Consolers of the Lonely

Third Man/Warner Bros.

BY MELISSA MAERZ

WHAT SEPARATES THE BLUES GREATS

Odelay: Beck: MP3 Downloads

from the legends? A good story. And Jack White knows how to tell one. (Did you hear the one about the guitarist who mar¬ried his sister?) It’s no coincidence that his side band is called the Raconteurs: “When you call yourself a musician,” newest films the White Stripes leader said when he teamed up with singer-songwriter Brendan Benson, bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Pat¬rick Keeler in 2005, “you join that family of storytellers.”

He’s found the right clan. Consolers of the Lonely comes together like a blissfully stoned conversation between White and Benson about their favorite bands: Led Zeppelin, the Who, Badfinger.  Better Living Through Circuitry Each of them riffs off the other, trading verses and guitar leads on a host of compelling sto¬ries: a classic Western (the Ennio Morri-cone sendup “The Switch and the Spur”), a feel-good biblical allegory (the folk hymn “These Stones Will Shout”), a revenge saga (the slow-burning epic “Carolina Drama”). White channels Benson when he coos har¬monies on the piano-led “Pull This Blan¬ket Off.” Benson channels White when he growls on the gritty, garage-inspired “Salute Your Solution.”  Bob Marley – Freedom Road And their styles merge completely on “Consolers of the Lonely,” which doles out every possible ex¬clamation point: explosive guitars, abrupt tempo changes, a floorboard-rumbling rhythm section and a climax where the whole band starts laughing. That song’s title (and the album’s) comes from an in¬scription on a post office building in Wash-ington, D.C.: “Messenger of sympathy and love, servant of parted friends, consoler of the lonely, bond of the scattered family, en-larger of the common life.” If that’s a mail¬man’s job – to connect people – then that’s what these songs are aiming to do too. A Night with Lou Reed 1983

This two-party system of songwrit-ing didn’t work as well on Broken Boy Soldiers. In order not to overshadow Benson, White almost rendered himself anonymous, abandoning his three-chord limit and letting himself get caught up in

Brilliant waves Omidyar over, and the eBay founder -thin, serious, dressed like a grad student – scoots past Al Gore, who is locked in conversation with Cameron Diaz. Brilliant gives Omidyar a half-hug, and the two chat about Omidyar’s three kids and his upcoming trip to India. “Pierre is one of the finest, most decent people in the world,” Brilliant says after Omidyar moves on.

The brief encounter underscores the challenge Bril¬liant faces as the leader of Google’s growing philan¬thropic empire. Hanging out with billionaires, after all, is not the same thing as being a billionaire. As the head of DotOrg, Brilliant derives his power and moral author¬ity from the fact that he is not part of this crowd, that he retains his ability to sit in a room with a bunch of CEOs and tell them that their doomsday profiteering is stupid. It’s his connection to human suffering, not his connec¬tion to money, that is his gift. If he loses that connection, he loses everything — and he knows it. “It’s easy to forget the real purpose of my work,” says Brilliant. “Behind all the numbers and the meetings, lives are at stake.”  No Announcements to Display

For Google itself, the risk of launching DotOrg has lit¬tle to do with money or losing focus on its core business. It has to do with trust. “It has to be clear that this effort is not about gaining commercial advantage but about changing the world,” says Doerr. Right now, Google is able to deflect many questions about privacy and cor¬porate evildoings simply because Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem like honest guys. But the more the company moves into new arenas, like energy and public health, the more danger there is that Google could be revealed to be just another greedy corporation using philanthropy as a mask to hide its plundering and profiteering.

Brilliant, with his unshakable belief in human will, remains certain that DotOrg can be a force for good in the world. What worries him today is not evil corpo¬rations, but religious intolerance. After all, for a man who believes that love is all we need, nothing is more frightening than hatred. “I used to think terrorism was a virus, and love was the antidote,” he says. “What keeps me up at night is that Americans don’t understand there is goodness in every religion. What worries me is that we may not understand that we are all in this together. How do we build a world where we love each other more than we hate each other?”

For the moment, Larry Brilliant is balancing on the tightrope between promises made and promises yet to be kept. At the TED Conference, Jeff Skoll, another eBay billionaire turned philanthropreneur, drifts over to talk about a recent trip they took to India together. Movie producer Lawrence Bender says hello, and Brilliant art¬fully bats down a rumor that he once had an affair with Mia Farrow (“Don’t I wish!” he jokes). Tomorrow night, there will be the billionaires’ dinner, and the following day, eighteen holes at Pebble Beach.

Brilliant is not unaware of the contradictions be¬tween the many worlds he inhabits, but it’s clear that he himself, like the philanthropy he is pursuing, is sort of a hybrid – hippie and techie, humanist and capitalist, optimist and realist. When I ask him if he ever fears he has sold his soul for an invitation to the Billionaires Ball, he leans over again, almost whispering in my ear.

“It’s like my friend Wavy says,” he tells me. “The art

of life is putting your little bit of good where it will do

the most.”

But DotOrg’s clean-power initiative is even more am¬bitious – it’s nothing less than an energy moonshot. The stated goal is to fund research into breakthrough tech nologies that, within the next decade or so, could pro¬duce what the group calls “RE<C” – renewable energy cheaper than coal.

DotOrg has announced investments in two companies: Makani Power, which hopes to har¬ness high-altitude wind energy, and eSolar, which uses sunlight to drive conventional steam turbines. Brilliant, with his boundless optimism, believes that both efforts represent a new approach to renewable energy. “Our goal is not to go after short-term profits,” he says, “but to actually develop breakthrough technology that will dis¬place the biggest problem the world has when it comes to global warming: our dependence on coal.” Carbonation – RocketThemeTemplate

But Google’s move into energy raises a pressing ques¬tion: Does the company plan to get into the electricity business, which generates $387 billion in the U.S. alone? “Are we open to it?” Brin says, sitting in a wicker chair at this year’s TED Conference. “Yes, but we don’t know exactly how. Is it as investment? Is it in a partnership? Is it simply to bring power to our data centers? I’m happy to play any of those roles. This is not a charity. And if it pays off, it’s a great investment.”

The initiative closest to Brilliant’s heart, however, is the one he developed for the TED Prize: predicting and preventing the outbreak of new infectious diseases. Along the Mekong River, DotOrg is working with health ministers in Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cam-bodia, Vietnam and China to set up an early-warning system for bird flu. The company has also developed a cellphone-based communication system for emergency-aid workers in disaster zones and is funding research to improve real-time mapping of new disease vectors.

As the system evolves, it’s easy to imagine how Google’s prowess in search technology, satellite imag¬ery and mapping might revolutionize how we respond to epidemics. But as the company moves deeper into the realm of public health, the questions get more complex. Collecting data is one thing; once you get it, what do you do with it? If you detect an outbreak somewhere in the world, who has the authority to make the call? Who takes responsibility for the warning if it turns out to be wrong? Who profits if it’s right?

“Our objective is purely for the health of the popula¬tion,” says Dr. Theresa Tam, who is responsible for the Canadian detection system that won Brilliant’s admira¬tion. “I don’t know what Google’s objective is.”

2.            Presenting a $15,000 check to Joseph Tackie, a small businessman in Ghana. “Business is a better engine for creating jobs than aid,” Brilliant says.  Computers · Electronics

morning as we take a ferry across the bay from his home to his office in San Francisco. Car & GPS “Every step along the way, you see human misery-beggars, lepers, people literally starving. Let’s say you have a couple of rupees to hand out – how do you decide who to give it to? Is a person who is missing a hand more worthy than someone who is missing a leg? Someone who’s starving to death versus a mother with a sick child?”

Brilliant built his DotOrg team from scratch, bring¬ing in experts like Dan Reicher, the assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, and Dr. Mark Smolinski, who had worked on biosecurity with the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative. The core team went through a long list of ideas, winnowing out the best in courtroom-style debates. The question was not just “What does the world need most?” but “Where can Google make the most difference?” Another litmus test: “Will it scale?” That is, if it works, could DotOrg grow it exponentially? A pandemic-warning system, based on Google search technology, would definitely scale. Build¬ing roads in Africa, though important, would not. Using these criteria, the group settled on a handful of initial projects: forecasting epidemics, empowering citizens in the developing world to fight for clean water and decent schools, funding small businesses and entrepreneurs, and developing new renewable electricity sources.

Brilliant was invited to speak at Google. He didn’t know it at the time, but during his talk, the company’s co-founder, Larry Page, and CEO, Eric Schmidt, were sitting in the back of the room. “I guess they liked what they heard,” Brilliant says. “Because when it was over, Eric turned to Larry and said, ‘Let’s hire him.’”  Banda XXI 7 Anos Radio Promo mp3

But when Google approached Brilliant about the job, he was hesitant. “I was not a twenty-five-year-old kid who had spent his life dreaming about working at Google,” he says. He was uneasy about DotOrg’s lack of endowment – in effect, the funding was only as good as the company’s word. For Brilliant, it was also a leap into corporate America: “I wasn’t sure I wanted to work at a big company, no matter how well-intended it seemed.” He dithered for weeks. Finally, Doerr invited Brilliant to dinner at his house, where the venture capitalist and his friends put the squeeze on him, arguing that the Google name and Google billions would give Brilliant an unparalleled opportunity to do good in the world. Amira My Desire mp3 Music

“Let’s be clear,” Roger McNamee told him. “You have nothing better to do right now. You’re a perfect fit.”

OVERNIGHT, BRILLIANT BECAME THE human bridge between Google’s mountains of cash and the world’s impoverished, starving masses. Sometimes he would come home at night to his hilltop house in Mill Valley – a modest, modern place with a photo of his Indian ashram on the wall and a swim¬ming pool in the back yard – and his doorstep would be cluttered with packages from people asking for help. It reminded Brilliant of his time in India. “There are 500 steps between the road and the Ganges,” he tells me one