Long Now

### Making plastic even better Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken _Titanic_ , none are synthetic plastic, because there was hardly any available in 1912. Natural plastic, however, was a familiar material. Amber was popular. Rubber was essential (all plant cellulose is made of long-chain polymers). Ivory for everything from billiard balls to piano keys was in such high demand that an 1867 paper warned about the looming extinction of elephants. The first synthetic plastic---celluoid---was developed as a substitute for ivory, and the elephants survived. Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac ("It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac."), and was first used to insulate electrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics _trade_ show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along---Orlon and Dacron---as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys---Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty. Looking for new markets, the marketers discovered disposability---disposable cups for drink vending machines, disposable diapers ("Said to be responsible for the baby boom"), Bic lighters, soda bottles, medical syringes, and the infinite market of packaging. Americans consume 300 pounds of plastic a year. The variety of plastics we use are a problem for recycling, because they have to be sorted by hand. They all biodegrade eventually, but at varying rates. New bio-based polymers like "corn plastic" and "plant bottles" have less of a carbon footprint, but they biodegrade poorly. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiencies of fracking, the price of natural gas feedstock is plummeting, and so is the price of plastic manufacture. Some plastics have some chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates that are toxic. American manufacturers don’t have to list the materials in their products, and there’s no hope of testing every one of the 80,000 industrialized chemicals loose in the world. Freinkel recommends greatly expanding the practice of “green chemistry,” so that every process and product of manufacturing is safe and sustainable from the ground up. She would like to see a stronger regulatory environment and the building of a fully systemic recycling infrastructure. In the Q & A Freinkel recommended a book by Elizabeth Grossman, _Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry_.

### Bio-blender Earth Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of "the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs." The first momentous change came from microbial exchange---20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases---"the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history." That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s "Little Ice Age" (1550-1800) apparently resulted. Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which "went shopping" worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato---a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated. In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America---maize and sweet potato---could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. "A Katrina per month for 100 years," as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover. In America two imported diseases---malaria and yellow fever---were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas. During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. "There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation." Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. "You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time." The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

### The real creation story “History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life---Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to science, and from science a valid, shareable creation story is now emerging. For the last 65 million years Earth has been dominated by eusocial animals. Ants, termites, and bees in some areas make up half of all biomass. Yet only a few of the million known insect species made the jump to eusociality. One variety of mammal, a tiny set of primates, made a similar jump. Once they began to use their eusocial skills to fan out from Africa 60 thousand years ago, they gradually became far more dominant even than the social insects. “The term ‘eusocial,’“ Wilson said, “means a society based in part on a division of labor, in which individuals act altruistically, that covers two or more generations, and that cares for young cooperatively.” That eusociality is so rare suggests how difficult it is for altruistic traits to evolve. The powerful evolutionary force to make individuals that successfully reproduce has to be overcome by some form of selective pressure which generates altruistic individuals who yield their interests to the interests of the group. How does that occur? Examining near-eusocial species like African wild dogs and snapping shrimp along with primitively eusocial species like sweat bees shows that a crucial step appears to be made when multiple generations linger to defend a constructed nest with valuable access to food. That step can be made with a simple change to a single behavioral gene, silencing the trait for normal dispersal of young to carry out their own independent reproduction. When the young linger to defend the nest and begin to provide for the next generation of young, eusociality begins. All eusocial species appear to have arisen from multi-generational nest defense. Two million years ago our ancestors began using fire for campsites and cooking. At the same time hominid brain size began expanding dramatically. Social traits emerged that have characterized humanity ever since. We love joining groups, and we became geniuses at reading the intentions of each other, a skill we fine-tune incessantly with our enjoyment of gossip. In another distinctively human trait, like ants, we became highly adept at collaborative warfare. Wilson had long been a proponent of William Hamilton’s theory of “kin selection” as an explanation for how altruistic traits could evolve. But as a naturalist he found it did not explain phenomena that he and others were discovering in eusocial species, and he began to favor “group selection” instead---a process where the “target” of evolution was sacrificially collaborative traits, because highly cooperative groups beat poorly cooperative groups, and the “units” of evolution (genes) adjusted accordingly. It is successful groups, more than successful families, that are being selected for. In 2010 Wilson, along with mathematician Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita formally challenged kin selection with a peer-reviewed paper in Nature. There was, as Wilson put it, “considerable blowback” from kin selection theorists and supporters. Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation. Our vibrant cultural life may be driven in part by it. In response to a question about what the next stages of human eusociality might be, Wilson said he hoped for a fading of interest in end-state ideologies and end-time religious creation stories because they so fervently deny negotiation.

### The Quantified Planet “About 74,000 years ago,” Lynas began, “a volcanic event nearly wiped out humanity. We were down to just a thousand or so embattled breeding pairs. We’ve made a bit of a comeback since then. We’re over seven billion strong. In half a million years we’ve gone from prodding anthills with sticks to building a worldwide digital communications network. Well done! But... there’s a small problem. In doing this we’ve had to capture between a quarter and a third of the entire photosynthetic production of the planet. We’ve raised the temperature of the Earth system, reduced the alkalinity of the oceans, altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, changed the reflectivity of the planet, hugely affected the distribution of freshwater, and killed off many of the species that share the planet with us. Welcome to the Anthropocene, our very uniquely human geological era.” Some of those global alterations made by humans may be approaching tipping points---thresholds---that could destabilize the whole Earth system. Drawing on a landmark paper in Nature in 2009 (“[A Safe Operating Space for Humanity](http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html),” by Johan Rockström et al.) Lynas outlined the nine boundaries we should stay within, starting with three we’ve already crossed. 1. Loss of biodiversity reduces every form of ecological resilience. The boundary is 10 species going extinct per million per year. Currently we lose over 100 species per million per year. 2. Global warming is the most overwhelming boundary. Long-term stability requires 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we’re currently at 391 ppm and rising fast. “The entire human economy must become carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative thereafter.” 3. Nitrogen pollution. With the invention a century ago of the Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizer, we doubled the terrestrial nitrogen cycle. We need to reduce the amount of atmospheric nitrogen we fix per year to 35 million tons; we’re currently at 121 million tons. Other quantifiable boundaries have yet to be exceeded, but we’re close. 4. Land use. Every bit of natural landscape lost threatens ecosystem services like clean water and air and atmospheric carbon balance. “Already 85% of the Earth’s ice-free land is fragmented or substantially affected by human activity.” The danger point is 15% of land being used for row crops; we’re currently at 12%. 5. Fresh water scarcity. Increasing droughts from global warming will make the problem ever worse. In the world’s rivers, “the blue arteries of the living planet,” there are 800,000 dams with two new large ones built every day. The numeric limit is thought to be 4,000 cubic kilometers of runoff water consumed per year; the current number is 2,600. 6. Ocean acidification from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasingly lethal to ocean life such as coral reefs. The measure here is “aragonite saturation level.” Before the industrial revolution it was 3.44; the limit is 2.75; we’re already down to 2.90. 7. The ozone layer protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. One man (Thomas Midgley) invented the chlorofluorocarbon coolant that rapidly reduced stratospheric ozone, and one remarkable agreement (Montreal Protocol, 1987) cut back on CFCs and began restoring the ozone layer. (In Dobson units the limit is 276; before Midgley it was 290; we’re now back up to 283.) Two boundaries are so far unquantifiable. 8. Chemical pollution. Rachel Carson was right. Human toxics are showing up everywhere and causing harm. Coal-fired power plants are one of the worst offenders in this category. (Lynas added that nuclear waste belongs in this category but “the supposedly unsolved problem of nuclear waste hasn’t so far harmed a single living thing.” 9. Atmospheric aerosols---airborne dust and smoke. It kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, the soot causes ice to melt faster, and everyone wants to get rid of it. But one beneficial effect it has is cooling, so Lynas proposes “we could move this pollution from the troposphere where people have to breathe it up to the stratosphere where it can still cool the Earth and no one has to breathe it. That’s called geoengineering.” Lynas proposed that the goal for the future should be to get the whole world out of poverty by 2050 while staying within the planetary boundaries. Among the solutions he proposed are: clean cookstoves for the poor (they cause 1.6 million deaths a year); better GM crops for nitrogen efficiency and concentrated land use; integral fast reactors which run on nuclear waste (a recent calculation shows the UK could get 500 years of clean energy from its present waste, and the resulting IFR waste is a problem for 300 years, not for thousands of years); international treaties, which are crucial for dealing with global problems; carbon capture (everything from clean coal to biochar); and ongoing “dematerialization,” doing ever more with ever less, including more intense farming on less land. “Peak consumption,” Lynas noted, has already arrived in much of the developed world.

### Save Agricultural Biodiversity Humanity’s agricultural legacy is on a par with any of our great cultural legacies, Richardson said, but preserving it is not just a matter of honoring the history and richness of our most fundamental civilization-enabling technology. For the health of future crops and livestock we need the deep genetic reservoir of all those millennia of sophisticated breeding. A million people died in the Irish Potato Famine because the whole nation depended on just two varieties of potato. In Peru, where potatoes originally came from, Richardson visited a field at 14,000 feet where 400 varieties of potato (with names like “Ashes of the Soul” and “Puma Paw”) are grown in just two acres. The local 1,300 varieties of potato are managed by a “Guardian of the Potatoes,” whose job it is in the community to know the story and uses of all the potatoes. The accumulated wisdom in the crops and livestock is profound. We’ve been breeding cattle for 10,000 years, goats for 9,000 years, dogs for 12,000 years, chickens for 8,000 years, llamas for 6,500 years, horses for 6,000 years, camels for 4,000 years. All those millennia we have been in deep partnership with the animals. All of our staple foods are ancient. Wheat has been bred for 11,000 years, corn for 8,000 years, rice for 8,000 years, potatoes for 7,000 years, soybeans for 5,000 years “For 9,900 years,” Richardson said, “we’ve been building up variety in domesticated crops and livestock---this whole wealth of specific solutions to specific problems. For the last 100 years we’ve been throwing it away.” 95% is gone. In the US in 1903 there were 497 varieties of lettuce; by 1983 there were only 36 varieties. (Also changed from 1903 to 1983: sweet corn from 307 varieties to 13; peas from 408 to 25; tomatoes from 408 to 79; cabbage from 544 to 28.) Seed banks have been one way to slow the rate of loss. The famous seed vault at Svalbard serves as backup for the some 1,300 seed banks around the world. The great limitation is that seeds don’t remain viable for long. They have to be grown out every 7 to 20 years, and the new seeds returned to storage. Even with living heirlooms, the rule is Use It Or Lose It. Devotees of exotic cattle say “You have to eat them to save them.” With dramatic photos Richardson compared the livestock shows in Wales with the livestock markets in Ethiopia. You see children adoring the young animals and breeders obsessing on details of excellence and uniqueness. “One guy says, ‘You see that sheep with the heart-shaped spot on his left shoulder? I’ll bet you I can move it to his rump in four generations.’” There’s a sheep called the North Ronaldsay that is bred to live solely on seaweed on the coast. Ethiopia has some specialists, like the Sheko cattle that are resistant to tsetse flies, but unlike in Europe, most of their breeds have to be generalists capable of providing meat, milk, labor (such pulling plows), and warmth in the winter. Helping preserve agricultural biodiversity is open to anyone. The [Seed Savers Exchange](http://www.seedsavers.org) in Decorah, Iowa, has 13,000 members. Their catalog is a cornucopia of heirloom garden delights, and members learn how to produce and store their own seeds and then share them. “It’s a wonderful example of citizens participating in the process.” And we can always acquire a new taste for old foods. Teff! Quinoa! Amaranth! Randall Lineback cows! You have to eat them to save them. PS: Jim Richardson’s beautiful heirloom photos and article may be found [here](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text).

### Public Funding for Public Elections Larry Lessig gave a rousing performance for the 100th Seminar About Long-Term Thinking. In a lawyerly fashion he laid out evidence of a new type of corruption that is disrupting the American republic, and he offered a remedy for that corruption. Lessig has a very distinctive visual style of using slides that punctuates, word for word, the clear logic of his argument. He said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions. That is now illegal and eliminated. This new type of corruption is more subtle, indirect and harder to outlaw. Corporations legally donate money to the election campaigns of legislators, who in turn tend to vote in favor of the interests of those corporations. Non-profits like [Maplight](http://maplight.org/) can graph the evidence that a representative voting in favor of a particular corporate-friendly law will receive 6 or 10 or 13 times the funding than someone who opposes the law. He cited studies that showed the ROI (return on investment) of lobbying to be 1,000%. It was one of the sanest expenses for a corporation. But the distortion is not just one sided. The issue that Congress spent the most time on in 2011 -- a year when US was waging two wars, dealing with a near economic depression, and revamping health care -- was the bank swipe fee. Who should pay the credit card use fee -- the banks or the stores? There were corporations on both sides of this minor argument, but each side was promising campaign funds, so this was the issue that got all the attention of the officials. But the real money to be made in Congress is the relative fortune to be made as a lobbyist after leaving office. The differential in wages between a staff member and a lobbyist has escalated a hundred fold in the past 40 years. Now 43% of staff go on to become lobbyists. The promise of a well-paying job working for corporate interests later is enough to warp voting now. None of this is illegal, but Lessig argues that we have a constitutional argument for eliminating it. The Constitution talks about the republic being "dependent on the people alone." But now it is dependent on corporate funders, and more and more JUST on corporate funders. His solution is to return the republic to being dependent on the people alone. His solution is an innovative kind of campaign finance reform. Give every voter a $50 campaign voucher. The $50 comes from the tax pool. It can be given to any candidate who accepts only money from the vouchers (and maybe a limit of an optional voluntary $100 per single voter). Thus all campaign money would come in very small amounts from The People. Lessig calculates that the total amount of money raised this public way would be 3 times the amount raised by private means in the last election cycles, and therefore more than adequate. But it would break the grip of corporate influence over what is voted up. The result would not be harmonious utopia, but the usual give-and-take compromises of politics -- which the US has not seen in decades. The issues that people cared about would return to the agenda. Lessig spent the remaining time and some of the question and answers talking about the real-politic necessary to pass this reform. A similar public financing scheme works in places like Sweden, where one elected legislator told Lessig he had never had to worry about where his funding came from. But the US has a fierce free-speech component not found elsewhere, and ironically, since spending money is viewed as a type of free speech, this complicates reform. As a free-speech advocate himself, and a constitutional lawyer, Lessig talked candidly about the difficulties of reform. He ended by saying that it would probably be a generational task. Overcoming institutional racism and sexism took more than one generation, and returning the republic to the "people alone" could take just as long, although in this case, the republic might not last that long without reform.

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past. New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

### All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity's greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. "We're building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!" Start with what the ancient library had---books. The [Internet Library](http://www.archive.org/) already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots---29 of them around the world---they're churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from [physical libraries](http://www.archive.org/)\---100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library's "[ePort](http://oakland.lib.overdrive.com/B5827532-F62F-49BC-8C8E-8BF0DDBD600A/10/644/en/Default.htm).") As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The [Archive audio collection](http://www.archive.org/details/etree) has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading. Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating---600,000 of them are accessible in the [Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/movies) already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone's permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an [online archive of TV news](http://www.archive.org/details/911) coverage all that week from around the world ("TV comes with a point of view!") and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001. The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the [Wayback Machine](http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second. "What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?" Kahle asked. "For burning! It's all gone!" To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media every five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new [Bibliotheca Alexandrina](http://www.bibalex.org/Home/Default_EN.aspx) in Egypt and in Amsterdam. ("So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won't sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.") Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it's because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they're free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.

### Eco-continuity in California California ecology used to be much more driven by floods and fires, Cunningham said, showing with her paintings how the Great Valley would become a vast inland sea, like a huge vernal pool progressing each year from navigable water to intense flower displays to elk-grazed grassland. Lake Merritt in Oakland was a salt water inlet. On the Albany mudflats grizzly bears would tunnel into a beached humpback whale for food, joined by California condors. Every fall at the Carquinez Strait a million four-foot-long Chinook salmon headed inland to spawn. Only 300 years ago the whole Bay Area was grasslands, routinely burned by the local Indians. There were oaks in the valleys, redwoods in the Berkeley Hills, and extensive oak savannahs inland. The hills were greener more of the year than now, with fire-freshened grass attracting elk, and native perennial grasses drawing moisture with their deep roots. Cunningham researched the ancient landscapes using old maps, photos, paintings, scientific reports, sundry local experts, and 30 years of fieldwork. She witnessed the last wild condors feeding on a calf carcass, chasing off a golden eagle. (The condors are now back in the wild, spotted as far north as Mt. Hamilton.) To learn about the behavior and ecological effects of wolves and grizzly bears, she studied them in Yellowstone Park. (The California golden bear was enormous, up to 2,200 pounds.) Along the Pacific shore there used to be 10-ton Steller's sea cows (extinct in 1768), a giant petrel with an 8-foot wingspan, and a flightless diving goose that ate mussels. Further back, in the Ice Ages before 12,000 years ago, the ocean was lower, and San Francisco Bay was a savannah occupied by huge bison (6 feet at the shoulder), a native full-sized horse similar to the African quagga (Cunningham shows it with quagga-like stripes), Columbian mammoths, and the giant short-faced bear (10 feet tall standing up). For current Californians Cunningham encourages local restoration of old ecosystems, perhaps learning to live with more flood and fire. With her multi-millennial perspective, she's pretty relaxed about climate change. As much as long-term ecology is about continuity, it is about change.

### Learning to learn fast To acquire "the meta-skill of acquiring skills," Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: "What if I try the opposite of best practices?" Some conventional wisdom---"children learn languages faster than adults" (no they don't)---can be discarded. Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically. For instance, don't study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it's spoken. You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words. That's what Ferriss calls the "minimum effective dose" for learning a language. The equivalent with any skill or goal is worth identifying. A regular 5 minutes of kettlebell swinging can tone the body rapidly; 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking makes your slow-carb diet effective; just 20,000 "early evangelists" for your book in its first 2 weeks guarantees it becomes a best seller. With any skill, "solve for extremes and anomalies." Look at who's best and how they do it, but especially look for those who are surprisingly good---the wispy girl who can deadlift 405 pounds---because they're doing it with technique rather than genes, and technique is learnable. How do you manage the self-discipline to bear down on learning a skill? Ferriss suggests you begin by treating your new regime as a trial (vowing permanence can be discouraging)--- give it 2 weeks or 5 serious sessions. By that point early rewards from the discipline will keep you going. You have to measure to detect the rewards ("What gets measured gets managed"--Peter Drucker), and score-keeping lets you make your progress a competitive game with others---which becomes its own motivation. Make public bets about your specific goals, where you'll pay painfully if you fail. "Loss aversion" is a surprisingly powerful incentive. You can get profound effects in an amazingly short time, Ferriss concluded. "Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think." PS: [ A collection of all of these summaries of the SALT talks](http://www.amazon.com/Summaries-Condensed-Long-term-Thinking-ebook/dp/B005I57M4O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316213727&sr=1-1) is available on the Kindle for $3. Foreword by Brian Eno.