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So what I'm going to talk about is uh my latest book which uh was co-authored with uh Michael Mandelbomb.
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It's a book about America.
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It's called That Used to Be Us.
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How America lost its way in the world and invented and how we can come back.
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I know some of you have read it. Those of you haven't. I know who you are.
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uh you know where you go to school.
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Um so that used to be us.
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Whenever we tell people the title of our book, their first question usually is uh but but but but does it have a happy ending?
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And our answer always is very simple. It does.
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We just don't know yet whether it is fiction or non-fiction.
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That really is going to depend on us.
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Now you might ask, how did two foreign policy geeks, I'm foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times.
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My co-author Michael Mandlebomb is chaired professor of international relations at John's Hopkins.
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How did two foreign policy geeks end up writing a book about America?
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And the answer is very simple.
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We're old friends, been friends for 20 years.
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We talk almost every morning. We're neighbors.
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And over the last four or five years, we started to notice something.
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We would start every morning talking about the world, and we'd end every day talking about America.
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And it quickly became obvious to us that America, its fate, future, vigor, and vitality was really the biggest foreign policy issue in the world.
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Lord knows America makes its share of mistakes and more in the world.
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But we do believe on balance the United States is a importantly constructive force in providing global public goods and that if America goes weak or becomes infeebled, your kids won't just grow up in a different America or a different China or a different Brazil.
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they will grow up in a fundamentally different world.
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And so something is very important at stake right now in the fate and future of our country.
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Now, Michael and I are both movie buffs and uh the mo the book is built around a lot of different movie themes.
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There's one in particular that probably frames our original take on the book.
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It's from that 1958 Orson Wells classic Touch of Evil.
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I'm sure some of you have seen it.
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movie about murder and kidnapping, conspiracy and corruption in a town on the Mexican-American border.
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Orson Wells plays a crooked cop who tries to frame his Mexican counterpart for a murder.
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At one point, Wells stumbles into a brothel and finds the proprietor, Marlene Dietrich, who is also a fortune teller with cards spread out in front of her.
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"Read my future for me," Wells says.
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"You haven't got any," she replies.
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your future is all used up. Is that us? Is that America? Well, we don't think so.
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But we also don't think that our future is simply assured that it's a given.
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And that's really why we wrote this book.
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Now I want to just take a couple of minutes to read the first really few paragraphs of the book from the opening chapter which is called if you see something say something.
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This is a book about America that begins in China.
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In September 2010 I attended the World Economic Forum summer conference in Tanzhen, China.
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5 years earlier, getting to Tenzhen had involved a three and a half-hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted, crowded Chinese version of Detroit. But things had changed.
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Now, to get to Tenzhen, you head to the Beijing South Railway Station, an ultramodern flying saucer of a building with glass walls and an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels.
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You buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in Chinese and English, and you board a world-class high-speed train that goes right to another roomy modern train station in downtown Tanzhen.
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Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008, the Chinese bullet train covers 72 miles in 29 minutes.
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The conference itself took place at the Tienzen Beijing Convention and Exhibition Center, a massive, beautifully appointed structure the like of which exists in few American cities.
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As if the convention center wasn't impressive enough, the conference's co-sponsors gave some facts and figures.
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They noted that the building contained a total floor space of 2.
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5 million square feet and that construction of the Beijing Convention Center started on September 15th, 2009 and was completed in May 2010.
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Reading that line, I started walking around my room September, October, November, December.
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That's eight and a half months.
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Returning home to Maryland from that trip, I was describing the Ten Complex and how quickly it was built to my co-author Michael and his wife Anne.
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And at one point, Anne interrupted and said, "Excuse me, Tom, have you been to our subway stop lately?
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We all live in Bethesda, Maryland, and often use the Washington Metro subway to get to work in downtown Washington DC.
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I had just been at the Bethesda station and knew what Anne was talking about.
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The two short escalators there had been under repair for six months.
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While the one being fixed was closed, the other had to be shut off and converted into a two-way staircase.
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At rush hour, this was creating a huge mess.
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Everyone trying to get on or off the platform had squeezed had to squeeze single file up and down one frozen escalator.
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It sometimes took 10 minutes just to get out of the station.
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A sign on the closed escalator said that its repairs were part of a massive escalator modernization project.
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What was taking the modernization project so long? I investigated.
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Kathy Assado, a spokeswoman from Washington Metro, said that the repairs were scheduled to take about 6 months and are on schedule.
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Mechanics, she said, need 10 to 12 weeks to fix each escalator.
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A simple comparison made a startling point.
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China's Ted Construction Group took 32 weeks to build a world-class convention center from the ground up, including giant escalators in every corner, and it was taking Washington Metro 24 weeks to repair two tiny escalators of 21 steps each.
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We searched a little further and found that on November 14th, 2010, the Washington Post ran a letter to the editor from one Mark Thompson of Kensington, Maryland, who wrote, "As someone who has ridden Metro for more than 30 years, I can think of an easier way to assess the health of the escalators for decades.
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They ran silently and efficiently.
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But over the past several years, when the escalators are running, aging or ill-fitting parts have generated horrific noises that sound to me like a Tyrannosaurus Rex trapped in a tarpit, screeching its dying screams.
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But the quote we found most disturbing came from Maryland Community News.
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It was a story about the long lines at rush hour caused by the seemingly endless metro repairs.
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It was a quote from Benjamin Ross who lives in Bethesda and commutes every day to downtown.
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My impression standing in line there, said Ross, is that people have sort of gotten used to it.
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People have sort of gotten used to it.
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Indeed, that sense of resignation, that sense, well, that's just how things are in America today, that sense that America's best days are behind it and China's best days are ahead of it, have become the subject of water cooler, dinner party, grocery line, and classroom conversations all across our country.
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So, do we buy the idea, increasingly popular, that Britain owned the 19th century, America dominated the 20th century, and China will inevitably reign supreme in the 21st century? No. No, we do not.
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And we've written this book to explain why no American, young or old, should resign himself or herself to that view either.
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The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America's future.
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We are optimists, but we are frustrated.
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We are two frustrated optimists.
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The title of this opening chapter, well, you know what it is.
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If you see something, say something.
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And you know where that comes from.
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It is the motto of the Department of Homeland Security.
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It plays over and over on loudspeakers in airports, bus stations, and railway stations around our country.
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Well, we have seen and heard something, and millions of Americans have, too.
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What we've seen is not a suspicious package left under a stairwell.
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What we've seen is hiding in plain sight.
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We've seen something that poses a greater threat to our national security and well-being than anything al-Qaeda does.
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What we've seen is a country with enormous potential falling into the worst sort of decline.
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a slow decline, just slow enough for us not to drop everything and pull together to fix what needs fixing.
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This book is our way of saying something about what is wrong, why things have gone wrong, and what we can and must do to make them right.
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So that's the basic framing of the book.
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Now, the book basically argues that America America today faces basically four great challenges.
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And I'm going to talk about one today.
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Um the first is a perceptual challenge.
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Um and that is understanding what world we are living in.
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If you don't begin your day as a country or a company by asking the question, what world am I in?
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What are the biggest trends in the world?
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Well, you're never going to get to the right answers.
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We we use a concept in the book that was developed by the US Air Force in fighter pilot school called the udaloop. stands for OOD DA.
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Observe, orient, decide, and act.
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And what we teach our fighter pilots is if you're in a dog fight and your ability to observe, orient, decide, and act is faster than the other pilot, you will shoot them out of the sky.
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If their ability to observe, orient, decide, and act is faster than you, they will shoot you out of the sky.
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Right now, our national udaloop, our ability to observe, orient, decide, and act about the biggest trends in the world today is completely discombobulated.
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And one reflection of that is that we as a country have made the worst mistake a country or a species can make.
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We have misread our environment in two fundamental ways.
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We first thought the end of the cold war was a great victory.
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And surely it was a great victory over totalitarianism.
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But we thought that victory entitled us to put our feet up and take off our shoes.
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when in fact it was a victory that unleashed two billion people just like us just when we needed to actually be racing tying up our shoes tighter.
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We put our feet up and then we compounded that mistake after 911 by spending a whole decade chasing the losers from globalization called the Taliban and al-Qaeda rather than the winners called China, India and Brazil.
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So that's kind of why at the macro level we are where we are.
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Our udaloop is broken and we misread our environment.
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Now, if we were reading our environment, what would we be seeing?
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We'd be seeing that America today faces three great challenges.
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And I'm, as I said, I'm going to focus on just one.
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And it's the first and that is how we respond to what I believe is the biggest trend happening in the world today.
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The trend that is affecting more things than anything else, the merger of globalization and the IT revolution.
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And I'll talk about that in detail in a second.
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Second great challenge we face is debt and deficit.
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All the entitlement issues which you're familiar with.
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And the third is energy and climate.
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How do we power our future and help power the future of middle classes all over the world without tipping our planet into dangerous climate change?
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But let's just focus on the first because the first is really a workplace challenge and ultimately an education challenge.
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The merger of globalization and the IT revolution is I believe the biggest thing happening in the world today.
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In fact, it is in terms of impact as big as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with one difference that played out over 20, 30, 50, 100 years.
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And this is playing out over a relatively few number of years.
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What are we talking about?
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So back in 2004, I wrote a book, started writing a book called the world is flat.
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How the world was getting connected. And it came out in 2005.
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Well, what I've really realized in writing this book is that we have gone from a connected world to a hyperconnected world in a very short period of time. How did I know that?
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When I sat down to write this book with Michael, first thing I did was get the first edition of The World is Flat off the bookshelf.
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Cracked it open to the index, looked under ABCDE, FF FF FFA, Facebook wasn't in it.
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So when I was out saying the world is flat, we're all connected. Fasten your seat belts.
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When I was out there saying all that, Facebook didn't exist.
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Twitter was still a sound.
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The cloud was still in the sky. 4G was a parking place. LinkedIn was a prison.
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Applications what you sent to college.
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And for most people, Skype was a typo.
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All of that, all of that happened after I said the world is flat.
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And that is what has taken us from connected to hyperconnected.
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I call this the great inflection.
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If we were really talking in this country about the biggest thing going on right now, it is this incredible inflection.
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But this inflection has been disguised by post 911 and the subprime crisis.
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But it is the biggest thing going on right now.
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See, when I when I wrote the world is flat, I said we'd connected uh Beijing, Boston.
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I I said we connected Boston and Bangalore in India.
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We've now connected Boston, Bangalore and Sesi in the hyperconnected world.
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Say where si where's Sesi?
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That's a town 90 miles from the interior with 90,000 people which thanks to these web enabled browser enabled cell phones is now on the grid with your friends and my kids every bit as if they live next door.
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When I when I wrote the world is flat I I said that we had connected Detroit and Damascus.
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We've now connected Detroit, Damascus and Derra. You say, "Where's Dara?"
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Oh, Darra is the dusty Syrian border town on the Syrian Jordanian border where the Syrian uprising began.
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Where, thanks to these flip cams and, you know, web enabled, cell phone enabled cameras, we have been able to watch the Syrian uprising live despite the fact that the Syrian government has banned every international news organization from its borders.
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We watch it on a YouTube virtual station called SNN, Sham News Network.
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Shem is Arabic for Syria where the revolutionaries pump all their video content.
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There are about 15 people in the front row.
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Half of them are students.
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No problem in their wallets right now.
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Together they have enough money to start Sham News Network.
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That is connected to hyperconnected.
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When I travel around, I love to read local newspapers.
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You you find the best little stories that are often very revealing.
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In October, October 30th, 2010, I was in uh I was in India and I picked up the Hindustan Times and there was this little story in there caught my eye.
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It said that a a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing 3G mobile network service at the summit of Mount Everest, the world's tallest building.
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story said this would allow thousands of climbers and trekers who throng the region every year access to high-speed internet and video calls using their mobile phones.
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Do you realize how many phone calls are now being made from the top of Mount Everest that begin?
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Mom, you'll never guess where I'm calling you from.
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That is a hyperconnected world.
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But I tell you, there's other signs of it as well and aren't just about technology.
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Uh I'm from Minnesota, as some of you may know. My wife is from Iowa.
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Um Iowa has a great liberal arts college.
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Um Grenell, 1,600 students, wonderful liberal arts school in central Iowa.
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And um last year Grenell College, 9% of all applications came from China.
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Of those, 43% had perfect 800s on their math SATs.
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When I was at Brandeise, you know, Dean said I went to Brandeise.
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I think we had a Chinese exchange student, you know, Jiao from Beijing.
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He taught us all how to eat with chopsticks.
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You know, get that out of your head. Okay?
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And I'm not talking about Stanford now.
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I'm talking about Grenell College in central Iowa had 255 applications last year from China, 43% with perfect 800s on your math SATs.
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That is a hyperconnected world.
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You want your kids to go to Grenell.
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They aren't competing with kids in PaloAlto or Minneapolis.
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They are competing with the best students from Shanghai PS21. So what does this mean?
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What it means at the macro level is that when the world gets this hyperconnected, it's as if the whole world were a Stanford math class and the whole global curve just rose.
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The whole global curve just rose because suddenly every employer which you'll be engaging with or that you worked for before you came here suddenly now has more access to more cheap automation, cheap software, cheap robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before.
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And the result is the whole global curve has risen.
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And the result of that is to me the single most important social, political, and economic fact of our age, the hyperconnected age, which is that average is over.
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Average is officially over.
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You know the old saying in Texas, if all you ever do is all you've ever done, all you ever get is all you ever got.
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That is, as they say, NA, no longer applicable.
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If all you ever do now is all you've ever done, all you'll ever get is not all you ever got.
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you will get below average.
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Woody Allen's line, 90% of life is just showing up.
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Also, NA, if you just show up now, you will not be able to earn an average lifestyle.
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Everybody is going to have to define, nurture, and develop their extra, that unique value ad that justifies in this world of rising curve, why they should be hired or promoted.
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I know what you're thinking.
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You're thinking very easy for you to say Mr.
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Smartyp Pants New York Times columnist. I know. No, no.
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Let me tell you about my job.
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I became a New York Times columnist, foreign affairs columnist in January 1995.
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I inherited James Reston's office in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. What a thrill.
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This great columnist and editor from the 60s and 70s. I inherited his office. Now, I suspect Mr.
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Restston used to come to the office back in the 60s and 70s and start every day by saying, "I wonder what my seven competitors are going to write today." And he knew all seven.
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Walter Litman, Steuart Alop, Mary Mcgroy, Tony Lewis. I do the same thing.
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I come to the office every morning and I say, "I wonder what my 70 million competitors are going to write today.
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I have 70 million competitors.
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I've just been through the Middle East.
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You know, you get written about, blogged about, compared with people.
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When I when I was in Beirut in the summer of 82, I could write whatever I wanted about RF.
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It took six weeks for the New York Times to get from New York to Beirut.
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Unless someone picked up a scratchy international phone line and managed to get through and say, "Did you see what Freriedman wrote about you?" Who? Freeman. No, Freriedman. Who does he work for? The New York Times? The New York Post? No.
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the new I could write whatever I want.
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Today I'll tell you a story.
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I was in India in uh September and I went out to IIT Jodpur and invited there by the dean because that's one of their MITs as I'm sure you all know.
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Um I Jodpur had won the contract for who could build a iPad for under $40. They built a $39 iPad.
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By the way, this will be a feature of the hyperconnected world.
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you will see radical breaking of price points.
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Uh not $400 to $300 but $400 to $39. 95.
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So uh I went out there to see this fascinating story.
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This was designed by two electrical engineering professors at IIT Jodpur.
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One of whom comes from a village in India with no electricity which I just really love. And um amazing device. They gave me one. I took it home.
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I wrote my Sunday column about it.
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My Sunday column moves in the New York Times on the web at 8:00 PM Saturday night.
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Sometime between 8:00 PM Saturday night and 8 am New York time.
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Someone in India ran a lab stress test of the device and posted it in the comments section right under my column.
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Now, if you think that doesn't keep me on my toes, okay, that before my readers in New York or San Francisco have even read it, someone has posted a lab stress test of the device that I have written about.
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And by the Thank God it backed up that it was a it was a real machine and really worked.
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But that really really keeps you on your toes.
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So, what's what's going on or what does this mean for the workplace?
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and therefore for education.
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Well, historically, as I'm sure you've been learning here, the workplace has been segmented into three tiers.
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Basically, the top tier was non-rine work.
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We all want to be non-rine.
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Uh that's engineers and scientists, writers and singers, athletes and authors, professors and doctors.
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We all want to do work that cannot be described by an algorithm and therefore outsourced, automated or digitized. Second is routine work.
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Routine work is the work that was either done in a repetitive way in an assembly line or processing in a bank or insurance company.
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We all know routine work has been crushed.
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The other end is non-rine local work.
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This work that has to be done face toface.
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It's the nurse, it's the massage therapist, uh it's the dentist, it's your divorce lawyer.
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Stuff that has to be done face to face in a specific location.
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And the wages of non-rine local workers will depend on the concentration you have of non-rine high-skilled workers.
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It's much better to be a massage therapist in Certino than it is in Gary, Indiana today, obviously.
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So, we all want to be non-rine.
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Well, here's what I think has happened as the world has gotten hyperconnected.
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It's no longer enough now to just be non-rine.
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You need to be creative non-rine.
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You actually need to bring something extra.
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It's not enough just to say, "I'm a radiologist. I'm non-rine. I'm safe."
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No, I can read your X-rays now in Bangalore.
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It's not enough to say, "I teach political theory. I'm non-rine." No.
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Michael Sandell, my friend at Harvard, teaches justice.
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His political theory justice course, which has a thousand kids in it at Harvard, is now online. I can get him. Why? Why do I need you?
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It's not enough to say, "I'm a I'm a lawyer. I'm non-rine."
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You got to be a creative lawyer.
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It's not enough to be an accountant.
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You have to be a creative account.
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Not really a creative accountant, but you know what I mean.
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You you you've got to bring some.
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You got to can't just say, "Hey, I'm a columnist."
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No, you got to you got to bring something extra.
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This really is the big change in the workforce.
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And the way I literally stumbled on this was because I do everything kind of inductively was going out and interviewing employers and asking them what they're looking for in employees today.
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So for the book we interviewed four generic employers.
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One was high-end white collar, the head of a Washington office of a national law firm.
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Low-end white collar, the head of the outsourcing firm uh um uh 247 where I actually started the world is flat.
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Uh blue collar, the head of DuPont, Ellen Coleman.
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and the world's biggest green collar firm, the head of the US Army Education Corps.
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And here's what was really interesting.
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You asked, "Who are you looking for?"
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Chapter in the books called Help Wanted.
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And what they tell you, what came through is they're all looking for the same employee. What is that employee?
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They're all looking for people who can do critical thinking and problem solving dot dot dot in order to get an interview.
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Yeah, critical thinking and problem solving, that's not table stakes.
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What they're actually looking for are people who can not only do their job, but invent, reinvent, and re-engineer their job while they're doing it.
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Because when the world gets this hyperconnected and the pace of change is so fast, the big boss up there cannot possibly be keeping up with every knit and twiddle or see the new openings for innovation unless you have people on the line touching the product who can do that.
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you're going to have a huge problem.
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It's why companies like Zingga that are at the cutting edge now do employee reviews, team management reviews, excuse me, four times a year because if you're going through five product cycles in a year, you can't wait for 12 months to understand you have a bad team leader and this is going on in different ways in every industry.
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So the lawyer very interesting his name is Jeff Lesk happened to be a family friend.
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This all started in 2008, height of the subprime crisis.
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Lehman Brothers has just melted down.
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And um we're out to dinner with he and his wife.
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And I said, "Jeff, what's happening in your law practice?"
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He said, "Business is way off."
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I said, "What are you doing?"
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He said, "We're laying lawyers off."
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I said, "That's interesting.
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In a law firm today, who gets laid off first?
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Is it last in first out?" "Oh, not anymore."
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He said now he said basically when we had all that work in the bubble and we handed it to our lawyers and they did it in a routine non-rine way and handed it back a lot of them are gone.
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The ones we're keeping are those who did it in a creative non-rine way.
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Those who came to us and said Jeff we can do this old work in a new way or we can do new work in a new way.
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His interview in the book ends with him saying, "Our firm just hired a chief innovation officer."
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How many law firms have you ever heard of having a chief innovation officer?
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That is where they're going.
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So, what was particularly interesting for me was the guy who heads the green collar firm and his name is General Martin Dempsey.
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So, General Dempsey, you may have heard his name because he's now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but we interviewed him because he was head of the US Army Education Corps.
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But what's interesting about General Dempsey and he tells the story in the book is that um he actually commanded the first armored division that took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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In 2008, 5 years later, he was promoted to be head of SentCom, our overall Middle East command.
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And in that job, he went and visited a US base in Afghanistan, far-flung base near the Hindu Kush, commanded by a US Army captain.
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He sat with that captain for two hours and as he tells in the book, he came out and said, "I realized after talking to that captain that he had access to more intelligence at the tactical and national level and could order up more firepower than I, General Martin Dempsey, could when I commanded the troops that took Baghdad from Sodom Hussein five years earlier.
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Therefore, how we choose that captain, train that captain, and promote that captain has to fundamentally change."
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He came back, took over the US Army Education Corps.
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One of the first things he did was intro introduce real uh experiential learning and uh team creativity.
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You're a new recruit now at boot camp.
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One of the first things they do is give you an iPhone.
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By week three, you may be asked to download the lesson.
28:20
The drill instructor will sit in the first row and you will teach the course.
28:24
They've completely revamped the whole way.
28:26
We choose, select, and promote our officers now.
28:33
and they're still in the process.
28:35
So that's actually what's going on out there in the labor market.
28:38
What it means for us as a country is we have two educational challenges today.
28:42
We need to bring our bottom to our average so much faster because we have so many young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are just way below average.
28:52
And we've got to bring our average to the global heights so much farther.
28:57
The first is a challenge of the three Rs.
29:01
more reading, writing and arithmetic.
29:03
The second is a challenge of the three C's.
29:05
More creativity, cooperation, communication, and collaboration. Four C's.
29:12
That's the double challenge that we have today.
29:15
We need more education and we need better education.
29:19
Let me just try to sum up so we have some time for questions because a lot of parents ask me, I'm parent, what do you tell your kids?
29:26
How do you how do you tell your kids to deal with this world?
29:30
And I I really distill it to four basic pieces of advice how to lean into this world.
29:36
First, think like a new immigrant.
29:39
Second, think like an artisan.
29:41
Third, think like Jeff Bezos at amazon. com.
29:44
And fourth, think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis, just off Highway 100, my favorite restaurant. Think like an immigrant.
29:52
How does the new immigrant think?
29:55
The new immigrant says, "I just showed up here in PaloAlto and there is no legacy spot waiting for me at Stanford University or the Graduate School of Business.
30:06
I better figure out what are the best opportunities here.
30:09
And I better pursue them with more vigor, more intensity, more consistency, and more adaptability than anybody else."
30:17
New immigrants are paranoid optimists.
30:24
They are optimists because they picked up from somewhere and went to somewhere they thought would be better and they are paranoid.
30:29
They know it can be taken away from them any day.
30:31
Think like an immigrant because we are all new immigrants now in the hyperconnected world.
30:39
Second, think like an artisan.
30:42
This is an idea from Larry Katz at Harvard. Who was the artisan?
30:43
The artisan was that person in the Middle Ages who made every item oneoff.
30:46
every saddle, every utensil, every piece of furniture, every pair of shoes, every item of clothing.
30:53
What did the best artisans do?
30:55
They brought so much extra, so much of their unique value ad to what they did.
31:00
They carved their initials into their work when they were finished.
31:06
Do your job every day where you feel you brought so much extra, so much unique value add to it that you'd want to carve your initials into your work.
31:18
Third, think like Jeff Bezos.
31:18
Jeff uh always um or for many years signed his annual shareholder letter.
31:24
Reed Hoffman talks about this by saying it's still year one in the internet.
31:29
And the lesson that Reed deduced from that and I think is totally right is always be in beta.
31:38
Always lead your life as if you are in beta.
31:42
As if you're four fifths done but not quite finished.
31:44
As Reed says, I think rightly, in Silicon Valley, there's only one four-letter word, and it's not four letters, but it does start with an F, and it is finished.
31:55
The minute you think you are finished, that you're complete, that's when you really will be finished.
32:00
Lead your life as a lifelong learner, constantly reinventing and re-engineering yourself as if you were a product in permanent beta.
32:13
Lastly, think like that waitress at Perkins Pancake House.
32:15
So, I'm from Minneapolis.
32:17
Perkins is my favorite restaurant.
32:18
Somebody here is from Minneapolis. I know.
32:19
Um, uh, knows what I'm talking about.
32:22
I was back home working on the book Sunday morning.
32:24
Out to breakfast with my best friend Ken Greer at Perkins.
32:28
I ordered three buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs.
32:33
Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit.
32:35
Waitress came after 15 minutes.
32:38
She laid down her two plates and all she said to Ken was, "I gave you extra fruit." She got a 50% tip. Why?
32:49
Because that waitress didn't control much.
32:52
But she controlled the fruit ladle. And that was her extra.
32:55
What was she doing in her own little context?
33:00
She was thinking entrepreneurally.
33:05
Always think entrepreneurally.
33:08
So in this hyperconnected world, think like an immigrant. Please stay hungry. Think like an artisan. Take pride.
33:13
Think like Jeff Bezos and always be in beta.
33:16
And think like that waitress at Perkins.
33:20
Always think entrepreneurially.
33:22
Because friends, we all now truly do live in Garrison Keeler's Lake Wagon where all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the children need to be above average.
33:33
Thank you very [Applause] much. Thank you.
33:44
[Applause] So floor is open.
33:50
We can talk about this or anything else that's on people's minds.
33:54
But uh I guess right over there. Who's got the mic? I don't know.
33:56
So we have questions there and questions there and here. Thank you.
34:04
Uh, I was a student here more years than I care to remember, but I think I'm of that generation that grabs your column, reads your books, and does everything.
34:14
And we're prepared to make you Zar of the United States, the canary in the minefield, or both.
34:18
Tell me a little bit if you could as to whether you ever step back and feel like you are really having any influence on a hidebound arterial sclerotic government as we have today.
34:31
And can you see signs of that cracking in any way?
34:36
That's a really good question. Thank you. Next question, please.
34:42
No, it's uh so you know, I am by nature an optimist.
34:50
Um and I explain this actually a little bit in the book. It's not not contrived.
34:54
It it's we all are, you know, uh past his prologue.
34:58
So I actually grew up in Minnesota um in the 60s and 70s.
34:59
I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park.
35:04
uh sort of six square mile area with the Cone brothers, Al Franken, Michael Sandell.
35:09
We all grew up there at the same time.
35:10
Al went to the same Hebrew school.
35:12
In fact, uh which is the subject of one of the Cone Brothers movies.
35:15
And um when I graduated from high school, 1971, Minnesota was on the cover of Time magazine, our governor, holding up a walleye under the headline, the state that works.
35:28
So my senators growing up were Eugene McCarthy, Walter Montdale, and Hubert Humphrey.
35:33
My congressmen were liberal Republicans, Bill Frenzil and Clark McGregor.
35:37
In other words, I grew up at a place at a time where politics and by the way, my the companies in my where Dayton Hudson, Control Data, Honeywell, they thought it was their job to build the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, not just make a profit.
35:51
So, if you want to know where my optimism, innate optimism come, it really comes from where I grew up and when I grew up.
35:58
I grew up in a place at a time where politics worked.
36:04
And that had a deep impact on me and left me with a feeling that why can't we go back there again?
36:09
Why can't we have that today?
36:12
And that's what distresses me about, you know, the moment we're in politically now because we we actually had a formula for success in this country and we've gotten away from it.
36:25
We're not we're not where we are we didn't get to be where we are by accident and we're not in this fix we're in by accident.
36:31
We had a five-part formula for success.
36:33
It was first educate our people up to and beyond whatever the technology was. Excuse me.
36:38
When it was the cotton gin, by the way, I just have to say something.
36:41
I was on Jeopardy two weeks ago. Okay?
36:45
The scariest thing in the world. Okay? And I got wrong.
36:51
Who invented the cotton gym?
36:55
That's all I'm going to tell you. Okay?
36:56
So, and I've been using it in my speeches so many times.
37:00
Anyways, when we had the cotton gin, it was educate your people up to and beyond.
37:04
So that was universal primary education.
37:05
When it was the factory, it was universal secondary education.
37:09
When it's the knowledge economy, it needs to be universal post-secary education of either vocational or you know um uh liberal arts.
37:17
That was the first thing we did.
37:19
We had that education pillar, right?
37:21
Second, we had infrastructure.
37:21
We built the world's best infrastructure, roads, airports, telecom bandwidth to really enhance and enable commerce.
37:28
Third, we built the the world's most open immigration economy to attract I can just look out at this room uh innovators, the high-end and and and energetic lowerkilled people who came to our country and started all these new companies out here.
37:41
Fourth, we had the best institutions and rules to incentivize risktaking and prevent recklessness.
37:47
Unless we had the most government-f funed research to push out the boundaries of science and technology so our best minds could pluck off the best flowers and turn them into great companies.
37:59
That was our five-part formula for success.
38:00
It was the greatest public private partnership in the history of the world. Where is it today? Education.
38:10
We're now in the Pisa tests.
38:13
We're 25th in the world basically with Argentina and Slovenia.
38:15
lovely countries but not to historically our peers. Okay. Um uh immigration. Immigration.
38:21
Did you watch the Republican debates?
38:25
It was about who could electrocute more Mexicans.
38:28
Basically, it was I see you an electric fence and I raise you an electric fence.
38:32
The whole message was come to this country, get educated, and then get the hell out of here. Okay. Infrastructure.
38:39
I recently flew from Hong Kong to LAX.
38:42
That's like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones today. Okay.
38:46
I mean, uh, LAX looks like one of those 1950s diners, but it wasn't designed that way.
38:52
It literally is still like a 1950s diner. Subprime Crisis.
39:00
How'd you like them rules, regulations, and institutions?
39:03
Government funded research.
39:05
That graph, it looks like an EKG heading for a heart attack.
39:09
So if you think of the five pillars that made us great as a country, all five are now in decline and that is the source of our problem.
39:18
So when I hear people stand up and say, I was just one lonely guy.
39:19
I was just one lonely guy out there.
39:23
The government had nothing to do with my success. I did this by myself.
39:26
You didn't do anything by yourself.
39:28
Did you build those roads?
39:31
Did you create that legal system?
39:32
Did you build that bandwidth?
39:34
You did nothing by yourself. None of us did.
39:36
What we did was this great public private partnership where the public enabled the private and the market.
39:44
Bob English we interview in the book the one Republican two one of two Republicans who lost their seat to a tea party candidate in the last bi-election South Carolina.
39:53
Wonderful guy green republic.
39:56
You see why he got challenged by a tea party guy.
39:58
But he tells this great story you know where he's out at a town hall meeting at a small town of South Carolina.
40:03
guy stands up in the third row, elderly guy, and says, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
40:10
So he says, it's like, "Where do I start the conversation?"
40:16
He says, "You know what I mean?
40:18
So we've lost sight of what made us a great country."
40:22
And so what do we need today?
40:25
Well, to me, we need three things.
40:27
We need we need to cut spending because we've made promises to this generation we cannot possibly keep.
40:31
We need to raise taxes because if we just cut our social safety nets, that'll be the end of capitalism.
40:39
No safety nets, no capitalism.
40:42
Capitalism is a incredibly efficient, powerful system, but it's brutal. It leaves people behind.
40:48
You need safety nets to have sustainable capitalism.
40:50
And lastly, we need to invest.
40:52
We need to invest in that formula for success.
40:54
Well, right now that's the problem.
40:56
We have one party that wants to cut, one that wants to tax, but nobody that has this hybrid politics, which is what we need.
41:04
I think in his heart, President Obama has it, but he really hasn't been able to, I think, articulate that in the campaign.
41:13
So, what what am I looking for in a candidate?
41:15
What do I think the country is looking for?
41:16
I think they're looking for someone who has three things.
41:18
One is a plan to fix our problems at the real scale of the problem.
41:24
And please don't tell me it's not going to hurt and that 97% of us aren't going to have to pay a thing.
41:30
If that's your answer to the scale of the problem, you don't have an answer.
41:35
Because people know we're in trouble.
41:37
You look them in the eye and say, "I've got a plan."
41:39
You know, if you ask Allan Simpson and Erskin BS about putting together Simpson Bowls, what they'll tell you is every time they made the plan big, they got more people.
41:47
Every time they shrunk it down, they lost people.
41:48
Second, the plan's got to be fair.
41:51
The wealthy have got to pay more.
41:53
They've had two great decades, but everyone needs to pay something.
41:56
We're all in this together.
41:58
And lastly, it needs to be aspirational.
42:03
Not just about balancing the budget. I'm not a tax day guy.
42:06
I'm a Fourth of July guy.
42:08
If you want people to sacrifice, to put up with this, tell me we're not just going to balance the budget.
42:16
Tell me we're going to make the country great again and preserve the American dream for another generation.
42:22
And then it's got to be a tied to a vision of America in the world today. What is that vision?
42:26
To me, it's very obvious.
42:29
We want America to be for the world today what Cape Canaveral was to America in the 1960s.
42:35
Cape Canaveral was where we launched our one moonshot.
42:38
We're not going to launch one big collective moonshot anymore.
42:41
We want America to be the launching pad where everyone in the world should want to come to launch their moonshot. You got an idea?
42:49
come here because we have the best infrastructure, best education, most open immigration, best IP laws, most venture capital.
42:58
We want to be the launching.
43:00
If we can just be the launching pad for everybody or as many people, we're going to be fine.
43:04
The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, we'll be fine.
43:11
I don't hear any of that today.
43:15
And the worst thing I can say about this campaign, the worst thing I can say about it, it isn't even interesting. Over here. Thanks for coming. Uh, Mr.
43:29
Friedman, I wanted to ask you in a flat world when a 9 years old or 15 years old kid can broadcast the revolution, what's the value ad of journalists and where is this industry going in couple of decades? Yeah.
43:43
Um, so, um, I've been very much enriched by the fact if you if you kind of looked at my what I read every day. So, it's great for me.
43:55
I I can read the not just the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, but but I read um uh I read websites.
44:00
I read some of the best bloggers in the Arab world.
44:06
Uh, I can read Haritz and the Beirut Daily Star.
44:08
And so, um, I don't think there's, um, not only think is the need for good explainers, um, diminished, I think it actually grows because we're now aware of so many more things.
44:23
And I think what people hunger for in a world of so many voices now are trusted, you know, observers and reporters.
44:31
That's certainly what I hunger for.
44:32
So um you know so much of the blogosphere is is really about opinion and um the best of it I find is as good as anything you'll read in the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other great newspaper. It really is.
44:47
And so for me the great thing about it it's really opened up the space for a lot of other people.
44:50
You know there's only one foreign affairs columnist on the New York Time.
44:53
I mean and this is really we needed more and this has opened it up.
44:57
But um what I always tell journalists who want to go into this business is that there's no it doesn't matter whether you're blogging uh tweeting um youtubing it still comes down to though do you have the basic journalism values of get it right um uh be fair uh be objective and correct your mistakes.
45:19
Do you bring those values to if you bring that to blogging I want to read you.
45:22
If you bring it to the Washington Post I want to read you.
45:24
But um for me to trust you for just cuz you're there and just because you have a megaphone by the way doesn't make you right anymore that cuz I have the platform but makes me right.
45:34
The only thing you can know about me was that to get where I got I had to go through a certain you know set of hurdles and learn certain values.
45:41
So um I find in all the noise finding those trusted voices for me is more important than ever.
45:51
So I think this is a it's a growing business. are great opportunities.
45:55
You can jump in now, you know, more quickly than ever.
45:58
But don't confuse the ability to come in quickly with the need not to have the really basic trusted values that create trust between you and your reader because that's what creates a following.
46:09
I mean, there's two ways to create a following.
46:12
One is tell people what they want to hear and we have people on the left and right who do a lot of that and you can go now narrowcast and go just have all your biases confirmed.
46:20
Um but uh if you're talking about real journalism, I mean to me as a journalist, what do I aspire to?
46:28
I aspire I was just in Beirut, Jordan and and Abu Dhabi as the dean said.
46:33
I aspire to one thing when I go to a country.
46:36
Tell people there something they didn't know about their own country.
46:40
Anything I tell you about Abu Dhabi will be news. Okay?
46:43
But if I can go to a country and spend time there, talk to people and tell them something that they didn't know, that's that's what you aspire to.
46:53
I don't say I do that every time, but that's that's what I'm trying to do.
46:57
So, there's more to this craft, I would say, to get it right, to develop a trusted following than um than just declaring yourself a blogger.
47:07
But the good thing about it is that if you bring those values to your blog, there's no reason you can't be one of my 70 million competitors head-to-head.
47:16
Thanks for your question.
47:18
Got a guess just a couple more.
47:18
And yeah, who where's the microphone?
47:20
I don't know who's got the mic.
47:26
We'll take a couple more and then we'll close it down.
47:32
I'll offer a triple guarantee of customer satisfaction. This won't be boring. Uh my name is Mitchell.
47:36
Uh I'm in the high performance computing uh community and uh I consider myself very very fortunate to be here in Silicon Valley because I was born on the east coast uh near a giant submarine base called Gruntton.
47:49
called Gruntton. But uh my question uh has to do with uh actually I kind of have a a comedy anxiety because you talk about having really high performance standards for as as an average proposition and uh I I suppose that
48:05
means doing a fair amount of homework and uh in the past year or two uh we've had a tremendous interest uh from the community in in uh the former Soviet Empire in in how to clone Silicon Valley, how to import it, and And this week there was just a phenomenal story. I'm hoping you could uh share with us
48:21
I'm hoping you could uh share with us from your trip in Jordan because Jordan seems to have embraced uh some some of the essential aspects of Silicon Valley.
48:31
Let me take that up if I could. Sure.
48:32
And two comedy tangents because No, let's not because it's it's really short and so I want to I want to take that up.
48:37
It's really it's really important question.
48:38
Um so I just did come from Jordan and I wrote about um uh a company called Oasis 500 which I think would be of interest to to your community.
48:46
Let me just backtrack and I'm I'm really glad you asked that question because the dean and I were talking about this uh earlier.
48:54
Um I think the biggest political science question, economics question, sociology question and business opportunity if I were looking for a startup is basically how we find rewarding and meaningful work for so many people who have gotten caught up in this hyperconnected world uh and lost their jobs simply because they have been outsourced, automated, digitized, cheap genius or cheap labored.
49:20
I think that's the biggest not only political science question.
49:25
I think that's the biggest economic opportunity out there today.
49:27
If you're looking for a startup, please don't start a social network for people with six toes. Okay? All right.
49:34
Take on something really big.
49:37
And that is the big question because we are in this world where you know they say the modern American factory today is just a man and a dog.
49:46
The man's there to feed the dog.
49:48
The dog is there to keep the man away from the machines. All right.
49:50
That is kind of the world we're going into.
49:52
That is the world we're going into.
49:55
And what that's going to mean for labor and and job opportunities, rewarding and meaningful work so people can be in the middle class.
50:03
I don't think there's any more important question than that.
50:05
And so what you had in in Jordan, that was really the question they were addressing.
50:11
So um a group of ex Silicon Valley uh Jordanian former head of data for Yahoo Sama Fiad went back and started a company called Oasis 500.
50:19
They invited every young Jordanian techie.
50:23
The uh Arabic is about 1% of language on the internet.
50:27
Uh 75% of that content is produced in Jordan.
50:30
But we all know that Arabic speakers are far far more.
50:32
So talk about a market that has been untapped. It's it's that market.
50:37
and they put out basically an invitation to young um uh techies in Jordan, come with your startup idea.
50:44
Uh if we like it, we'll give you $15,000 to pursue it and you have to enroll in a six-week boot camp to learn how to start a company.
50:51
If you graduate from boot camp, we'll give you office space for six months.
50:55
If you survive that windowing process, we will give you mentoring, networking, and investment angel funding ourselves.
51:05
Um they're now getting 450 applications a month.
51:09
Um they uh have already launched uh about 60 companies and what is so exciting as one of the um lead innovators says you know this isn't about creating jobs it's about in creating companies and companies are growth stories.
51:25
They not only create jobs, but they spin off people who start more companies.
51:29
And if you're going to have a sustainable Arab Spring, it cannot be sustainable without jobs for what is the biggest youth bulge in the world.
51:38
And so, uh, for me, it was one of the best news stories that I've really come across.
51:43
And thank thank you for asking it.
51:44
We have time for one more question.
51:46
Um, and I don't know if we, uh, who's got the microphone. You you choose. Hi, I got lucky. Um, thanks for coming.
51:57
So, my question, um, you talked about the need for education, infrastructure, government, those kind of things on one hand, and we know that you know a lot about the Arab Spring on the other hand as another as another realm.
52:09
Um, do you see parallels in the dissatisfaction of youth that drives the Arab Spring coming west?
52:19
I mean, we're starting to see it in Europe and the US.
52:21
And to what extent do you think that and and when do you think that the youth here are going to say, "This sucks. I've had enough.
52:27
You know, older people, you're taking all my money with all our entitlements.
52:32
You're not educating us."
52:33
Uh, I'd love if you could comment on that.
52:36
It's a really really good question.
52:37
You know, I I have uh two daughters in their 20s and sometimes I look at them and think, you are so much more optimistic than you should be.
52:47
you know, I mean, you know, I mean, um, how do I say this?
52:52
You know, um, I'll tell you the difference between us and the Arabs.
52:58
I I had the, um, opportunity to be I was in Takar Square for the revolution and that was the greatest story I've ever covered.
53:05
I will tell you in in um, I became a journalist in 1978 and that is the greatest story I ever covered.
53:12
And the reason it was the greatest story is that I came home and people said uh, what was it like?
53:18
I said it was actually the most apolitical political event I've ever covered because it was actually about the deepest human things. It was about dignity.
53:28
Number of Egyptians who said to me, I was ashamed to show my Egyptian passport. Think about that.
53:35
That any of us should be ashamed to because they're living in a flat world and they know how far behind they are. It was about dignity. It was about justice.
53:41
It was about the the quest for the tools and the freedom to realize my full potential.
53:46
And that's where the frustration was there.
53:49
The inability to even get the tools or the opportunity to realize their full potential. Thank God.
53:57
I don't think that's true in this country.
53:59
Not at the acute level it was there.
54:01
So kind of at a macro point of view, that is a really big difference that um we aren't stifled in that way.
54:09
You have a good idea today.
54:09
there's a good chance if it's good you will find the money. You can pursue it.
54:12
They couldn't and and that's why you know what what actually happened there was it it really is something almost best compared to something in the natural world.
54:22
It was like a volcanic eruption.
54:24
It's a cliche but it really was.
54:24
It was this huge just um I am somebody really was what it what it was about.
54:33
And it had just enough force to blow the lid up but not off.
54:35
So the lid is still there.
54:39
It's the Egyptian army, the Ansean regime, the guys beating people up in the streets.
54:44
And what happened in that opening is that the most organized force in the society, the Muslim Brotherhood came in to the opening.
54:50
But if they don't satisfy the longings of all those young people, they are going to get blown away, you know, just as much.
54:57
So it's going to be a great drama that unfolds.
55:04
I think now year and a half into it um there's there's sort of two things that really come to my mind of of what what needs to happen.
55:12
Um one is you know you can sometimes if you think of of history or countries as tilted you know some are tilted that way some that way some that way.
55:22
So think of the Soviet Union.
55:24
Um the Soviet Union was a country that was really tilted like that we know and what the democracy revolution there did and Gorbachov Chevron the help of the west was kind of gave it a positive slope.
55:37
Now I would tell you this positive slope today is called Putinism under a microscope.
55:40
Don't get me wrong this is corrupt. It's authoritarian.
55:45
In fact under a microscope it looks like that.
55:47
Um but it's like an airplane that's flying across the sky.
55:51
If you're in the airplane, you feel all the, you know, the turbulence.
55:54
But if you're sitting on the ground, you'd say, "Hey, that country has a positive slope." What do I mean by that?
55:59
Because I think the real agent of change happens in this delta.
56:04
And it takes 9 months and 21 years.
56:04
It's called a generation.
56:08
So right now in Russia, in Putin's Russia, if you go there, it's true, don't ask to be president.
56:15
But short of that, you can read what you want, travel where you want, think what you want, start, got a great startup community going.
56:22
Someone referred to their attempt to have a Silicon Valley. There's a lot happening.
56:27
It is not the Soviet Union.
56:27
And a new generation is coming of age there.
56:30
This nine months and 21 years, you know, it's actually kind of interesting.
56:34
The Russian democracy movement began in 1990.
56:37
The first protest against Putin happened in 2011, 9 months and 21 years to the day.
56:46
So what is my hope for the Arab Spring? Keep the slope positive.
56:48
I know it's not they're not going perfect government right now.
56:53
It maybe partly Islamist. That's fine.
56:55
As long as they look more like Turkey than Saudi Arabia basically, you know.
56:59
um keep the slope positive so that nine months and 21 years can come of age, interact with the world, realize their full potential because you know if you if you sort of add it all up, I mean what I really believe is that there's no more developed and developing countries anymore.
57:17
That's like really what I'd call round world. That's that's over.
57:20
Um in a flat world, you know, there's no there and there's no here.
57:25
You know, there's no near and there's no far.
57:29
There's just good, better, and best because in a flat world, I can get good, better, and best anywhere.
57:33
And you want to make sure you're at least good, not better, and best.
57:37
And that means I think they're just going to be two kind of countries in the world going forward. Hie and lies.
57:42
High imagination enabling countries and low imagination enabling countries.
57:48
Because if I've just got the spark of an idea now, that's what I saw in Jordan.
57:51
If I just got the spark now, I mean, as an American, man, I can go to I can go to Delta and Taiwan, they'll design that for me.
57:58
Skip over to Alibaba and hang.
57:59
Jack Ma will get me a cheap Chinese manufacturer for that. Jump up to amazon. com.
58:03
Jeff Bezos will do my fulfillment delivery.
58:05
Craigslist will get me an accountant and freelancer.
58:06
com will get me the logo for under $20.
58:10
The only thing they can't get me is that the one great advantage we still have is we still in nurture enable this.
58:19
I see it everywhere here.
58:19
We should be pressing that advantage to the hilt, designing the public policy to go with that and to nurture it.
58:28
That's not what we're doing, you know.
58:31
Um, we're not a low imagination enabling country and you don't want to be that.
58:36
So, what is exciting about the Arab world today is I see the chance for them to move from lies to HIS.
58:41
That's what you see in Jordan today.
58:43
It's going to be a struggle.
58:45
It's going to be generational.
58:47
It's going to take a long time.
58:47
Lord knows though, I've been criticized for my optimism about that revolution.
58:52
I wouldn't take a word back. I'm rooting for them. Thank you very much. [Music] Change lives. Change organizations. Change organizations. Change the world.