Good afternoon and
welcome, everyone.
Thank you all for joining us
for today's Compton Lecture.
I'd like to express my gratitude
to the Compton Lecture's
advisory committee for their
excellent choice of speaker.
I also want to thank our very
special guest, Mr Tom Friedman,
for joining us on
campus today to write
the next chapter in this
distinguished lecture series.
After the lecture, I'll lead a
conversation with Mr. Friedman,
drawing from questions
that the MIT community
members submitted in advance.
First, some context.
In 1957, MIT established
the Compton Lectures
to honor the memory of MIT's
10th president, Karl Taylor
Compton.
Dr Compton had led MIT
for almost a quarter
of a century in two roles.
First, as president
for 18 years.
And then as chairman
of the MIT Corporation.
He guided MIT through the Great
Depression and World War II.
In the process, he helped the
institute transform itself
from an outstanding
technical school
for training its own engineers
to a great, global university.
A distinguished physicist,
President Compton
brought a new focus on
fundamental scientific
research, and he made science an
equal partner with engineering
at MIT.
In addition, during the war,
he helped invent a partnership
between the federal government
and America's research
universities.
In the best tradition-- in
the best MIT tradition--
President Compton was known for
the scope of his understanding,
his integrity, his creative
vision, his inspiring
service to society, and
his charismatic charm.
Today we celebrate his
legacy by honoring someone
who brings these same gifts to
his role as an internationally
renowned author,
reporter, and columnist.
At MIT, we believe deeply in
the critical role our community
plays in inventing the future.
But to invent the
future, you have
to be able to see
around corners.
I don't know anyone who does
that better than Tom Friedman.
He has the same
facts and witnesses
the same events as we do.
But with a keen eye for detail
and a masterful understanding
of history and context, he
notices what most of us miss.
A three time Pulitzer Prize
winner and a foreign affairs
columnist for the
New York Times,
Tom is a global citizen and an
advocate for creative solutions
to complex problems.
He's known for his original
thinking and writing
about his big, global issues,
such as war, trade, poverty,
energy--
and for doing so with a
sense of clarity, purpose,
and most of all, accessibility.
Through all the noise,
he remains focused,
offering a perspective
that is unique, thoughtful,
often provocative,
and always essential.
In the process, he has helped
shape the national conversation
on the most important
issues of our time.
He has written seven New
York Times bestsellers.
In his most recent, Thank
You for Being Late--
an Optimist's Guide to Thriving
in the Age of Accelerations,
he makes the case that the
world is being reshaped
by the acceleration of
three giant forces--
digital globalization, climate
change, and technology,
forces that matter deeply
to all of us at MIT.
Seeing around corners,
noticing what we miss,
and having the courage to
tell us what he concludes
are just a few of
the many qualities
that set Tom Friedman apart.
He lives by the saying, if
you don't go, you don't know.
Well, he's here.
And we're all looking
forward to hearing
from him this afternoon.
Please join me to give a
warm welcome to Tom Friedman.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Great to be here.
Rafael, thank you.
It's a treat to be here.
I've been able to come to MIT
a lot of times over the last 20
years.
I could never get
in as a student,
so it's a fantastic
way to be able to visit
your wonderful campus.
And I've had a great day today.
I'm going to talk to
you today basically
about how I write a column
for the New York Times.
That's really what this
talk will be about.
It's really about how I
look at the world, how
I organize events, and how I
interpret and analyze things.
My basic method was best
described by one of my teachers
Lynn Wells, who is
a systems analyst.
And Lynn always says, never
think in the box today.
Never think out of the box.
Today you must
think without a box.
And what I'm going to
share with you today
is how I basically
think without a box.
And the formula comes
from my last book
Thank You for Being Late-- an
Optimist's Guide To Thriving
in the Age of Acceleration.
First question I
always get from people
is wherefrom comes the title,
Thank You for being Late?
It actually comes from meeting
people in Washington DC
for breakfast, where I live.
And I don't like
to waste breakfast
when I'm downtown at the
New York Times bureau
by eating alone.
I always try to
learn from somebody.
And so I schedule a lot
of business breakfasts.
And every once in
a while, someone
comes 10, 15 minutes late.
And they inevitably say,
Tom, I'm really sorry.
It was the weather.
The traffic.
The subway.
The dog ate my homework.
Anyways, about 3
and 1/2 years ago, I
scheduled a business breakfast
with a energy entrepreneur,
Peter Corsell, and he
came 15 minutes late,
and did the usual,
Tom, I'm really sorry.
The weather.
The traffic.
The subway.
The dog ate my homework.
And I just interrupted
him, I said,
actually Peter, thank
you for being late.
Because you were 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 two 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--
well, you're welcome!
Because they understood
I was actually
giving them permission to
pause, to slow down, to reflect.
In fact, 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 re-imagine.
And boy, don't we need to be
doing a lot of that right now.
This book was actually
triggered when I paused
and engaged with someone I
wouldn't normally engage with.
So I actually live in Bethesda,
Maryland outside of DC,
and I take the subway to
work about once a week.
And for me, that means
driving from my home
in Bethesda on Bradley
Boulevard to the Bethesda Hyatt.
And I park in the
public parking garage
beneath the Bethesda Hyatt.
And I take the red line
down to the New York Times
bureau near the White House.
And lo, 3 and 1/2 years
ago now, I did that.
Drove to the Hyatt parking lot.
I got my time-stamped ticket.
Parked my car.
Got the red line to DC.
Spent the day at
the New York Times.
Took the red line back.
Got my card.
Time-stamped ticket.
Drove to the cashier's booth.
Handed it to the cashier.
He looked at it, and
looked at me, and said,
I know who you are.
I said, great!
He said, I read your column.
I thought, great!
The parking guy reads my column.
He said, I don't always agree.
I thought, get me
the hell out of here.
But I said, no, no, that's good.
It means you always
have to check.
And I drove off, thinking
parking guy reads my column.
That's great.
And it was a week later.
I took my weekly trip into DC.
Parking garage.
Time-stamped ticket.
Red line.
Office day.
New York Times.
Red line back.
Car.
Time-stamped ticket.
Cashier's booth--
same guy's there.
This time he says, Mr.
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, well, write it down
for me and I'll look it up.
So he tore off a
piece of receipt paper
and he wrote on it, odanabi.com.
I got home, fired
up my computer.
Called it up.
Turns out he's Ethiopian.
Writes about Ethiopian
politics from the perspective
of the Oromo people.
Real democracy advocate.
It was a little rough,
but it was pretty good.
I shared it with my wife.
I thought about it
for a couple of days.
And I eventually concluded
that 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.
Which I did for four days.
We eventually overlapped
at 7:00 AM one morning.
I stopped under the gate
so it couldn't come down.
I got out of my car.
And I said, Ayele-- now I
know his name, Ayele Bojia--
Ayele, I want your email.
I'd like to send you a message.
And he gladly tore off another
piece of receipt paper,
gave me his email.
And that night, we
began an email exchange.
I saved them all.
They're in the
front of the book.
They're kind of funny-- in
which I basically said to him,
I have a proposition for you.
I will teach you how to write
a column in the New York Times
if you will tell
me your life story.
And he basically said, I
see you're proposing a deal.
I like this deal.
So we agreed to meet at Peet's
Coffee House in Bethesda
two weeks later, at which point
I showed up with a six page
memo on how to write a column
for the New York Times.
And he came with his life story.
Basically, Ethiopian grad
of Haile Selassie University
in Addis Ababa.
Economics grad.
Was a political democracy
advocate, and advocate
for the Oromo people there.
Eventually so much so, he got
thrown out of the country.
We welcomed him here
as a political exile.
We used to do that.
And he was blogging on Ethiopian
websites, of which there
turns out to be a lot.
I discovered this
whole universe.
But he told me they
weren't fast enough.
They wouldn't turn his
stuff around fast enough.
So he decided to
start his own blog.
And now, Mr. Friedman,
I feel empowered.
His Google metrics say he's
read in 30 different countries.
So this is my parking guy.
And it's a wonderful
story about how
anyone today can participate
in the global conversation.
And he's a wonderful man.
And we've become friends
as a result of this.
Well I then gave
him my six page memo
on how to write a column
for the New York Times.
I explained to him that a
news story is meant to inform.
I could write a news story
about this event tonight,
and would tell me whether
I informed better or worse.
But a column, what I
do-- an opinion piece--
is actually meant to provoke.
It's meant to
produce a reaction.
You see, I'm either in
the heating business
or the lighting business.
That's what I do.
I'm either doing the
heating or the lighting.
I'm either stoking
up an emotion in you,
or illuminating
something for you.
And if I really
do my job well, I
do both, and produce
heat and light.
And I know I've done that
by what reaction I get.
You read my column, and you
say, I didn't know that.
That's a good reaction.
I taught you something.
You read my column and say, I
never connected those things.
That's good.
You read my column and say, I
never looked at it that way.
That's good.
More light.
Your favorite-- you live
for this as a columnist--
happens twice a year.
Someone reads your
column and says,
Mr. Friedman, you
said exactly what
I felt, but didn't
know how to say.
God bless you.
God bless you.
I want to kill you dead.
You and all your offspring.
I get that too.
That tells me I
produced more heat.
In any event, I
explained to Ayele
that to produce heat and
light as a columnist requires
actually an act of chemistry.
And you have to combine
three compounds.
The first is, what
is your value set?
As an opinion writer, are you
a communist, a capitalist,
a neo-con, a neoliberal, a
libertarian, a Keynesian,
a Marxist?
What is the set of
values you're trying
to promote into the world?
Second-- and this will be
the guts of my talk today--
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 on more days.
You see, as a
columnist, I'm always
carrying around in my
head a working hypothesis
of how the machine works.
And my books are all attempts
at really understanding
the biggest gears and
pulleys of the world.
Because why?
Because I'm actually
trying to take my values
and push that machine
in their direction.
And if I don't know
how the machine works,
I either won't push it, or I'll
push it in the wrong direction.
And lastly, what
have you learned
about people and culture?
How different
people and cultures
are affected when
the machine moves,
and how their reactions
affect the machine.
Because there's no
column without people.
And there are no
people without culture.
Now mix those three together.
Stir.
Let it rise.
Bake for 45 minutes.
And if you do it
right, you, too,
can be a columnist at
the New York Times.
Well the more I
explained this to Ayele--
we had several sessions
at Peet's and online--
the more I started to
think about my own career,
and ask myself, well, if
that's what a column is about,
what's your value set?
Those of you read me know
I'm not quite a liberal.
I'm certainly not
a conservative.
That's because my
value set actually
emerged from the small
town in Minnesota
where I grew up in the '50s,
and '60s, and early '70s,
at a time and place
where politics worked.
And that's why I'm sort
of a congenital optimist,
and can't we all get along.
My values actually
emerge from there, not
from a library or a philosopher.
Second, how do I think
the machine works today?
And lastly, what have I learned
about people and culture?
And that's what Thank You
for being Late is all about.
The first half of the book is
about how the machine works.
And the second half is about
how this machine is not just
changing your world,
it's reshaping our world.
And it's reshaping five
realms in particular.
Politics, geopolitics, ethics,
the workplace, and community.
So let's talk about both.
How do I think the
machine works today?
Well, I think what is
shaping more things
in more places in more ways
on more days is that we're
in the middle of three giant
accelerations in the three
largest forces on the planet,
which I call the market, mother
nature, and Moore's law.
Now mother nature for
me is climate change,
biodiversity loss,
and population growth
in the developing world.
If you put them all on a
graph or a picture, well,
they look sort of
look like that.
They look like Glacier
National Park in 1913
and Glacier National Park, 2012.
By the way, that glacier's
been there for 7,000 years.
They look like Lake Chad.
Lake Chad, 1963.
And Lake Chad, 2013.
They look like a graph of
global average temperature.
They looked like a hockey stick.
Mother nature.
They look like a graph
of reported instances
of extreme weather since 1988.
Another hockey stick.
And the mother of
all hockey sticks,
they look like a graph of
world population growth
through history.
So if you put mother
nature on a graph today,
she looks like one hockey
stick after another.
The market for me
is globalization.
But not your grandfather's
globalization.
That was containers
on ships and planes.
That's actually
been flat lately.
What's actually knitting
the world together
through globalization
today is much more
digital globalization.
The way everything's being
digitized and globalized
through Facebook, and MOOC,
and Twitter, and PayPal.
Put that on a graph, it looks
like total data consumed
per month-- another
hockey stick.
It looks like
mobile subscriptions
in the United States.
And the last acceleration--
I don't have to tell the
students of this campus--
is in Moore's law.
Coined in 1965 by Gordon
Moore, the co-founder of Intel,
in a famous article in
Electronics Magazine,
Moore's law argued that the
speed and power of microchips
would double roughly
every 24 months,
and the place would
actually go down.
Gordon Moore coined
that in 1965.
Moore's law is alive
and well 53 years later.
Now every year across
those 53 years, someone
has written an article
saying Moore's law is over.
Moore's law is over.
Moore's law is over.
Run its course.
And what all those
authors have in common is
they were all wrong.
Moore's law is alive and well.
It's driven by some different
factors today, but never mind.
This PowerPoint is
actually running,
I suspect, on an Intel
14 nanometer chip.
It 37.5 million transistors
per square millimeter.
In January, a little
earlier, Intel
began shipping it's
10 nanometer chip.
It has 100 million transistors
per square millimeter.
And Intel can tell you
exactly how they're going
to do the 7 nanometer chip.
Got a pretty good
idea what they're
going to do for the
5 nanometers chip.
Now eventually this will
reach some kind of limit.
But right now, Moore's
law is alive and well.
And when you double and
double and double and double
something, over a
period of 53 years,
you start to get to some
really high numbers,
and you start to see
some really funky stuff.
Like cars that can
drive themselves.
And computers that can beat
any human in chess, Jeopardy,
or Go.
That's basically
where we are today.
Now it's very hard for
the human mind to grasp.
What's the difference between
37.5 million transistors
and a 100 million?
It's really the difference
between the self-driving car
that needs the entire
trunk of the car
to carry the brains of that
car and a self-driving car
that will need just a little
box under the front seat.
In fact, a couple
of years ago, Intel,
to try to drive home
this point, they actually
asked their engineers to
take a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle
and estimate what would
have happened had this VW
Beetle improved at the
same rate of Moore's law
on microchips since 1971?
And they estimated that if
it had, today that Beetle
would go 300,000 miles an hour.
It would get 2 million
miles per gallon.
And it would cost you $0.4.
You'd be able to drive
it your entire life
on a single tank of gas.
That's the power of the
technological exponential
driving our lives today.
Well the third acceleration--
sorry-- my argument is that
this third acceleration plus
the second and the first,
these three accelerations
in the market, mother
nature, and Moore's law--
these three hockey
stick accelerations--
they're actually
melding together
into one giant force for
change that is not just
changing our world, it's
reshaping our world.
Politics, geopolitics,
ethics, the community,
and the workplace.
Before I get to that, let me
just do a little deeper dive.
I'm not going to talk
about mother nature more.
I'm not going talk
about the market more.
I want to do a little deeper
dive, because I'm here
at MIT, on Moore's law.
My chapter on Moore's law
is actually called "What
the Hell Happened in 2007?"
What the hell happened in 2007?
I know what you're thinking.
2007.
What's this guy talking about?
Well, here's what
happened in 2007.
The year was kicked off
at the Moscone Center
in San Francisco
on January 9th when
a guy named Steve Jobs
introduced the first iPhone.
The iPhone, of course, is
actually a handheld computer
with more compute power in it
than the Apollo space mission,
and I'm told it doubles
as a phone and a camera.
That's how the year
was kicked off.
In 2007-- actually,
late 2006-- a company
called Facebook opened
its platform to anyone
with a registered email address,
and broke out of high schools
and universities,
and in 2007 went
global, as all the old
people in this audience
suddenly could have
Facebook pages.
In 2007 a company
called Twitter split off
on its own independent
platform and went global.
In 2007, maybe the
most important software
that most people have never
heard-- not the students
here-- called
VMware went public.
VMware is what enables
any operating system
to work on any computer.
It is the basis, really,
of cloud computing.
In 2007, maybe the second
most important software
most people have never
heard of called Hadoop
was launched into the wild.
Hadoop is named after the
founder's son's toy elephant.
It's what enables a million
computers to work together
as one.
I think they call it big data.
As Doug Cutting, the founder of
Hadoop, explains in the book,
they didn't invent
these algorithms.
They are actually
invented by Google.
They're called
GFS and mapreduce.
But as Doug explains,
Google lives in the future
and sends us letters back home.
And what Google did
was leave a trail
of breadcrumbs of its
big data algorithms
for the open source community
to reverse engineer.
They reverse engineered
it into Hadoop,
which is now being
run by virtually
every big company in the world.
The third thing that happened
in the software realm in 2007
was a company called
GitHub opened its doors.
GitHub today is the
largest repository
of open source software,
with over 14 million users.
And in a great act of irony for
those who live in that space,
was recently bought
by Microsoft.
In 2007, a company called
Google bought a little known TV
company called YouTube.
And in 2007, the
same company called
Google launched into the wild
its own operating system.
They called it Android.
In 2007, IBM launched the
world's first cognitive
computer.
They called it Watson.
In 2007, a guy up
in Seattle named
Jeff Bezos launched the
world's first ebook reader.
He called it the Kindle.
In 2007, an obscure
and anonymous
Japanese cryptocurrency
expert wrote this essay
on cryptocurrency.
It turned into bitcoin.
In 2007, three design
students in San Francisco
were attending the design
conference that year.
And they noticed all the
hotel rooms were sold out.
But one of them had three
spare air mattresses.
And they thought it might be
cool to see if they could rent
out these three spare
air mattresses to people
who couldn't get hotel rooms
for the design conference.
And it worked out
so well for them.
In 2007, they started a
company called Airbnb.
That's where the name comes
from-- from the founding three
air mattresses.
In 2007, a company
called Netflix
streamed its first video.
Here's what else
happened in 2007.
This is a graph of the cost
of sequencing a human genome.
A lot of people here
are familiar with that.
$100 million in 2001.
Falls to $10 million in 2006.
And then in 2007, you'll
notice it falls off
a cliff like an EKG heading for
a heart attack down to $10,000.
Interesting that it
happened in 2007.
Solar energy took off in
2007, as did a process
for extracting natural gas from
tight shale called fracking.
Between 2006 and 2008, America's
total natural gas reserves
increased by 35%, a staggering
number for an 18 month period.
This is a graph of
social networks.
Comes from Qualcomm.
You'll notice the
white line-- that's
the cost of generating
a megabit of data.
And it collapses from $8
basically down to $2 in 2007.
The blue line is the speed
of generating that data.
The two lines cross in 2008.
That's close enough
for government work.
This is a graph of
cloud computing.
You'll notice the
first year we really
get data of any
significance is 2008,
which suggests that the
cloud was born in 2007.
In 2007, the
internet-- late 2006--
crossed a billion users.
Seems to have been
a tipping point.
In 2007, Intel,
for the first time,
went off silicon to
extend Moore's law.
They introduced
non-silicon materials
into their transistors.
In 2005, Michael Dell, the
founder of Dell computers,
retired.
And in 2007, he decided he'd
better come back to work.
Turns out, friends, 2007
may be understood in time
as one of the greatest
technological inflection points
since Gutenberg.
And we completely missed it.
Why?
Because of 2008.
Yeah.
Right when our physical
technologies just
took off like we're on a
moving sidewalk in the airport
that suddenly went from
5 to 50 miles an hour--
right when that happened, all
of our social technologies--
the learning reform,
management reform,
political reform,
regulatory reform
you'd want with such
an acceleration--
completely froze, because we
entered the deepest recession
since 1929.
And in that dislocation
between what
happened to our
physical technologies
and what happened to our
frozen social technologies,
a lot of Trump and
Brexit voters were born.
Because a lot of people
got completely dislocated.
You know someone was alive when
Gutenberg invented the printing
press.
And you can bet that some
monk said to some priest, now
that is really cool.
You mean I don't have to write
these Bibles out longhand
anymore?
I mean, we can just
stamp these things out?
Well I think we are here
for a similar moment.
So what actually
happened in 2007?
Well the computer running this
PowerPoint, like all computers,
basically has five key
components, all laptops.
They've got the microprocessor,
that Moore's law chip.
They've got a storage chip.
They've got networking.
They got software.
And they've got a sensor--
a camera.
And what I do is I use
that model in the book,
and I trace the
history of all five,
and how all five basically
were in their own Moore's law.
And I think basically
what happened
is that they all melded
together right around 2007
into this thing
we call the cloud.
The cloud.
But I never use the term
the cloud in my book.
Because it sounds so fluffy.
So soft.
So cuddly.
So benign.
Sounds like a Joni
Mitchell song.
(SINGING) I've looked at
cloud from both sides.
This ain't no cloud, folks.
Well I call this in
my book the supernova.
The astrophysics
students among you
will know a supernova
is the largest
force in the natural world.
It's the explosion of a star.
And what happened
in 2007, I believe,
was an explosion of energy,
a release of energy,
into the hands of men,
women, and machines
that basically changed
four kinds of power almost
overnight.
It first changed
the power of one.
What one person can do today
as a maker or a breaker
is unlike anything we have
seen before in human history.
We have a president who
can sit in his pajamas
in the East Wing
of the White House
and tweet directly now
to a billion people
without an editor, a
libel lawyer, or a filter.
But what-- not going there.
Not going there.
Just, um--
[LAUGHTER]
But what is really scary
is that the head of ISIS
could do the exact same
thing from his bunker
in Raqqa Province in Syria.
Oh, the power of one to
be a maker or breaker
has fundamentally changed today.
The power of machines
have changed.
I spent all morning hearing from
amazing professors and students
here about that-- how machines
are quite all five senses,
but particularly sight,
and manipulation,
and the ability to
reason and think.
In many ways, we crossed
that line for the first time
on February 14th, 2011, on,
of all places, a game show.
There were three contestants.
Two were the all time
jeopardy champions,
and the third
contestant simply went
by his last name, Mr. Watson.
Mr. Watson, of course, was
an IBM cognitive computer.
He passed on the first
question of the show.
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,
an artificially generated
voice, "what is a shoe?"
And for the first
time, we all got
to watch a cognitive computer
solve a pun riddle faster
than two human beings.
And the world kind of
hasn't been the same since.
It's changed the power of flows.
Ideas now flow, and scale,
and accelerate, and meld,
and change at a speed we
have never seen before.
Where did you want to build
your town in the Middle Ages?
Where did the people
want to build Boston?
You wanted to build
it on a river,
because that river's flows
brought you food, and power,
and ideas, and transport.
You wanted to build
your town on the Amazon.
Where do you want to
build your town today?
On Amazon.com.
You want to build on
the digital flows,
and the data flows, that
will now drive everything.
And finally, it's changed
the power of many.
We, men and women,
empowered by these machines,
have become the largest forcing
function on and in nature.
Which is why the new climate
era, the new geophysical era,
has been named for us--
the Anthropocene.
These four changes in power--
they're not just
changing your world.
They're fundamentally reshaping
politics, geopolitics,
the community, ethics,
and the workplace.
So let me go through
all of those quickly.
Let's talk about the workplace.
Well, before we do, I want
to share with you a simple--
this is just a made up graph.
I was working on the
book and went out
to see Astro Teller
who runs Google X.
And I was giving him
the thesis of the book.
And Astro got out
three magic markers.
And he went over
to his white board.
And he just sketched this out.
And I said, what's that, Astro?
He said well that blue line
across the middle-- again.
this is just made up--
is the average rate at which
human beings and communities
adapt to change over time.
It has a positive slope,
but it's very gradual.
The white line, he
said, that's technology.
So over there in the 11th and
12th century, it was very flat.
Because you could go a whole
century, and your bow and arrow
didn't get better.
There was no bow and arrow
2.0 in the 13th century
after the 12th century.
But then we got the scientific
revolution, and Copernicus,
and Galileo, and
then ultimately,
Steve Jobs, and
Microsoft, and Intel,
and the line starts
to go straight north.
Then he took out a magic marker,
and he put that little diamond
there.
I said, what's that
little diamond, Astro?
He said, that's where we are.
We're at a point now where
technology is simply,
under Moore's law, accelerating
at a pace that the average
human and community
cannot keep up with.
Then he got another magic marker
and he drew that little diamond
there.
That little dotted
line there, I'm sorry.
And I said, what's that, Astro?
And he said, that's learning
faster and governing smarter.
And ain't that the job of MIT?
Ain't that the job of
every government today?
How do we enable more and
more citizens and students
to learn faster and
govern and operate smarter
in this age of acceleration?
And that's why my
chapter on the workplace
is called "How Do
We Turn AI into IA?"
How do we use artificial
intelligence to create
intelligent assistance--
A-N-C-E-- intelligent
assistants--
A-N-T-S-- and intelligent
algorithms so more people can
learn faster and govern smarter?
Let me just give you a
quick example of each one.
My chapter on
intelligent assistance
is built on the human
resources department
at AT&T. i spent a
lot of time there.
AT&T, giant telecom.
330,000 employees.
Living right next
to the supernova.
Competing in the most
intensely competitive space,
global telecom.
Pretty good chance
that whatever's
going on in the HR
department at AT&T
is coming to a
neighborhood near you.
So what's going on there?
Well, basically what they
do now-- their CEO Randall
Stephenson begins the year
with a pretty radically
transparent speech about
where the company is going,
what businesses they're going
to be in, and what skills
you need to be a rising
employee that year at AT&T. Then
they put all their
managers, 110,000 people,
in their own in-house
LinkedIn system.
So say I'm there-- and
I'm just making this up--
but they've got my
CV there, and they've
got all the places
I've worked at AT&T.
And then matching
that, they created--
and the number changes
every year, but--
10 skill sets that
they think you're
going to need to be a rising
employee that year at AT&T.
And they match that
up with my skill sets.
And it turns out
I've got 7 of the 10.
But I'm missing 3.
Then they partner with
Sebastian Thrun from Udacity.
And Sebastian created
nanodegrees, mini courses
online, 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 the nanodegree
courses for the skill
sets you're missing.
In fact, we heard you're
interested in the Middle East.
If you want to take a
course in archeology, hell,
we'll pay for that as well.
In fact, we know you have
an interest in computing.
We just created a $6,000 a
year, one year masters degree
online with Georgia Tech.
We're in for that as well.
Just one condition, Mr. Tom.
You have to take all
these courses at home
at night on weekends
on your own time.
Not on company time.
Now if I say, you
know what, Mr. AT&T?
I've actually 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
at AT&T much longer.
What is AT&T's new social
contract with their employees?
It's very simple.
You can still be a
lifelong employee at AT&T,
but only if you're
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.
Which is why my another one of
my teachers that was a McGowan
educator likes to
say, mom, dad, never
ask your kids anymore what you
want to be when you grow up.
Because whatever
it is is not going
to be here, unless it's
policemen or firemen.
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 be a lifelong learner?
And that leads to what I
think is maybe the thing
most roiling the country today.
It's a point that
another of my teachers,
Marina Gorbis from The
Institute for the Future makes.
You know, if I were giving
this talk 15 years ago,
a big part of the talk would
be about the digital divide.
Boston's got internet,
upstate Massachusetts doesn't.
America's got internet,
Cameroon doesn't.
There was a digital divide.
There's still a digital divide,
but it's rapidly disappearing.
In 5 years, certainly
10, I believe
anyone who wants network
access will be able to have it.
And when that happens,
Marina argues,
the most important
divide in the world
is going to be the
self-motivation divide.
Whose kids have
the self-motivation
to be lifelong learners long
after they've left home,
and mom and dad are not
there to say, Rafael,
have you done your homework?
And that has a lot of
people rightly freaked out.
Because a lot of people
were built to do what
they were told.
In fact, they built our country.
We owe them a huge
debt of gratitude.
Not everyone is built to be
a self-motivated, lifelong
learner.
Unfortunately,
that's going to be
hugely differentiating in
the world we're going into.
My example of
intelligent assistant
is the janitorial
staff at Qualcomm.
Another company I spent
a lot of time with,
Qualcomm, you may know, made a
lot of the chips and software
that actually run your iPhone.
They weren't made by Apple.
That's why Apple is always
suing Qualcomm over patents,
you may have noticed.
So I spent time on
their 64 building campus
profiling their
founder, Irwin Jacobs.
And they've done
something interesting.
Three years ago, they
took 6 of their buildings
on their 64 building
campus and they
affixed sensors everything--
to every light, door, window,
faucet, drain, computer--
they put sensors everywhere.
Then they beamed all that
data up to the supernova,
up to the cloud, and then they
beamed it back onto an iPad
with an incredibly
friendly user interface
for their janitorial staff.
So if I left my computer on
at night, or a pipe burst
above my head, they would
know at the exact same time,
if not sooner than I did.
And they could just swipe
down to see how to repair it
or who to call to fix it.
Qualcomm turned their janitors
into maintenance technologists.
They're janitors actually now
give tours to foreign visitors.
What do you think that does
for the dignity of a janitor?
Because he or she now has an
intelligent assistant enabling
them to learn faster
and operate smarter?
My last example of
intelligent algorithm
is the partnership between the
College Board, who administer
the PSAT and SAT exams, and Khan
Academy, the online learning
platform.
We all know-- I don't
have tell this crowd--
that in 11th grade, we have to
take the PSAT exam to measure
our skills in verbal and math,
to see if we can get into MIT
or wherever; and to
prepare us for 12th grade
to take the actual SAT that
will make that determination.
We also know that
many parents who
can afford to go and
hire a tutor from Kaplan
for $200 an hour to
goose their kids' scores!
Nothing wrong with that except,
it's a completely rigged game.
Because if you come from a
neighborhood or a family that
cannot even imagine rustling
up that amount of money,
or that you could even
do it, you were at a huge
disadvantage.
So 3 and 1/2 years
ago, the College Board
partnered with Khan Academy to
create an intelligent algorithm
for free PSAT and SAT prep.
Some of you may have
availed yourselves of it.
The way it works, for those
of you who haven't, is
in ninth grade, I
take the PSAT exam.
I get the results back.
They say, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom.
You did really well in verbal.
You could be a journalist.
But you have a
problem with math.
Particularly, you have a
problem with fractions and right
angles.
It then takes me
to a practice site
just for fractions
and right angles--
just for my specific weakness.
If I do well there, it takes me
to another site that says, Tom,
you could be in AP math.
Moi?
in AP math?
No one in my family
has been in AP math.
No one in my
neighborhood is in AP--
I could be?
You could be in AP math.
Do well there, it takes me
another site with 180 college
scholarships, and
another site where
young boys and girls from around
the country through the Boys
and Girls Clubs of
America are volunteering
to be tutors to shepherd
people through this intelligent
algorithm.
Last year, 3 million
American kids
got free PSAT and
SAT prep through
this intelligent algorithm.
Now I'm going to bet
you that none of you
have heard of any of this.
And that's because you've been
following our politics, where
the biggest ideas was how
Donald Trump could destroy
Hillary Clinton, how Hillary
Clinton could destroy Donald
Trump.
In fact, there is
massive innovation
going on in the country on the
pipeline of education to work.
In fact, there's
so much innovation,
I almost thought of writing
a book just about that.
And nobody is telling anybody.
And that's a good segue to
how politics is being reshaped
in this age of acceleration.
Now basically, the way I
think of politics today
is to go back to the
metaphor of the climate.
I think we're actually in the
middle of three climate changes
at once.
I think we're in
the middle of change
the climate of the climate.
We're going from later to now.
So when I was growing up in
Minnesota in the '50s and '60s,
later was when I could clean
that river, purify that lake,
rescue that orangutan.
I could do it now, or
I could do it later.
Today, later is officially over.
Later will now be too late.
So whatever you're going to
save, please save it now.
That is a climate change.
We're going through a change in
the climate of globalization.
We're going for a world that was
interconnected to a world that
is interdependent.
And an interdependent world, you
get a geopolitical inversion.
Your friends start to be
able to kill you faster
than your enemies.
If Greek and Italian banks
had gone under last night,
this room would be half full.
Greece, Italy.
Wait a minute.
They're in NATO.
They're in the EU.
They're allies.
In an interdependent
world they can kill us.
And in an interdependent
world, your rivals falling
becomes more dangerous
than your rivals rising.
If China had taken six more
islands in the South China Sea
last night, don't tell
anybody, couldn't care less.
Had China lost 6%
growth last night,
this room would be empty.
That is a climate change.
And lastly, we're
going through change
in the climate of business.
Every business
today using big data
an AI can, and therefore
must, analyze, find
the needle in the
haystack of their data
as the norm, not the exception.
Prophesize, customize, localize,
digitize, and automatize
at a speed, scope, and scale
we've never seen before.
Another climate change.
So that's how I begin my
thinking about politics.
What do you want when
the climate changes?
You actually want two things.
You want resilience.
You need to be able to take a
blow, because stuff happens.
And secondly, you
want propulsion.
You want to be
able to move ahead.
You don't want to be curled up
in a ball under your dorm bed,
waiting for the
climate change to pass.
So then I thought,
who do I talk to,
who do I interview,
about how you
get resilience and propulsion
when the climate changes?
And then I realized,
I knew this woman.
She was 3.8 billion years old.
Her name was mother nature,
and she dealt with more climate
changes than anybody.
So I called her up
made an appointment,
went out to see her.
I said, mother
nature, how do you
produce resilience
and propulsion when
the climate changes?
She said, well, Tom,
I have to tell you.
Everything I do, I
do unconsciously.
But these are my strategies.
First of all, she said,
I am incredibly adaptive.
In my world, in my
ecosystems, it's
not the strongest
that survive, it's
not the smartest that survive.
It's the most
adaptive that survive.
And I teach that through
a rather brutal mechanism
I call natural selection.
You may have heard about it.
Secondly, she said, I am
incredibly entrepreneurial.
Wherever I see a
blank space in nature,
I fill it with a plant or
animal perfectly adapted
to that niche.
I'm incredibly entrepreneurial.
Third, she said, I'm
incredibly pluralistic.
Tom, I'm the most pluralistic
person you've ever met.
I try 20 different
species of everything.
I see who wins.
I love diversity, she told me.
In fact, she told me
something interesting.
And this audience
reminds me of that.
She told me that her
most diverse ecosystems
are her most resilient
and propulsive ecosystems.
Oh, Tom.
I love diversity.
Four, She said, I'm
incredibly sustainable.
Nothing's wasted in my world.
Everything is food.
Eat food.
Poop seed.
Eat food.
Poop seed.
Nothing is wasted.
Fifth, she said, I am
incredibly high bred
and heterodox in my thinking.
Nothing dogmatic about me.
I'll try any trees
with any soils.
Any bees with any flowers.
Six, she said I build feedback
loops into all my systems.
I'm very attentive
to what's going on.
Seven, she said, my
most healthy ecosystems
are all complex,
adaptive coalitions.
That is, all the organisms,
plants, and animals,
network themselves together
into a complex, adaptive system
to increase their
resilience and propulsion.
Lastly, she told me,
Tom, 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 take their energy
to nourish my successes.
Well I believe that the country,
the company, the university
that most closely
mirrors mother nature's
strategies for building
resilience and propulsion
when the climate
changes is the one that
will thrive in this age
of three accelerations.
And since I was writing my
book during the 2016 election,
I imagined, what
if mother nature
had been running against Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton?
So I created mother
nature's political party
with an 18-point platform.
Which of course, is just a
proxy for my own politics.
But never mind.
Anyways--
[LAUGHTER]
I won't bore you with
the whole platform.
But suffice it to
say, on some issues,
mother nature is out there
to the left of Bernie!
Because she would be for
universal health care.
And she would be for universal,
lifelong learning systems.
Because she would
understand this world's
going to be too fast
for too many people,
and we need to strengthen our
safety nets and trampolines.
But to pay for them, should be
to the right of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page.
Mother nature
actually would have
abolished all corporate taxes.
All of them.
But she would have
replaced them with a carbon
tax, a tax on sugar,
a tax on bullets,
and a small financial
transaction tax.
She would understand we have to
tax the hell out of our bads,
because we cannot
afford our bads anymore.
Carbon's going to kill us.
Bullets are going to kill us.
And sugar through diabetes is
going to bankrupt our health
care system.
So she would get radically
entrepreneurial over here
to pay for stronger
safety nets over here.
But what do we know about
our current 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.
Because she would
understand you will never
be resilient and propulsive.
And that's basically why all of
our parties are frozen today.
We can talk about that
more in the question time.
How is geopolitics
being reshaped?
My chapter on that is called--
well, it's actually built
on the sitcom Get Smart.
I don't know how many
of you are my age.
I'm 65.
Just went on Medicare.
Loved the sitcom Get
Smart from the '60s.
Don Adams.
It was a spoof on James Bond.
He had a shoe phone.
Agent 86.
We'll have a little quiz here.
Who can remember the
name of the organization
Don Adams worked for?
[INAUDIBLE]
No.
No.
Control.
Give that man a free book, OK?
It was called Control.
Who was their worldwide enemy?
Chaos!
Chaos!
Exactly right.
The authors of that sitcom--
oh, they were ahead
of their time.
Because I believe the
central geopolitical divide
of the world today is no
longer east-west, north-south,
communist or capitalist.
It's between the world of
control and the world of chaos.
Or what I call the
world of order,
and the world of disorder.
And basically, I think to
understand geopolitics today,
you have to understand
that in the 20th century,
something really big happened.
The world went from being
governed by vast empires
to being governed by a
192 individual nation
states, birthed
by decolonization
and the end of World War I
and the end of World War II.
And the 50 years
after World War II
were a great time to
be an average state.
It was a wonderful time to
be a weak, little state.
Why?
First of all, there
were to superpowers
out there throwing money
at you, educating your kids
at Patrice Lumumba
University in Moscow,
our Wichita State in America,
giving you foreign aid,
building your government house.
You could be Syria and
lose three wars to Israel,
and get your army rebuilt
for free all three times.
Populations.
Lot of people had
demographic dividends.
Lots of young people,
few old people.
Climate change was
incredibly moderate.
And China was not in the
World Trade Organization,
so everybody could be
in the textile business,
and have lots of
low wage industries.
My argument is, in this age
of acceleration, all of that
flips in the early 2000s.
Now no superpower wants to
touch you, because all they win
is a bill.
People either have huge
demographic deficits,
or vast population
explosions in more and more
developing countries.
Climate change is
hammering countries now.
Senegal, where I recently
did a documentary,
is already at 2 degrees
rise average temperature
since the Industrial Revolution.
Two degrees rise
average temperature.
Where have I heard that number?
Oh, 2 degrees rise
average temperature
is what the Paris
Climate Agreement was
designed to prevent by 2100.
Senegal's already there.
They're going to 4 degrees.
And lastly, China's in the
World Trade Organization.
So nobody can be in
the textile business.
It affected everyone's
low wage industries.
Well I would argue
that shift basically
is completely stressing out
weak and average states.
Some are imploding.
A couple we blew up.
And many are fracturing
and hemorrhaging people.
In our hemisphere, it's
Guatemala, Honduras,
and El Salvador.
Guatemala, the most defor--
all three, actually,
are the most deforested
countries in Central America.
They cut down their
trees, we got the kids.
And in Africa, it
starts in West Africa,
and the world of disorder
stretches all the way
across North Africa
through the Middle East,
right up to the border of India.
And the biggest thing
happening in the world today
is that millions of
people are trying
to get out of the
world of disorder
into the world of order.
And it is fundamentally
reshaping the politics
of the world of order.
How we rise to
that challenge, we
can talk to in the questions.
Let me close by talking about
two areas that you probably
haven't thought much about
that are being reshaped.
One is ethics.
And the other is community.
So my chapter on ethics is
called "Is God in Cyberspace?"
Happens to be the best question
I ever got on a book tour.
1999, I had written a book
called The Lexus and the Olive
Tree.
I was at the Portland
Theater in Portland, Oregon,
talking about the book.
Came to question time.
Young man raised his
hand in the balcony.
Said, Mr. Friedman,
I have a question.
Is God in cyberspace?
I said--
[STAMMERING]
[SIGH]
I have no idea.
And I felt, frankly,
like a complete idiot.
So I got home.
I called my spiritual teacher.
He's a rabbi I got to know
when I was the New York Times
correspondent in Jerusalem
at the Hartman Institute.
He's named Zvi Mark.
He's a brilliant Talmudist
now living in Amsterdam.
Married to a Dutch priest.
Interesting character.
I tracked him down in Amsterdam.
I said, Zvi, I got a question
I've never had before.
Is God in cyberspace?
What should I have said?
And he said, well, Tom,
in our faith tradition,
we actually have two
concepts of the Almighty.
A biblical concept, and
a post-biblical concept.
The biblical concept says the
almighty is, uh, Almighty.
He smites evil and rewards good.
And if that's your
view of God, he sure
isn't in cyberspace, which is
full of pornography, gambling,
cheating, lying, prevarication,
people smearing one
another on Twitter, and--
now we know-- fake news!
But fortunately, he said,
we have a post-biblical view
of God.
And the post-biblical
view of God
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.
I really liked his answer.
I put it into the paperback
edition of The Lexus
and the Olive Tree, which
came out in the year 2000
where none of you saw it, and
it sat there for 16 years.
I sat down to write this book.
And after a year
of working on it,
I suddenly found myself
retelling that story.
And I finally stopped
myself one day
and said, why did you
retelling that story?
And the answer became clear
to me for two reasons,
and one just happened.
First reason, the one
that just happened,
is I believe somewhere
in the last year or two,
in the developing world, we
began living 51% of our lives
in cyberspace.
That's where you go to
find a date, find a spouse,
buy a book, write a book.
Do your banking.
Do your brokerage.
Buy your clothes.
Communicate with your family.
Get a mortgage.
We're now living 51% of
our lives in cyberspace.
And what's my definition
of cyberspace?
It's a realm where
we're all connected
and no one's in charge.
Yeah, there are no
stoplights in cyberspace,
you may have noticed.
No courts, no judges, no police.
No 1-800, please stop Putin
from hacking my election.
Yet that's where we're now
living 51% of our lives.
In other words, we're
living 51% of our lives
in a realm that is
fundamentally God-free.
And at the same time, thanks
to these accelerations,
we're now standing at
a moral intersection
we have never stood at
before as a human species.
In 1945, post-Hiroshima,
we entered a world
where one country
could kill all of us.
If it had to be one country,
I prefer it be mine.
I think we're entering
a world today where
one person can kill all of us.
And where at the
same time, all of us
could actually fix everything.
These accelerations are creating
powers where one of us could
kill all of us, and all of
us-- if we now actually put
our minds to it--
we have or will have
the power to actually
feed, house, clothe, and educate
every person on the planet.
We have never been to
this intersection before.
And what is this intersection?
What does it really mean?
It means we've never been
more godlike as a species
than we are today because
of these accelerations.
What does that mean?
What that means is what every
person today thinks, feels,
and believes matters
more than ever,
it means every person must
be in the grip of sustainable
values--
at a minimum, the mother of
them all, the golden rule.
Do unto others as you
wish them to do unto you,
because you now live in a world
where more people can do unto
you from farther, faster,
deeper, cheaper than ever
before Putin.
Did unto us in
our last election.
And we can do unto others
farther, faster, deeper,
cheaper than ever before.
We have never been more
godlike than we are today.
I know what you're thinking.
Everybody having
the golden rule.
I mean, like,
that's so fanciful.
I actually gave this part of
my talk as the commencement
address at Olin and
College of Engineering
a couple of years ago.
And I said to the parents there,
I know what you're thinking.
You paid 200 grand so your
kid could get an engineering
degree.
And who do they bring
in as the commencement
speaker but a knucklehead
promoting the golden rule?
Is there anything more naive?
And what I told them is
what I will tell you.
In a world where men,
women, and machines get
this super empowered,
and this interconnected
and interdependent,
naivete is the new realism.
Because I'll tell you
what's really naive--
thinking we're going
to be OK in a world
where men, women, machines get
this super empowered if more
people are not grounded in the
ethics and sustainable values
embodied by the golden rule
it matters now more than ever.
Where do you learn
the golden rule?
You actually learn it, I
think, in two places primarily.
First, strong families.
And second, healthy communities.
I'm not an expert
on strong families.
Hope I built one,
but would never
be so presumptuous as to
lecture you on that subject.
But I am an expert on
healthy communities.
Because I grew up in one.
And that's why my
book, after 12 chapters
about all this technology,
and all this climate
change, and all of
this globalization,
actually ends up
with me going back
to the little town
in Minnesota where
I learned the golden rule,
and telling that story.
A short story is my parents--
grandparents, excuse me--
emigrated from Eastern Europe
in the early part
of the 20th century.
They ended up in Minneapolis--
I have no idea how-- from
the Pale of Settlement
My parents were born there, as
was I. Minneapolis in the '30s
and '40s was the
capital of anti-Semitism
until Hubert Humphrey became
mayor and cleaned it out
of city government.
Humphrey practiced
on anti-Semitism
before he took on the
larger issue of civil rights
in the country.
A real hero in our house.
I was born in 1953.
And in those years, virtually
the entire Jewish community
in Minneapolis lived in a ghetto
in the north side of the city
with African-Americans.
Not because we were
integrated there,
but because we were
isolated there.
Anyways, after the war, the
world opened up for the Jews--
not for the African-Americans--
and the Jews
were able to escape that
ghetto, and in a three year
period in Minneapolis
between '53 and '56,
virtually the entire
Jewish community
moved out of the north side
of the city to one suburb
on the edge of town, the outer
outskirts of Minneapolis,
called St Louis Park.
In basically a
three year period,
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 St Louis Park.
OK?
So it was as if God threw us
all together there and said,
let's just throw them all
together and see what happens!
And what happened was kind
of an interesting experiment.
We, the Jews of Minnesota--
we called ourselves the frozen
chosen--
were thrown together with these
incredibly pluralistic Swede's.
We were, shot out of a
ghetto like a cannon.
These neurotic Jews
thrown together
with these pluralistic Swedes.
And I tell the story about
our little community,
because it was kind
of a freaky place.
You see, I actually went to
high school, a Hebrew school,
and lived in the same
neighborhood in the same eight
year period, with
the Coen brothers.
Al Franken.
Michael Sandel, the
political theorist.
Norm Ornstein, the
political scientist.
Mark Trestman, the coach
of the Chicago Bears.
Sharon Isbin, the guitarist.
The list goes on.
We have our own Wikipedia page.
It was a freaky place.
This is not a neighborhood
in the Upper West
Side of New York.
This was a one high
school town in Minnesota.
And it had a huge
impact on all of us,
because the civic
culture was so powerful.
We all took it into the world.
Sandel into political theory.
Ornstein and Franken
into politics.
The Coen brothers into film,
and me into journalism.
The Coen brothers
movie, A Serious Man,
was about our town.
In fact, if you saw No
Country for Old Men,
you may remember a scene
where Chigurh blows up
a car outside of a
pharmacy in Mexico
in order to go in
and steal drugs.
And at the end of the scene,
the camera pans to the pharmacy.
It's called Mike Zoss Drugs.
That was our little St
Louis Park drugstore.
So I basically tell
the story of how we
built an inclusive community.
And it was hard, and
there were struggles.
And there were broken
friendships and broken dates.
But over time, as I said, we
built a really interesting
place to propel
people into the world
with this deep, civic ethic,
born of this thing called
"Minnesota nice."
Got to be from
Minnesota to fully
understand "Minnesota nice."
Had a huge impact on all of us.
Hard to explain.
I give a couple of
examples in the book.
I was home working on the
book, and my friend Ken Greer,
his daughter was
getting married.
And my friend Jay came,
sat down at the table,
and he told me over dinner--
he said, Tom, my wife Eileen
was driving around the ring
road of 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.
[LAUGHTER]
That's Minnesota for road rage.
There was a Jewish mafia in
Minnesota in the '30s and '40s
in the age of prohibition.
My dad grew up with these guys.
I swear he wasn't in the mafia,
but he did grow up with them.
And when I was five years,
old my dad came home one day
and told me, one of his
friends had been sent to jail.
When you're a five-year-old
kid and your dad
knows someone who was sent
to jail, that freaks you out.
Which is why I never forgot what
he said when I said d-d-dad,
what did he do?
And he said, son, he was a
he was shopping in a store
before it was open.
[LAUGHING]
That's-- Minnesota for
breaking and entering.
So that was the
political culture
I grew up in, and had a big
impact on me to this day.
Anyways, I left Minneapolis
and St Louis Park in 1971
to discover the world.
And I came back 40
years later to write
the last chapter of the book--
"How the World Had
Discovered St Louis Park."
Now my high school is 50%
white Protestant Catholic
Scandinavian, 10% Jewish, 10%
Latino, and now, 30% Somali.
Because the little town that
took the Jews 50 years ago took
the Somalis this time around.
Now the inclusion challenge
is much deeper, racially
and religiously.
And I tell the story
of how they're doing.
But ain't that the
story of America today?
And ain't that the
story of the world?
How do we meld together now
a much more diverse country,
and bring education
and opportunity
to a much wider rainbow
of our population?
They're doing pretty well.
My high school is still
the fifth rated high school
in the state of Minnesota.
But it's a struggle.
It's hard, hard work.
But the reason my book is called
An Optimist's Guide to Thriving
in the Age of
Acceleration is that,
what actually is working in
Minneapolis and St Louis Park--
to go back to my
analogy of nature--
is that they're building
complex, adaptive coalitions.
Where business, educators,
philanthropists,
social entrepreneurs,
and local government
are all working together to
build resilience and propulsion
from the bottom, up, at a
time when America completely
has stopped working
from the top, down.
If you want to be an optimist
today about our country,
stand on your head.
It looks so much
better from the bottom,
up, than from the top, down.
It's not that we don't
have failing communities.
We do.
We have them aplenty.
But it is amazing to me how
many people out there today
want to get caught trying to
build these complex adaptive
coalitions from one end of
the country to the other.
Which is why my teacher for
the physics in this book, Amory
Lovins, always likes to
say when people ask him,
Amory are you an
optimist or a pessimist?
He says, Tom, I'm neither.
Because they're just two
different forms of fatalism.
Everything will be great.
Everything will be awful.
Amory says, I believe
in applied hope.
I believe in applied hope.
Not sure it's going to work,
but going to apply myself.
And I believe in applied hope.
And I can tell you
the country is still
full of people at the community
level who are applying hope.
And therefore, my talk and my
book end with a theme song.
My book has a theme song.
I actually explored,
could I buy the song
so when you open
the book, it would
play this song like a hallmark
card plays "Happy Birthday?"
The song is by one of
my favorite singers.
Her name is Brandi Carlile.
And her song is
called, "The Eye."
E-Y-E. And I believe it
is the anthem of our time.
The main refrain is, "I
wrapped 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, my three
accelerations--
they're a hurricane.
We have politicians in
this country and all
over the world today
who are trying to build
a wall to the hurricane.
I'm actually arguing
for building an eye.
An eye that moves with the
storm, draws energy from it,
but creates a platform
of dynamic stability,
like riding a bike, where
people can feel connected,
protected, and respected.
That is the healthy community.
I believe the great struggle
in this country 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.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
I see students running out to
do their problems for tomorrow
morning.
That's OK.
I understand.
That was quite a extremely rich
and intellectually stimulating
talk, Tom.
I have a few
questions that I want
to ask you from the audience
that asked ahead of time.
Let me do just a quick
plug, while people still
move around the aisles.
A quick MIT plug.
You mentioned in
your presentation--
this is not from
the audience, I just
thought of it writing--
you mentioned Qualcomm
VMware, Intel, Khan Academy.
Tom, what do those four
companies have in common?
[LAUGHING] I think it has
something to do with MIT!
Yes, indeed.
Correct.
Right answer.
They were founded by MIT grads.
OK.
Let me just ask a few questions
that I got from the audience
before you started.
"In 2011, you published a book
titled "That Used to be Us--
How America Fell Behind in
the World We Invented, and How
We Can Come Back."
Seven years later, how do
you see America's place
in the world today?
And can we still
make a comeback?
That's a really good question.
Next question, you
have there, Reif.
No, no.
OK.
Number two.
Well I was explaining to
some of your amazing faculty
I got to have lunch
with today here.
This book is
actually the product
of my own personal,
emotional journey.
So for 30 years, I
covered foreign affairs
in the Middle East for
the New York Times.
And after the failure of the
Iraq war and the Arab Spring,
I really just sort
of emotionally just
checked out of that
part of the world.
I just felt like everything
I had supported failed.
You know?
And if it were baseball,
I was batting 0, 0, 0.
So I decided to, in my
head, bring my game home,
and try to think
more about America.
And so I wrote that book
with Michael Mandelbaum
"That Used to Be Us."
It was really about how we
do nation building at home.
And then something started to
happen over the last few years.
I discovered the Middle East
had kind of followed me home.
That we had become
Sunnis and Shiites.
We called them Democrats
and Republicans.
But our politics moved
from partisan to tribal.
And it became so profoundly
depressing to me,
I decided actually to go home
to my little town in Minnesota
to see the source
of my optimism.
First of all, to see whether
I had made it all up,
or I just remembered it
in a kind of gauzy way,
or if there was
something real there.
What was going on that was
still working at the local level
that I could maybe bring back
to the national and regional
level?
And so that was where
the book originally
came from that was the
emotional journey that I was on.
I'm still a huge
believer in America.
But I'll tell you the lead
of my column for Wednesday,
If you don't tell anybody.
I started my career covering
a civil war in Lebanon.
I fear I'm going to
end my career covering
a civil war in America.
That's what it feels
like to me right now.
And I am deeply, deeply
worried about where
our country is going.
We've moved from
partisan, that's OK.
Politics should be partisan.
To tribalism.
Tribal is rule or die.
And I believe that when
Mitch McConnell prevented
Barack Obama, when
he was president,
from appointing a Supreme
Court Justice with basically
a year left in his term, which
was his constitutional right
and duty, when he was
blocked from doing that,
I think that will go
down in our history
as a terrible, terrible thing.
It broke something.
And now Democrats, when
they get the chance,
are going to do the same thing.
And that's how a great
constitutionally-based country
starts to unravel.
So I'm quite worried.
Well I would like
to ask a follow up,
which is how do we
get out of this mess?
But let's go to
question number two.
A two-part question.
"What did you major in as an
undergraduate at Brandeis?
And if you weren't just started
college today, what would
you choose as a major?"
So by major was actually--
maybe I'll just go back
and put it all in context.
So I grew up in
this little town.
And up until 10th
grade, I actually
wanted to be a
professional golfer.
And that's all I wanted to do.
And then in 10th
grade, my life changed.
I had that teacher.
A teacher who changes your life.
Hattie Steinberg,
journalism teacher
at St Louis Park
High in room 313.
And I took her
journalism course,
and I just fell in
love with journalism.
And when she died, I
wrote a column about her.
It's called "My Teacher."
And it's still the
most widely-read column
I've ever written.
And she was 63 years
old when I had her.
She was a woman of certainty
in an age of uncertainty.
And we gathered around
her room after school
like it was the malt shop,
and she was Wolfman Jack.
She was just a
remarkable teacher,
and the only journalism course
I've ever taken in my life
was hers.
And in 10th grade my--
not because I was that good,
because she was that good.
And in 10th grade, my parents
also took me to Israel
over winter break.
I had never been out of
the state of Minnesota,
except for some brief
forays into Wisconsin,
and I'd never been
on an airplane.
And I went to the Middle East,
and it kind of blew my mind.
I ended up living on
a kibbutz all three
summers of high school.
And when I started
college as a freshman,
I started taking Arabic.
And I eventually got
my BA from Brandeis
in Mediterranean Studies.
They really didn't have
a Middle East program.
It was called
Mediterranean studies.
I had a Marshall
Scholarship to Oxford.
I eventually got a Master's in
Arabic and Middle East Studies
from St Anthony's.
And I got my start
in journalism.
In 1975, I was walking
down the street
in London with my then
girlfriend, now wife.
Jimmy Carter was running against
Gerald Ford for president.
And The Evening Standard
had a blaring headline.
You know, The Evening
Standard always
has those blaring headlines to
entice you to buy the paper.
It said "Carter to
Jews, colon, If elected,
I promise to fire Dr. K."
And I stopped my then
girlfriend, now wife,
and said, look at that.
Isn't that funny?
That headline.
It says Jimmy Carter is
running for president,
and to win Jewish
votes he's promising
to fire the first ever
Jewish secretary of state.
And it just struck me
as incredibly ironic.
And I have no idea
what possessed me.
But I went back to my dorm room,
and I wrote a column about it.
And my then
girlfriend, now wife,
who came from Des Moines,
Iowa, took it home on break,
and gave it to
Gilbert Gramberg, who
was in the legendary editorial
page editor of the Des Moines
Register.
And he loved it, and liked it.
And he printed it on a half
page of the Des Moines Register
with an Alf cartoon.
And they paid me $50.
And I thought that
was the coolest thing
in the whole world.
I had been walking
down the street.
I had an opinion.
I wrote it up.
And someone paid me $50.
And I was hooked ever after.
So I then wrote, actually, op
ed pieces for the Des Moines
Register and The
Minneapolis Star
and Tribune throughout my
graduate school at Oxford.
And when I graduated,
I wanted to be
a reporter in the Middle East.
I applied at AP
and UPI in London.
AP said, kid, you've
never covered a fire.
You've never covered
a city hall meeting.
Yes, sir, but I've got
these 10 op ed pieces.
And then, UPI said, well,
you've never covered a fire.
You've never covered
a city hall meeting.
But if you can write
those, you can probably
learn how to do this.
So they took a chance.
They hired me in London.
I started on Fleet Street,
and I worked there for a year.
Then the number two man in
the Beirut bureau of UPI
got shot in the ear by a
man robbing a jewelry store
on Hamra Street.
He said, get me out of here.
I want to come home.
I did not want to pass go.
I do not want to collect $200.
Get me out of here.
And they came to me
and said, would you
like to be the number
two man in Beirut?
Your predecessor just got shot.
[LAUGHTER]
And I said I would.
So I went off to Beirut in
1979 as the number two man
in the Beirut bureau of UPI.
And the first two
stories I covered
were the Iranian
revolution and the takeover
of the Grand Mosque in
Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
And those two events shaped
my entire life ever after.
You speak both Arabic and--
I studied, but I'm
not fluent at all.
But enough that I can get
by and find my way through.
Well, OK.
Let's move to another
part of the world.
This fellow wrote, "as a
non-US and non-China citizen,
I worry that the
US and China might
be moving toward a protracted
and destructive clash.
Where do you see the
countries' relationship headed,
and what, if
anything, can MIT do
to help promote improved
relations between the two
nations?"
Well, I wish you'd been at our--
I had the privilege of having
a China lunch with your China
experts today.
And it was the theme
of our whole lunch.
So basically, my view is
that China and America
are the real one
country, two systems.
Not China, Hong Kong.
I think China and America,
that we are so intertwined
and our fates are intertwined--
not just economically.
But you heard my little
thing on geopolitics.
I think that it's going to
be for China and America
to come together to
stabilize the world of order,
and stabilize the
world of disorder.
That is our big project.
Unfortunately, we
don't understand that.
And so we each think
that our threat
is the other, when the complete
threat that will destabilize
both of us is disorder.
I think that requires
some changes on our part.
It is going to require some
changes on China's part.
But I'm a huge
believer that we are
doomed to rise together
or fall together.
And the sooner we
discover that, the better.
Anything that a place
like MIT can do to help us
discover that faster?
Well I'm just all for--
I think the more interaction,
the more Chinese students
that can come here--
I wrote my column
about this last week,
that I'm for entanglement.
I'm not for containment,
I'm for entanglement.
I want to entangle
more Chinese students,
in the very best sense
of the word, coming here.
I want more American
students going there.
I want more American
businesses there.
I want more Chinese
businesses here.
Because I think-- it was so
interesting talking to your AI
team, and just how much
they, as MIT professors,
now need to partner, draw
on, AI specialties in China.
We're never going to get where
we need to go collectively
without collaborating.
And I just think
we're going about this
in a completely ass-backward
way with this trade war.
I think there are
issues that China
needs to give on in
trade, and should
be taking the initiative.
But it's a subject I
spend a lot of time
thinking about and
worrying about.
Because I think we are
going to be the two
big pillars of the world.
And we have to engage.
I'm for entanglement.
You mentioned some of this.
But this question was proposed,
and I think it's still valid.
"With our politics and our
society increasingly polarized,
how do you think
consumers should approach
reading or watching the news?"
Well I think that long
before young people
get to MIT, that we need
to start in kindergarten.
I think the first
class in kindergarten
has to be called Digital Civics.
How do you read the internet?
And that you do not
read something--
when you read something
on the internet that
says the Minneapolis Sun
Sentinel reported that,
unbeknownst to the
New York Times,
Tom Friedman had
a criminal record
before he joined
the New York Times.
The first thing you need
to do is Google if there is
a Minneapolis Sun Sentinel,
because it turns out there
isn't.
And I think the
internet, in my view,
is an open sewer of untreated,
unfiltered information.
It's full of diamonds, and
rubies, and gold, and silver.
It's fantastic stuff.
And it's full of rusty nails,
broken glass, toxic materials,
and tin cans.
And unless we teach
our young people
in building them--
and our citizens--
the filters for how
to filter the diamonds
and rubies and gold from
the toxic materials,
we're going to get the kind
of politics we're getting now.
And it's not a small thing.
People know I'm not on Twitter.
I'm not on Facebook.
I've never smoked a cigarette.
And I hope to die
saying all three.
So I I'm on Twitter
because the New York
Times tweets my column.
If you come to me,
Rafael, and say
will you tweet this about
MIT, I will happily do that.
I'd give it to my secretary,
because I don't know how.
I know who my friends are.
They're not a thumb
up or a thumb down.
And anything said about
me in 140 characters
by an anonymous person, I'm
not altogether interested in.
So I have the privilege of
having a column at the New York
Times, so I don't need it.
If I didn't, I'd be
on Twitter every day.
But all I'm saying
is that I think
that the first inning of these
social networks were fantastic.
God, they were fun,
the first inning.
But the second innings
been a real bitch.
The second inning was
learning that Facebook--
and if you haven't read Evan
Osnos' piece in the New Yorker
about Facebook, you
should really read it.
I work for this thing
called a newspaper.
You shouldn't of started
me on this question, Reif.
So I work for this thing
called a newspaper.
And we have, at this
thing called a newspaper,
we have regulators on one side,
and we have editors on another.
And therefore, if
you want to take out
a political ad in
the New York Times,
you had to identify
who you were.
And if I made a mistake
in the New York Times,
my editor said I had to
correct that mistake.
And in-between, we had
readers and advertisers.
And then Facebook came along
and said, we're not a newspaper.
We're a platform.
By the way, we're
cool, so we actually
don't need your regulator.
And we don't need your editors.
But we want all your readers
and all your advertisers.
And we didn't know what to do.
And so they scarfed
up all our readers
and all our advertisers.
But they said, we don't need
these regulators and editors--
you need to trust us.
And we trusted them.
And they fundamentally
violated our trust.
And they did it for money.
They did it for scale.
And they have a lot to
answer for, I believe.
That could be
almost a way to win.
[APPLAUSE]
Just one last
question, because I
think this person would
want this question answered.
You repeated that today.
"You've said that
your dream as a child
was to become a
professional golfer.
So do you ever think about
turning off the keyboard
and hitting the links?"
[LAUGHING]
As a profession.
Well, I do.
You know, it's a little-known
fact in my biography
that I actually caddied in the
US open at Hazeltine in 1970
for the famous Puerto Rican
golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
And he was in second
place after the first day.
I was a 17-year-old
kid at the time.
And he ended up 26th, and he
paid me $175, and all the balls
and gloves in his bag.
And it's still one of the
high points of my life.
Anyways, about 25 years later,
some family friends of ours
were in Dorado Beach, Puerto
Rico, his home course.
And they ran into him.
They said, Chi-Chi,
do you remember
who caddied for you at the
US Open Hazeltine in 1970?
Not missing a beat,
he said, Tommy.
And as family,
friends will do, they
said to him, do you know he's
more famous than you are today?
And Chi-Chi thought
about that for a second
and said, "not in Puerto Rico."
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Please, thank him.
