TED 2013,

TED 2013 - Pope Benedict Moves to San Francisco - Viper Stormchasers -Vesta Restaurant Review - The Secrets of Silicon Valley a new book - Jamis's classifieds

by Jamis H. MacNiven

         When I first wrote about TED 10 years ago the conference was like an energetic teenager full of bright ideas. Today it reminds me of a seasoned 30-something – experienced, respected and wise and cutting a wide path through the intellectual wheat fields.TED.com

         Chris Anderson is the curator of this museum of thought. I was that when he first took over he looked calm enough but I think he might have been a little nervous about how it was all going to work out. It was terrific then but over time it has grown in self-recognition and the emergent world of TED eclipses all the other events I participate in. In fact TED has made Burning Man look somewhat dull. It certainly is less dusty and with the move to Canada next year less dusty still. I know, Canada? Who would have though that they would turn out to be cultural and economic heroes. We used to joke about Canada, now we want to be Canada.

         TED consists of dozens of talks over five days. Short or long it doesn’t matter. You can tell a compelling story in 30 seconds though most are 18 minutes. My aim with this article is to drive you to the TED website, so I’ll hit a few highlights. I’ll dive right in with Open ROV, David Lang’s company making open source underwater Remote Operating Vehicles submarine kits. These ROVs can take your eyes to 300-foot depths and you get to build the ship yourself.

         This was followed by a talk by Skylar Tibbit on self-assembling mechanical devices. Taking a page from Mother Nature, Skylar is exploring the step beyond 3d printing.  A few years ago we had memory foam, but now visualize solar powered factory pipelines that squeeze their fluid contents to their destination.

Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, Carl Page and Felix Kramer

         A video that really rocked me was follow the frog. Stop reading this drivel, look it up, now! I’m just sain’.

         Edith Widder finally discovered the long rumored 30-foot plus giant squid. But squid cheat being 2/3rds tentacle and all. Still I wouldn’t want to meet one on a lonely highway.  She discovered that the ROV’s being used in the hunt were always too noisy and once she sent a quiet one down the squid were all over the place. Ahh, the power of common sense.

         Tony Hsieh (Zappos) is a regular a TED and is one of the real trendsetters in clothing and business philosophy. Who’s Tony wearing now? He wears Betabrand a mutual friend Chris Lindland’s company. Betabrand is hip but not tooo hip. Heretofore exclusively sold online Chris has just opened a new very unusual store at 780 Valencia in The Mission. I love the word heretofore, yes? Uptop!

         Jennifer Grandville, the ex-governor of Michigan, had some electrifying ideas about the nation’s energy needs. I saw a strong Presidential possibility in her but discovered she was born in Canada. How hard would it be to the change the Constitution or maybe get annexed by Canada?

         Robert Gordon came out from behind the curtain and told us the sky was falling. He is a well-respected economist who says that growth, innovation and prosperity are coming to an end (get that man a chair and nice cup of cocoa).  He was in the distinct minority at TED. I feel that too many economists equate growth with prosperity. I am campaigning for increased prosperity but reducing the rate of growth.

         Rodney Brooks brought Baxter, the workplace robot. It performed badly (but Rodney was cool throughout) because the lighting was a bit too dim so it needed some effort to cajole a few reluctant movements out of the little fella. Later Julia Sweeney quipped that it only took three people to try to coax the robot to move a single item from a table to a box in about 10 minutes. A real job creator this. Ha ha. Well, not so fast. The first aeronauts were a rooster, a sheep and a duck in a hot air balloon (still a crew that has never been bested) and with this strange beginning we are now looking at travel to Mars. Queue the Strauss score from 2001.

         Speaking of Mars, Elon Musk materialized from the future to give us an update on his many mandates. Space travel plans are littered with crackpots. There is a team trying to fund an inflatable space hotel for tourists. Another wants to sell you a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. Elon is as far from crackpot as Edison is from Gyro Gearloose (of course Gyro’s stuff did work, more or less)

         Richard Turere came to see us from Nairobi. Now 13 he crafted a way to keep the lions from eating the family cows in the city limits of Nairobi back when he was a kid of 11. After several false starts he hooked a solar panel to an old car battery to run blinking led lights that keep the lions out of the pasture. Lion Lights are being used all over Africa now. His invention was real and would have been just as effective if he had been a 30-year old.

         There were other young inventors with more complicated tales. Taylor Wilson created a fusion reaction in his garage at 15 and now at 18 told us he could make a real dent in global warming and help foster world peace by feeding nuclear warheads to his pollution-free fission reactor. Well, maybe, but if he wasn’t so young would anyone listen? Bill Gates proposed a similar reactor a few years ago but Fukashima back-burnered that one.

         Even younger is Jack Andraka who at 15 has had the boldness to say that he invented a $3 test that can detect pancreatic cancer and, because of early detection, yield a 90% cure rate. This is audacious and the crowd loved it. I loved it, but I spoke with a notable research scientist from Stanford who had his doubts because the kid is unpublished so his data is hard to review. He might be a Pasteur or Lister but remove his age as a consideration and his story is less compelling. Still, he was a magnificent and provocative presenter.

         Bono came out to tell us about his charitable intentions. I have always been a little unconvinced by his rock star/poverty warrior bravado and the glasses make me suspicious. Bono took off his glasses, mocked his celebrity and made me believe. He is promoting ‘factivist’ thinking to counter demagoguery on his fight against poverty. Bono is a good man and a damn fine rock and roller.

         Bono is old school But Amanda Palmer sure isn’t. She says she’s a mix of punk and cabaret. Amanda has the heart of Janis without the pain; the punch of Patty Smith without the attitude and a voice very much like Bowie. A little while back she decided to ask her fans to pay her through Kickstarter instead of buying her album. She hoped to raise a hundred grand to support her and the band. Her fans sent her 1.2 million because that’s what they thought she was worth it.

Amanda and fan

 

At one performance she crowd-surfed across the Weston lobby. No one wanted to offend by touching them ladyparts so she nearly ended up being baloney-sliced face-first in the piano. See her talk and her TED musical performance but I advise against looking at her overproduced MTV like videos online. Just because you and the band can dress all in white is not reason to actually do it, Amanda… unless you’re from Sikkim.

         The staging at TED is a brilliant. This year it was a tree house theme and on one limb we found Ben Affleck. He said that TED felt like the Academy Awards for smart people but that he was going to be neither funny nor smart. He then became both, especially when imitating Al Gore. As we all laughed he said, “I hope Al’s not here”. He was. Ben brought the Congolese String Orchestra. These men were in formal tails playing western strings and made us all embrace this tragic place.

         Alastair Parvin open sources punch-out-of-plywood wiki buildings; much like kid’s models but giving you the ability to print your own house. He needs to team up with Tibbits so it self-assembles and maybe Baxter can live there.

         Danny Hillis says we’re at a point with the internet analogous to when singled celled organisms turned into multi-celled organisms. He warned us that there is no backup system for the internet and that it’s fragile and vulnerable. Just sayin’.

         We saw some art from the forthcoming film called The World’s Largest Jumping Fish. It Looks like Life of Pi on LSD. It will be blowing minds at theaters near us soon. Bring Tupperware for your brain.

       Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who pointed out that a good many 20 somethings without a life plan had better get with it. She says some young folks are lazy maybe but some simply need some tools for success. She has a book.

         Mitra Siugrat was this year’s TED Prize winner (a cool million). For some time he has been mounting computers literally in holes-in-walls in poor areas all over the world and then walks away. In one poor village in a Tamil-speaking region of India he returned a month after going live and talked to the children who were playing on the computer. He asked them what they were doing. These ten and twelve year olds said they were investigating the structure of DNA. Their one comment was that all the programs were in English, which they did not speak. He said, “Oh sorry.” They said, “No problem we learned English.” They are not being coached by professionals, but there is a team helping them. Retired grandmothers in northern England come aboard with video chat to encourage the kids. Not to tutor or test they just say “Good job, keep going.” This remarkable morphology has spread to other places. Get thee to the internet to see more.

Jamis with inventor of Glass Babak Parviz

        The geeks from Google were wearing their Google Glass heads-up hyper reality project on their faces. This is the sort of thing that got you beat up for on the playground years ago but now it gets you a G5 jet. Geek respect happened gradually as this is a world were we didn’t even notice that our biggest celebrities had names like Arnold and Sylvester.

        Mary Lou Jepson (cofounded One Laptop Per Child) is the Head of Digital Display for Google Glass. She proposed that it might soon be possible to bypass our verbal categorization of data and interact directly with images in our brains. Basically a new way to think.

         De-extentiction. You heard it here first. Steward Brand and his wife Ryan Phelin believe that their new program called Revive and Restore can literally bring back extinct animals. This is not ivory tower conjecture. They say the science is close to bringing back recently departed animals. You’ve heard of the passenger pigeon?  A boy with a bb gun killed the last wild one in 1900.  But did you know that it was the most populous bird on earth and that it was hunted to extinction. It was also the biggest source of meat for the poor in America the early 19th century. Flocks were reported to be a mile wide and 300 miles long. In a few decades we ate every last one. It has been reported to taste better than chicken and I intend to find out if it’s true.  

The very last one died in a zoo

         Liu Bolin is truly the invisible man (run to your computer and look him up[wait no running you are already on your computer, right]) by making himself (nearly) invisible. Really he can do this. He speaks convincingly about political and social issues in a manner completely original and memorable. He can actually make himself invisible. I saw him do it.

         Larry Lessig talked to us about how to equitably fund political races. It makes perfect sense so it will go nowhere. His work dovetails with Steven Johnson who just released a penetrating book about the new networked landscape in Future Perfect. Steven is a social scientist and he believes we are witnessing the old vertical power systems being pushed aside by social networks. Occupy and other movements represent what he calls peer progressive cooperation, an emerging model for the very structure of society. Occupy didn’t work you say? Not so far but the future isn’t done with us yet.

         Again with the kids. Dong Woo Jang is a kid who picked up sticks at 14 in his Korean neighborhood and began crafting bows and arrows to examine the intersection of mathematics, wood, flight and craft. His many bows allowed him to see the metaphor and the reality of this most ancient tool. It is now overlooked but is indeed a member of the top-ten most important human contrivances of all time.

         One presenter showed us new evidence that the alphabet might not have been invented in Biblos, present day Lebanon, but in upper Egypt considerably earlier. I’m an alphabet aficionado and so if this is true it’s BIG news.

         Kees Moeliker of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam won the Ignobel Prize for being the first to document a case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks, he brought the a duck. It was dead. He’s kidding...or is he?

         N. Korean activist Hyeonseo Lee came from privilege and as a child was told that the starving people in her country were diseased and there was nothing that could be done for them. Her family fell into disfavor and they escaped through China to Vietnam and finally to S. Korea which was only a few miles, but a universe, away. A moving tale of despair and triumph.

         Eleanor Longden moved us too. She has schizophrenic tendencies and has a talkative team in her head that first tried to kill her and then helped get her through school as she finished her PhD. Mostly folks with this diagnosis fail at life but she is making those voices work for her.

         Neil Gershenfelt is examining the boundary between bits and atoms in the Fab Lab at MIT.  He says the digital revolution is over and we won!

       There is so much more. Much, much more online.

Pope Benedict Relocating to California

The long lonely highway

         It’s official. The recently retired Pope Benedict (or is it back to Ratzinger once again) is moving to a nice three story Victorian in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco. I’m told he has joined the Powerhouse Gym on Market to keep those abs buff. I am not making this up. The ex-pontificate is driving the Popemobile from Miami to San Francisco because he wants to see America up close.

         He called me in March from the Holiday Inn along Alligator Alley in Florida. He told me that the alligators were very nice if a bit snappy.  He said he was disappointed to discover that his car would only do 9 miles an hour but he said he was looking forward to cruising into Nashville and eating fried grizlin’ and possum pie at Minnie Pearl’s Gud Eats.

Expect the ex-pontifcate to be pulling into Buck’s sometime in the fall.

Restaurant Review

         Why are you eating here when you could be eating at Vesta? Oh right, you can’t get in because it’s too busy. This is the first restaurant review I’ve ever done for the competition. Well they aren’t really competition. As with the restaurants in Woodside, we’re all friends.  

         Peter Barone and his wife Courtney opened Vesta at Broadway and Main in Redwood City last year. It is his parents and my old pals Roy and Rose Barone’s old location, which they ran in the 70s and 80s across from Margaret and my construction office.

         Now all our kids are the biz and let me tell you, these kids are schooling us parents.

         Vesta is truly amazing. First, they close Sunday and Monday and make less money so have conquered one of the biggest limitation of the business, burnout. The staff is convivial as heck but the big news is that the food is simply spectacular. I’ve eaten at Noma in Denmark, called “the best restaurant in the world” I’ve uncovered insider places from Toulouse to Tokyo but in this great big world I’ve never eaten at a place (that my kids didn’t own) with better food than Vesta. It’s pizza, salad and veggies. But with such flair and love that has forced me to recalibrated my understanding of this cuisine. Do-not-miss the sausage, honey, green chili and mascarpone pizza. Oh I had my doubts about the honey but trust me; this is the best single food anywhere. It is.

         This isn’t just me playing nice. Check out their well-earned ratings online.

         I can tell you this, though. The art collection is pretty weak. Thank goodness.

MacNiven Boys in San Francisco

         Dylan continues to captain the restaurant group in SF with his brothers, Tyler and Rowan. The Woodhouse Fish Co. brand is growing and West Of Pecos, in the Mission, is already a year old. Overseeing the kitchens is corporate chef August Schuchman. August is on fire (in a good way) and I predict that he will be a name in years to come. That is a single name like Gordon or Wolfgang. He’s that good.

Viper

By Jeff Shardell (Buck’s first guest author ever)

Dustin and Jeff

         Two years ago, I was perched on a knoll top just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi with video camera in hand.  No, I wasn't filming butterflies or bird migrations, I was filming a tornado.  This wasn't just any tornado, it was a behemoth - an EF-5 tornado (picture Tornado7) barreling directly towards me at 60 miles per hour.  With self-preservation kicking in, every fiber of my being was telling me to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.  I remember thinking to myself "Why in the %#^%$! am I putting myself in this situation, yet AGAIN?"  The path that lead me here was a bit circuitous but as Steve Jobs is famously quoted as saying, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

         Jumping back in time, I was your typical tech guy, holding a number of senior business positions at a variety of Bay Area companies.  My most recent was running business development at Google from the early 2000s until 2009.  Even though technology is what put food on my table, I always had a latent passion for weather.  I spent my early years growing up in Florida and was that crazy kid (every neighborhood has one) who ran outside to watch the thunderstorms roll in while others were taking shelter. In undergrad, I studied meteorology and even though I transitioned to business, my excitement for extreme weather never left me.

Crimineeeee!

         Fast forward a bit after leaving Google when I convinced a friend of mine to come storm chasing with me.  Landing in Denver with nothing more than a rental car (full insurance policy of course!), laptop and data card in hand, we embarked on a week of chasing.  After days of crisscrossing a multitude of flyover states in search of storms, we finally captured the full lifecycle of a beautiful tornado in the Comanche Grasslands in southeastern Colorado (picture DSC_0139) and I knew I was hooked.  When I got back, I started trying to convince everyone who would listen and who was adventurous enough to come storm chasing with me.  When I exhausted my friends and family, I got connected with the guys on the Discovery Channel's Storm Chaser show and started chasing with them.

         Now, me and my good friend and chase partner Dustin Feldman decided to double down and create the only high-end VIP storm chasing business in the world - Viper Tours LLC.  

         We chase in a specially designed Ford Raptor and our goal is to get our guests as up-close and personal to a tornado as possible - without actually getting sucked in! We've even signed on with a TV production company and will be filming a pilot for a reality TV show about our business and our adventures during the chase season.  If you are interested in experiencing the thrill of a lifetime, visit vipertours.com for more information - or just reach out and say hi.  Oh, and in case you are wondering what ever happened with that EF-5 tornado - well, it veered off it's track in the last few minutes and thundered harmlessly by.

         I have seen nearly 50 tornadoes over the past few years.  What keeps me coming back? Well, there is nothing like experiencing this powerful but beautiful force of nature.  Once you feel the wind blowing through your hair, the rain and hail on your skin and the smell of wet summer wheat fields, all the while a funnel is being born in front of you, you know you are witnessing one of the miracles of life.  As Haruki Murakami said, "When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in.  That's what this storm's all about."

The Secrets Of Silicon Valley

         Now on sale at Buck’s bookstore (The Smallest Bookstore In The World) right here.

         I’ve read all the books about The Valley. This one is by far the best and not just because of the couple of flattering pages about me. It is a solid work with insights from 100 years ago up to 2013 of the Valley’s tech industry. If there is one book you should read about our little Valley of Surprises it is Deborah Perry Piscione’s new book.

Classified ads

     I’ve decided to get rid of much of my stuff. I’m not talking about the stuff at Buck’s but the junk I have at home so if you know anyone interested in the following let Jamis know.

·       1929 Springfield Phantom Rolls Royce. This is has had just two owners, just me and the countess. It has 7,000 original miles but need an alignment. $975,000

·       Jivaro shrunken head collection. These are pretty rare. Six heads including the “Spaniard” Juan Calderon. Perfect if, somewhat shrunken, condition. $67,000 each or 300k takes them all.

·       Henry VIII suit if armor. This is probably technically the property of the British Crown but we’ll just keep it between us. This from his fat period. 12 million or will trade for Florida real estate.

·       Set of golf clubs. $75.

Why I don't worry about the debt - View Inc. and Will Milne

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WHY I DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE DEBT

 By Jamis MacNiven

     Have a look at the ‘debt clock’  http://www.usadebtclock.com/ and you will see the dial spinning at over 2 million dollars a minute. Real dramatic.

     This made some folks jumpy during this most recent election season and it took up at least 50% of the oxygen. And still does. Let’s pick this issue apart. OK, first my credentials. None, but hey, my ideas are at least as good as the collective opinions about this issue because, like noise canceling headphones, there is so much disagreement that there seems to be no single set of facts. Just relentless buzzing. (See Alan Greenspan the ex-head of the Fed who told Congress in 2011 that after 40 years he didn’t know what he was talking about) Well, I want to take your worry about the debt away and replace it with a bigger worry.

     First, the debt is often compared to the GDP as if that comparison had any relevance. (Look!  50 SUVs are the weight of a grey whale!) As we shall see the debt can be compared to something but it isn’t the GDP.

     A government’s purpose in a free society is to make a reasonably safe environment for us to live our lives. We come together and forge an agreement to operate with a set of rules. Then we spend the rest of the country’s existence fine tuning the agreement.

     Some folks in this country are always trying to figure out what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Ha-larious. Why do we care what these folks from another age might feel today? (I think they are so beloved by some people because they carried guns) Some say we have a pact with them. We don’t. We have a pact with the Constitution. Big difference.

     One job of our government is to raise money and manage some of the social systems like providing for the common defense, running a post office, conducting a census and so on. The Constitution was immediately seen as incomplete so we amended it before the ink dried and have been doing so ever since (the Supreme Court rulings have the force of the Constitution). Nearly all of us agree that the government should manage a lot of activities. One thing it is charged to run is a treasury system and with that comes the ability to create debt and print money. Cool, free money!

     So the national debt is 16ish trillion (and lots of state and local debt too). (In pennies the weight of 17.5 million grey whales, big ones.) People are heard to say you can’t live beyond your means at home so how can a government? If you go overdrawn you will go bankrupt they say. True, but the federal government isn’t a household on steroids. It can print money, go to war, make some pretty amazing rules - all things you can’t do at home. If we inflate the money supply we can reduce the debt. I’m not suggesting doing this because, as I contend, the size of the debt doesn’t matter anyway.

     Some say we can reduce the debt by creating millions of new high paying jobs. If we buy more stuff we will grow our way to prosperity. Even Robert Reich an avowed lefty at UC Berkeley says this. But from where I sit it seems as demand grows the things are shipped in from shored long ago. What about the balance of payment to other countries and a weaker dollar? Well we are actually expecting oil independence and even export soon. Really, that’s what they say.

     Why do I say worrying about the debt shouldn’t keep you up? Because the debt is merely a bookkeeping tool whereby one party borrows money and another party is paid interest. Why borrow money? Ideally one borrows to have access to the utility value of something like moving into a house decades before it’s paid for. It is also used to fill in gaps in the ratio between revenue and the actual cost of things. Last year the insane argument about not raising the debt ceiling might have made sense except it was used to pay outstanding bills, not for new work.

     There was also a lot of noise about China holding our debt like a parent who might withhold your allowance. Well, they already hold the debt and it can’t be ‘called.’ (They actually only have 8%.) The mechanism is - we send them money and after the kleptocrats skim off about half they build things like factories to make more stuff. We then buy that stuff and send them yet more money. (Talk about a tool to promote world peace!) 4 trillion of the debt is owed to the Federal Reserve and 2 or so to Social Security. Now I’m no economist but doesn’t that mean we owe much of it to ourselves?

    It looks like we will continue to borrow money to pay ourselves the interest on borrowed money but eventually even a hall of mirrors fades away and this magic well will run dry. The result will be to write the debt off as a bad loan and our credit will go down the drain. What will happen then? We will be forced to live within our means which is what everyone has been clamoring for. People say, oh, we will become Greece. Austerity! Yes indeed. Or maybe we call it sustainability.

     “We can’t have a dystopian future - we need our comforts!” yell the consumers. Well the future is here. This $4,000 chair promises to make you happy. All 300 pounds of it which is what the average American will soon weigh. Sure looks like the chair from Wall-e.

     So if I say the size of the debt is of little relevance and a comparison to the GDP isn’t effective, what is? We now actually have a use for the whales and SUVs. We have to compare the debt to all the stuff.

     The functional debt on a car, a freeway, a whale or anything that exists is zero according to the universal law we call reality. This means that if it exists and is useful the universe doesn’t care if there is paper debt against it because it is actually here. If there happens to be a paper debt applied to it that is a characteristic like a tree casting a shadow, but it is of no consequence to the thing itself.

     The ‘stuff’ exists so the universe says it is completely paid for. I’m talking about both simple things like an apple and complex systems like weather. Let’s start adding up the utility value of everything and for simplicity sake let’s use just planet Earth and divide by the USA.

     We have to add all the cropland, sure, and all hose Beanie Babies but we also have the infrastructure like the dams and waterways, uniform weights and measures, and less intangible things like the protocol of driving on the right.

     So what’s it all worth? Digging around on Wikipedia gives a value of the Earth (for insurance purposes no doubt) of 42 quintillion (18 zeros) US dollars. So if the America controls, say 25% of the world’s value then our share is about $10 quintillion. This makes the national debt about a millionth of the value of all our stuff in just the US and that isn’t counting the sunshine. At this point most of the readers will assume I’m kidding but I am quite serious. I know the 18 zeros is a made-up number isn’t the real value actually far higher. In fact, priceless.

     Clearly if we raise the national debt it will have little impact on the ratio. What will wreck the formula is to devalue the stuff. We all know by heart the list of how this might happen. Asteroid, check. GMOs, check. Nuclear war, check. Pestilence, check. These things might happen but probably not. What about global warming? Were you watching NYC and New Jersey becoming a surfer’s paradise? Oh, it’s happening. The big storm cost tens of billions sure, but make New York City uninhabitable below the third floor and watch the value of these places decline rather more.

     By this point some are agreeing. Others are disagreeing and thinking I’m taking a leftist position. Well if reality is tilted to the left I guess that’s true but really it need not be partisan issue.     Am I so pure and above the fray? No, not at all. I’m gobbling resources with everyone else even while trying to cut back.

     So maybe I’m all wet but this is a country where (according to the National Science Foundation 2011) 32% of Americans believe in magic numbers so I hope to appeal at least to these folks.

   I guess this all sounds pretty nuts. Maybe I’ll get one of these chairs after all.

VIEW INC

The walls at Buck’s are covered with art and technology from an earlier age of adventure and discovery, but much of the real action in science and technology has now moved to an atomic and molecular level. My friend Aymeric Sallin leads a Venture fund called NanoDimension (anchored in Zurich and Menlo Park) and deals with all sorts of nano-sized technologies. This technology involves tiny elements harnessed to big projects. Aymeric chose this industry to focus on because, as a physicist, he gets it. He supports companies as they move atomic processes from lab to fab.

     Here in the Valley many new firms focus on software; NanoDimension backs businesses that make stuff out of atoms. Their latest project, View Inc., involves the slight movement of an ion on the molecular level which changes glass from clear to variable tint. This infinitesimal realignment now is poised to disrupt an entire industry.

     We all lament the disappearance of American manufacturing jobs to other countries. By backing View Inc. a consortium of VCs, including NanoDimension, has created hundreds of jobs in the USA and will soon add hundreds more. I was privileged to have an inside look at this remarkable technology while it was still in stealth mode.     

     The folks at View have built a plant in Mississippi to manufacture dynamic window glass. Office buildings, hospitals, restaurants, homes and countless other buildings are wrapped in glass. Take a multi-story office, the kind you see throughout Silicon Valley and you will (I will never see them the same way again) notice that nearly all the blinds are half or all the way down. Funny, you finally work your way up to the edge of the building, a corner office even, and then immediately pull the blinds down so you can see  your screen. And down they will stay.

     View manufactures glass that can be dimmed automatically in bright sunlight or controlled directly by the user. When combined with dimmable lighting and tight zone control of the temperature you can create an ideal environment and still see out the windows. Dimming the glass also keeps direct sunlight out thereby reducing the AC load, a big factor for modern buildings. On energy savings alone this product pays its way. But the real benefit isn’t about money but about the human experience. We have a deep primal need

to scan the horizon. It has been well documented that a view makes people happier, more productive and in hospitals, speeds patient recovery.

     But hasn’t this glass been around for a long time? Yes, 40 years and its inventor is an emeritus advisor to View. But dimmable glass has never been available on a commercial scale. To learn how to manufacture this at scale 

--> To learn how to manufacture this at scale Dr. Rao Mulpuri  and his team worked with Seagate and repurposed a disc manufacturing facility in Milpitas – it was an efficient and cost effective move and represents a re-purposing so indicative of Silicon Valley. In the glass industry, the acquisition of this plant is on a par with Elon’s score of the Ford plant for Tesla in Fremont. 

     The View team managed to recycle it for their R and D facility where they perfected the technology before building their fabrication plant in Mississippi. Mississippi was so excited to see them show up that they all went gigging for gators and attracted them with huge incentives and support. From this plant they will supply not only North America but Europe as well, where the energy conservation requirements for buildings are far more stringent.

     The technology required to manufacture a double pane, dimmable window that can be up to 5x10 feet is daunting. But making it is just part of the equation. With this sort of product you can’t trickle into the market for testing. It’s more like building a bridge. In other words you can’t even sell your first window until you put the entire organization together with a capacity to produce huge quantities of the product. 

     Recently the first twelve windows were installed in the lounge of the W Hotel in San Francisco and in a very real sense each window cost tens of millions. 

     View and its VC backers have spent years helping move this disruptive new product into an untested market in dicey times. These people have guts. Silicon Valley style all the way. Viewglass.com

LOCAL WORLD CHAMPION WILL MILNE

     Who’s the best saber swordsman in the world between 50 and 59 years of age? My cousin - Will Milne! That’s right, he just returned from Austria where he won the gold medal in the Veteran World Championship. 

     Modern fencing, also known as Olympic fencing (to distinguish it from historical fencing) is divided into three sports depending on the weapon; foil, epee or saber. Foil and epee are all about poking the other guy with the tip of the blade in order to score a point. The tip of the blade has a button switch on it so when  your opponent gets “stabbed” you score a point. No poke, no point. Saber is different. With saber you can hit with any part of the blade and a light comes on. Saber is all about slashing, cutting, lunging and attacking. Like a free-for-all with car antennas. All this takes place in a couple of seconds.

     Will has been saber fencing for about 10 years. By most measures he is a hobbyist in that he hasn’t been at it his whole life, unlike some of the fencers that he conquered at this year’s Veteran World Championship. So what kind of tournament is this? Well, the last US person to win the tournament was Ed Korfanty in 2006. Ed is the current saber coach for the Women’s US Olympic Team. Remember the US flag bearer in London, Mariel Zagunis? She was the one with the big smile, the woman who won gold in Athens and Bejing? She’s one of Ed’s students. 

     This is Will’s second year on the US Veteran National Team. Two years ago the tournament was held in Croatia and he came back a disappointing tenth place, a real letdown. He says he lost to a screaming Italian with an entourage who were cheering and waving towels and generally being Italian. His excuse for losing? “I panicked”. Not this year when he brought back a gold medal so large it came home in the hold. Will says one critical difference this year was that US Fencing Association sent along a coach for the athletes, none other than Vladimir Nazlymov. What, you don’t know the name? Well, he fenced for the Soviets in four Olympics, winning six medals (three of them gold) won ten world championships, was coach of the Soviet Olympic team and then immigrated tothe States where he became coach of the US team. Oh, him. Says Will, “I wouldn’t have won without Vladimir. It’s a lot easier to stay calm with a coach like him on your side.”

    When I asked Will how it felt to win, he amazed me with his perspective. He said that when you win you don’t have to tell a story about how you nearly won, how the guy who beat you was a ten times winner of this or that, or how, if not for a loose floorboard or any of a million other reasons, you would have won. When I asked him how it went in Austria he said simply – “I won.” Winning needs no clarification. He said the best part was standing on the top of the podium with the silver and bronze medalists below him as they played The Star Spangled Banner. Nothing like rubbing it in.

      Not that all this has been easy. A few years ago Will took a blade through the hand, and not a slight cut either. It cut his extensor tendon. He lost some function in his sword hand, yet even with this he is the current world champion. How is such a thing possible? Will says much of it is about controlling stress. If you can be the one swordsman in the room who isn’t panicked and spinning out mentally, you’ve got the edge.

     This might seem like a mildly interesting recreational pastime except that Will brings this same sense of calm to his profession. Will is a homebuilder - Milne Design and Build. This is a field fraught with tension. Homes in our area are custom made productions not unlike motion pictures. There are good ones and less good ones but nearly always they are really stressful to produce. I know this because I used to be in the business, homes, not movies. Back in 1979 when Will was a teenager he worked for me as an apprentice on Steve Jobs’ house. This is pretty funny as it was only my second job ever and I was a pretty green builder. I was certainly in no position to teach much, having just arrived on the scene myself.

     Will is far better at his craft than I ever was. He knows what he’s doing, sure, but the real reason his projects run so smoothly is that he’s always calm. I was on one of his job sites in Woodside a few years ago on the last day of construction and even though there were dozens of people everywhere, and the client too, he took it all in stride. Will specializes in fine residences in Atherton, Menlo Park and Woodside. One of his projects is under construction two doors north of Buck’s on Canada Rd.

    I asked him about similarities between fencing and building and he said that in most respects they’re very different. Building is collaborative and takes lots of time and patience with input from numerous sources. Fencing is fast, instinctive and individual. Primal. Hit or be hit. And the best way to hit rather than get hit? Don’t panic. I do see a lot of parallels though. On his jobs nobody panics.

     Next year Will is going back to Europe and the rumor is the tournament is somewhere in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. He’ll be defending his title against the Russians and Bulgarians, the French and the Germans, and yes, the screaming Italians. Will he slash and cut his way to the top a second time? We shall see. 

Dinner in Denmark

For some years those in the food community have been talking about the magical cooking at el Bulli in Spain and as a result this restaurant had been called the best restaurant in the world. Maybe yes, maybe no, but this much is clear - it was the hardest reservation to land for sure. Easier to get into Stanford. Well the chef decided that being open 6 months a year was too much so he said, “How about no months open?” Take that! So he took himself off to Harvard to teach and now another restaurant is the hot place - Noma in Copenhagen. Is it the best? Maybe? But right now it is the hot place to go so go we did. Since we went all the way to Denmark we thought we had better try other impossible places to get into. I went with Margaret my wife and as many know her at Buck’s - the substance behind the flash - me being the flash. We went with Peter Friess the recent director of the Tech Museum in San Jose and his airport-museum designer wife Birgit Binner. I was to handle the food arrangements and Birgit would suss out the corners of Scandinavian Design.

A friend in Copenhagen managed to get us into Noma on a Friday night a 7 o’clock. I really hadn’t expected this so it was a terrific surprise. The dining experience at Noma is ridiculous, spectacular, enchanting, overpriced, hilarious and a real deal considering the creativity and time spent making sure you have a night to remember. The web is bristling with opinions on this. I can tell you this. I had 23 courses and the food ran from OK to you’ve got to be kidding? I’m convinced that tasty food isn’t actually part of the dining experience at Noma. It’s true that I haven’t got a palette turned to Nordic on the dial but like any art, Noma gets to be judged by the common man and no one is more common than me. I wanted to love the food on all levels and I give them high marks for invention but a failing grade on flavor. The service was predictably warm and compelling which included a great deal of give and take with the international staff. The starters featured such things as fruit leather wrapped around pork cracklin’ to resemble, well pork cracklin’. There was scallop jerky. A plate of fried moss and a clever mussel or rather a faux mussel with real meat and an edible fake shell. There was a smoked game bird egg in a box of smoldering hay and, a real crowd pleaser, a donut hole with an anchovy stuck through it. It is at this point in the meal that the Russian billionaires generally get up, pitch a pile of cash on the table, and go looking for a steak. I’m not kidding this has happened repeatedly. There is plenty of bread though and great bread and heavily salted butter not the pale white lard-like stuff some trendy places give you in America.

The entrees were equally obtuse. At one point they brought us each a sizzling cast iron skillet and directed us to each cook a hens egg and give it dollops of roadside weeds. I think this a nod to hobo cooking. I was half expecting to be asked to heat up some beans in a can over a fire made of tire shreds. One of the latest restaurant trends is to take photos of food while dining. Chefs and restaurant owners are divided on this as there can be flashes going off all round but they are cool about it at Noma and owners would be well advised to give in on this trend, as it seems to be here to stay. The dishes marched at us relentlessly until we were ready to surrender but on they came in their multitude. One of the final courses was a dessert specialty of caramel blended with bone marrow in a section of cow bone. I thought they were kidding but no, it was really as promised. Smelled like a slaughterhouse. We were with fun people doing something decidedly odd so a very good time was had. Denmark is very civilized and strictly modern. In fact they invented Danish Modern though that’s from the 50s. Our hotel, the Radisson Blu, was the particular center of the action when we were there. On our arrival we saw a good many cops with guns. I thought I was home or at least in Italy but it was just the arrival of Hu Jintao the president of China who was there to tour the Carlsberg beer plant. They had cleared the top 5 floors and we saw the leader and his pack several times. I thought we hit it off but he never calls, he never writes. We went to the world famous Louisiana Museum on the outskirts of Copenhagen. They just slap themselves silly with the rich irony of naming the place after our state.

They find this wildly funny, I think. They aren't big on actually laughing. The hit of the show, which you really must see, is 32 big photos of some big fat guy smoking a cigarette. Really, once you get over a dozen it becomes pretty funny but I don’t think it was meant to be funny. I looked long and hard and tried to extract the reason or the meaning. The whole affair seemed meaningless. No doubt there are many who would bring meaning to it and I think that the art and very smoothness of Scandinavia is often a canvas on which to drape your own thoughts. It isn’t as if we don’t do plenty of this in America. In the 60s there was a big movement to display blank canvases. Well they weren’t exactly blank they were painted flat white. They sold for a lot of money. We never figured out what the Danish Kroner exchange rate was but I think that a bill that reads many thousands is not a good sign. And what is with tipping in Scandinavia? It is clearly written on the bill that the tip is included. I finally figured it out. The natives are a bit cagey, as they don’t want to spoil your fun, so the practice seems to be: tip lavishly beyond the amount on the bill if you are an American. If you are local you leave enough to buy half a ride on bus. Then it was off by car across a few hundred miles of Swedish countryside. It quickly dawned us that there is a lot of wood and water in Scandinavia and everything not composed of these two substances is made of rock. Billboards, junkyards, amusement parks and shopping centers don’t fill the landscape like here at home. Stockholm was a revelation. Easily one of the most compelling cities and I’ve been to. It’s a Baroque confection with many buildings dating from when it was a leading power 400 years ago. It never seems to get dark, the weather is perfect, everyone has a job, from the apple cheeked Swedish maid selling strawberries in the farmers markets to the sharply dressed ship stewards on the many watercraft. They really are a beautiful people. Many of the women quite tall and a lot of men are 6’6” and more. They are simply gigantic. And I don’t think they ever die. We met our friends David and Hi-jin who live part time in Half Moon Bay and part time in their penthouse overlooking Stockholm, as Hi-jin is Swedish. They are both artists and have done quite well. Hi-jin cooked one night and we ate as the night tried, without much success, to fall. The next evening we all went to a very elegant restaurant called F12. There the food was elaborate, tiny and inventive. One thing you can say is that the Scandinavians, like the Japanese, eat like one should. Very little red meat, a lot of fish and small portions. People in these countries bike for serious and the bike lanes are sacrosanct. It you are an uneducated tourist you tend to wander into them and the tinkling bill of an approaching bike belies the freight train insistence of these speeding vehicles. And what about the dark Scandinavian soul? I fully expected to witness people sobbing at the meaninglessness of life jumping of bridges in quantity but if there is shadow over them they never showed it to me. Even in the bike lane struggle they warned us with great courtesy. Everyone we met was smiling and of course they all speak English. I’m told the winters are long and bleak but that’s why Walt Disney invented Florida so with prosperity, and they are very prosperous, comes less depression. Peter found us an amazing hotel on a small island that was a renovated military barracks. Long and narrow, eclectic and wonderful. Most of our island was wrapped with the most stunning marina imaginable.

There were over a hundred houseboats all along the stone quay with signs illustrating to their histories. There were tugs, barges, military recon vessels, light ships and fishing boats. Many were in the 100-foot range and several were from the 19th century. All immaculate. This is the most aquatic of cities and there are thousands of inhabited islands so ferries and freighters abound. And get this, they are connected to the sea but the Baltic is so far away that the salt content is less then 1% and there is no tide. This is great for preserving ships. This was certainly the case with the Vasa the most visited site in Scandinavia. The Vasa is the 226-foot flagship of the Swedish navy that was launched in front of an admiring throng in 1628. It must have looked magnificent for the few minutes it floated but it proved to be a bit top heavy (must have been that last piece of bone marrow candy) and it fell over and sank in the harbor.

Top heavy? Since when are 700 sculptures of the royal court, medieval kings, roman emperors, Egyptian deities and fanciful animals spreading from water line to poop deck top heavy? Warships of today generally deemphasize art in favor of better ballast. An inquest resulted in finger pointing in a circle until it landed on the ship’s designer where it belonged. He had conveniently died and there it ended until the 1960s when the ship was lifted and went through a decades long preservation process. Today the wood is slowly disintegrating due to it’s high sulfur content and is expected to dissolve in the next 100 years so you should go soon. David and Hi-jin were making a movie called Unspoken when we showed up one night and we became part of it. Each of us in turn stared silently at the camera for a few seconds. No special effects, no orphans or Penguins, very Scandinavian in its simplicity. I expect the fat guy smoking a cigarette will be in it. See the progress at davidandhijin.com. We moved on to Helsinki and were there for the best possible day of the year - exactly midsummer when the city empties out. We emptied with them to an island to celebrate the longest day. There were bonfires (20-foot piles of green sticks), dancing and the singing of the traditional songs. The kids struggle on stilts and they sell small things made of wood and twigs. The Finns are a smart and tidy people who have made it big in the tech world of late and incomes have been high. Some Finns are worried that the dream is dimming because Nokia, the one time cell phone leader, is nearly exhausted and other reversals threaten there financial future. I get the feeling that they will be fine though. They have a very make-do philosophy and their spareness is reflected in the house and design studio of their greatest architect, Alvar Aalto. The house was like the people, modest, and completely unembellished. Aalto never worked in Beverley Hills. The main attraction in Helsinki for us was the 20-seat restaurant Chef and Sommelier. Sasu Laukkonen makes the food in a tiny kitchen and sits with you gazing into your eyes while describing each dish. Yes, we were hypnotized. My friend Henri Alen set us up there on the last day before the remaining 10% of people leave town. I had met Henri at Buck’s when he filmed a Finnish cooking show at Buck’s recently. Henri is very big in Finland and of course he was at his lake house with most everyone else. Sasu spends his day gathering weeds and bits of turf from the roadside and mushrooms from the forest, then in combination with local fish invents compelling dishes. Dining with Sasu was almost a distillation of all the New Nordic cooking as each glass, sliver of bread, and pinch of salt has a story. Susu is a man on fire and when he hears that his place, in my opinion, is better than Noma I know he will agree because this is man on a mission to make his place the best restaurant in the world. We sampled a lot of New Nordic cooking and I can say it will never take hold here. Many of us have been to fancy restaurants in San Francisco and New York where the food seems to be mainly about design but has familiar tastes. Americans just require more stuff on the plate and less raw mackerel. At one point we were eating fir needles and pickled pinecones. Not as good as it sounds. They also lo-o-ve rye crisp which is pretty much everywhere. Even the houses are made of it. In Finland the people have to take a good deal of ribbing because the country is quite small and the people are demure and a great deal more civilized than nearly everyone else. But they like to kick it when they can so one way they cut loose is to bring the household carpets to the shore and launder them on piers specially constructed for that purpose. This is popular summer pastime and we saw a good many installations with washing tables and large wringers. OK, I know it’s not a monster truck rally and you think I’m kidding but it gives you something to do every year, by the water and turns work into play.

We had one more day so we hopped a ferry for the hour and a half ride to Estonia. It rained all day and we saw the country from a dripping tour bus. They are trying mighty hard there and even with the lowest population density in Europe have built a couple skyscrapers in their compact city demonstrating their arrival in the 21st century. Margaret and I hopped back to Denmark for a final night and we opted to stay by the airport in the town of Dragør dating to the 12th century. We dipped into the only place open for dinner and didn’t expect much as we were almost the only ones there. What came were clever salads with local greens and perfectly seared scallops, magnificent battered and fried place, a local fish, and a perfectly done roast pork with gravy. Maybe the Strandshotel dining room is the best restaurant in the world.

THE FARM OF THE FUTURE -- AN APOLOGY TO STEVE JOBS -- and A RIF ON BOOK COLLECTING

Bill Davidow stopped in recently and introduced me to Ko Nishimura. Ko was peddling lettuce and I explained that we already had plenty of lettuce and why did I need his. Ko said it was rather special and I felt a bit like I was being sold magic beans. I was right. I was invited to the farm in Campbell and when I arrived at a nondescript warehouse I stepped into the farm of the future.

Ecopia Farms™ is a tech startup featuring some pretty bright lights such as Bill Davidow, cofounder of Mohr Davidow the venerable VC firm, and Ko who as CEO grew electronic parts supplier, Selectron, from $93 million a year to over $18 billion. Ko was also on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where the Nobel crowd hangs out. Their other co-conspirator is Sam Araki who built satellites for many years as the President of Lockheed Martin Missile and Space Company. So you might be getting the notion that these are not your average farmers or indeed typical startup guys. None of these fellows is exactly a kid but they bring an exuberance to the venture as if it sprung from a dorm room, yet tempered with their daunting collective wisdom.
It is sweetly ironic that Ko and Sam should end up as farmers. As kids their fathers were both farmers who wanted to make sure that their sons weren’t stuck behind the plow, so they went to college and ended up pursuing careers in industry. But here they are - behind the plow. In Japan this is know as “Big Bachi” or the gods reversing your plans by playing a trick on you.

Ko and I agree that our emphasis in this country on food as a commodity as opposed to being a substance we treat with reverence needs to be rethought. Based on income, food is cheaper here than anywhere else in the world but we are losing ground against the interests of agribusiness. Ko says that his grandmother taught him to treat food and life itself as a sacred trust and he feels that he is keeping doing right by her with Ecopia Farms. Sam’s father was an organic agricultural innovator who pioneered the use of bat guano and fishmeal to grow legendary produce. Now they are taking this family heritage and giving it a 21st Century spin. These folks have assembled a powerful team. The COO is Phil Fok who heads up the actual farming. He is turning out both greens and process patents at a prodigious pace.
I have seen several high-rise farming schemes. In fact there is a whole industry devoted to making pretty drawings of 50-story farms that are not remotely practical. Ecopia Farms is different. Using a multi-level growing rack with low-temp high-efficiency controlled-spectrum lights they can make greens stand up and sing. These plants are grown organically in a proprietary soil and they use about 1% of the water of outdoor farming. The installation is part R & D facility and part working farm, shipping to the best restaurants in the Bay Area. They grow tiny micro greens and herbs as well as lettuces, arugula, kale, chard and a host of other items. Many of the whole lettuces are about the size of a rose flower. The first full-scale Ecopia Farms operation is in a 23,000 sq. ft. warehouse (about ½ acre) which produces the equivalent of a traditional 100-acre farm. There is a great deal of unused warehouse space in cities all around the country and Ecopia Farms is gearing up to be the ultimate expression of “locally produced”

By precisely controlling the light, soil and water they take commercially available organic seed and make it produce far more efficiently than can be done outdoors. Naturally one thinks of the electricity used to light all the racks but I’m told that the efficiency is so high that the florescent room lights actually use more power than the grow lights. Add photovoltaics to the roofs and urban farming has come of age.
Some firms in the green space are well intentioned but wholly unworkable. Electric airplanes, viable fuel from algae and self-assembling solar electric farms make nice articles but in the real world are a waste of time. I’ve seen Ecopia Farms and we are now carrying the product. Check our specials menu for a featured salad.
Ecopiafarms.com

Dr. Rodney Perkins Breakfast Special 2.0
Dr. Perkins is a friend of mine and has been since the mid-80s when he was my last client before I went into the restaurant business. Rodney happens to be a world-renowned ear surgeon and an inventor. He has a great many patients and has led the world of hearing by merging innovative software with hearing hardware, not unlike Steve Jobs did at Apple.

The only name we have on any of the menu items (besides my wife’s pork chops) is The Dr. Rodney Perkins Breakfast Special. It has been a staple of our menu for nearly 10 years. Not one to rest on his past culinary success Rodney has devised a new incarnation of this old favorite.

Although Dr. Perkins was a founder of the first company to use collagen injections for wrinkles, the first company to commercialized a medical laser that was developed from scratch to be a surgical laser, the first company to introduce high tech signal processing into the hearing device industry and a founder of multiple successful medical device companies in a wide range of surgical specialties, he is inordinately pleased with his spot on the menu and he should be. It’s a healthy omelet - low in fat and calories and remarkably satisfying.

He tells me he is already working on 3.0.


Sorry Steve
I used to be a general building contractor back in the Pleistocene. My first job was fixing a stuck door in a house in Atherton and three years later I had remodeled the entire 25,000 sq. ft. mansion. Essentially I learned my trade by trial and error on this one house. Then I started job #2.

I went to see a young computer guy in Los Gatos who had bought an unremarkable 1920s tract house that he thought he’d fix up. When we first met he showed me his computer. It was an Apple 2. We sat on the floor in a room devoid of furniture and he explained that he could create a column and a row and by merging the numbers calculate a result. “Big deal,” I thought. I asked him how many employees he had and was startled when he said about 250. Now that impressed me. I had just one, plus my partner and wife, Margaret.

Thus began a year of yet more trial and error. I’ve read the new book about Steve Jobs and I shake my head in wonder that he put up with me for so long. We were actually friends though, and spent a good deal of time together. He and his girlfriend Barbara came up to our house and we frequently went out to dinner. In fact it was Barbara who picked the name for our two-week old second son, Tyler. One day, early in the job, Barbara came home as Steve and I were conferring on the front porch. She was in great distress and said, “John Lennon has been killed.” Steve burst onto tears and we had a group hug. It was a moment of raw humanity with Steve. There was a lot more emotion to come.

The house was a modest one and our aim was to make it a little gem. The problem was I was merely handy and Steve wanted perfection. Building is a skill like any other and to be good at it requires a great deal of experience; experience I didn’t yet have. But beyond that Steve had developed the now well documented notion that even if you think otherwise you can do a lot better than you think you can and that every detail matters.

Once he took me into his basement and pointed out the phone block mounted to a piece of plywood. It had a single wire running across its surface and he asked that we make it straight and evenly space the staples. I just rolled my eyes and argued with him that it didn’t matter. I lost that argument and all of the others. Steve yelled at a lot of people and the reports say he was pretty abusive. He must have cut me some slack because I recall him yelling but it wasn’t memorably vicious.
During the time we were together Apple went public and I now know that he was under a great deal of stress. At work he was fully in command but at home he was less sure. Steve is often pictured sitting on the floor of this house in his profound simplicity and I can report that during the time I knew him he really did sleep on a mattress on the dining room floor and his only furniture was a kitchen table and chairs. The reason he is pictured sitting on the floor is that he could not pick a couch. I know, I went couch shopping with him. I also went car shopping with him. He drove an old Mercedes and after his highly successful IPO at the age of 25 he thought a new car was in order. The very definition of frustrating is car shopping with Steve Jobs. We went to several dealerships and each time the over-choice and flawed design made it impossible for him to pick one and we went home in the old car. Of course he could have just bought them all but Steve was never wired for excess.

One of my last encounters with Steve was when he was holding back payment because of some inadequacies on the job. I was pretty desperate to get paid and early one morning I jumped on him in bed and half-mockingly grabbed him by the neck and told him he better pay me or he was going to be the deadest - youngest - richest self-made man. In the end we worked it out and he paid me.
For many years Steve lived in Woodside but he didn’t feel comfortable coming into Buck’s and I don’t think he ever did. Now that I am older I really appreciate his persnicketyness. Steve wasn’t in a position to teach me my trade, but he was a teacher but if the student isn’t ready…. So Steve, I’m sorry I wasn’t a better craftsman. Now I get it, but alas it’s too late.

My Books – mine, all mine, damnit!
I collect rare books. If you’re a collector you know that it is just crazy to pass some things up so I’m fortunate that there are not a great many books in my nitch or I would be broke. I collect books with things in them. Simply that. Books either one-off or editions that have had things applied to the inside. They could contain letters or even envelops. I recently acquired a fantastic collection of 457 ‘covers.’ These are envelops with pictures on the outside commemorating this or that. This collection is one person’s life’s work. The collection dates from the Civil War through the Spanish American War right through WWI. The collector fancied anti-Confederacy pictures many of which are pretty harsh. Well it was war, right?

Several of these books are on display at Buck’s. One of my favorites is in the bar. It is a collection of cigarette cards pasted in a book from the 1920s. Not wildly rare in itself but surrounding the open book in the frame you will see original, miniature tempera painting of the warships of the world. I have several hundred of these tiny paintings with detail so miniscule that the finest details disappears below view and it must have been done under a huge magnifier with a single hair brush.

In the back hall is another book of cigarette card photos, hand-tinted in Algeria, about a hundred years ago. They are sort of harem women and I have shuffled the cards around to display the more demure ones because most of them are pretty naked. They are actually French prostitutes wearing, or barely wearing, lavish costumes. On the wall opposite that is a collection of fabric samples or more exactly the trim used on lampshades and curtains. There is a French word for this trade but I can’t recall it. Please if you know the term clue me in. These materials were manufactured in New York’s Garment District in the 1920s by the Sig Heller Company and it is a salesman’s sample book. One day a fellow came up to me very excited. “I went to grammar school with Siggy Heller the grandson of this manufacturer.” Nice.

Near the back of the restaurant, mounted on two columns, are pages from the one book I specialize in. I have 7 examples and am always looking for more. I have visited the copies at Stanford and the British Library and but have been unable to locate many others. The book, is called Ancient Coins and was published in 1852. It is a brilliant treatise on coins from their invention to late Roman times. That’s a pretty good run but after nearly 3,000 years coins are about to disappear. The books contain 11 pages of coin replicas. In the mid 19th century a new type of binding was invented to replace stitching called ‘perfect binding’ with a glued edge. It is far from perfect and so these books have generally fallen apart. All but one of mine have been rebound. This alone is an interesting tour through the world of binding.…are you still awake…?

Anyway, please, please, please if anyone can think of a pedantic Greek or Latin phrase I can use to refer to this sort of book I would love to start using it.

Opps, I misspelled Gabriel, well tough no one reads this anyway. But if they (you) did (do) here it goes...

I’m a member of a cult. It’s true. It’s a non-religious one though and mostly composed of left-wingers but make no mistake, we have cult-like tendencies. This is my annual report on the hijinx in Long Beach at the TED Conference. The name means Technology Entertainment and Design. This year it could well have used the letter ‘A’ as well because there was a heavy emphasis on the arts. Like most topics at TED the arts come freighted with political and social import. Each year there is prizewinner who is given a hundred grand and the platform to make a wish. These wishes don’t include having the Budweiser girls dance at your summer BBQ (Yes I’m talking to you, Kelly) but are more like Jamie Oliver’s wish from last year that “Every child be taught to cook in school.” Of course this is simply ha-larious. Take it from me kids, cooking can only be done by experts in elaborately equipped gigantic factories. Plus you need packaging, trucks, advertising and lawyers. No. Food preparation is not for amateurs.

This year’s prizewinner, JR, had a much more down to earth idea. Go into ghettos and politically charged environments and rumble. JR is a 26-year-old Parisian street artist who gave up the spray can to travel with a small band of outlaws to very troubled cities to shoot people. It’s true. JR favors a very short barrel so he has to creep close to his quarry and from a couple of feet…aims and blam! He has their picture. He then takes these images and blows them up to billboard size and pastes them like wallpaper on the favelas in Rio, or ‘The Wall’ in Palestine or a desperate street in India. The idea is to involve the inhabitants in their neighborhoods and their very lives. He explains it far better than I can but, trust me, this guy has the magic; just look him up. “Stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project & together we’ll turn the world inside out.” This is JR’s wish. 1930’s movie theaters in the Mission in the City and JR’s team has expressed interest in doing a project there. insideoutproject.net

TED is a five-day gab fest with about 70 speakers discussing everything from astrophysics and neuropathology to how very, very wrong that person was who last year promoted that vastly increased video gamesmanship as a way to save society.

Some of the most unlikely characters speak such as Mohamed Nanabhay, head of Al Jazeera, the once reviled Arabic news agency…now, not so. He was as relevant as the CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooya, was ill-advised. She seemed like a perfectly nice person and a capable CEO as she told us about the good works Pepsi is doing to help the disadvantaged. What she didn’t mention was that most of what Pepsi sells is child-blimping sugar water and meatless taco meat. Well no one is perfect but some product lines are less perfect than others.

We saw the stunning pictures of Paul Nicklen, the soft-spoken National Geographic photographer who encountered the extraordinarily vicious leopard seal under the ice in the south polar sea. Leopard seals have been know to crash through several feet of ice to eat people right down to and even including their boots, except this seems to be unsubstantiated. Paul showed us pictures of the encounter he had of the repeated attempts by the toothy 12-foot seal trying to feed him like your granny stuffing you with pabulum (but made out of penguins).

At TED we don’t just sit in comfy chairs like a bunch of smug over-achieving fat cats (OK there is a lot of that) but we also powwow in the social spaces. Myself, I am sometimes mistaken for someone of consequence (a rumor that has got about) to my perennially startled amusement. At one point I was talking about the future of the internet to a fellow who turned out to be the Steven Bratt, the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation at M.I.T. He said he found my ideas compelling and brought over his associate to participate in the conversation. I found myself laying out the future of the WWW to Tim Burners-Lee, the guy who invented it. Yoohoo, people, I sell pancakes…professionally.

Speaking of food, the wacky and wise Nathan Myhrvold (ex-CTO at Microsoft) unveiled his $500 - 50 pound cookbook where he teaches us how to cook an egg in about 4 hours. But that egg is perfect. Nathan built a lab and has dissected the act of food preparation into its most basic components and then puts it all back together. This is an excellent how-to guide for sawing a remarkable amount of cooking equipment into twain to demonstrate the action inside. After sawing down the middle of a commercial convection oven he commented gleefully that the great thing about cutting machines in half is that you’ve got 2, count em, 2 halves. The man is a mad genius.

Deb Roy had a fascinating study on the formation of language. Using the ultimate nannycam he put cameras in every room of his house and taped the first 60,000 hours of the growing up process of his son. Deb was able to record the development of every word his son learned and how it happened. The camera tracked all the kid’s movements as well as those of the rest of the family. Brave New World you say? Well get-a-grip. Privacy is soooo 2003. Really, Deb’s study is quite a revelation but please watch the swearing around the kid will ya?

Morgan Spurlock depressed me with his presentation. Now, Morgan is a documentary film burner who made Super Size Me about his 30-day sentence at McDonalds. He has made a new film titled The Best Movie Money Can Buy. This is the tale of Morgan transparently selling product placement as the sole purpose of his documentary. He was able to get some sponsors though most (like PepsiCo) preferred not to join in. This is because (like the cigarette ads which show the young and pretty 20 somethings laughing and cavorting) they really sell addiction and death. Transparency is … err…hard for some companies. The depressing part of his talk (which will seen by millions) was that the very presentation itself was auctioned to a sponsor and someone bought the naming rights to: Some Damn Co. presents Morgan Spurlock. I actually forgot the name of the firm that bought it but it sold for 7,200 bucks which about what I pay my boat boy to polish the cleats on my yacht for a week.

Long Beach is a strange venue but the town is certainly glad to have us. The downtown looks peppy enough but a couple of blocks off the main drag reveals a business community that reminds me of Detroit but with better weather. The Long Beach airport buildings appear to be made of bolted together trailers and we quaintly wandered across the tarmac and actually climbed up and down stairs from our plane like Richard Nixon visiting Liberia. But Long Beach has its special charms. It is one of the few cities to feature a Seven Eleven with four working oil wells in the parking lot. A hundred years ago this area was the biggest oil producer in the world. It still smells like the whole town is being reroofed.

Bill Gates introduced a man he thinks is pretty hot stuff, Salmon Kahn, who founded the Kahn Academy. Sal is a Bay Area guy who gave up his servitude in the hedge fund mines to present short, simple online videos teaching all sorts of subjects. He started with math but has moved into economics and physics. It is his theory that lectures should be seen at home and that the homework is better being done in class. I think he might do to American education what Netflix did to Blockbuster. He has personally created 2,100 videos with 40,670,660 lessons delivered as of his speech. The Los Altos School Distinct has a pilot project using his teaching tools. Bill says Sal is the most important educator he has ever met.

Most of the talks are 18 minutes but some are just 3 like the one from the guy who told us about being on the jet that landed in the Hudson. He could see the river coming on fast and was sure that it was the end. But it wasn’t. His takeaway was: don’t put anything off because tomorrow can arrive unexpectedly…or not (I must finish Remembrance of Things Past, tonight!)


Some talks come with vivid demonstrations like that of the Handspring Puppet Company. These stage crafters built a lifelike full-sized horse with three actors inside it for a London (coming to New York) play called War Horse. You can see the puppeteers standing below the cane and leather puppet but in an instant you are made to see the horse as real or even more than real.

Reality is blurred once again when you hear about the advances in medicine such as the artificial human bladder the surgeon Anthony Atala printed on a modified dot matrix desktop printer and implanted in a teenage boy. It is still working after several years and the doctor is now printing kidneys, which are in a test phase.

TED is about the strange and transcendent. Strange is the savant Daniel Tammet who you can see a good deal of on youtube. He is best known as having recently recited, from memory, 22,514 digits of pi. Let me try… is it 3.141 or is it 3.414? Daniel also has synesthesia. This is a rare condition where the senses get scrambled. He can hear colors and smell sounds. Hey, I went to Berkeley in the 60’s. We could all do that then.

Stanley McChrystal the commander in the Middle East was with us and he told us what a good soldier he was but failed to mention his ill timed Rolling Stone interview in which he dissed the Commander-in-Chief and got tossed out on his keester. I was sitting right next to Gavan Newsom who diplomatically withheld comment. Julie Taymore was a refreshing contrast to Stanley. She headed up the disastrous Spiderman musical and she made reference to it with grace and humor. Even though this project hasn’t worked out so well she was the creative force behind the Lion King and I expect her to come roaring back in her next chapter.

My favorite presenters are the artists like Eric Whitace. He is a composer and a conductor who gave us Lux Aurumque. Here he assembled 185 singers from 12 countries to sing his choral work, virtually, then cut all them together and mapped each singer’s video on the screen. Since then he has done another video with 2,000 singers revolving slowly in giant spheres. It is spookily like the 22nd century.

22-year-old Sarah Kay brought us back to the present with her a-mazing slam poetry about growing up in New York with street smarts and a good attitude. She was my favorite of all the stage jockeys. You can finder her at http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/18/if-i-should-have-a-daughter-sarah-kay-on-ted-com/
Another artist was Homaro Cantu. He works in food at Moto in Chicago. This is America’s answer to El Bulli, in Spain, so it really isn’t food so much as theatrical gastronomy. I think I know where the other half of Myorvald ’s oven went. Here is a restaurant guy who isn’t concerned with nutrition, price, sustainability or practicality. With all that you still can’t get a reservation. Maybe I should try freezing maple syrup in liquid nitrogen. Help, someone call Jamie Oliver!

There are somber topics with hopeful notes such as the Egyptian Google employee who enabled the first wave of the Egyptian revolution. He told the TED crowd that the most remarkable thing about the uprising was that everyone (and no one) were the leaders.

We saw the first public demo of the Bubbli augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos in a bubble shape. Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a series of pictures with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that ‘bubble’ by holding their own phones in front of them. A frivolous toy? Maybe, but so was Twitter.

Of course there were parties at night and (so unlike high school) I found myself at the cool kids party where I spoke to a couple of guys who told me that their fathers were in a movie together called Don’t Look Back, a long-ago documentary featuring Donovan and Bob Dylan. Oh, man I even have a son named Dylan. Norman Lear showed up; Demi Moore and Aston Kutcher drifted in and it became a real Hollywood scene but with more oil wells in the front yard than you see in Beverly Hills. (Note: They aren’t entirely absent in Beverly Hills by the way. There are producing wells on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. BHHS is floating on it; a fact that is cruelly ironic.)

The TED movement has grown far beyond the confines of Long Beach. In the last couple of years TEDX events have sprung up from Mombasa to Miami. These one-day affairs cost just $100 and follow the same basic format. There are several in the Bay Area throughout the year. Some 1,500 have already happened with another 800 are being planning. There is also a big TED event this summer in Edinburgh Scotland.

People think you have to be invited to go to the main event but this isn’t really the case, though it is generally sold out more then a year in advance. People do get into the French Laundry so you no doubt can come to TED if you are persistent. They let me in and I sell pancakes for a living.


Books Books Books

We have four great books by friends of mine to discuss this month. All these authors have been featured here before with previous books. But because these books don’t have the requisite three-flattering-pages-about-Jamis I don’t actually carry them here but I think, if you are very clever, you can find them.

Overconnected by Bill Davidow (Mohr
Davidow Venture Partners cofounder) is a somewhat depressing look at some of the dark consequences the internet can have on economies and political systems. (well I guess it can’t all be The Bernstein Bears Go to Disneyland) The shape and tenor of our interwoven world has basically come to us a compromised collection of default settings and this self assembly doesn’t come with robust failsafe protections. Bill has seen the internet grow from his insider’s point of view and the book is a cautionary tale in a world where unintended consequences are multiplied by ubiquitous connectivity.



In Next Medicine: The Science and Civics of Health Dr. Walter Bortz tells us that our medical system is essentially backwards. We attempt to fix what breaks verses preventing illness. Dr. Bortz should know a thing or two about health as a gerontologist who has gone deep into the subject. The fact is our medical techniques are the envy of the world but the economics and distribution of resources is slipping fast. It isn’t just some arm-chair gabbing either because Wally has made his own life an example of lifelong fitness. In fact, last time I checked he and his wife Ruth Anne had about 60 marathons between them.

Andy Kessler is a funny writer. Breezy and full of pith and vinegar with his up-in-your-grill gonzo journalism. Andy lays out a new manifesto for unleashing entrepreneurial creativity in Eat People. ”Andy is a recovering Wall Street hedge funder who is for, growth for growth sake guy supporting unfettered marketplaces with an unromantic view of government protections to preserve the status quo of ongoing businesses. If they fail, let em go. Andy makes the dismal science of economics lively and with his hilarious push o the pen it goes down easily.
Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions examines how to promote your brand in a world of vicious competition and ethical conflicts. Richard Branson say, “Guy’s book captures the importance – and the - art of believing in an idea that delivers something entirely unique to the customer. The power of a really good idea to transform the marketplace and individual customer experiences is huge and this book offers a wealth of insights to help business and entrepreneurs tap into that potential.