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Andrew Tobias
Andrew Tobias

Money and Other Subjects

TED 2016

February 19, 2016

What a week.  Can’t wait to post some of the videos in the days and weeks ahead.  Ranging from Al Gore’s hugely compelling, hopeful progress report on climate change (not yet linkable), to these drones flying around the theater.

Pizza really will be flying in through our open windows, I guess; and what an interesting way to inspect bridges, build bridges, and rescue people.

But just as we’re about to be able to eradicate mosquitoes, should we decide to — should we decide to? — as one speaker explained a method to quickly make all baby mosquitoes males and thus wipe out the species . . . probably not a good idea? . . . now we have to imagine pesky mosquito-sized drones spying on us or squirting chemicals into our carrot juice.

We heard from the reclusive founder of Linux, the co-founder of Uber, and the co-founder of Airbnb.  I can’t wait for you to see those talks.  So great.

And amazing music . . . not least John Legend . . . who introduced Adam Foss, an amazing young prosecutor whose story will totally change your child’s career path.  (I assume you have a kid in law school?)

And a 10-year-old girl from India, and the prime minister of Bhutan (their nation is not just carbon neutral but carbon negative), and the world’s long-time reigning female chess champion (who showed us how she beat Gary Kasparov), and a gentleman who made a clarinet out of a carrot — right there in front of us — and then rocked the house with it.

And perhaps the most powerful talk you’ll ever see on gun violence, with suggestions for reducing ours.  And another on a memorial to the 4,000 lynching victims that moved TEDsters afterward to toss an additional $1.6 million into the pot toward its realization.

And virtual reality!

And holograms!

And Craig Venter‘s personal genome — all 3 billion characters of it, printed out in a tiny font on hundreds of thousands of enormous pages bound into dozens of enormous volumes wheeled out by half a dozen stagehands pushing half a dozen large carts.  (The speaker went to one and zeroed in on the page and the specific few characters that determined the color of Mr. Venter’s eyes.)

And an interactive cybersecurity workshop conducted by an IBM scientist that included, in the audience, TED attendee Peter Norton (as in: Norton Anti-Virus, and no, he no longer owns it, so don’t hate him for whatever annoyances the current management may have caused you).

And the head of the US Digital Service — brilliant young people on loan from Google and Twitter and Amazon, etc., working to do for the rest of the federal government what six of them called in to rescue healthcare.gov so successfully did.  (Six!)

Oh!  And there’s Cher!  And my hero Norman Lear!  And Paul Allen!  And Paul Tudor Jones, whose “Just” corporate index debuts this fall and may well induce corporations to compete to be recognized as treating their employees and their environment better than their peers.

And it just went on and on and on and will all be yours, free, at ted.com in the months to come.

What a time to be alive.

What a responsibility we have to elect serious people with the vision and skills and temperament to not to screw it all up.  Everything is at stake in the next decade or two.

It could all go magnificently right . . . or horribly, cataclysmically wrong.

But for now, watch those drones.

 

 

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