The 2007 “TED” conference — an eponymous acronym for ‘Technology Entertainment and Design’ — drew celebs-with-substance like Philippe Starck and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the conference center in Monterey, CA this weekend. It’s slugged as a summit of “icons, geniuses and mavericks,” but it’s really a Silicon Valley boondoggle that parades as Davos Lite.

Few geek/policy-wonk conferences deliver YouTube-able entertainment. But this high-powered, high-tech, Meet-Up totally delivered thanks to the presence of Al Gore, the sole member of Google’s advisory board, and Tony Robbins. The one-time TV infommercial schtick-man used the forum to re-brand himself, up-market.

Here’s the news-making line Robbins shot back after Gore humorously heckled him:

He’s broken my pattern, that son of a bitch.

But Robbins said it as a laugh-line, and the camera’s cut-away in the video above shows one of the first laughs he got was out of Gore himself. (Look for it at minute 6:00 in the above video.)

The occasion was Robbins’ point that the saboteur in each of us makes excuses for big misses in our lives. How does it do that? By story-telling about the ostensible ‘missing’ resources that apparently undermined our situation.

Gore, who was sitting near the front, added “the Supreme Court” to Robbins’ Power-Point litany of “lack of money, technology and time.”

Robbins’ rejoinder is that emotion (translation: energy, passion) is a far more convincing resource.

Said he unto Gore about the 2000 presidential election: “If you’d communicated with that emotion I bet you would have beat his ass, and won.”

New Age bulletin boards are all a twitter because Robbins earned street-cred with his audience of Silicon Valley egos and cynics by prolificly swearing.

Snippets = “bullshit,” “ass,” “get a fucking life,” “shit,” “crazy shit,” and of course, “son of a bitch.”

Tony, we concede, has it ‘goin on. No wonder Clinton sought his counsel during the Lewinsky scandal: this guy makes America’s most-loved living president wilt with shame in the charisma and self-deprecating-humor department.

Robbins’ key message: Give unto others, and you shall receive the same for yourself. His style: black Baptist gospel. Gore hugged Robbins at the end of his 20-minute presentation.

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