Chemist @ #TED

88. Artist Marian Bantjes talking @ #TED. Here are some pieces of amazing art inspired by her dentist! http://bit.ly/cfruIB

89. “Beauty is nature’s way of having natural selection work from a distance.” Denis Dutton speaking @#TED about beauty versus food in survival.

90. @SarahSilverman #TED “I was walking down the street in New York and a guy whistled, and I turned around and said ugh, and he said, not you!”

91.  David Rockwell at #TED announces that he’ll be building/designing 100 playgrounds around the United States – goal to create a sense of play.

92. David Rockwell at #TED on his imagination playgrounds – bye, bye jungle gym. Time Magazine shows pictures herehttp://bit.ly/9oYfIw

93. New quad rotor helicopter being shown at #TED with integrated augmented reality – controllable by iPhone – see it herehttp://bit.ly/8GzO4D

Saturday, Session 11: Simplicity

94. Mandelbrot, 1st full-time “fractalist” shows the “complication” of a cauliflower. Interview with great pics here:http://bit.ly/a7yWl8 #TED

95.  Mandelbrot tells how the “roughness” number can describe the surfaces of mountain ranges, cauliflowers, and the inside of a lung. #TED

96.  A human lung’s volume is very tiny, but it has an enormous area-it is nearly space filling. Surface area is about = to a tennis court!

97.  Sam Harris a few days ago gave 1 of the #TED talks that I really can’t wait 4 it to be online.Wired Mag sums it up here: http://bit.ly/a1s9rs

98. “Academics like complexity and emergence – the world puts up with it reluctantly, but really wants simplicity.” George Whitesides.

99. “There are things that can appear very complex, but in actuality, they are just “stacked” simplicity.” George Whitesides.

100. Big standing ovation for “common sense” at end of Philip Howard’s talk on absurd unintended consequences of legal action in our system.

101. Philip K. Howard: judge a law by its effect of the broader society, not a single disgruntled individual.

102. GNH (Gross National Happiness) versus GDP – for happiness, how do you feel about how you spend your time each day? Conley.

103. Conley happiness equation – Wanting what you have/Having what you want. Western countries focus on the denominator instead of numerator.

104. Conley speaking about happiness around the world. Check out the world happiness index country by country: http://bit.ly/17etDQ

105. “Nature’s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.” – James Cameron

106. Jim Cameron pitched Titanic as “Love Story on a Ship,” but what he really wanted 2 do was get a chance to dive down to see the Titanic!

107. James Cameron online on the making of Titanichttp://bit.ly/9KFfVE and how his $200m gamble paid off and made $1 Billion.

108. “Don’t put limitations on yourself, others will do that for you.” – James Cameron at #TED “Failure IS an option, but FEAR is not!”

109. Sir Ken Robinson on great Abe Lincoln quote from 1862 – The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate… full quote here:http://bit.ly/acHT68

110. Ken Robison’s daughter never wears a watch. She says, “It’s a single function device.” He says, “no, no, here’s the date.”#TED

111. 12-year old child prodigy http://bit.ly/13HiR @ #TED“Kids love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them.”

112. Just concluded an amazing #TED full of Ideas Worth Spreading. I’d like to share ideas with @TEDChris about helping turn those into reality.

200,000 years ago, we first controlled fire, 4,000 years ago we invented the wheel, and 150 years ago we began burning every fossil fuel we could dig out of the ground.  That era will end and be just a tiny blip in the story of man.  However, every effort man has made to get more control over energy from outside of his body, and get more efficient in using that energy, his standard of living has increased, and his level of freedom has increased.

The ultimate end game of man’s progress in the control of energy is to renewably create his energy.  Once that is achieved, there will be no more fighting over resources, and no limit to man’s potential.  Energy = Freedom, or more precisely, renewable energy brings freedom.

And by the way, renewable energy means no emissions, and no carbon, so you get that benefit also.  But I would say the following – that carbon control should not be the cake, it should be the icing.  If you believe that, then the debate over man’s causality in climate change is a moot point, and the only thing that matters is to find the single most cost-effective way to enter the entirely renewable energy era.

I was thinking about how I get a new one every few months, instead of just paying $99, or much more, for a great reliable 5-year version. The 5-year version would have rechargeable batteries, a nice inductive charger, a nice stand, and extra brushes. The $6.95 one has none of those, and I throw it out for a new one fairly often. Economically, I come out ahead, never having to lay out $99+ up front and I can have one in more than one bathroom, and one in my luggage for travel, etc. But then I realized I’m throwing it out so often, filling up the earth with the junk, and using up precious materials on the planet. But I do it because it’s convenient, and because it’s cheap.

It’s quite selfish, however. It’s cheaper for me, but for the planet? This example plays itself out in millions of our daily items – not just all of our plastic disposables, cups, bags, but also all of our computers, tires, and really everything. Since there is no charge for throwing anything away, most of the incentive to make something last a long time is offset by the super low upfront cost.

I can’t think of any other way to solve this other than to have a “disposal tax” that is added into the purchase price of everything based on it’s life, element usage, and disposal cost. Unless there is a clear price signal that this matters, I think we will continue to descend into a low up-front cost, higher disposal-rate society. I think there are lots of challenges here, but I think this is very important. I’d love to hear thoughts to the contrary, and either why this wouldn’t work, or why this isn’t necessary.

Today, the world uses 83 million barrels of oil per day, down from the peak a few years ago of 85 million.  The current worldwide capacity to get oil out of the ground is believed to be 85.5 million barrels per day.  With 200 million more cars on the road in just 10 years, the fighting over oil will be extreme.  We’ll need 100 million barrels per day and it’s believed that the most we can get is 90.

The transformation of the car industry that is necessary to enable to world to survive on 90 million barrels per day is mind boggling.  All the great startups being funded, and all the great things going on to improve cars, even if they all happened and bore fruit — it’s still so hard for there to be enough new efficient vehicles to make a dent.  And this is even more so because cars are being built better, and last longer, and so are being turned over more slowly than ever before.

The leverage, however, has been huge.  If the average sale is $20,000, and the average rebates is $4,000, there’s a 5x multiplier on a boost to the economy.  I don’t know what other stimulus funds have had a 5x boost.

I strongly feel we should reduce the cash for clunkers fee to $2,000 for two months, and then $1,000 for two months and allow up to $5B or $10B more, since we can then get 10x or 20x multiplier at that reduced amount.

I feel that we need to find more of this kind of stimulus – if we are going to provide stimulus at all.  We gave $50B to the car companies immediately and got nothing like this bang for the buck – for less than 1/5^th that amount we could do so much more.

Am I missing something here?  I’d love to hear what any downside of this could be.

Creep up the floor price.  Imagine something like a $5 rise in the floor per quarter, and leveling off at some point, maybe even at $150/barrel.

Several important reasons for this twist:

1. it would gradually phase in the pain (even though all the money should be given back in the form of lower taxes elsewhere — I propose this should be tax neutral.  The only purpose should be encouraging different use patterns and stability and predictability.

2. it would be a dramatic boost to the car industry.  Here’s what I learned about the car industry since I wrote my last post on this: the car industry needs predictability to succeed.  The wild volatility in the price of fuel is what causes the making of the incorrect car models and the extra car inventory that is so harmful to the car industry.  There is no other industry where the swing in the price of an outside substance — not under the control or predictability of the car industry — affects the demand / value of its product so much.  Here’s what I heard from the CEO of Auto Nation at the WSJ:EcoNomics conference — when gas prices went from $2 to $3, to $$ and then back down to $3 and then $2 last year, he said that the value of a used Prius went from $15,000, to $20,000, and then to $25,000 at $4.  Then it went back down to $20k, and $15k on the way back.  It was completely symmetric on the way up and down and swung $10,000 (or more than 40% in value) just by a $2 swing in gas prices.  Think about this.  You are a car company planning to invest $1B or $2B to make your car making decision 3-4 years out and there’s something you don’t control that can make the value swing more than $10,000, or more than 6x your profit on that product!  That’s insane, and unsustainable, and in fact, look what happened in that experiment.

Therefore, I think that it’s not even price of gas that matters, it’s just knowing with some stability what it will be, and if you took the current $50/barrel and just slowly phased in a $5/barrel floor increase, so it would be $70 in a year, $90 in two years, and so on, that would give an underlying hugely valuable signal to the market (both customers AND manufacturers).  Let me know what you think of this idea.

Thanks,

Bill

It would be the first, global, progressive pricing scheme that would give “life-line” like service to all in need of the freedom and convenience of basic electricity.  Second, it would, at the same time, provide the incentive for renewable energy to blossom, in an extremely fair and global way.

The idea is this – take the lowest possible electricity price anywhere on the planet, about $0.03 per kilolwatt hour, and offer that rate to everyone on the planet, for their first kilowatt hour (per month, per person).  For each doubling of usage, increase the rate $0.01.  So if you use 2 kilowatt hours per month, your rate is $0.04.  For 4 kilowatt hours per month, per person, your rate is $0.05.

On a blended average basis, rates would not rise for any consumers basic consumption.  Only for very large consumption would rates rise slightly.  However, the large consumption rise would allow a fast payback on renewable energy installations, and utilities would know a fixed rate that they could earn for expanding usage and demand, and this would allow much greater deployment.

If the entire world could both stabilize and articulate an increasing rate like this, then that knowledge and stability to providers would encourage tremendous innovation and investment to meet the need.  Right now, in many places of the world, electricity is subsidized to be so inexpensive (Governments fund this by taking a loss) that it’s impossible for renewable to compete.  The intent is to provide affordable power to lower-income, smaller users.  But with fixed pricing, renewable competition is eliminated.  Logarithmic pricing would fix this and allow both – affordable power and unsubsidized renewable competition.

Had we instituted a $100 floor price of oil, just since the middle of September, when oil went below $100, we would have raised nearly half a billion dollars a day, or more than $33 billion so far.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, even in this new era of huge numbers we hear about.  Plus it would be continuing to pile up at more than $1B per day right now.  In addition, we would have no fear that investments in the future would not pay back at a particular rate, because of the certainly of minimum $100 / barrel oil.

On the one hand, I find it hard to bring myself to suggest people should be paying this extra price right now, but actually, I feel it’s the right thing.  Why?  Because with any good strategy, there is by definition a trade of a short-term loss in return for a long-term gain.  In this case, I feel setting a floor price of $100 (or any reasonably high number) is medicine that will definitely make the patient healthier in the long term.

I suspect there are people who would disagree.  I would love to hear what you think.

Thanks,

Bill