Al Gore at Google

Al Gore, who introduced himself as “I’m Al Gore — I used to be the next president of the United States,” gave a talk at Google today. (Speaking, as all guest speakers do, in the Google 'multi-purpose room' - 30 minutes earlier, this was one of the Google cafeterias)

If only he had been able to show how smart, funny, and down-to-earth he was when he was in office and running for Pres. The world would be a different place. He was all that - very smart (jeeze I miss that in our elected officials: your assignment - compare/contrast Clinton/Gore with Bush/Cheyney) , pretty danged funny, and definitely down to earth. Also very passionate. (On the down-to-earth part, he told an anecdote about giving his Climate Crisis talk to a bunch of red-neck friends on a house boat in Tennessee late at night. And qouted one of his newly-enlightened friends responding with 'holy f***!". Mr Gore added that he hoped this talk wasn't going to be video-streamed to the web.)

His talk was on the Climate Crisis - how we got here, how bad is it (VERY), and what we can do about it (quite a bit - but need to act soon). The talk was a Power Point presentation (but, of course, with Al Gore live) of a movie that will be coming out shortly. For more info see his website. Google is going to take the whole company to the movie as soon as it's released.

After his planned talk, there was about 30 minutes of Q&A. Again - I sure wish we had seen this guy in 2000. If only his handlers had just let him be himself. The man can actually think on his feet and not worry about staying on message.

The guy to the left of Al is Dr Larry Brilliant, who heads up Google.org - the non-profit side of Google. Just a regular guy -spent years in India ashrams, hung out with Grateful Dead and Wavy Gravy, oh - and was largely responsible for ridding India of smallpox.


It was a really interesting afternoon. But then, I had to drive home (after wasting an hour losing/finding my Google badge and thus) hitting prime time traffic over to the coast. Have I mentioned that there is a problem with the roads? Sorry - was trying to stop that whining.