Optimal Friction™

Thomas Friedman, Stewart Brand, Lester Brown, and Robert Freling are stunning the POPTech audience with a discussion about the dramatic shifts happening in the world from our consumption on non-renewable fuels, population growth, and geopolitical impacts from the relentless consumption of oil and rising prices.

The storytelling aspects of these powerful speakers is captivating. Two of them simply sat in a chair and talked without any fancy graphics and slides. The room is silent and the discourse is powerful and captivating.

Brand's and Freling's audiovisuals are remarkable. There is far too much content in from this quartet to capture for this blog in real-time. Suffice to say that their message about the current and (near) future implications of our global growing consumption of fuel (China, India, and the former USSR are consuming resources at exponential rates) is already creating an upheaval of life on this planet with inevitable impact on a dramatic scale.

Freling's talk evokes memories of last year's inspirational POPTech presentation by Bunker Roy on the work of the Barefoot College in India, which has trained two generations of villagers without any formal paper qualifications to become health-care workers, solar engineers, hand-pump mechanics and teachers in their communities. He is hopeful as he describes the role of technology in solving so many of the world's problems, using solar power examples in rural Third World villages. He is working with the Partners in Health initiative at the Clinton Foundation.

One thing I found surprising from Stewart Brand was the forecast on polulation growth to 8-9 billion, followed by a dramatic decline back down to 3 billion. For more on this, go to some of Brand's research where he references forecasts based upon U.N. population studies.