>> From the Library of
Congress, in Washington D.C. >> It is my pleasure and
honor to yield the floor to the great Tom Friedman. [ Applause ] >> Thomas L. Friedman: Thank
you, I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Wow, it's great to do
a neighborhood concert. This is fantastic. Marty, thank you. We are in a golden age of journalism
at least as regards to 2 newspapers, the New York Times and
the Washington Post. We are going at it every day and one
of the people centrally responsible for that golden age is
Marty Baron and it's, it's an honor for me to
be introduced by him. And if you would silence your
cellphones or put them on stun, I'll be forever grateful. So, thank you for being late. An optimist guy de-thriving
in the age of acceleration. First question I always get from
people when they hear the title of the book is where from comes the
title, Thank You for Being Late. And it actually comes
from meeting people in Washington D.C,
I live in Bethesda. For breakfast, I like too
not waste not waste breakfast when I'm downtown eating alone,
I like to learn from someone so I often organize business
breakfast and every one in a while someone comes in 15
minutes late and they say; Tom, I'm really sorry, it was
the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog ate my homework. And one day, over 3 years ago,
now, my friend Peter Corsell, energy entrepreneur came, we
were meeting at the Hey Adams, he came a few minutes
late, said the usual; Tom, I'm really sorry the weather,
the traffic, the subway, the dog out my homework, and I
just spontaneously said to him; actually Peter, thank
you for being late. Because, you're late, I've been
eavesdropping on their conversation. Fascinating. I've been people watching the
lobby, fantastic, and best of all, best of all, I just connected
2 ideas I've been struggling with for a month, so
thank you for being late. People started to get into it,
they'd say, well you're welcome, because they understood I was
actually giving them permission to pause, to slow down, to reflect. My favorite quote from the front
of the book is from my teacher and friend Dov Seidman
who says, you know, when you press the pause
button on a computer it stops, but when you press the pause
button on a human being, it starts. That's when it starts to reflect,
rethink and reimagine, and boy, don't we need to do
a lot of that now. Now this book, thank you. This book actually was triggered
when I paused and engaged with someone I wouldn't
normally engage with. So, as I said, I live in
Bethesda, Maryland with my wife Ann and about once a week I take the
subway to work, and so for me, that means driving
from the Bethesda, from our home on Bradley
Boulevard to the Bethesda Hyatt. I park in the basement
of the Bethesda Hyatt, in the public parking garage there
and I take the Red Line into D.C., down to the New York Times office,
not far from the white house and low of 3 years ago, now I did that. I parked my car, took the Red Line
in, spent the day at the office, took the Red Line back, got
in my car, time stamp ticket, drove to the cashier's booth,
handed it to the cashier. I looked at him looked at me
and said I know who you are. I said great. He said I read your column. I said, great, parking
guy reads my column. He said, I don't always agree,
I thought, get me out of here. But, I actually said well that's
good, it means you always have to check then and I drove off
thinking it's great the parking guy reads my column. Anyways, a week later, I took my
weekly trip into D.C. by subway, parking garage, Red Line, office,
Red Line back, parking garage, car, time stamp ticket, cashier's
booth, same guy's there. This time he says, Mister Friedman, I have my own blog,
would you read my blog. I thought, oh my god, the
parking guy is now my competitor. What just happened? So, I said look, right it
down and I'll look it up. So, he tore off a piece
of receipt paper and he wrote on it odenoby.com. I got home, I call, told Ann,
I called it up on my computer. Turns out he's Ethiopian,
wrote about, was writing about Ethiopian
politics from the perspective of the Aroma people, a
real democracy advocate and it was pretty good,
it was a pretty good blog. I thought about him for a few days and I eventually concluded this was
a sign from god, that I should pause and engage this guy, but
I didn't have his email, so the only way I could
do it was park in the parking garage every day. So, that took 3 or 4 days. I don't remember how long
anymore, but we overlap one morning at 7 A.M. I parked under the
gate so it couldn't come down, I got out of my car and I said Elia,
now I know his name, Elia Bojerre. Elia, I would like your email,
I'd like to send you a message, which he gladly gave me and that
night we began an email exchange. I've saved them all and most
of them are in the front of book, they're kind of funny. But, I basically said
to him, in essence, I have a proposition for you. I will teach you how to write a
column for the New York Times, if you will tell me your life story. And he basically said, I see your
proposing a deal, I like this deal. So, he asked that we meet near
his office out in Bethesda at Pete's Coffeehouse
across from the Hyatt. Pete's has since sent me a gift
certificate for putting them in the book, which
we did 2 weeks later. And I came with a 6-page
memo on how to write a column and he came with his life story. His life story as an economics
grad from [inaudible] university in Addis Ababa, was a political
activist, a democracy advocate. His democracy activism eventually
earned him a one-way ticket out of Ethiopia. We welcomed here, him
here in our country as a political exile,
yes, we did that. And, and he told me he was
blogging on Ethiopian websites, different ones, but they wouldn't
turn his stuff fast around, turn stuff around fast enough,
so eventually he decided to start his own blog and now
Mr. Friedman, I feel empowered. His good metrics say he's read
in 30 different countries, he's my parking guy and
it's a wonderful story and he's a wonderful man of how
anyone today can participate in the global conversation and
he taught me so much about that and about his own country, Ethiopia. Well I then presented
him with a 6-page memo on how to write a column. So, if the world is a big data
problem, this is my algorithm, this how I go about
cutting through it. And I thought about some of this
before, but I never put it together until I did it in the memo for Elia. I basically explained to him that
a news story is meant to inform and it can do so, better or worse. The post tomorrow will write
a story about this festival and Marty will tell whether they
did better or worse, but a column, an opinion article,
is meant to provoke, it's meant to produce a reaction. So, I'm either in the
heating business or the lighting business,
that's what I do. I'm either doing a heating or
a lighting, I'm either stoking up an emotion in you or I'm
illuminating something for you and if I really do it well,
I do both and create heat and light and a reaction. And I can tell if I
created heat or light by the reaction I get from readers. Some might read your column
and say, I didn't know that, that's a good reaction,
you created some light. Some might say, never looked at it
that way, that's a good reaction, I never connected those things,
more light, your favorite, you live for this as a column. This happens 4 times
a year, Mr. Friedman, you said exactly what I
felt but didn't know how to say, God, God bless you. I want to kill you dead, you and
all your offspring, I get that. That's usually heat
and light also, okay. So, but I explained to Elia
to produce heat and light, actually required a
chemical reaction and you had to combine 3 chemicals. The first is what is your value
set, what are the set of ides, values and principles you're
promoting in the world. Are you a communist, a capitalist,
a neo-comm, a neo-liberalist, libertarian, a [inaudible],
a Marxist, what are the set of values you're pushing? Second, how do you
think the machine works. So, the machine is my shorthand for what are the biggest forces
shaping more things in more places in more ways in more days. As a columnist, I'm always carrying
around in my head a working theory of how the big gears and
pullies of the world work. Why? Because I'm trying to take
my values and push the machine in their direction and if I
don't know how the machine works, I either won't push or I'll
push it in the wrong direction. And in many ways, all my
books have been an exploration about how the machine works. Lastly, what have you learned
about people and culture? How the machine effects
different people and culture and how they come back
and affect the machine, because there's no
column without people and there's no people
without culture. Stir those 3 together, mix it up,
let it rise, bake for 45 minutes and if you do it right,
you will produce a column that produces heat or light. Well, the more I engage with
Elia on this, we had 3 sessions at Pete's Coffeehouse and
several emails in between. The more I step back
and would say to him, well that's what a column is
about, what's my value set. Those of you who read me know that I
have a rather quirky set of values. I'm not quite liberal, I'm
certainly not a conservative, that's because my values
actually emerge from the small community I grew up
with in Minnesota in the 1950's, 60's and 70's, at a time and
place where politics works. And that had a huge
impact on me, to this day. How do I think the machine works
today and what have I learned about people and culture
and I decided that was the book I wanted to write. And that's what Thank You
for Being Late is all about. The first half is about how the
machine works and the second half is about how this machine, today,
is not just changing your world, it's reshaping your world. And it's reshaping 5 realms
in particular, the work place, politics, geopolitics,
ethics, and community. So, let me try to give
you a quick run through. How does the machine work today? Well I think what is shaping more
things in more places in more ways and more days is the fact
that we're in the middle of 3 non-linear accelerations,
all at the same time, with the 3 largest forces on the
planet, which I call the market, mother nature, and Moore's law. And I should tell you that I mixed
these 3 together for a reason. One of my teachers in
this book, Linwells, something he's really taught
me, which is, I think essential to doing proper journalism
today, is never think in the box and never think out of the box, today you must think
without a box, okay. You need to be melding all of
these disparate things together and in my case, they're the market,
mother nature, and Moore's law. So, the market for me is
digital globalization, not your grandfather's
globalization, that was containers on ships, planes and trains. If you chart that today, it's
actually flat to going down, but digital globalization, the
way everything is being digitized and globalized, whether it's through
Facebook or Amazon, or Google or Twitter or Paypal or Mooks, if you put that on a
graph it looks like, looks like a giant hockey stick. Mother nature for me is climate
change, biodiversity loss, and population growth in
the developing worlds. If you put that on a graph,
it looks like a hockey stick. And Moore's law, get that first
slide up here for a second, coined by Gordon Moore, the
co-founder of Intel in 1965. Gordon Moore, positive,
that the speed and power of microchips would double
roughly every 24 months and the price would
stay roughly the same. Moore's law has held up for 52 years and it is the engine driving
all technological change today, because Moore Moore's law
drives more globalization, more globalization drives
more climate change. Now, about once a year
for the last 52 years, someone has written an article
saying, Moore's law is over, it's going to run out and for
52 years, what they all have in common, is they were all wrong. Moore's law is alive and well,
it's now about 30 months, but your computer at home
now, is probably operating on an intel workhorse
chip that's a 14-nm chip. It has 37.5 million transistors
per square millimeter, you cannot see them, at the end
of 2017, Intel will introduce its, under Moore's law,
10 nanometer chip. It will have 100 million
transistors per square millimeter. Now I know that's very abstract,
hard to conceive what that means. Basically, what it
means is, the difference between those 2 chips
is the difference between a self-driving car
that needs to whole trunk to contain the brains of that
car, so it can drive itself, and a self-driving car that
will just need a little box under the front seat. So, if you think your world is fast
now, wait till the end of the year. In fact, Intel's engineers
wants to try to explain the power of Moore's law. One step back and said what if a
1971 Volkswagen Beatle had improved at the same rate microchips have,
what would it be like today. And they calculated that that 1971
VW Beatle today would go 300,000 miles an hour, it would get
2 million miles per gallon and it would cost 4 cents. You'd be able to drive it your
entire life on one tank of gas. That is the power of the technological
exponential now driving our lives. So, my chapter though, on Moore's
law, and I'm really just going to talk about that today, not
the climate and the market. My chapters actually called,
What the hell happened in 2007? What the hell happened in 2007? What's this guy talking about? 2007, such an innocuous year. Well here's what happened in 2007. The year was kicked
off in January of 2007, when one Steve Jobs introduced
this, the first Iphone at the Moscone Center in San
Francisco, beginning a process by which we're about half way
through putting one of these into the hands of virtually,
well we're about half way now, to everyone on the planet. That is a handheld computer
with more compute power in it than the Apollo Space Mission that
doubles as a phone and a camera. That's how the year began. But in 2007, a company
called Facebook, which had been previously confined
to high schools and universities, in late 2006, opened
its platform to anyone with a registered email address. And in 2007, Facebook went global. In 2007 a company called
Twitter split off on its own independent
platform and went global. In 2007, the most important
software you may have never heard of called Hadoop, named after
the founder's son's toy elephant, launched its algorithm
into the wild. Hadoop is what enables a million
computers to work together as if they're one, seamlessly, that's actually I think
we call it big data now. Hadoop actually didn't
invent the algorithms, it's based on 2 algorithms invented
by google called [inaudible] and MapReduce, but as the founder of
Hadoop, Doug Cutting, explains to me in the book, Google
lives in the future and sends us letters back home, and
what google did was leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the open
source software community of its algorithms, they
reverse engineered it, Hadoop is the public version of
it, there isn't a major company in Washington D.C that
isn't somewhere in the background running Hadoop. In 2007, the second most important
software you may have never heard of called VMware went public. VMware is what enables any operating
system to work on any computer. Well you're used to that now, but that actually was
very unique back then and that's what enables
Cloud computing. So, we can have all
these commodity servers and anyone can run any
operating system on them. In 2007, a company called
GitHub, the world's, now largest, repository for open-source
software, opened its doors. In 2007, this company called Google
bought a little know T.V. company called YouTube. And in 2007, Google
launched its own algorithm into the wild called Android. In 2007, Marty's boss Jeff Bezos
introduced the world's first e-book reader, called the Kindle. And in 2007, IBM started the
world's first cognitive computer called Watson. In 2007, 3 design students
in San Francisco, were attending a design
conference that year and they noticed all the
hotel rooms were sold out, but one of them had 3 spare
air mattresses and they decided to rent them out to people
who couldn't get hotel rooms and it worked out so well, in 2007, they started a company
called Airbnb. That's why it's called Airbnb,
because of the 3 air mattresses. In 2007, the internet crossed a
billion users for the first time, it was actually late 2006,
really scaled in 2007. Here's what else happened in
2007, this is a graph for the cost of sequencing a human genome. So, for those of you in the
back who can't see, in 2001, it cost us 100 million dollars to
sequence a human genome, in 2006, it fell to 10 million and then
you'll notice in 1 year it goes over a cliff, like an EKG
heading for a heart attack, that year is 2007, the price of sequencing a human
genome collapses to $10,000. In 2007, solar energy took off. As did a process for
extracting a natural gas from tight shale called fracking. Between 2006 and 2008, America's
total natural gas reserves increased 35%, that is a spectacular
number in 2007. This is a graph of what
social networks look like. So, that white line over on the
left that's actually the cost of generating a megabit of data. You'll notice the line goes straight
down in, what year is that, 2007. And then the blue line is the
speed of transmitting that data, you'll notice the 2
lines cross in 2008, close enough for government work. Oh yeah, I forgot the Cloud. This thing we call the Cloud,
it was born in 2007, first year, the statistics show up as 2008. In 2007, Intel for the
first time, went off silicon to extend Moore's law and
introduce non-silicon materials into its microchips. In 2005, Michael Dell, the
founder of Dell Computers retired and in 2007, he decided he
better come back to work. Turns out friends, 2007 may be
understood in time as surely, one of the greatest technological
inflection points since Gutenberg. And always remember,
someone was alive when Gutenberg invented the printing
press and surely some monk turned to some priest and said, now
that is really cool, okay. You mean I don't have to write all
these bibles out long hand anymore, we can just stamp them out. Well I think you were alive at a
similar inflection point in 2007, unfortunately we all
completely missed it. Why? Because of 2008. So, right when our physical
technologies just took off, like we're on a moving sidewalk
in an airport that went from 5 to 50 miles per hour,
right when that happened, all of our social technologies,
the regulatory reform, the political reform, the manager
reform, the learning reform, you'd want to go with
it, all completely froze because we entered the
deepest recession since 1929. And in that dislocation, many
Brexit and Trump voters were born. You cannot understand what's going on if you don't understand
that disjunction. So, what happened in 2007? Well, I argue what happened is your
computer basically is 5 key parts, it's got that processor chip,
it's got a storage chip, it's got networking, it's got
software and it's got a sensor. And what I trace in the book is
how 5 are actually in a Moore's law and what happened in 2007,
is they all melded together into this thing we call the Cloud. The Cloud. But I never use the term the Cloud
in my book, because it sounds so soft, so fluffy,
so cuddly, so nice, sounds like a Joanie Mitchell song. I've looked at clouds
from both sides. This ain't no cloud
folks, what I call it in the book is the supernova. Those of you who are science fans
know the supernova is actually the largest energy force in nature,
it's the explosion of a star. And I think what happened in 2007,
was a release of energy in the hands of men, women and machines,
the likes of which, we have never seen before, and it
overnight, changed 4 kinds of power. First it changed the power of
1, what 1 person can do today as a maker or a breaker is amplified to a degree we have
never seen before. We have a president who can sit
in his pajamas in the West Wing and tweet to a billion people,
directly, without an editor, a liable lawyer or a filter. Okay, so. But, but here's,
here's what's really scary, the caliph of Isis can do the
exact same thing from his bunker in Raqqa Province in Syria. The power of 1 today to be a maker
or breaker is fundamentally changed. The power of machines have changed. Machines are acquiring all 5 senses. We have never lived in a world
where machines had all 5 sense and as a result, machines can now
analyze, optimize, prophesize, customize and automatize anything. They can analyze, they can find the
needle in the haystack of that data as the norm now, not the exception. They can optimize, they can tell
United Airlines exactly what altitude to fly that GE engine
for every mile of its flight to get the premium
energy efficiency. They can prophesize. Oh, you've seen the IBM Watson add,
the repairman comes to the building, says I'm here to repair the elevator and the guy says the
elevator's not broken and the repairman says I know,
but it will be in 6 weeks. Because with big data, we know that. We can customize just for
you and we can now digitize and automatize everything
and anything. That is a new world, one
we've never inhabited before. We kind of cross that line, I
would argue, in February 2011 on all places, a game show. There were 3 contestants, 2 we're
the all-time Jeopardy champions and the 3rd contestant simply
went by his last name Mr. Watson. Mr. Watson passed on
the first question, but he buzzed in before
the two humans on the second question,
see if you can get it. The question was, it's worn on the
foot of a horse and used by a dealer in a casino, and in under
2.5 seconds, Mr. Watson said, in perfect Jeopardy
style, what is a shoe. And for the first time,
we watched live on T.V, a cognitive computer figure out
a pun faster than 2 human beings and the world kind of
hasn't been the same since. It's changed the power of flows,
ideas now flow, circulate, meld, fracture, and change faster
than we've ever seen before. Confederate statues were up for, you
know, a century and a half and bam, one day, we decided to take
them down and they're all gone. Barack Obama ran 6 years ago, saying
marriage between a man and a woman, today blessedly so, he says
marriage is between any 2 humans who love each other and he
followed Ireland in that opinion. Ideas now flow and
change and congeal at a pace we've never seen before. And lastly, it's changed
the power of many. These amplified powers of men,
women, and machines have become so great that we have become the
biggest foresting function on and in nature and that's why the
new climate era has been named for us, the Anthropocene. Well the argument I make in this
book, is that these 4 changes in power, they're not
just changing your world, they are reshaping your world and
that requires fundamental rethinking of everything and they're reshaping
5 realms; politics, geopolitics, ethics, the community
and the workplace. So, let me spend the next,
I can have with this talk, talking about what I mean. So, basically the workplace
is being changed in large part because of this graph. I was out working on the book,
I was interviewing Astro Teller, the CEO of Google EX,
Google's research arm. And I went to see him and I told him
the thesis of the book and he got up from his desk and went
over to his whiteboard and he drew this very
crude, simple graph. So, the blue line across the middle, you'll notice it has a positive
slope, but it's very gradual. I said, what's that Astro? He said, that's the average
rate at which human beings and societies adapt
to change over time. It has a positive slope,
but it's gradual. The white line that starts below and
then loops up, that's technology. So, if you lived at the left
end of the line in the 11th or 12th century, we forget, if
you lived in the 11th century or 12th century, your bow
and arrow did not get better between the 11th century
and the 12th century. There was no bow and arrow
2.0 in the 12th century, okay. The line of innovation
was very flat, but then we got the scientific
revolution, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Steve Jobs
and Intel, Bill Gates and the line starts
to go straight north. And then Astro drew that
little diamond there, and I said what's that Astro. He said that's where we are. We're at a point now where
technology is evolving faster than the average human
being in society can adapt. Then he went out and got a 3rd
magic marker, it's hard for you in the back to see maybe, but, and he drew a little dotted
line off the blue line. And I said what's that Astro? He said, that's learning
faster and governing smarter and that is the challenge
of the workplace today. How do we enable more people
to learn faster and how as a society do we govern smarter
so we can lift the adaptation line to meet technology
where it's taking us? So, let me give you some samples
of what I'm talking about. So, my chapter in how the workplace
is being reshaped is called How do we turn AI into IA. How do we take artificial
intelligence and turn it into intelligent assistance, a, n,
c, e, intelligent assistants, a, n, t, s, and intelligent algorithms so more people can learn
faster and govern smarter? I believe that's the
central managerial governing and education challenge
of our time today. So, I'll give you a
couple of examples. My examples of intelligent
assistance, ance, is actually the human
resources department at AT&T. I spent a lot of time with AT&T, giant global telecom company
living right next to the supernova, competes everyday with
Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and all these great
telecom companies. Pretty good chance that AT&T
with its 360,000 employees, whatever is going on in their
human resource department, coming to a neighborhood near you. So, what's going on here? Well, this is, in shorthand,
basically what's going on is this; their CEO Randall Stephenson
begins the year with a radically transparent speech
about where the company is going, what markets their going to
be in and what skills you need to be an AT&T employee that year. Then they put all 110,000
managers of a non-unionized staff in their own in-house
LinkedIn system. And so, they've got me in there, you
know, Tom Friedman, Tom Friedman, and then they determine that there
are, I'm estimating this roughly, 10 different skill sets you
need to be a thriving employee and rising employee to AT&T
given where they're going as a company in the world today. And on my LinkedIn
profile, turns out I have 7 of the 10 skills, but I'm missing 3. Then they partnered with Sebastian
Thrun, the founder of Udacity, the online learning university. He created nanodegrees and
courses for all 10 skill sets. Then they came back to me and
said Tom, here's the deal, we will give you up to $8,000 a year
to take all the nanodegree courses for the skills you're missing, in
fact we heard you're interested in the middle east, you we're in, if you want to take an archaeology
class, in fact if you want to take our 1 year
master's degree for $6,000 that we built with Georgia Tech. we'll pay for that as well. Just one condition
Tom, one condition. You have to take all these courses
on your own time at night, at home and on weekends, not
on company time. Now, if I say, you know, Mr. AT&T, I've climbed up one too
many telephone poles, I'm not into this anymore. They now have a wonderful
severance package for me. But I won't be working
there much longer. If I do take the courses, they're
social contract for their employees, is they will offer them the new jobs
first, they will not go outside. What is AT&T's social contract
with their employees today? It's very simple, you can be a
lifelong employee today at AT&T, but only if you are
a lifelong learner. If you are not ready to
be a lifelong learner, you can no longer be a
lifelong employee at AT&T. And that is the social contract
coming to a neighborhood near you. The days when you could go
to college for 2 or 4 years and then dine out on that knowledge
over the next 30 are completely gone in the age of acceleration. What you learn now in your 1st year,
may be out of date by your 4th year and therefore being a lifelong
learner becomes the single most important competitive advantage you
can have in the age of acceleration. Which is why my friend
Heather McGowan likes to say, today never ask your kid what do
you want to be when you grow up, because whatever it is,
unless it's a policeman or fireman, not going to be there. Only ask your kid how you
want to be when you grow up. Will you have an agile
learning mindset, will you be predisposed
to lifelong learning. And that's why another
friend of mine Marina Gorbis, CEO of the Institute of the
Future in Palo Alto likes to say, the biggest divide in the
world we're going into now, is no longer the digital divide. We remember the digital divide,
Washington D.C. had internet, upstate Maryland didn't, you know, American had internet,
central Africa didn't. The digital divide is going to be
gone in 5 years if it isn't already, and when it's gone, the biggest
divide in the world is going to be the self-motivation divide. Who has the self-motivation
to be a lifelong learner after you've left home or graduated
school and mom and dad are not there to say Tommy, have you
done your homework? And I believe one of the things
roiling our society today, is this issue of the rising
importance of self-motivation, because a lot of people were
built to show up to work and do what they were told. And by the way, these are good
people, and they built our country. We ask them to show up, we asked
them to do what they were told, and they did it, and
they did it damn well, but the world has changed now, and one of the things roiling
the society is the necessity of lifelong learning and how
more important self-motivation is becoming. That's my example of
intelligent assistance, my example of intelligent assistant
is the janitorial staff at Qualcomm. So, I spent a lot of
time at Qualcomm because I profiled their
founder Irwin Jacobs in the book for networking and when I was there, I discovered that Qualcomm
had taken 6 of their building and they affixed sensors everywhere,
on every door, window, faucet, sink, air conditioning, heating
system, computer, light, they put sensors everywhere. And then they beamed all
that data up to the Cloud, up to the supernova, and now
they beam it down onto an Ipad with an incredibly user-friendly
interface for their janitors. So, if I leave my computer on
or a pipe bursts above my head, they know it just when I do, if
not faster and they just swipe down to see who can fix it or
how to repair it themselves. Qualcomm has turned their janitors
into maintenance technologists. Their janitors now give
tours to foreign visitors. What do you think that does for the
dignity of a janitor, because he or she is now and intelligent
assistant, enabling them to live and learn at a higher pace? My example of intelligent
algorithms is the partnership between the college
board and Khan Academy, the online learning platform. For free PSAT and SAT prep. Now we all know the
story in 11th grade, you have to take your PSAT
exam your preparatory SAT exam to see how well you do and to get
you ready for your SAT exam to get into the college of your choice. We all know that many parents will
go out and hire a tutor for $200 and hour to boost their
kid's PSAT and SAT scores. Don't worry, many of us did it. A completely rigged game. A completely rigged game, because
if you come from a neighborhood or a family that can't
possibly afford such a tutor, you are at a real disadvantage. So, 3 years ago, David Coleman
of the college board and Sal Khan of Khan Academy created
an intelligent algorithm for free PSAT and SAT prep. The way it works is I
take my PSAT in 11th grade and I get the results back and the
results say Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. You did really well in
verbal, you could have a career in writing maybe, but you
have a problem in math, in fact you specifically
have a problem with fractions and right angles. It then takes me to a practice site
just for fractions and right angles, just for the things
that I'm weak at, doesn't waste any time
on my strength. If I do well there, it takes
me to another site that says, you know, you could be in AP math. Me, in AP math? I don't know anyone who is in AP
math, no one in my neighborhood was in AP math, you know,
you could be in AP math. Another site for college
scholarships and another site where young boys and girls
at the boy's and girl's clubs of America are volunteering
to shepherd other young people through this intelligent algorithm. Last year, 3,000,000 American
kids got free PSAT and SAT prep through this intelligent algorithm. Last example is, is
opportunity at work. So, we have a real problem in
this country, we have less count, roughly 32,000,000 people who
started college but never finished. Some went 1 year, 2, 2 and a
half, 3, 3and a half years. They drop out before they did get a
degree, they go to apply for a job, where's your BA, no BA, no job. So, there are groups
like Opportunity at Work, that have come along that will
now, you can come to them, they will badge what you learned
in 1 year, 2 years, 2 and a half, 3 year, and they will then partner
with employees to slot you in based on what they have determined
you know. So I profile in the book,
Young African American Women, Lashawn Lewis who is going to Michigan Tech studying
computer science. She had to drop out for
family reasons after three and a half years, ended up
having to drive a bus to and from computer school,
couldn't make that up, and working on the help desk at a law firm helping lawyers
rediscover their lost passwords. She was discovered by a group
like Opportunity at work. They partnered with Mastercard, slotted her in as a systems
engineer at Mastercard. Today she is a senior
systems engineer at Mastercard and in the last line in her
interview in my book she says and Mr. Freedman, I
still don't have my BA. That is an intelligent algorithm. Now, I'm going to make a
bet with every one of you. I'm going to bet none of you
have heard of any of this. And, that's because you
weren't paying attention to our last election. You see, the fact is there
is massive innovation going on in our country on the
pathway of education to work. In fact, there's so much innovation, I thought at one point I could
just write a book on that. Whatever you can think
of I promise somebody in some community is
already doing it, it just needs to be
shared and scaled. Unfortunately, what was
our last election about? Berny Sander's big idea was
to tear down the big banks. Donald Trump's big idea was
to tear down Hillary Clinton. And Hillary Clinton's big
idea was to direct you to her website
www.hillaryclinton.com. But, the fact is there is
massive innovation going on around this centrally important
subject of education to work. It touches every home and no
one's telling anyone about it. So that brings me to my
second world that needs to be reshaped and that is politics. So, I use a lot of parallels
from nature in my book and my thinking in general. And, I believe, to think
about politics today you have to understand that we're
actually in the middle of three climate changes at once. We're in the middle of a change
of the climate of the climate. We're going from what
I all later to now. Later, was when I was growing up and
I could fix that lake in Minnesota, repair that forest,
save that orangutan, I could do it now or later. Not anymore. Later is officially over. Later will be too late. So, whatever you're going to save,
you better think of saving it now. That's a climate change. We're in the middle of a change
of the climate of globalization. We're going from a world
that's interconnected to a world that is interdependent. That's a difference of degree
that's a difference of kind. The interdepended world, your friends can kill you
faster than your enemies. Oh my God, if Greece and
Italy's banks go bankrupt, we'll all feel it here. Greece and Italy, well
they're in the EU, they're allies, they
can kill us today. And, your rivals falling in an interdependent world
become more dangerous than your rivals rising. Frankly, if China takes more islands in the South China Sea,
I couldn't care less. If China's growth goes from 0%, from 6% to 0% this festival
will not be held next year. That's what happens in
an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more
dangerous than your rivals rising. That's a climate change. And lastly, we're going through
this climate change in technology. Machines can now, as I said,
analyze, optimize, prophesy, customize, anathematized, anything. There's a thought about that
and thought about politics. I said to myself, well,
if we're going through all these climate
changes, who can I interview? Because, what do you want
when the climate changes? You want two things. You want resilience. You need to be able to take a blow. But, you also want propulsion. You want to be able to move ahead. You don't want to be curled up
in a ball under your bed just because three climates
are changing at once. So, as I said, I thought who can I
talk to about how you get resilience and propulsion when
the climate changes? Then, I realized I knew a woman,
she was 3.81 billion years old. Her name was Mother
Nature and she dealt with more climate changes
than anybody. So, why don't I interview her? So, I called her 800 number, made an
appointment and went out to see her. I sat her down and
said Mother Nature, how do you produce resilience and
propulsion when the climate changes? She said, well Tom,
first of all I have to tell you everything I
do, I do unconsciously. But, these are my strategies. She said, first of all
I'm incredibly adaptive. In my world, only the
adaptive survive. And I do it through a very brutal
mechanism I call natural selection. A second, she said, I am
incredibly entrepreneurial. Wherever I see a blank place in
nature, I fill it with a plant or animal perfect adapted
to that niche. Lastly she said, thirdly she
said I am incredibly diverse and pluralistic. I love pluralism I try 20
different species and see who wins. I love diversity. Fourth, she said, I am incredibly
sustainable, everything is food, eat food, poop seed, eat food, poop
seed, nothing wasted in my world. Fifth, she said I'm
incredibly hybrid and heterodox. I try all kinds of ideas
and mix them together, mix any birds with any
trees, any flowers any bees, any plants with any soils. Lastly, she said, I do believe
in the laws of bankruptcy. I kill all my failures. I return them to the great
manufacturer in the sky and I use their energy
to nourish my successes. I got it thank you. You can, you can put
the sign down, I got it. Yeah thanks. Now, thank you. So, as I thought about
that, it occurred to me that the political party that's
going to thrive in the age of acceleration is the one that
most closely mirrors Mother Nature's strategies. And, as I thought about that,
I thought, because it was 2016, why don't I start my
own political party. And so, I created, in the book, Mother Nature's political
party based on those ideas. I won't go into the
details with you on that. But, basically the core
idea is, on some issues, of course this is all just a
proxy for my own politics, but, mother nature's actually to
the left of Berny Sanders. Mother Nature would be
for universal healthcare. She would understand that,
in an age of acceleration, we need to improve are
safety nets and trampolines because more people are going
to find this world too fast. But, at the same time, because
she's hybrid and heterodox, Mother Nature would be to the right of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page. She would be for abolishing all
corporate taxes and replacing them with a carbon tax, a tax
on sugar, a tax on bullets, and a small financial
transaction tax. Mother Nature would want to radically stronger
safety nets over here. And, to pay for them, she'd want to get radically entrepreneurial
over here. Unfortunately, in our politics, if you're for stronger
safety nets you're never for radical entrepreneurship, if
you're for radical entrepreneurship, you're never for stronger
safety nets. What would Mother Nature call that? Stupid, that's what
she would call it. She would tell you, you
could never build resilience and propulsion that way. I won't spend any more on politics. Quickly the last two areas
and I finish with this that need to be reshaped. The first is ethics. You're thinking ethics,
ethics what does that have to do with Moore's law? Well, thank you. My chapter on this
subject is called Is God in Cyberspace, Is God in Cyberspace. And, it actually comes from the best
question I ever got on book tour in 1999 on the Portland Oregon. And the man stands
up in the balcony, I'm selling a book called
Lexus and the Olive Tree and he says Mr. Friedman
I have a question. Is God in cyberspace? And, I said ah, ah, ah. I have no idea. So, I got home, I called
my spiritual teacher, he's a rabbi Saint Mark,
he's a great Talmudist I met at the Hartman Institute
in Jerusalem and now lives in Amsterdam married to a Dutch
priest, interesting character, I said [inaudible] I got a
question I've never had before. Is God in cyberspace? What should I have answered. And, he said Tom, well
basically in our faith tradition, we have two concepts
of the Almighty. One is that He's Almighty, He
smites evil and rewards good. If that's your view of God He sure
isn't in cyberspace which is full of pornography, gambling,
cheating, lying, prevarication and now we know fake news, okay. But, he said fortunately, we
have a postbiblical view of God which says God manifests
Himself by how we behave. So, if we want God
to be in cyberspace, we have to bring Him there
by how we behave there. Only we can bring God
into cyberspace. Well, as I thought about that,
put it in the paperback edition of my book Lexus and the Olive
Tree, it sat there for 20 years where none of you saw it. And, and there it was. Anyways, I started writing this book and suddenly I start asking
myself that question again. I said why are you
asking that question? And, the answer immediately became
clear to me, it's for two reasons, the first happened just last year. I think 2016 was the year
when we started living 51% of our lives in cyberspace. That's where we went to get
our news, write a, find a book, buy a book, buy a house, buy
a car, meet with our friends, find a date, find a spouse. We are now living in the
developed world, at least, 51% of our lives in cyberspace. And, my definition of
cyberspace is that it's a realm where we're all connected
and no one's in charge. It's the ultimate God free realm. There are no stop lights there,
no police, no ethics code, no 1-800 please stop Putin
from hacking my election. We are living our lives in a
realm that is ethics and God free. And, at the same time, because
of these accelerated powers that I've written about, we're now
standing at a moral intersection, we have never stood up
before as a human species. In 1945, we entered a world where one country could kill
all of us post Hiroshima. If it had to be one country,
I'm glad it was mine. I believe we're entering a world
where one person can kill all of us and where, at the same time, all of
us could actually fix everything. These same amplified powers
are creating a world where one of us could kill all of us and all
of us could actually feed, house, clothe, and educate every
person on the planet if we put our minds to it. We have the power to do that now. We have never stood at
this intersection before. And what does that mean? It means we have never
been more Godlike as a species than we are today. And, what does that mean? That we're living most of our
lives in a realm that is God free and we are increasingly Godlike,
that means what everyone thinks, feels, and believes
matters now more than ever. And, that means that everyone
today has to be in the embrace of sustainable values particularly
the one everyone shares, the Golden Rule, do unto others
as you wish them to do unto you because we now live in a planet where more people can do unto
you farther away, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before and
you can do unto others farther away, deeper, cheaper than ever before. Everyone today has to be in
the embrace of the Golden Rule. I know what you're
thinking, how naive. No, what is naive is thinking we're
going to be okay if everyone isn't in the embrace of the Golden Rule. Naivety today, in the age of
acceleration is the new realism. Where does the Golden
Rule come from? It comes from two places in my view, strong families and
healthy communities. I'm not an expert on
strong families. I hope I've built one. I never lecture anyone
on that subject. But, I am an expert on strong
healthy communities because I grew up in one in Minnesota
in the 50s, 60s, and 70s called Saint Louis Park. And, that's why my book
and talk ends here. Basically, the short story
is in Minnesota in the 40s. Minnesota was the, Minneapolis
was the capital of antisemitism until Hubert Humphrey became mayor. My grandparents came from Europe,
my parents were born in Minneapolis and I was born in the
north side of the city which was a ghetto basically with
just Jews and African Americans, not because we were integrated there
but because we were isolated there. My parents couldn't
join AAA in the 50s. antisemitism was a real problem until Huber Humphrey
became mayor of the city. After the war, the entire
Jewish community, virtually, of North Minneapolis moves out
in a three year period unmasked to one little town
called Saint Louis Park, about 20 minutes half hour away
outside of Central Minneapolis. And, overnight, a town that had been
100% white, protestant, catholic, Scandinavian, became
20% Jewish 80% white, protestant, catholic, Scandinavian. If Sweden and Israel had a baby,
it would be Saint Lois Park, okay. And, I tell the story of how
we built a community together, how we built an acute
inclusive community together. And there were warts
and there were problems and there were broken
hearts and broken days. But in the end, we built a
really interesting community. I went to high school or
religious school or grew up in the same neighborhood
roughly the same time with the Coen Brothers,
Al Franken, Norm Ornstein, the philosopher Michael Shandel,
Sharon Isbin the Guitarist, Marc Trestman the coach
of the Chicago Bears, Dan Wilson was someone
like you with Adel. It was a freaky place. The Coen Brother's movie A Serious
Man was about our Hebrew school. And, if you saw No Country For
Old Men, you remember the scene where Chigurh blows up a
car outside of a grocery, outside of a pharmacy excuse me
in Mexico to go in and steal drugs and at the end of the scene
the camera pans to the pharmacy and it's called Mike Zoss Drugs which was the little Saint
Louis Park Drugstore. I tell the story of that community
and how I learned something there and it effected all of us, Frank
and Sandel, a myself we all took it into politics in different ways. Some become Minnesota nice,
hard to explain Minnesota nice if you're not from Minnesota. But, you know, in the book I tell
the story of home bread in the book and I went to my friend
Jay Goldberg's wedding, [inaudible] daughter's wedding and
my friend Jay Goldberg was there. We sat at the table and Jay told
me Tom my wife Ilene was driving on the ring road around
Minneapolis today and a driver almost
drove her off the road. And she came home and said Jay
I was so mad I almost honked. Okay. That's Minnesota
for road rage okay. I tell another story. There was actually a Jewish mafia
in Minnesota in the 30s and 40s. My dad grew up with these guys. He wasn't in the mafia, I swear. But, when I was a young
boy five or six years old, my dad came home one
day and told me a friend of his had been sent to jail. And, when you're a six year
old or five year old kid, the idea your dad knows someone
who went to jail, that is freaky. And, I said to him
dad what did he do? And, rejoinder I never forgot. He said son he was shopping
in a store before it was open. That's Minnesota for
breaking and entering. Okay. Anyways, I tell all the
story of Minnesota, I left in 1971 to discover the world, and
I came back 40 years later to write this book, and found that the world had
discovered Saint Louis Park. Now, my high school's 50% white,
protestant, catholic, Scandinavian, 10% Jewish, 10% Hispanic,
and 30% Somali, small African American,
same community. And now the diversity
challenge both religiously and racially is much bigger,
the chasm that has to be built. And, I tell the story
of how they're doing it. And, they're doing pretty well. Washington Post says they're
still the fifth rated high school in the state of Minnesota. But it's a struggle, it's
a struggle every day. But, if you want to know why
the book, and I conclude here, is an optimist guide, is
because the problems are huge. But, when you go to
these communities, it is amazing the number of people
who want to get caught trying. My teacher and friend
Emory Lovens likes to say, whenever anyone asks her about
Emory what are you an optimist or a pessimist, Emory
says I'm not neither because they're just two
different forms of fatalism, everything will great,
everything will be awful. Emory says I believe
in applied hope. And, I believe in applied hope. You want to be an optimist about
America today, stand on your head. The country looks so much
better from the bottom up than the top down, okay. It's not that we don't have
communities that are struggling and failing, but we
also have a huge number where people are applying hope. And, that's why my book and this
talk ends with a theme song. My book had a theme song. I actually thought
can I buy this song so when you open the book
it would play this song like a Hallmark card
plays happy birthday? And it's really, I think,
the anthem of our time. It's by one of my favorite
singers, Brandy Carlyle. And, the song is called
The Eye, E Y E. And, the main refrain is I wrap your
love around me like a chain but I never was afraid
that it would die. You can dance in a hurricane but
only if you're standing in the eye. You see, I think these
accelerations I've written about, they're a hurricane. They are a hurricane. We have a president who is trying to
build a wall against the hurricane. I'm advocating an eye, an eye
that moves with the storm, draws energy from it that creates
a platform of dynamic stability, a healthy community, where
people can feel connected, protected, and respected. I think the great struggle in our
politics going forward is going to be between the wall
people and the eye people. And, my book is a manifesto
for the eye people. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov
