Tuesday, August 31, 2010
视频: 号称超越iPad 三星-Samsung Galaxy Tab平板Demo 演示
Forgive the music because you’re going to wanna trudge through this video. It is by far the best Samsung Galaxy Tab video to date and might be some sort of official demo. The entire 2:43 video is filled with nothing but action shots and size comparisons. Is it an iPad killer? Still hard to tell, but this video certain makes a case for it. Click through for the video.
TALKS | TEDX Lisa Margonelli: The political chemistry of oil
About this talk
In the Gulf oil spill's aftermath, Lisa Margonelli says drilling moratoriums and executive ousters make for good theater, but distract from the issue at its heart: our unrestrained oil consumption. She shares her bold plan to wean America off of oil -- by confronting consumers with its real cost.
Director of the New America Foundation Energy Policy Initiative, Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy.
Why you should listen to her:
Lisa Margonelli's work examines the promise and possibility of a post-oil world. She has studied California's opportunity to benefit from new technologies and policies, and is looking at the unexpected complications of alternative fuels and energy efficiency.
Margonelli has been published in The Atlantic, New York Times online, Washington Post, Wired and other publications. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, was recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association.
"Lisa Margonelli has a rare and precious talent. She has drawn a wonderfully readable portrait of the fascinating and surprisingly little-known human face of Big Oil."
Simon Winchester
So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted. But before I talk about the political chemistry, I actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil.
This is a photograph from when I visited Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2002 to watch the Minerals Management Service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice. And what you see here is, you see a little bit of crude oil, you see some ice cubes, and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm. The napalm is burning there quite nicely. And the thing is, is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the American consumer. We're four percent of the world's population; we use 25 percent of the world's oil production. And we don't understand what oil is, until you check out its molecules, And you don't really understand that until you see this stuff burn. So this is what happens as that burn gets going. It takes off. It's a big woosh. I highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday, because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again. It'll just bake your retinas. So there it is; the retinas are baking.
Let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil. Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules. It starts of with the very small ones, which are one carbon, four hydrogen -- that's methane -- it just floats off. Then there's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon. You've probably heard of benzene rings; they're very carcinogenic. And it goes all the way over to these big, thick, galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons, and they have thousands of hydrogens, and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them. Those are called the asphaltenes; they're an ingredient in asphalt. They're very important in oil spills.
Let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water. It is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous. Oil doesn't sink, it floats. If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill. And the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water. It spreads out to be really thin, so you have a hard time corralling it. The next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate, and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that, and shrimp. And then the asphaltenes -- and this is the crucial thing -- the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise. It triples the amount of oily, messy goo that you have in the water, and it makes it very hard to handle. It also makes it very viscous. When the Prestige sank off the coast of Spain, there were big, floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil, with the consistency, or the viscosity, of chewing gum. It's incredibly hard to clean up. And every single oil is different when it hits water.
When the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics, it's absolutely explosive. For the first time, American consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves. They have a "eureka!" moment, when we suddenly understand oil in a different context. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics, because it's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important, why we need to stay focused. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, "Wow! I'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work." No, they think, "Uggh. I have to go buy gas. I'm so angry about it. The oil companies are ripping me off. They set the prices, and I don't even know. I am helpless over this." And this is what happens to us at the gas pump. And actually, gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger. You might notice that many gas pumps, including this one, are designed to look like ATMs. I've talked to engineers. That's specifically to diffuse our anger, because supposedly we feel good about ATMs. (Laughter) That shows you how bad it is.
But actually, I mean, this feeling of helplessness comes in because most Americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy, not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market. And the thing is, too, is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume, which is somewhat reasonable, because, in fact, we have designed this system where, if you want to get a job, it's much more important to have a car that runs, to have a job and keep a job, than to have a GED. And that's actually very perverse.
Now there's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas, which is that we'd rather be doing anything else. This is BP's gas station in downtown Los Angeles. It is green. It is a shrine to greenishness. "Now," you think, "why would something so lame work on people so smart?" Well, the reason is, is because, when we're buying gas, we're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, we're angry at the one hand, and we want to be somewhere else. We don't want to be buying oil; we want to be doing something green. And we get kind of in on our own con. I mean -- and this is funny. It looks funny here. But in fact, that's why the slogan "beyond petroleum" worked. But it's an inherent part of our energy policy, which is we don't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use. We talk about energy independence. We talk about hydrogen cars. We talk about biofuels that haven't been invented yet. And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill.
Okay, so the politics of oil are very moral in the United States. The oil industry is like a huge, gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else, but we actually see it in very moral terms. This is an early-on photograph. You can see, we had these gushers. Early journalists looked at these spills, and they said, "This is a filthy industry." But they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing. They weren't farmers, they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground. It's the "Beverly Hillbillies" basically. But in the beginning, this was seen as a very morally problematic thing, long before it became funny.
And then, of course, there was John D. Rockefeller. And the thing about John D. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry, and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company, a multinational. It was terrifying. You think Walmart is a terrifying business model now, imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s. And it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy. But what's really amazing is that Ida Tarbell, the journalist, went in and did a big exposé of Rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place. But in many ways, that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us. And here's one of the things that Ida Tarbell said. She said, "He has a thin nose like a thorn. There were no lips. There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them." (Laughter) Okay, so that guy is actually still with us. (Laughter) I mean, this is a very pervasive -- this is part of our DNA. And then there's this guy, okay.
So, you might be wondering why it is that, every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill, we call these CEOs down to Washington, and we sort of pepper them with questions in public, and we try to shame them. And this is something that we've been doing since 1974, when we first asked them, "Why are there these obscene profits?" And we've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these CEOs. And we take it as, you know -- we look at it on a moral level, rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level. And so I'm not saying these guys aren't liable to answer questions, I'm just saying that, when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards, you don't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate, or you're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil. So I'm saying this is kind of a distraction. But it makes for good theater, and it's powerfully cathartic, as you probably saw last week.
So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing. I mean, these pictures -- this is from the Santa Barbara spill. You have these pictures of birds. They really influence people. When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969, it formed the environmental movement in its modern form. It started Earth Day. It also put in place the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Everything that we are really stemmed from this period. I think it's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us. He we are normally; we're standing at the gas pump, and we're feeling kind of helpless. We look at these pictures, and we understand, for the first time, our role in this supply chain. We connect the dots in the supply chain. And we have this kind of -- as voters, we have kind of a "eureka!" moment. This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important. But it's also really important that we don't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it. We actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem.
One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms. We were very reactive, as opposed to being proactive about what happened. And so what we did was, actually, we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling. We stopped drilling in ANWR, but we didn't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed. In fact, it's continued to increase. The only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices. As you can see, our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out. We only have two percent of the world's oil reserves. 65 percent of them are in the Persian Gulf.
One of the things that's happened because of this is that, since 1969, the country of Nigeria, or the part of Nigeria that pumps oil, which is the delta -- which is two times the size of Maryland -- has had thousands of oil spills a year. I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations. That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969. And we can wrap our heads around the spills, because that's what we see here, but in fact, these guys actually live in a war zone. There's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of Maryland, and it's all related to the oil. And these guys, I mean, if they were in the U.S., they might be actually here in this room. They have degrees in political science, degrees in business. They're entrepreneurs. They don't actually want to be doing what they're doing. And it's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us.
The other thing that we've done, as we've continued to increase demand, is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs. One of the places we put in a big oil project in Chad, with Exxon. So the U.S. taxpayer paid for it; the World Bank, Exxon paid for it. We put it in. There was a tremendous banditry problem. I was there in 2003. We were driving along this dark, dark road, and the guy in the green stepped out, and I was just like, "Ahhh! This is it." And then the guy in the Exxon uniform stepped out, and we realized it was okay. They have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields. But at the same time, Chad has become much more unstable, and we are not paying for that price at the pump. We pay for it in our taxes on April 15th.
We do the same thing with the price of policing the Persian Gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open. This is 1988. We actually bombed two Iranian oil platforms that year. That was the beginning of an escalating U.S. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump. We pay for it on April 15th, and we can't even calculate the cost of this involvement. The other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the Gulf of Mexico, which was not part of the moratoriums. Now what's happened in the Gulf of Mexico ... as you can see, this is the Minerals Management diagram of wells for gas and oil. It's become this intense industrialized zone. It doesn't have the same resonance for us that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has, but it should, I mean, it's a bird sanctuary. Also, every time you buy gasoline in the United States, half of it is actually being refined along the coast, because the Gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well. So the people of the Gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment.
And finally, American families also pay a price for oil. Now on the one hand, the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil, but on the other hand, the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work, generally in a fairly crumby car. If you look at people who make $50,000 a year, they have two kids, they might have three jobs or more, and then they have to really commute. They're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care. And the same thing happens at the 50th percentile, around 80,000. Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy, but they're also a drain on individual families, and it's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher.
So, what I'm going to talk to you about now is: what do we have to do this time? What are the laws? What do we have to do to keep ourselves focused? One thing is, we need to stay away from the theater. We need to stay away from the moratoriums. We need to focus really back again on the molecules. The moratoriums are fine, but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil. One of the things that we also need to do, is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world, before you reduce the amount of oil that we use. We need to focus on reducing the oil.
What you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the U.S. economy. It comes in on the side -- the useful stuff is the dark gray, and the unuseful stuff, which is called the rejected energy, the waste, goes up to the top. Now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount. And one of the things that we need to do is, not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient, but we also need to fix the economy in general.
We need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel. for example, we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000. We actually encourage people to drive more. We have policies that reward sprawl. We have all kinds of policies. We need to have more mobility choices. We need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil. And we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry, which is at least 10 billion dollars a year, into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute. Whether that's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road, this is where we need to be. We need to kind of rationalize this whole thing, and you can find more about this policy. It's called STRONG, which is "Secure Transportation Reducing Oil Needs Gradually," and the idea is, instead of being helpless, we need to be more strong. They're up at NewAmerica.net. What's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump, to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are, having kind of that special moment, where we connect the dots actually at the pump.
Now supposedly, oil taxes are the third rail of American politics -- the no-fly zone. I actually -- I agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much, but I think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline, and upped it to six cents next year, nine cents the following year, all the way up to 30 cents by 2020, that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption, and at the same time we would give people time to prepare, time to respond, and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time. Let me give you a little sense of how this would work.
This is a gas receipt, hypothetically, for a year from now. The first thing that you have on the tax is, you have a tax for a stronger America -- 33 cents. So you're not helpless at the pump. And the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign, very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack. And what it says is, "The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs." That's a lot. And so this -- you can see that you're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax. And also, the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system. And at the same time, you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting, or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car, or whatever it is you're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence. With this whole sort of suite of policies, we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption -- or our oil consumption -- by 20 percent by 2020. So, three million barrels a day.
But in order to do this, one of the things we really need to do, is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon. We need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater, not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there. We need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules.
Thank you.
(Applause)
TALKS Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing
About this talk
Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.
Dan Cobley is a marketing director at Google, where he connects customers and businesses, helping both navigate digital space to find what they need.
Why you should listen to him: In 2006, Dan Cobley was appointed director of marketing at Google for central and northern Europe. He shows customers the best way to use Google products to find the information and services they’re searching for, while working with businesses to demonstrate how a search engine can help them find interested customers.
Before Google, Cobley was the vice president of branding and marketing for Capital One and the marketing director of Ask Jeeves. He’s worked in both the UK and US, but always in marketing although his first degree from Oxford is in physics.
"The fantastic thing about the web is that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can tap into a global market from day one."
Dan Cobley
So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing.
So quick show of hands -- who studied some marketing at university? Who studied some physics at university? Ooh, pretty good. And at school? Okay, lots of you. So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories.
So, physics and marketing: We'll start with something very simple, Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration." This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. (Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle, a larger mass, it requires more force to change it's direction. It's the same with brands. The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P&G keep brands separate, like Oreo and Pringle and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures.
Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Getting a little more technical now. So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state, i.e., the position, and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. So to explain that -- if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. The act of observation changes it. It's the same in marketing. So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost buy lots of junk food. And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched-for category. So luckily, the science -- no, sorry -- the marketing is getting easier. Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. So the physics is, you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. The marketing is -- the message for marketing is -- that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do.
So next, the scientific method, an axiom of physics, of all science -- says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation. You can only disprove it. What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. So if we take an example -- Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. And there are parallels for marketing. You can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. Take BP. They spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. Think about Toyota. It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. Well, you know the story. (Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it. Any hypothesis is shaky. And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand.
And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. The same is true of marketing. If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. But where we are today, things have changed. You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. But then you lose control of it. With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. Your brand starts being dispersed. (Laughter) It gets more chaotic. (Laughter) It's out of your control. (Laughter) I actually saw him speak. He did a good job. But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. This distribution of energy is a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.
So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. Thank you.
(Applause)
Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.
Dan Cobley is a marketing director at Google, where he connects customers and businesses, helping both navigate digital space to find what they need.
Why you should listen to him: In 2006, Dan Cobley was appointed director of marketing at Google for central and northern Europe. He shows customers the best way to use Google products to find the information and services they’re searching for, while working with businesses to demonstrate how a search engine can help them find interested customers.
Before Google, Cobley was the vice president of branding and marketing for Capital One and the marketing director of Ask Jeeves. He’s worked in both the UK and US, but always in marketing although his first degree from Oxford is in physics.
"The fantastic thing about the web is that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can tap into a global market from day one."
Dan Cobley
So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing.
So quick show of hands -- who studied some marketing at university? Who studied some physics at university? Ooh, pretty good. And at school? Okay, lots of you. So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories.
So, physics and marketing: We'll start with something very simple, Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration." This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. (Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle, a larger mass, it requires more force to change it's direction. It's the same with brands. The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P&G keep brands separate, like Oreo and Pringle and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures.
Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Getting a little more technical now. So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state, i.e., the position, and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. So to explain that -- if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. The act of observation changes it. It's the same in marketing. So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost buy lots of junk food. And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched-for category. So luckily, the science -- no, sorry -- the marketing is getting easier. Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. So the physics is, you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. The marketing is -- the message for marketing is -- that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do.
So next, the scientific method, an axiom of physics, of all science -- says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation. You can only disprove it. What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. So if we take an example -- Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. And there are parallels for marketing. You can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. Take BP. They spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. Think about Toyota. It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. Well, you know the story. (Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it. Any hypothesis is shaky. And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand.
And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. The same is true of marketing. If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. But where we are today, things have changed. You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. But then you lose control of it. With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. Your brand starts being dispersed. (Laughter) It gets more chaotic. (Laughter) It's out of your control. (Laughter) I actually saw him speak. He did a good job. But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. This distribution of energy is a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.
So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. Thank you.
(Applause)
TALKS Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index
About this talk
Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn't have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.
Nic Marks gathers evidence about what makes us happy, and uses it to promote policy that puts the well-being of people and the planet first. He's the founder of the Centre for Well-Being at the UK think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF).
Why you should listen to him:
Nic Marks thinks quality of life is measurable, and that true contentment comes not from the accumulation of material wealth but from our connections with others, engagement with the world, and a sense of autonomy. This isn't just theory: a pioneer in the field of well-being research, Marks creates statistical methods to measure happiness, analyzing and interpreting the evidence so that it can be applied to such policy fields as education, sustainable development, healthcare, and economics.
The founder of the Centre for Well-Being, an independent think tank at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in London, Marks is particularly keen to promote a balance between sustainable development and quality of life. To investigate this, he devised the Happy Planet Index, a global index of human well-being and environmental impact. The results made headlines: People in the world's wealthiest countries, who consume the most of the planet's resources, don't come out on top in terms of well-being. Which raises the question: What purpose does unfettered economic growth serve?
To measure (and possibly improve) your own HPI, visit two useful sites from NEF: 5 Ways to Well-Being and Well-Being at Work.
"Marks urged politicians to pay more attention to life satisfaction over GDP. 'The big message of [the HPI] rankings is that we have to produce a system that makes people happier without costing the Earth,' he said."
Louise Gray, Telegraph
Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. He said, "I have a dream." And I have a dream. I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. I think this film is one one of the hardest watches of modern times, "The Road." It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future.
For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. We have focused on the worst-case scenario. We have focused on the problems. And we have not thought enough about the solutions. We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened -- think of a deer. A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is.
What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And on of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, and economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce.
But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." How crazy is that, that our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being.
And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. This is from a global survey. It's asking people, what do they want. And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. Okay, they think money is slightly important. It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. We all need to love and be loved in life. It's not nearly as important as health. we want to be healthy and live a full life. These seem to be natural human aspirations. Why are statisticians not measuring that? Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? And really, this is what I've done with my adult life -- is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits.
And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. We all have one planet. We all have to share it. It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. And economics is very interested in scarcity. When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. It is an efficiency measure. And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph.
Running horizontally along the graph, is "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. More is bad. Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "happy life years." It's about the well-being of nations. It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being -- typically, sub-Saharan Africa. In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world.
But now for the good news. There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. This is an aspirational graph. We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. They're Latin American. The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. Maybe some of you have. Costa Rica. Costa Rica -- average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. That is longer than in the USA. They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet -- than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. They are the happiest place. They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world -- a quarter of the resources.
What's going on there? What's happening in Costa Rica? We can look at some of the data. 99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. They abolished the army in 1949 -- 1949. And they invested in social programs -- health and education. They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. They have the social connectedness. (Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly -- and the thing we might have to think about -- is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. It might be Latin American. And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. That's what we need to do. And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. And then we're starting to create a happy planet. That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. And this is a trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. And so in strict happy planet methodology, we've become less sufficient at turning out ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. It's actually not very long away. It's half a human lifetime away. A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. This is not the very distant future. This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. That is changing our business. That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. I think we want it to carry on. I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. They want to hold on to what they've got. And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more.
Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. Human beings are very motivated by the "now." You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. What would that look like for society? Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio -- I don't even know which way the dollar pound should go to be good news. And why do I hear that? Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? That's how you create a collective goal. You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. At a personal level, we need these nudges too. Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do -- never my best thing. What are these for happiness? What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier?
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program -- lots and lots of people -- involved lots of experts -- everything evidence based -- a huge tome. But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from.
And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? Keep building them. The second one is be active. The fastest way out of a bad mood, step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. Being active is great for our positive mood. The third one is take notice. How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, both strong for our well being. The fourth is keep learning and keep is important -- learning throughout the whole life course. Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. It's more curiosity. It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. Keep learning. And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. We feel good if we give. You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves.
And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. They don't have any carbon content. They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. He said, "I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land." And he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. And not only that, we need to create a great transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things.
Human beings want to be happy. Pave them with the five ways. And we need to have sign posts gathering people together and pointing to them -- something like the Happy Planet Index. And then I believe that we can all create a world we'll want, where happiness does not cost the earth.
(Applause)
Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn't have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.
Nic Marks gathers evidence about what makes us happy, and uses it to promote policy that puts the well-being of people and the planet first. He's the founder of the Centre for Well-Being at the UK think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF).
Why you should listen to him:
Nic Marks thinks quality of life is measurable, and that true contentment comes not from the accumulation of material wealth but from our connections with others, engagement with the world, and a sense of autonomy. This isn't just theory: a pioneer in the field of well-being research, Marks creates statistical methods to measure happiness, analyzing and interpreting the evidence so that it can be applied to such policy fields as education, sustainable development, healthcare, and economics.
The founder of the Centre for Well-Being, an independent think tank at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in London, Marks is particularly keen to promote a balance between sustainable development and quality of life. To investigate this, he devised the Happy Planet Index, a global index of human well-being and environmental impact. The results made headlines: People in the world's wealthiest countries, who consume the most of the planet's resources, don't come out on top in terms of well-being. Which raises the question: What purpose does unfettered economic growth serve?
To measure (and possibly improve) your own HPI, visit two useful sites from NEF: 5 Ways to Well-Being and Well-Being at Work.
"Marks urged politicians to pay more attention to life satisfaction over GDP. 'The big message of [the HPI] rankings is that we have to produce a system that makes people happier without costing the Earth,' he said."
Louise Gray, Telegraph
Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. He said, "I have a dream." And I have a dream. I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. I think this film is one one of the hardest watches of modern times, "The Road." It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future.
For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. We have focused on the worst-case scenario. We have focused on the problems. And we have not thought enough about the solutions. We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened -- think of a deer. A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is.
What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And on of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, and economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce.
But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." How crazy is that, that our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being.
And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. This is from a global survey. It's asking people, what do they want. And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. Okay, they think money is slightly important. It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. We all need to love and be loved in life. It's not nearly as important as health. we want to be healthy and live a full life. These seem to be natural human aspirations. Why are statisticians not measuring that? Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? And really, this is what I've done with my adult life -- is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits.
And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. We all have one planet. We all have to share it. It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. And economics is very interested in scarcity. When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. It is an efficiency measure. And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph.
Running horizontally along the graph, is "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. More is bad. Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "happy life years." It's about the well-being of nations. It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being -- typically, sub-Saharan Africa. In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world.
But now for the good news. There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. This is an aspirational graph. We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. They're Latin American. The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. Maybe some of you have. Costa Rica. Costa Rica -- average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. That is longer than in the USA. They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet -- than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. They are the happiest place. They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world -- a quarter of the resources.
What's going on there? What's happening in Costa Rica? We can look at some of the data. 99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. They abolished the army in 1949 -- 1949. And they invested in social programs -- health and education. They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. They have the social connectedness. (Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly -- and the thing we might have to think about -- is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. It might be Latin American. And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. That's what we need to do. And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. And then we're starting to create a happy planet. That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. And this is a trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. And so in strict happy planet methodology, we've become less sufficient at turning out ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. It's actually not very long away. It's half a human lifetime away. A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. This is not the very distant future. This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. That is changing our business. That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. I think we want it to carry on. I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. They want to hold on to what they've got. And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more.
Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. Human beings are very motivated by the "now." You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. What would that look like for society? Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio -- I don't even know which way the dollar pound should go to be good news. And why do I hear that? Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? That's how you create a collective goal. You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. At a personal level, we need these nudges too. Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do -- never my best thing. What are these for happiness? What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier?
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program -- lots and lots of people -- involved lots of experts -- everything evidence based -- a huge tome. But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from.
And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? Keep building them. The second one is be active. The fastest way out of a bad mood, step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. Being active is great for our positive mood. The third one is take notice. How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, both strong for our well being. The fourth is keep learning and keep is important -- learning throughout the whole life course. Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. It's more curiosity. It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. Keep learning. And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. We feel good if we give. You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves.
And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. They don't have any carbon content. They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. He said, "I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land." And he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. And not only that, we need to create a great transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things.
Human beings want to be happy. Pave them with the five ways. And we need to have sign posts gathering people together and pointing to them -- something like the Happy Planet Index. And then I believe that we can all create a world we'll want, where happiness does not cost the earth.
(Applause)
TALKS Jim Toomey: Learning from Sherman the shark
About this talk
Cartoonist Jim Toomey created the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, a wry look at underwater life starring Sherman the talking shark. As he sketches some of his favorite sea creatures live onstage, Toomey shares his love of the ocean and the stories it can tell.
For the past 13 years, Jim Toomey has been writing and drawing the daily comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, about a daffy family of ocean dwellers.
Why you should listen to him:
For the past 13 years Jim Toomey has been creating the daily comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, which appears in over 150 newspapers in North America. Toomey's latest book of comics (his fifteenth) is Discover Your Inner Hermit Crab, and the strip has recently become a musical.
Sherman's Lagoon is a combination of Toomey’s two lifelong passions: drawing and the sea. He’s been engaged in the former activity since he could hold a crayon, and his love affair with the sea dates back to his early childhood. The inspiration for the comic strip can be traced back to a family vacation in the Bahamas where he saw a real shark swimming in a remote lagoon. Toomey became a certified diver at the age of 12, and, as an adult, has logged dives all over the world, including Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America, and extensively in the kelp forests of California
Cartoons are basically short stories. I tried to find one that didn't have a whole lot of words. Not all of them have happy endings. So how did I get started cartooning? I doodled a lot as a kid, and if you spend enough time doodling, sooner or later, something happens: all your career options run out. So you have to make a living cartooning.
Actually, I fell in love with the ocean when I was a little boy, when I was about eight or nine. And I was particularly fascinated with sharks. This is some of my early work. Eventually, my mom took the red crayon away, so it was [unclear]. But I'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently, and it's become the foundation of my work because, I feel like, if in a day, I can see the ocean differently, then I can evoke that same kind of change in others, especially kids. Before that day, this is how I saw the ocean. It's just a big blue surface. And this is how we've seen the ocean since the beginning of time. It's a mystery. There's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean, mostly negative. And that prompted people to make maps like this, with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land, but when you get to the waters edge, the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint. And this is the way I saw the ocean at school -- as if to say, "All geography and science lessons stop at water's edge. This part's not going to be on the test."
But that day I flew low over the islands -- it was a family trip to the Caribbean, and I flew in a small plane low over the islands. This is what I saw. I saw hills and valleys. I saw forests and meadows. I saw grottoes and secret gardens and places I'd love to hide as a kid, if I could only breathe underwater. And best of all, I saw the animals. I saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane I was flying in. And I flew over a lagoon with a shark in it, and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born.
So from that day on, I was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land, but my head was down there, underwater. Up until that day, these were the animals that were most common in my life. These were the ones I'd like to draw -- all variations of four legs and fur. But when you got to the ocean, my imagination was no competition for nature. Every time I'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board, I'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier. And the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie.
Whenever I talk to kids, I always like to tell them, the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive. It's not a dinosaur; it's a whale, animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean. Speaking of dinosaurs, sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago. So if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like, that's what a dinosaur looks like. So you have living dinosaurs and space aliens, animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions. It's just incredible; no Hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that. Or this fangtooth. The particles in the water make it look like it's floating in outer space. Could you image if we looked through the Hubble Telescope and we saw that? It would start a whole new space race. But instead, we stick a camera in the deep ocean, and we see a fish, and it doesn't capture our imagination as a society. We say to ourselves, "Maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something."
So, what I'd like to do now is try a little drawing. So, I'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here. I love to draw the deep sea fish, because they are so ugly, but beautiful in their own way. Maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here -- give him a headlight, maybe a brake light, turn signals. But it's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters, their shapes and sizes. So some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book. For instance, take these sea turtles. They kind of have a sixth sense like Superman's x-ray vision. They can sense the magnetic fields of the earth. And they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean. I kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with. Or take this sea cucumber. It's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all. He's like an underwater Spiderman. He shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy. Of course, sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears, which, in my opinion, makes them much more interesting a superhero. (Laughter) He can't spin a web anytime; he's got to pull his pants down first.
(Laughter)
Or the blowfish. The blowfish is like the Incredible Hulk. It can change its body into a big, intimidating fish in a matter of seconds. I'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated. And then I'm going to attempt onscreen animation here. Let's see. Try and inflate it. (Laughter) "You talkin' to me?" See, he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating. Or take this swordfish. Could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose? Do you think he wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says, "Somebody's getting stabbed today." Or this lionfish for instance. Imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs. It's not something you want to put on your Facebook page, right?
My characters are -- my lead character's a shark named Sherman. He's a great white shark. And I kind of broke the mold with Sherman. I didn't want to go with this ruthless predator image. He's kind of just out there making a living. He's sort of a Homer Simpson with fins. And then his sidekick is a sea turtle, as I mentioned before, named Filmore. He uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans, looking for a mate. And he does manage to find them, but great navigation skills, lousy pick-up lines. He never seems to settle on any particular girl. I have a hermit crab named Hawthorne, who doesn't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab, so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark. And then I'll introduce you to one more character, this guy, Ernest, who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body.
So with characters, you can make stories. Sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens. So, imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom. (Laughter) Or, sometimes I take them to places that people have never heard of because they're underwater. For instance, I took them skiing in the Mid-Atlantic Range, which is this range of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic. I've taken them to the Sea of Japan, where they met giant jellyfish. I've taken them camping in the kelp forests of California.
This next one here, I did a story on the census of marine life. And that was a lot of fun because, as most of you know, it's a real project we've heard about. But it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters. So we start off the story with Ernest, who volunteers as a census taker. He goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish. Then he meets the yeti crab, the famous vampire squid -- elusive, hard to find -- and the Dumbo octopus, which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really didn't have to change a thing when I drew it.
I did another story on marine debris. I was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business, and they -- I asked them, "So what's one issue you would like everyone to know more about?" And they said -- this one friend of mine said, "I've got one word for you: plastic." And I told him, "Well, I need something a little sexier than that. Plastic just is not going to do it." We sort of worked things out. He wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride, which doesn't really work in voice balloons very well. I couldn't fit them in. So what I did was I made an adventure strip.
Basically, this bottle travels a long way. What I'm trying to tell readers is that plastic doesn't really go away; it just continues to wash downstream. And a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean, which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it, especially if they can't stand each other, like these two. So, I sent them to Boise, Idaho, where they dropped a plastic bottle into the Boise sewer system. And it ended up in the Boise River and then on to the Columbia River and then to the mouth of the Columbia and to the Pacific Ocean and then on to this place called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- which is this giant Pacific gyre in the North Pacific, where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around -- and then back onto the lagoon. So that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along. So a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway, but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one.
The third storyline I did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult. It was on shark finning, and I felt really strongly about this issue. And I felt like, since my main character was a shark, the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this. Now, finning is the act of taking a shark, cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water. It's cruel, it's wasteful. There's nothing funny or entertaining about it, but I really wanted to take this issue on. I had to kill my main character, who is a shark.
We start with Sherman in a Chinese restaurant, who gets a fortune that he's about to get caught by a trawler, which he does. And then he dies. He gets finned, and then he gets thrown overboard. Ostensibly, he's dead now. And so I killed a character that's been in the newspaper for 15 years. So I got a lot of reader feedback on that one. Meanwhile, the other characters are talking about shark fin soup. I do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue. Sherman's up in shark heaven. This is what I love about comic strips, you know. You really don't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because, if you start with a talking shark, readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door. You can kind of do anything. It becomes a near-death experience for Sherman. Meanwhile, Ernest finds his fins on the internet. There was a real website based in China that actually sold shark fins, so I kind of exposed that. And he clicks the "buy now" button. And voila, next-day air, they show up, and they surgically reattach them. I ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our National Marine Fishery Service, to force other countries to have a stronger stance with shark management.
(Applause)
Thanks. I'd like to end with a little metaphor here. I've been trying to think of a metaphor to represent Mission Blue, and this is what I came up with. Imagine you're in an enormous room, and it's as dark as a cave. And you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can't see anything. You've been given one tool, a hammer. So you wander around in the darkness, and you bump into something, and it feels like it's made of stone. It's big, it's heavy. You can't carry it away, so you bang it with your hammer, and you break off a piece. And you take the piece out into the daylight. And you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster. So you say to yourself, "Well, that's worth something." So you go back into the room, and you break this think to pieces, and you haul it away. And you find other things, and you break that up, and you haul those away. And you're getting all kinds of cool stuff. And you hear other people doing the same thing. So you get this sense of urgency, like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible. And then some yells, "Stop!" And they turn up the lights. And you realize where you are; you're in the Louvre. And you've taken all this complexity and beauty, and you've turned it into a cheap commodity.
And that's what we're doing with the ocean. And part of what Mission Blue is about is yelling, "Stop!" so that each of us -- explorer, scientist, cartoonist, singer, chef -- can turn up the lights in their own way. And that's what I hope my comic strip does in a small way. That's why I like what I do.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)
Cartoonist Jim Toomey created the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, a wry look at underwater life starring Sherman the talking shark. As he sketches some of his favorite sea creatures live onstage, Toomey shares his love of the ocean and the stories it can tell.
For the past 13 years, Jim Toomey has been writing and drawing the daily comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, about a daffy family of ocean dwellers.
Why you should listen to him:
For the past 13 years Jim Toomey has been creating the daily comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, which appears in over 150 newspapers in North America. Toomey's latest book of comics (his fifteenth) is Discover Your Inner Hermit Crab, and the strip has recently become a musical.
Sherman's Lagoon is a combination of Toomey’s two lifelong passions: drawing and the sea. He’s been engaged in the former activity since he could hold a crayon, and his love affair with the sea dates back to his early childhood. The inspiration for the comic strip can be traced back to a family vacation in the Bahamas where he saw a real shark swimming in a remote lagoon. Toomey became a certified diver at the age of 12, and, as an adult, has logged dives all over the world, including Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America, and extensively in the kelp forests of California
Cartoons are basically short stories. I tried to find one that didn't have a whole lot of words. Not all of them have happy endings. So how did I get started cartooning? I doodled a lot as a kid, and if you spend enough time doodling, sooner or later, something happens: all your career options run out. So you have to make a living cartooning.
Actually, I fell in love with the ocean when I was a little boy, when I was about eight or nine. And I was particularly fascinated with sharks. This is some of my early work. Eventually, my mom took the red crayon away, so it was [unclear]. But I'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently, and it's become the foundation of my work because, I feel like, if in a day, I can see the ocean differently, then I can evoke that same kind of change in others, especially kids. Before that day, this is how I saw the ocean. It's just a big blue surface. And this is how we've seen the ocean since the beginning of time. It's a mystery. There's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean, mostly negative. And that prompted people to make maps like this, with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land, but when you get to the waters edge, the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint. And this is the way I saw the ocean at school -- as if to say, "All geography and science lessons stop at water's edge. This part's not going to be on the test."
But that day I flew low over the islands -- it was a family trip to the Caribbean, and I flew in a small plane low over the islands. This is what I saw. I saw hills and valleys. I saw forests and meadows. I saw grottoes and secret gardens and places I'd love to hide as a kid, if I could only breathe underwater. And best of all, I saw the animals. I saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane I was flying in. And I flew over a lagoon with a shark in it, and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born.
So from that day on, I was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land, but my head was down there, underwater. Up until that day, these were the animals that were most common in my life. These were the ones I'd like to draw -- all variations of four legs and fur. But when you got to the ocean, my imagination was no competition for nature. Every time I'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board, I'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier. And the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie.
Whenever I talk to kids, I always like to tell them, the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive. It's not a dinosaur; it's a whale, animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean. Speaking of dinosaurs, sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago. So if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like, that's what a dinosaur looks like. So you have living dinosaurs and space aliens, animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions. It's just incredible; no Hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that. Or this fangtooth. The particles in the water make it look like it's floating in outer space. Could you image if we looked through the Hubble Telescope and we saw that? It would start a whole new space race. But instead, we stick a camera in the deep ocean, and we see a fish, and it doesn't capture our imagination as a society. We say to ourselves, "Maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something."
So, what I'd like to do now is try a little drawing. So, I'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here. I love to draw the deep sea fish, because they are so ugly, but beautiful in their own way. Maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here -- give him a headlight, maybe a brake light, turn signals. But it's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters, their shapes and sizes. So some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book. For instance, take these sea turtles. They kind of have a sixth sense like Superman's x-ray vision. They can sense the magnetic fields of the earth. And they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean. I kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with. Or take this sea cucumber. It's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all. He's like an underwater Spiderman. He shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy. Of course, sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears, which, in my opinion, makes them much more interesting a superhero. (Laughter) He can't spin a web anytime; he's got to pull his pants down first.
(Laughter)
Or the blowfish. The blowfish is like the Incredible Hulk. It can change its body into a big, intimidating fish in a matter of seconds. I'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated. And then I'm going to attempt onscreen animation here. Let's see. Try and inflate it. (Laughter) "You talkin' to me?" See, he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating. Or take this swordfish. Could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose? Do you think he wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says, "Somebody's getting stabbed today." Or this lionfish for instance. Imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs. It's not something you want to put on your Facebook page, right?
My characters are -- my lead character's a shark named Sherman. He's a great white shark. And I kind of broke the mold with Sherman. I didn't want to go with this ruthless predator image. He's kind of just out there making a living. He's sort of a Homer Simpson with fins. And then his sidekick is a sea turtle, as I mentioned before, named Filmore. He uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans, looking for a mate. And he does manage to find them, but great navigation skills, lousy pick-up lines. He never seems to settle on any particular girl. I have a hermit crab named Hawthorne, who doesn't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab, so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark. And then I'll introduce you to one more character, this guy, Ernest, who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body.
So with characters, you can make stories. Sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens. So, imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom. (Laughter) Or, sometimes I take them to places that people have never heard of because they're underwater. For instance, I took them skiing in the Mid-Atlantic Range, which is this range of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic. I've taken them to the Sea of Japan, where they met giant jellyfish. I've taken them camping in the kelp forests of California.
This next one here, I did a story on the census of marine life. And that was a lot of fun because, as most of you know, it's a real project we've heard about. But it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters. So we start off the story with Ernest, who volunteers as a census taker. He goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish. Then he meets the yeti crab, the famous vampire squid -- elusive, hard to find -- and the Dumbo octopus, which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really didn't have to change a thing when I drew it.
I did another story on marine debris. I was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business, and they -- I asked them, "So what's one issue you would like everyone to know more about?" And they said -- this one friend of mine said, "I've got one word for you: plastic." And I told him, "Well, I need something a little sexier than that. Plastic just is not going to do it." We sort of worked things out. He wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride, which doesn't really work in voice balloons very well. I couldn't fit them in. So what I did was I made an adventure strip.
Basically, this bottle travels a long way. What I'm trying to tell readers is that plastic doesn't really go away; it just continues to wash downstream. And a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean, which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it, especially if they can't stand each other, like these two. So, I sent them to Boise, Idaho, where they dropped a plastic bottle into the Boise sewer system. And it ended up in the Boise River and then on to the Columbia River and then to the mouth of the Columbia and to the Pacific Ocean and then on to this place called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- which is this giant Pacific gyre in the North Pacific, where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around -- and then back onto the lagoon. So that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along. So a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway, but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one.
The third storyline I did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult. It was on shark finning, and I felt really strongly about this issue. And I felt like, since my main character was a shark, the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this. Now, finning is the act of taking a shark, cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water. It's cruel, it's wasteful. There's nothing funny or entertaining about it, but I really wanted to take this issue on. I had to kill my main character, who is a shark.
We start with Sherman in a Chinese restaurant, who gets a fortune that he's about to get caught by a trawler, which he does. And then he dies. He gets finned, and then he gets thrown overboard. Ostensibly, he's dead now. And so I killed a character that's been in the newspaper for 15 years. So I got a lot of reader feedback on that one. Meanwhile, the other characters are talking about shark fin soup. I do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue. Sherman's up in shark heaven. This is what I love about comic strips, you know. You really don't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because, if you start with a talking shark, readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door. You can kind of do anything. It becomes a near-death experience for Sherman. Meanwhile, Ernest finds his fins on the internet. There was a real website based in China that actually sold shark fins, so I kind of exposed that. And he clicks the "buy now" button. And voila, next-day air, they show up, and they surgically reattach them. I ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our National Marine Fishery Service, to force other countries to have a stronger stance with shark management.
(Applause)
Thanks. I'd like to end with a little metaphor here. I've been trying to think of a metaphor to represent Mission Blue, and this is what I came up with. Imagine you're in an enormous room, and it's as dark as a cave. And you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can't see anything. You've been given one tool, a hammer. So you wander around in the darkness, and you bump into something, and it feels like it's made of stone. It's big, it's heavy. You can't carry it away, so you bang it with your hammer, and you break off a piece. And you take the piece out into the daylight. And you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster. So you say to yourself, "Well, that's worth something." So you go back into the room, and you break this think to pieces, and you haul it away. And you find other things, and you break that up, and you haul those away. And you're getting all kinds of cool stuff. And you hear other people doing the same thing. So you get this sense of urgency, like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible. And then some yells, "Stop!" And they turn up the lights. And you realize where you are; you're in the Louvre. And you've taken all this complexity and beauty, and you've turned it into a cheap commodity.
And that's what we're doing with the ocean. And part of what Mission Blue is about is yelling, "Stop!" so that each of us -- explorer, scientist, cartoonist, singer, chef -- can turn up the lights in their own way. And that's what I hope my comic strip does in a small way. That's why I like what I do.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)
Johan Rockstrom: Let the environment guide our development
Johan Rockstrom: Let the environment guide our development
About this talk
Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.
If Earth is a self-regulating system, it's clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Johan Rockstrom has led a team of scientists to define the nine Earth systems that need to be kept within bounds for Earth to keep itself in balance.
Why you should listen to him:
Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems -- and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix -- but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.
Rockstrom teaches natural resource management at Stockholm University, and is the Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He's a leading voice on global water, studying strategies to build resilience in water-scarce regions of the world. Fokus magazine named him "Swede of the Year" in 2009 for his work on bridging the science of climate change to policy and society.
"Rockstrom has managed in an easy, yet always scientifically based way, to convey our dependence of the planet's resources, the risk of transgressing planetary boundaries and what changes are needed in order to allow humanity to continue to develop."
Anna Ritter, Fokus magazine
About this talk
Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.
If Earth is a self-regulating system, it's clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Johan Rockstrom has led a team of scientists to define the nine Earth systems that need to be kept within bounds for Earth to keep itself in balance.
Why you should listen to him:
Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems -- and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix -- but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.
Rockstrom teaches natural resource management at Stockholm University, and is the Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He's a leading voice on global water, studying strategies to build resilience in water-scarce regions of the world. Fokus magazine named him "Swede of the Year" in 2009 for his work on bridging the science of climate change to policy and society.
"Rockstrom has managed in an easy, yet always scientifically based way, to convey our dependence of the planet's resources, the risk of transgressing planetary boundaries and what changes are needed in order to allow humanity to continue to develop."
Anna Ritter, Fokus magazine
Real time monitoring of your energy consumption
Would you conserve energy if you could monitor your consumption by the hour? Lucid Design Group has developed new software that provides users with instant feedback on how much energy they're using. SmartPlanet visits the start-up to see their dashboard up close.
The Future of... Packaging
Packing material is no friend to the environment. Energy intensive to produce, it often ends up in landfill after a single use. SmartPlanet correspondent Sumi Das looks at some greener compostable options for protecting your packages.
Is the cure for cancer inside milk?
Bruce German, a professor at UC Davis is researching the properties of milk and how it functions when ingested by growing infants. In his lab, scientists disassemble milk from mothers around the world, probing every molecule, then study the exact structures to come up with an understanding of how milk fights disease and improves health.
Treating scoliosis in kids with magnets
Stopping curvature of the spine in kids usually requires a series of painful operations to implant rods and screws to adjust the spine. Even then, the results are often less than perfect. However, a medical team at UCSF has developed a technique using magnets that promises to do away with so many surgeries.
Fighting deadly parasitic infections with a UV flashlight
Using fluorescent dyes and a simple ultraviolet flashlight, Ellen Beaulieu, a medicinal chemist at SRI International has created a test to detect parasitic infections in human beings. The new test will make it easier to stop the spread of diseases, such as Chagas, Leshmaniasis and African Sleeping Sickness by providing a low cost, low technology diagnostic for medical personnel in developing countries.
Reinventing the clay building brick
CalStar Products CEO Tom Pounds is laying the foundation for 'green' building materials one brick at a time. His company has developed a new type of building brick that uses neither clay or cement during manufacturing. Instead they've figured out a more energy efficient process by using fly ash, a material that's left over after burning coal in the nation's big power plants.
LEED pioneer shows off his sustainable home
Founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, David Gottfried helped dream up rating system that eventually became LEED-otherwise known as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification system. SmartPlanet visits the visionary's LEED platinum house in Oakland, California for a tour of its sustainable features.
Got foam? In search of the perfect beer
Do you prefer beer with or without foam? Charlie Bamforth the professor of brewing sciences at UC Davis says people want foam, so he's applying scientific principles to produce the perfect beer. SmartPlanet visits his lab and looks at an instrument that measures the foam stability of beer.
The life of a designer: From Apple to surfboards to digital encyclopedias
From his early work, creating the eMate at Apple, to his latest project, developing a digital encyclopedia based on Wikipedia, Thomas Meyerhoffer has been at the forefront of innovative computer design. Smart Planet takes a closer look at his design philosophy and his current work, reinventing the design of surfboards.
NASA | Plant Productivity in a Warming World
The past decade is the warmest on record since instrumental measurements began in the 1880s. Previous research suggested that in the '80s and '90s, warmer global temperatures and higher levels of precipitation -- factors associated with climate change - were generally good for plant productivity. An updated analysis published this week in Science indicates that as temperatures have continued to rise, the benefits to plants are now overwhelmed by longer and more frequent droughts. High-resolution data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, indicate a net decrease in NPP from 2000-2009, as compared to the previous two decades.
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NASA | Katrina Retrospective: 5 Years After the Storm
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. Five years later, NASA revisits the storm with a short video that shows Katrina as captured by satellites. Before and during the hurricane's landfall, NASA provided data gathered from a series of Earth observing satellites to help predict Katrina's path and intensity. In its aftermath, NASA satellites also helped identify areas hardest hit.
This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010600/a010633/index.html
Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f...
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A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko
A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko
A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko
In the world of Google and Bing, why do we need yet another search engine? Well, Blekko's founder, Rich Skrenta, shows me a ton of things we can do with Blekko that we can't do with Google, particularly around social search. I've been using it for the past week and find it very compelling.
blekko's management team is an experienced group that has founded multiple successful startups and held leadership positions at major tech companies including Google, Netscape, and AOL.
Michael Arrington interviews the Blekko founders
BlipSnips
August 30th, 2010 By Greg Keller
We were honored to have been interviewed by Robert “the Scobleizer” Scoble, one of the industry’s most respected and read tech journalists. He is a massive fan of video (e.g., his interviews are all conducted with his trusty Canon DSLR) and he is most notably the gut who ‘gets the scoop’ before company’s hit it big. Robert puts in the long hours traveling and reaching out to technology startups and is a fan of the entrepreneur. We like that.
And so, here is the BlipSnipped version of our 14min interview! Enjoy…
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wisestamp: making email signatures more useful
Email signatures. You wouldn't think you could innovate on those, but Wisestamp found a way. They make your email signature "live" with hooks into your social networking tools. Check it out!
Wisestamp: making email signatures more useful
A new kind of socially-biased search engine:
A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko In the world of Google and Bing, why do we need yet another search engine? Well, Blekko's founder, Rich Skrenta, shows me a ton of things we can do...
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Old School Steve Jobs On Changing The World
It looks like that Xerox IP isn’t the only thing Steve Jobs appropriated for Apple. Here he is in all his chubby 1997 glory, introducing the TBWA/Chiat Day produced “Think Different” campaign with an unattributed quote from poet Jack Kerouac, “People who think they are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones who actually do.”
What’s most jarring about this video is the chasm between what Jobs holds as Apple’s core values in 1997 and those of the patent hungry-monopoly that is the Apple of today. As one commenter pointed out:
“Think different… As long as we approve your application for download on the app store.”
Or, “Unless you’re Adobe.“
Connecting city governments and Web 2.0 talent.
Connecting city governments and Web 2.0 talent. Learn More »
Code for America was founded to help the brightest minds of the Web 2.0 generation transform city governments. Cities are under greater pressure than ever, struggling with budget cuts and outdated technology. What if, instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities could leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory?
We believe there is a wealth of talent in the web industry eager to contribute to the rebuilding of America. Code for America gives them the means.
City governments, learn more.
Designers & developers, learn more.
http://twit.tv/specials
Code for America was founded to help the brightest minds of the Web 2.0 generation transform city governments. Cities are under greater pressure than ever, struggling with budget cuts and outdated technology. What if, instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities could leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory?
We believe there is a wealth of talent in the web industry eager to contribute to the rebuilding of America. Code for America gives them the means.
City governments, learn more.
Designers & developers, learn more.
http://twit.tv/specials
The crisis will deepen, we need real news
October 4, 2009
The crisis will deepen, we need real news
TRNN REPLAY: Paul Jay of The Real News speaks at the Von Krahl Academy, Estonia in November 2008
Transcript
Courtesy: vonkrahl.ee
Tallinn, Estonia
November 2008
TEXT ON SCREEN: "Free media" lecture by Paul Jay, The Real News Senior Editor, at the Von Krahl Academy
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: The Real News Network, the fundamental idea of it is to change the economics of journalism. What we believe is that for-profit journalism leads to compromised journalism. It may not always have been the case, but it certainly is now, and it's the worst on television. When you deal with the commercial pressures in what you would call "normal" times, having to sell ads and worry about ratings and all of this, it creates a gravitation in television news to have to do something that would simply attract audiences at the cheapest cost. These are normal times, and that leads to closing of foreign bureaus, it leads to news that's very superficial, and also news that's safe, stays on the official page, within the official narrative, because it's best for your commercial interest. That's the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is at times of crisis. At times of crisis, it's not a commercial imperative, at least not a narrow one, that kicks in; it's a political imperative. And you can see it in many countries, but you saw it in the most exaggerated way in the United States in the leadup to the Iraq war. When Colin Powell went to the United Nations, any good journalism would've been able to say, on the day Colin Powell told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a good journalist would have been able to debunk that on that day. In fact, Scott Ritter, who was the American nominee to the United Nations inspection team in Iraq, he'd left the inspection team about 10 months earlier, but he spoke in Tokyo on the very day that Powell spoke to the United Nations, and Ritter said to a meeting of the Foreign Press Association of Japan that everything Powell had said was a lie, and it turned out Ritter was right. That speech of Ritters', that was covered by AP on video and in their text wire services. Every news organization in the world got Ritter's speech, and nobody used it, and everybody simply let Powell get away with what helped lead to an illegal war. So the idea of The Real News is, through the Internet, through thousands of people around the world contributing small amounts of money, we can create the financial base to create a news organization that can try to describe the world as it is. We think good journalism first starts with accepting that you can't know any absolute truth. And when we say "The Real News," we don't mean we know some absolute truth; what we mean is that there is a real world out there, and we all have direct experience with it, and we want to cut past all the propaganda and the spin that describes that world through news, because we're now entering a period of human history which is certainly one of the more dangerous crossroads we've ever been in, and perhaps as never before we need to know what the reality is. We're now entering a period of a general crisis of the world capitalist system. It's the big one, according to just about every economist you could talk to. We've been riding bubble to bubble to bubble the last 30, 40 years, and the big bubble is bursting. And you add to that the climate-change crisis. And then, out of this, the geopolitical tension that already existed is going to be exaggerated many, many times. Just start with a country like Pakistan. So we need to know the reality, because I think it's very clear that the traditional political process in virtually every country, with some exceptions, maybe, in Latin America, is paralyzed. No fundamental solutions are going to come from any of the traditional political parties or traditional political process. So our objective is uncompromising journalism. And what that means is to follow—we believe in facts. We believe we will never know all the facts. And we'll follow the facts as best we can wherever they lead. And we'll question assumptions. And to do that, you need independent economics.
TEXT ON SCREEN: What started The Real News?
JAY: I'll tell you how this came to pass, how I got here. I'm actually a filmmaker is what I really am. I'm known for—my last film was called Return to Kandahar, which I shot in Afghanistan. And about four or five years ago, the last thing on Earth I wanted to do was this. I'd been juggling many balls. I'd been making films and doing the debate show. And what I really wanted to do was make a fiction film. And I started writing a script called 2020, and it was about a documentary filmmaker in the year 2020 who stumbles on a political conspiracy. And I was coming to the end of doing the debate show after 10 years, and I wanted to focus just on making one thing, this movie. And I wrote most of the script, and I think it was pretty good. To write the script 2020, I had to imagine: what does the year 2020 look like? So I started trying to imagine 2020. Okay, so we're not going to be probably flying around in spaceships. But you start extending the current trends. Anyway, so I'm typing what all this is going to look—2020's going to look like, and it doesn't look good. The idea for this network, it started to percolate in my mind around that time. And the idea of having a platform where we could get the smartest people in the world to analyze what our reality is, and what are rational solutions to the problem facing us, and to create a medium that could have that kind of dialog with millions of people, which means television, whether it's on the Internet or TVs in the living room. So I was looking: well, what does 2020 look like if we have that kind of network, and if it's financed by ordinary people, and if it's independent, and if it has the guts and courage to stand up under political pressure? And guts and courage comes from economic independence. You know, we're not thinking that we have some super characteristics, those of us working on The Real News. We're ordinary people as you are. If you have economic independence, you can stand up under pressure. So I'm writing this script, and I'm saying, well, 2020 looks better with that kind of a network. And so then I came to this moment where I had to make a very big personal decision, which is: do I want to write about it, or do it? And I think we're all going to be facing this kind of moment right now that one can't understand theoretically what we're moving into, but life for most people, in Europe and North America at least, still kind of carries on sort of normally right now, and at some point you have to actually believe what you think is coming and start acting now, because if we wait, the longer we wait, the more difficult it's going to be to find the solutions. So at some point about four years ago, I just decided, okay (pardon the language), the shit is going to hit the fan. And it was also in the context—I was running this debate show on CBC. So the debate show, running this show, really opened my eyes about television news. I mean, I knew television news was crappy, but when we were doing the debate and had the ability to go into these questions day after day, then we could really see how bad TV news was. And there was a particular moment for me—or maybe two moments. One was 9/11. The morning of 9/11, we had been off for the summer, and we were planning to be back on the air on 9/17, and we had planned our show. And so we're sitting there in our offices getting ready, and the planes hit the buildings, and, you know, we watched in shock like everyone else. And then, two days later, President Bush went on television and called on the world to start a war on terror. And so I phoned CBC. I said, "We can't wait till the 17th to go on the air." And so they said, "Okay, you can go on on Friday," which I guess would have been—the 14th I think we went on. And the morning of the 14th, there were editorials in newspapers across North America and in much of the English-speaking world. I don't know what happened in the non-English speaking world. But the editorials went like this: if you try to connect the events of 9/11 to US foreign policy, if you talk about such a thing as root causes, and if you say this is anything other than a fight between good and evil, then you're blaming the victims and you're capitulating to terrorism. And there's a tremendous campaign to shut down the analysis of why 9/11 had taken place. So we had this weird relationship with CBC. We're an independent production. They didn't really have much control over what we were doing, which is partly why a couple of years later we were canceled. But we did the debate that night. We debated root causes, and we debated US foreign policy in the Middle East. We started a rational conversation about why 9/11 events had taken place. And then we continued our coverage through the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and we started—we were debating the real reasons, especially for the war in Iraq. And at the same time, American media was—I don't know. You must've seen it through CNN. I know CNN International's a little better than what the CNN that's seen in North America is. But the coverage of the leadup to the Iraq war was as bad as Pravda ever was. So this became a very big choice for me right around this point, which is: do I continue living life normally? Do I make my movie? And I was in a pretty good position 'cause I'd had a track record. My documentary films had always done very well. They'd been seen on BBCs and Artes in North America. I was one of the filmmakers that actually could raise money for films. And I had the TV show. So I had to decide: do I believe my own rhetoric or not? And so I decided life is short. And I guess the fundamental decision for me was that unless I find—if I'm not doing the thing I think is most meaningful, then I'm not happy. You know, when you reduce it to that, if I'm not doing the thing I think is the most significant with my life, then I find I feel empty inside.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Afghanistan
JAY: There's another moment, I guess, that was a very formative moment for me. I had this chance to go to Afghanistan in 2002 and make the film. And we're—you couldn't do it now, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated so badly. But we were able to go from Kabul to Kandahar, back to Kabul, up to Mazari Sharif. And on the road from Kabul to Kandahar we stopped at a roadside restaurant, and we met this young boy at the restaurant that—. We're sitting on the cushions and drinking tea. And so I asked how old he was, through the translator. And he just kind of smiled, sort of in an embarrassed way, and the translator told me he doesn't know 'cause he can't count. Schools in that whole part of Afghanistan had been closed for over 25 years. There was some drivers, truck drivers there, and one of them said, "Where are you from?" And I said, "Guess." And he said, "Germany." And he thought Germany because the Germans had started building a school near where we were. And I said, "No, I'm from Canada." I said, "Do you know where Canada is?" He said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Next to Germany." Well, he'd never seen an atlas; he's never seen a globe; he's never seen a map of the world. To put this in context, before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and then the civil war that followed after the Americans essentially abandoned Afghanistan, the cities of Afghanistan were relatively sophisticated. The woman I made the film with who grew up in Kabul, when she was a teenager in Kabul in the early '80s, if you wore a burqa to school, you were laughed out of the school. They thought you were, like, some country kid that had shown up. She worked at a radio station in Kabul. She wore blue jeans and Western clothing. It was a relatively sophisticated city. In Kandahar before the Civil War and before the invasions, some of the most renowned people in Kandahar were the women poets. So it struck me what had happened in terms of the geopolitical machinations of Russia and the United States had destroyed this place. And the Americans had done something very specific in Afghanistan, which they've done in many countries, which is they ally themselves with the most backward rural forces. So in Afghanistan they gave these tribal leaders money, Stinger missiles, and guns, and these backward tribes imposed themselves on the cities. And the issue of, like, democracy and all this simply wasn't an issue. The issue was creating a situation in Afghanistan that was conducive to what US government of the day thought was in their interest. But for me personally, it was another thing that just struck me, that much of the world is heading into medievalism as far as we move into the digital age, and this medievalism is going to come and bite us over and over again. And, of course, moving into this new financial crisis, the situation's going to get even more exaggerated. So we can talk more about these kinds of things if you want, but the short of it is is that the political process is paralyzed in most of our countries. I can't say anything about the politics of Estonia. I don't know. But in most of the countries, political process is paralyzed, and the media creates this false narrative of our lives which reinforces this paralysis. So what we're trying to do is break this monopoly on daily news, and through creating this Internet and TV platform, contribute to breaking the political paralysis.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Iran
JAY: Like, if you take Iran, the American intelligence agencies about eight, nine months ago issued something called the NIE, the national intelligence estimate, where all the intelligence organizations together do a report on various questions. So they did a report on whether or not Iran has a nuclear weapons program. And the NIE came to the conclusion that there was not a weapons program, that Iran was not close to having enriched uranium at a point where they could have a weapons program, and if they ever really wanted a weapons program, which there was no evidence they did, that they're something close to seven to nine years away from being able to do it. That was a two-week story in the United States. It went away. And then both parties during the election campaign, both McCain and Obama, over and over and over again talked about what to do about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, even though their own intelligence agencies had said there isn't one. So we have been doing that story all along. And if you look at the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, they've said very clearly: Iran cannot have an enriched uranium program that could be weaponized unless they leave the Nonproliferation Agreement, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Agreement, that the inspection process, the safeguard process, is effective, and they couldn't operate outside of it unless they pull out. Nobody reported on ElBaradei, who's the leader of the IAEA. We reported it, but none of the American news agencies reported that statement of his. I don't know if it got reported here or not. So what we're trying to do is cut through the bull. And then the other thing we're trying to do—and this we haven't done enough of yet, and it's partly 'cause we're still raising money, we're financially just getting started—something I mentioned in the video, which is we want to do a lot of coverage about solutions. We think that as much as this period is dangerous, we don't want to do news that, after you watch it, you just want to blow your brains out. I know—actually, I got lectured really well once by a student at a university who said—I was going on about how the climate-change crisis and this and that, and, you know, by the end of what I had said, you would be pretty depressed. And so she, this young student, said to me, you know, if you just try to scare us, we might as well as well just go get high and get laid, because what's the point? It just seems too overwhelming. So we want to make solutions news. We think there are solutions, and we think all over the world there are models that we can learn from. There are rational solutions that can be found. And the vast majority of people just want to live a normal life, a rational life, and a healthy life. So we're going to make solutions news, and we're going to be scouring the earth for models of change.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Terrorism
JAY: First of all, there is terrorism. There is a real 9/11. Real planes flew into real buildings. People got killed. The tactic of terrorism usually is something born of desperation, but not always. The problem is kind of multifaceted, the way I see it. First of all, there's no such thing as terrorism as a thing in itself. There's very specific political forces that use terrorist tactics. So the terrorism of a Hezbollah or a Hamas in its fight with Israel is a very different thing. Or if you want to go the other ways, what people have called state terrorism, that Israel uses against the Palestinians, is a very different thing than what al-Qaeda did. There's very different political forces at work here. What the Bush administration did is they wanted to create this construct to replace the construct of the Cold War, because in the Cold War they had the Evil Empire, and the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union justified the US doing anything they wanted to around the world, including creating a whole infrastructure of corruption throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, regime after regime, which were thieves and had nothing to do with really fighting against any influence of the Soviet Union. They were fighting against their own people—the yearning to have their own independent nations, to have control of their own natural resources, and so on. So the Evil Empire justified the military-industrial complex and the assertion of US hegemony everywhere. With the fall of the Soviet Union, they lost their Evil Empire, so they needed another Evil Empire. And terrorism, as this abstraction, became the new Evil Empire. That doesn't mean there isn't real terrorism. It's complicated, but this is what I said earlier when I talked about this 9/11 thing. They don't want to talk about why al-Qaeda exists. They don't want to—like, there was a photograph in the video. I don't know if you saw it, but it's Roosevelt on a destroyer in 1945 meeting with King Ibn Saud from Saudi Arabia. And they make a deal with the Sauds, Roosevelt makes this deal, which is: we're going to have you control the oil of Saudi Arabia, you're going to make a deal with the Wahhabi tribe (Wahhabism is this extreme form Islamism), and we're going to use you. And Eisenhower actually said it quite explicitly: we're going to use the Saudi royal family to spread Islamic extremism throughout the Middle East in order to fight nationalism and socialism. So the roots of this al-Qaeda and the roots of bin Laden are found in this Saudi-US connection that goes back right to just after World War II. And then in Afghanistan, you know—you probably know the story—the Americans actually invited bin Laden to come to Afghanistan. They asked the Sauds to send someone to Afghanistan to become one of the figures of Islam. I mean, I'm no fan of bin Laden, and if they caught him tomorrow, I think that would be a good thing, personally. But if you read his message to the Americans, which he sent in 2004 on October 29, just before the November 4 election, he said that "You say we're fighting you because we hate freedom." He said, "Well, if that's true, why don't we attack Sweden?" It's a fight against US policy in the region. It may be a psychopathic fight, it may be a manipulative fight, but it's about US policy. But they don't want Americans to consider these things, because they want Americans to live in ignorance, and the media there facilitates it.
TEXT ON SCREEN: Obama
JAY: There's such enthusiasm for Obama, there's such hope in Obama, but people have to also know the truth about Obama. And right now, if you're alternative media or mainstream media, the narrative is "don't touch Obama". And while, I mean, from a personal point of view I think it's better that Obama's president than the last eight years of having a regime which is more or less run by psychopaths—and I don't say that as a joke. I think you could—you know, any clinical definition of what a psychopath is, I think you would find they meet that. But what Obama is—or let's put it this way: what Obama promises is not what Obama is. Well, we did this story and we'll do more. To understand Barack Obama, you have to go back to 2002 or 2003 and find out why did he oppose the Iraq War. The people that opposed the Iraq war fell into two camps in 2002, 2003. One camp said: there's no evidence of weapons of mass destruction; let the UN inspectors complete their work; it's illegal to invade a country unless they're a direct, immediate threat; international law matters, and it's in the interest of all peoples to defend international law; and so on. That's one camp. Another camp—and this particularly came from people like Brent Scowcroft and people who were around George Bush I's administration—they opposed the Iraq War because it would weaken the American empire, that it was a strategic blunder, that going into Iraq, the American army would get tied down. It would most importantly undo the balance of power in the region, that Saddam was a block to Iran, and if you take out Saddam, you open up the territory for Iranian expansion. So the reasons for this camp's opposition to the Iraq War had to do with how do you maintain the strength of the empire. Well, Barack Obama was part of that camp. His opposition to the war was based on that it would strategically weaken the United States, not because it would be an illegal war. And you go back and read his speeches from 2002, 2003, that's his argument. So Obama is—if you ask—you can read what he says about himself. I think Obama's sincere and he should be taken at his word. And most Americans, at least anyone who consider themselves sort of left of center, liberal left, they all read into Obama something he never said, I think because he used the language of fundamental change. But Obama traces his foreign policy back to Truman. Truman was the American president after World War II, and he's the one that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He was the one that decided not to demilitarize after World War II. It was a big decision. Usually after wars, countries pull back on their army and their armed forces. Truman decided not only to keep the armed forces but even to expand them into what many people are now calling, in the United States, the creation of something called a "national security state", which was this convergence of the industrial-military complex with the security apparatus, creating a big, permanent infrastructure, so now something close, if you put all together the American budget, apparently is as much as half the US budget goes into this military-industrial complex now—government budget. Obama traces his foreign policy to Truman and Kennedy and Reagan. Kennedy even put even more money into militarization. And so Obama is—and if you look now, if you're following his recent cabinet appointments, they're completely conventional center, center-right Democratic Party cabinet appointments, from finance to State. Hillary Clinton looks like she's going to be Secretary of State. Just one bit of Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. About a year ago, there was an amendment, a resolution put forward in the Senate called the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, by Senator Kyl and Senator Lieberman, and this amendment was to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Senator Webb, one of the leading foreign-policy brains in the Democratic Party, fought this resolution, saying that if you declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard "terrorists", it's the same as calling the Iranian government "terrorist", and it's essentially a declaration of war, and it's handing Bush and Cheney another blank check for another war, not the least of which there was no evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was terrorist. And I'm quoting leading Democratic Party people now like Senator Webb. Almost the entire leadership of the Democratic Party voted against this resolution; Hillary Clinton voted for it. Point is is that Obama is exactly what he says he is: he's extremely traditional, centrist American politician. He's run a brilliant campaign, probably one of the best-executed election campaigns in the modern age. He's got millions of people filled with hope and inspired and engaged in the political process, and he comes at a time when all the old thinking is not going to work, because of the financial crisis. How they're going to deal with that, we'll see. Obama was kind of picked by a group of political operatives about eight years ago, and their first big breakthrough was the 2004 Democratic Party Convention, where they got Obama to speak on a keynote speech, which was the beginning of this run to the presidency. His major funders are [George] Soros and Warren Buffett. It's a section of the elite, and they do want change: they want a more vibrant domestic economy; they want more investment in infrastructure; they're for a more rational capitalist system. Soros says something which I think was very good, which was interesting, I thought, because Soros helped finance a lot of the really neoliberal governments come to power in Eastern Europe who believed, many of them, in a real, total free market. And Soros said the other day on American television, he said that what he calls "free market fundamentalists," that they believe that a free market will always correct itself. And he says it's not true. Soros was saying that a free market will always go to extremes unless government comes in and corrects it. So the group around Obama want a more rational capitalism, which is—I mean, from a personal point of view, I think is better than an irrational capitalism. So, you know, it's good. But do they want fundamental change for ordinary people in the United States? And I would say no.
TEXT ON SCREEN: 9/11
JAY: And it brings up a whole question of whether the Obama administration is going to hold the Bush administration accountable for crimes. And the biggest crime will be the war in Iraq. The second biggest crime will be illegal spying on the American people. And the issue of holding a president accountable for crime, and the vice president, we've been reporting on. We've been reporting on the attempt to impeach the Bush administration. And many, many people, especially people involved in, you know, judicial rights, constitutional rights, believe this issue of the criminal prosecution of Bush goes to the core of defending the Constitution. But there's another thing, which is the Obama administration should look into the events of 9/11, and that should be one of the things they hold that administration accountable for. And the problem is, too many Democrats are implicated. And that's the problem with a lot of these issues. But we know for a fact that Condoleezza Rice went to the 9/11 Commission and said that she, after getting this memorandum—I don't know if everyone knows the story. Condoleezza Rice got a memorandum from the intelligence agencies which said bin Laden plans to attack America, and Rice reads this memorandum and did nothing. We know, because in front of the 9/11 Commission she more or less lied. She said that she tasked the FBI to tell 72 FBI bureaus about the memorandum and that they should be on the alert for terrorist activities. And the 9/11 Commission later actually phoned all 72 bureaus, and it turned out only 2 had even been notified at all—70 never heard about it. So we know for a fact that she got a memorandum saying bin Laden plans to attack America, and we know for a fact she did nothing about it. So that's a good place to start. So in terms of respecting the movement, we believe there are many, many unanswered questions, and we don't think the official version explains many questions. At the very least what 9/11 was was [inaudible] most criminal negligence in history. At the very least, there should be some accountability for this.
TEXT ON SCREEN: "They"
JAY: Well, there's different "theys". "They," in the most general, is the elite. "They" are those that own television stations, banks, and so on. But you can break up "they". There's not a monolithic "they". Amongst "they", they fight each other like crazy. So the elite that's more connected to the military-industrial complex has big divisions with the elite that has more interest in the domestic economy. And money siphoned off into the military is destroying the American economy. The debt is going through the roof. I think one of the fundamental reasons for the current economic crisis is because there's so little real purchasing power amongst ordinary Americans. People's wages may be at 1972 levels, but their standard of living didn't go down that much, because they borrowed. Everyone had credit cards. I don't know what it's like here, but it was crazy. Every day—at least once every two, three weeks, I get another credit card in the mail. They were just giving credit to everyone, because there was so much capital in so few hands, they didn't know what to do with it. So one of the things you can do with it is keep loaning it to people in some way or another. So this artificial economy was developing there. So people like [Rupert] Murdoch in that section of "they" have a different economic strategy than the "they" who make money out of more militarization. But "they" is the elite. George Will, who's a very well-known right-wing commentator on American television and in the newspapers—he's probably even the most or in the top three or five most famous right-wing commentators—he was on a show, The George Stephanopoulos Show, which is a new show on Sunday mornings. And he got angry once, 'cause I don't think he would have said what he said if he hadn't lost his temper. It was about McCain having seven houses. I don't know if you heard this during the campaign. People were giving McCain trouble for seven houses. And George was on the show, and somebody was talking about McCain's seven houses, and he says, "This is ridiculous. Who cares if he has seven houses? America has always been ruled by its aristocracy." He said, "Democracy in America's not about whether the elite is going to rule or not; it's about which section of the elite's going to rule." So that's "they".
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