 Good evening, everyone. My name is Bill Burns. I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment, and I'm delighted to welcome all of you in from the cold this evening, and I'm especially delighted to welcome Tom Friedman back to Carnegie and to help launch or continue the launch of this terrific new book. Thank you for being late. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I have to admit that Tom had me at the subtitle An Optimist Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. All of us, I think, are looking for reasons to be optimistic as 2016 draws to a close. This is, as all of you know very well, a moment of extraordinary disruptions and dislocations and disorder, literally turning lives, politics, and societies upside down around the world and here at home. Tom has always had a rare gift for asking the right questions at exactly the right moment and an equally impressive gift for providing creative and compelling answers for helping us to understand and deal with the very combustible combination of political and economic and technological and environmental challenges emerging all around us. Tom also has a gift for understanding the lessons of history and the power of community in all of our lives. But in my experience, he's never dwelt on the past. He looks ahead and recognizes that the only real choice before us is not whether to embrace the future, but how. So this book is as good a guide to that future as I've found. I can't think of a more important or timely contribution, and I certainly can't think of anyone better to launch our conversation this evening than my friend David Rothkopf, Carnegie colleague, the editor of Fine Policy, and another remarkably thoughtful and perceptive observer of the uncertainties and the possibilities all around us. So I hope you'll join me in offering a very warm welcome to David Rothkopf and Tom Friedman. Thank you very much. Tom, it's great to be here with you. And what Tom just told me is the last stop on his book tour. This is the very last event. If you haven't seen me on cable, your cable is broken and you should call your service provider. But if you have, we're going to try to talk about some slightly different things. So even if you have seen it, stay here. You know, I put it a little bit in perspective. I've known Tom for quite some time now, back in a prior Indonesia back in Vietnam. But no. But, you know, Washington's got a reputation about, you know, pundits and policy people and short-sightedness and self-interest driven observations. And Tom has always been the exception to that rule to me. Tom has always been looking out into the future. In fact, a week ago, when we did our big global thinkers event for foreign policy, we launched something new, which we're doing in conjunction with AARP. Sorry, I don't, I mean, you don't qualify yet, but someday you will qualify, which is a lifetime global thinkers award for people who are thinkers who change the way other thinkers are thinking. And Tom was the very first person I thought of with regard to this award because part of what we're talking about here is a future in which change is going to happen much more rapidly than it's even happened today. And that change is going to be a lot of the issues that we've centered that award on, demographics, technology, other kinds of things. But here's the kicker, Tom's unusual. He's a remarkable thinker on a global level, but we're going to do something for you tonight that hasn't been done with all of you in six weeks. We're going to have an optimistic conversation. We both share this kind of anomaly, which is we actually strongly believe that things are getting better and that the future holds better things for us than the past. And in fact, if you pick up foreign policy right now, the cover story, and actually this I wrote it, is called The Case for Optimism. And if you pick up Tom's book, the subtitle is about optimism. So I want to start there. You know, you've been around. You've been on the road from Baruch to Jerusalem. You've been in Washington in the swamp, watching it just get deeper, basically. You've been in all of that, yet you're an optimist. You're very positive about what's happening. Why? Well, David, let me start with the end of the book then because it really is related to that. And, Bristol, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. And Bill, thank you. It's always great to be on this podium at Kearney. Because a lot of people have asked, David has asked me on the way up. So what have you learned on book tour? And I've been all over the country and two overriding things. The first is how much people are starved for navigation writing. They're just arched for navigation. They now sense that in their lives that there's these accelerations, they're caught up in what's going to happen with my job, what's going to happen in my community. But they're starved for navigation, especially after this election. And they're starved for trusted navigators. I don't know if I don't in any way pretend that I'm one, but I can tell that that's what people are really hungry for because they sense something that I sense. And the only way I can put it is in Middle Eastern terms, we're becoming Sunnis and Shiites. Our politics has gotten utterly tribalized. So much so that we just saw in this election, both people just fall in line. And if you read in my column, you know what I believe, that people voted for a man who was fundamentally indecent. And so I think people feel that something really scary is happening. And if you heard the president's news conference, he really spoke to this in a very profound way. I think this afternoon. Yeah, because he basically noted that when when we become tribalized, then facts don't matter. Then institutions don't matter. All that matters is my tribe wins. And that is truly the beginning of the end of what makes us human. So I find people are just really they know that they feel that they fear it and and they're really hungry for an alternative to that. What I what I learned and is the source of my optimism is that and this gets to the bookends in the community I grew up in St. Louis Park, which is a small town slash suburb outside of Minneapolis. Let me go there for a second, David. And then sort of tease out the larger point. So the point I make, the reason I go back there had to do with the subtext of this book that basically I covered the Middle East for 30 years. I was on the White House lawn for Oslo. I saw a Rabin and Arfa Cheh Kanz. I was in Tahiris Ware for the Arab Spring launching. I was there for I was I was in Baghdad for the Iraq War, the hope that we could somehow partner with people there to produce a different politics and basically everything I hope for failed. I'm I'm unfortunate, I have to say, except Tunisia. So I came home and I sort of invested my optimism in America and wrote a book with my friend and colleague, Michael Mandelbaum. That used to be us, how America lost its way in the world that invented and how we can come back. And it was really about this idea of nation building at home. And then I watched us start to mirror the Middle East. And so what really was going on psychologically for me in this book was I decided I really needed to go back home to this community. I grew up in that I remembered so fondly that was a place of inclusion where politics worked and first just to determine whether I made it all up. Or I just remembered it in some gauzy way or whether it was real. And if it was real, what were the lessons and that I could share with people? So I go back to St. Louis Park and these are the last two chapters. And the back story is that the Jews in Minnesota all lived vast majority of them, except Bob Dylan's family up in Hibbing all lived in a ghetto in the north side of Minneapolis with African Americans and from the basically thirties and forties. My mom and dad went to a totally integrated high school, not because it was integrated, but because basically the blacks and Jews all live together in a ghetto. And Minneapolis was known as the capital of anti-Semitism in America. And my parents couldn't join AAA, for instance, among other things until Hubert Humphrey became mayor in the late forties and cleaned it out of city government. And so Humphrey really began his civil rights crusade actually working on anti-Semitism, not black, white issues. So in the mid fifties, after the war, the boys come home from the war and the Jews are able to basically escape the north side. And in the three year period between roughly 1953 and 1956, they all move out to one town, St. Louis Park, which had both the housing stock and didn't have restricted covenants so they could all move. So I grew up actually in a house with my aunt and uncle's family and we moved one house and they moved two doors down. And everybody and my uncle moved two doors down the other way. So this suburb overnight, which had been 100% Protestant, Catholic, Scandinavian overnight becomes 20% Jewish, 80% Protestant, Catholic, Scandinavian. So I would say if Sweden and Israel had a baby, it would be St. Louis Park. And what happened was a incredible sort of explosion of creativity that the Jews of Minnesota, we called ourselves the frozen chosen. And so we and these progressive Swedes basically and really embrace their plurals and God sort of put us all together and out of that came my high school, my Hebrew school and my community. And so I grew up with the Cone brothers, Al Frank and Norm Ornstein, Michael Sandel, Sharon Isben, the guitarist, Peggy Ornstein, Alan Wiseman, Dan Wilson, wrote someone like you with Adele. It's got his own Wikipedia page. This was a freaky place. OK, this is not a neighborhood in the upper west side of New York. This is a little one high school town in Minnesota. And we all basically, I think we're deeply affected, Michael Sandel's communitarianism, my moderate politics, Al Franken's commitment to social justice, the Cone brothers, you know, take on the world, Peggy Ornstein. We all kind of brought Minnesota out into the world because we all knew we grew up in an inclusive community where politics work. And so I tell that story. Then I come back 40 years later. And I basically explained that I left Minnesota in 1971 to discover the world. And I came back in 2013 when I started working on this book to find that the world had found Sandel's part. Now my high school is 50% white Protestant Catholics, Scandinavian, 10% Jewish, 10% Hispanic and 30% Somali in African-American because the same town that was ready to take the Jews took the Somalis. So now the inclusion challenge is so much broader and deeper. And I go back to basically see how they do. And the Washington Post rates my high school as the sixth or fifth, it's in the best high school in the state of Minnesota with a completely different demographic. So is it challenging? It's hugely challenging. And Minneapolis has a whole parallel set of challenges because their public school system now is 68% non-white. And in St. Paul, it's 78%. Minneapolis said there was like some ridiculous number of languages spoken. Right, over 142 languages I think, now spoken in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school system. 102, I think, different languages. So it's gotten incredibly diverse. Now why is this important? Because Minneapolis, St. Paul is the home now of 19 Fortune 500 companies. So this is the workforce of the future. So if they need to take on this challenge of inclusion and education is not just some little hobby for these companies. So we'll talk about that in a second. But what I found overall, David, was that lots of problems, lots of challenges. We had a police shooting in St. Paul just a few months ago. But what I found is that but despite the depth of these challenges, you know, my friend, Amy Lovens, who is a great physicist, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and was my tutor in this book for all the biology and natural world stuff and he's been a great tutor. And Amy likes to say whenever he's asked are you an optimist or a pessimist, he says I'm not either because they're just two different forms of fatalism. Everything's gonna be great. Everything's gonna be awful. Amy says, I believe in applied hope. And I love that term applied hope. And what I saw in my community in Minneapolis were not that there weren't difficult problems and not that they were all being fixed. But boy, the number of people who wanna get caught trying is phenomenal. The number of people who want to apply hope. And that is the source of my optimism. If you wanna be an optimist about America today, stand on your head because the country looks so much better from the bottom up than from the top down. And for some very specific reasons. And so let's go to Minneapolis and then I'll stop this answer. But Minneapolis has spawned. One of the reasons I'm such an optimist is because what you'll find is massive social innovation going on at the local level and very apolitical. So Minneapolis has taken it to an extreme because Minnesota in the 50s was blessed with an extremely farsighted elite and philanthropic elite. It was the Dayton family started Dayton's and Target. The McKnight's, the Bush's who started 3M, the Pillsbury's, the Cargills, the General Mills family. And they all used to vacation together in the summer in Northern Minnesota, the place called Lake Itasca. And they invented corporate social responsibility. They come down at the end of the summer and they mandated that every Minnesota company had to give a 5% top line to the community. And that's why we got all these amazing things like the Tyrone Guthrie Theater and the park system and whatnot. So we went through our own bad patch. We had Donald Trump before there was Donald Trump. His name was Jesse Ventura. And he was a wrestler who managed to win in a three-party race. And the state really started to get off track. And so what happened in the early 2000s is a group of these 19 Fortune 500 companies, all these philanthropies, local government in the University of Minnesota, the new generation got together and formed the Itasca Project. They meet every two weeks. They basically chart out all the things they think the state needs in terms of education, entrepreneurship, buy Minnesota infrastructure. When Tim Palenti was governor and wouldn't sign the transportation bill because he wanted to career favor with the Tea Party, the Itasca Project got four Republican legislators to split from the party. And Tim Palenti was forced to sign the transportation bill. And so a study Itasca gets one of the most remarkable social entrepreneurship, I think innovations in the country. I say they meet, I just sat in on their meeting this week. They meet every two weeks, they're bored. McKinsey provides free data, everything's database. And their symbol, they had no website. They actually only created a website because they knew I was gonna write about them. So they figured they better have something on the web. If you, they have a huge inclusion project where all these CEOs are now going through diversity training. And I've got a wonderful interview for me in the book of the head of Lutheran Brotherhood explaining like, they always had Lutafisk at their Christmas party. And now they've got these Somalis. That's disgusting, right? They've got these, and new workers that they're trying to make a feel at home. But the point is the symbol of the Itasca group is a dining room table. Everybody gathers around, there are no sides. You've checked your politics at the door. And by the way, if you wanna get something done, your obligation is to do it yourself, to lead that project. So don't raise anything at the table that you aren't ready to lead yourself. And I tell their whole story, but it's these kinds of social innovations that are happening actually all over the country. My friend, Gidey Greenstein, I quote in the book as it makes a really important point, which is that nothing needs to be invented today. Whatever you can think of, there's something you need already doing it. It just needs to be found, highlighted in scale. And that's why I'm an optimist. And it sounds like a very good reason to be an optimist because it sounds like your optimism is not just rooted in a few recent developments about the future, it's rooted in a long history of people confronting challenges and finding solutions for them and adapting to a new era when changes are happening more rapidly. In the book, you talk about three accelerations. And I think before we get into some more specific questions, maybe you could explain that idea because I think it's really central for the book. So the book in some ways is, it's built around me explaining actually to my parking garage attendant how your way to column. And that's how it begins. And I won't tell you planning for your retirement. Right, exactly. I'll just do this. Everyone knows I just put 10 cents in me and I'll explain to you how to write a column. And I explained to them that a new story is meant to inform about a, I could write a new story about this event and inform better words, but a column is meant to provoke. So I'm either in the heating business or the lighting business. That's what I do. I'm either doing heating or lighting. I'm either stoking up an emotion in you or I'm illuminating something for you. And if I really do it, well, I do both at the same time. But I explained to him that to produce heat and light requires a chemical reaction. And you have to combine three compounds. The first is what is your value set? Are your comments of capitalism, neocon, neoliberal, libertarian, Marxist, and Keynesian? What is the value set you're trying to push into the world? Second, how do you think the machine works? So the machine is my shorthand for what are the biggest forces shaping more things and more places in more ways and more days. As a columnist, I'm always carrying around in my head a working hypothesis of how the machine works. Because when you take your values and wanna push the machine, you better know how it works. Otherwise you either won't push it or you'll push it in the wrong direction. Lastly, what have you learned about people and culture? Because there's no column without people and no people without culture. How does the machine affect people and culture? And how do different people and cultures respond and then affect the machine? Stir all that together, let it rise, bake for 45 minutes, and if you do it right, you'll produce either key or light. So the book came out of, as the more I explained this to my parking guy, the more I started to reflect to myself, like, well, if that's what a column is, what is my value set? Where did it come from? How do I think the machine works today? And what have I learned about people and culture? And that's really the frame of the book. And what David is alluding to is, how do I think the machine works today? So I think what is shaping more things and more places and more ways and more days is that we're in the middle of three non-linear accelerations all at the same time with the three largest forces on the planet, which I call the market, mother nature, and Moore's Law. So Moore's Law coined in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, said the speed and power microchips will double every 24 months. It's now up to about 30 months, but never mind. That's an unusual exponential that could hold up for 52 years. If you put it on a graph, it looks like a hockey stick. A few years ago, Bryan Kazanich, the CEO of Intel, had his engineers just do a back of the envelope calculation. What would happen if a 1971 BW Beetle improved at the rate of Moore's Law, as microchips have? And they determined today that that beetle would go 300,000 miles an hour. It would get two million miles per gallon, and it would cost four cents. So we rarely encounter exponentials in our life. That's why they're very hard to grasp. One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is what they call in physics, the second derivative, where you're dealing with something that's growing exponentially. John Kelly, the third who ran the IBM Watson project, and I spent a huge amount of time with the Watson team, said to me along the way, and I quoted this in the book, that when you get a new card, it always comes with a sticker on the rear view mirror. And it says, objects in your rear view are closer than they appear. John said, that belongs in your front windshield now. It's the stuff coming at you that is much closer than it appears. So that's one acceleration. The second acceleration I call the market, that for me is digital globalization, not your grandfather's globalization, containers on ships. It's actually going down. But everything that is now being digitized and globalized, whether it's through Facebook, PayPal, Twitter, MOOCs, that's what's actually driving globalization today and making the world not just hyper-connected but interdependent. And lastly, Mother Nature has climate change, biodiversity loss, and population growth. Put all of them on a graph, they all look like hockey sticks. And what's going on today is that three of them are interacting. More and more's law drives more digital globalization. More globalization drives more climate change and more solutions. And my argument is these three accelerations aren't just changing the world. They're fundamentally reshaping the world. And they're reshaping five realms, and we're in the middle of it, politics, geopolitics, ethics, the workplace, and community. And the first half of the book is about how these accelerations are being formed. Second half is about how they're reshaping the world. I just say one thing more about Moore's law. My chapter on Moore's law is called What the Hell Happened in 2007. And this emerged from my research, because when I started actually digging into Moore's law, I kept arriving at 2007. It sounds like such an innocuous year. I mean, what's this guy talking about? Well, here's what happened in 2007. In 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and began a process by which we are now putting a handheld computer connected to the internet and basically the hands of everyone on the planet. We're not there yet, but we're on our way. That's not all that happened in 2007. 2007 is actually late 2006. A company called Facebook opened its platform, to anyone with a registered email address. Had been confined to high schools and universities, and it went global in 2007. In 2007, a company called Twitter spun off on its own independent platform. It was started in 2006 and went global. On 2007, the most important software platform you've never heard of called Hadoop, named after the founder's son's toy elephant, launched this algorithm into the wild. It is one of the key foundations of big data. It's what allows a million computers to work together as if they're one computer. It's actually Google that pioneered it, but as Doug Cutting, the founder of Hadoop says in the book, Google lives in the future and sends us letters back home. And what Google did was basically take its key algorithms for enabling us to connect all these computers to create big data and then to be able to search unstructured data. And they left breadcrumbs for the open source community and the founders of Hadoop created the open source version of what Google had done and basically everyone, yeah, who Facebook, Twitter, they all built on that. But I'm just getting started. In 2007, GitHub, now the world's biggest open source software repository opened its doors. In 2007, Google released into the wild an operating system called Android. On 2007, Google bought a little known TV company called YouTube. In 2007, Jeff Bezos unveiled the world's first ebook reader called the Kindle. On 2007, IBM launched the world's first cognitive computer called Watson. In 2007, three design students in San Francisco were attending the design conference that year decided to rent out their three air mattresses to people who could not get hotel rooms. And it worked out so well, they started in 2007 Airbnb. In 2007, change.org started, 2007, Palantir started. You'll see in the book, I have a graph of the cost of sequencing a human genome, $2,100 million. A couple years later, it's $10 million. And then it goes literally over a waterfall. You'll see the graph in the book. Trace your finger down to the bottom. The year is 2007. 2007, solar energy took off. In 2007, a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale called fracking began. In 2007, the cloud started. That's when you see the first, the cloud, as we know it today, emerge. The first numbers for profits emerge. And in 2007, Intel for the first time went off silicon to extend Moore's law. The interest in non-silicon materials into their transistors, which allowed them to keep the exponential going. Turns out 2007 may in time be understood as the single greatest technological inflection point since Gutenberg invented the printing press. And we completely missed it because of 2008. So right when our physical technologies just take off, like we were on a moving sidewalk at an airport, that went from 5 miles an hour to 35 miles an hour, right when that happened. What Eric Beinhacker calls our social technologies. All the things you need to go with that, the learning, the relearning, the adapting, the regulation and deregulation, the political reform, everything froze. And we're now living, I believe, David, in that disjunction. And so, you know, I just remind people, someone was alive when Gutenberg invented the printing press. And someone did say to some priests, now that is really cool, okay? I don't have to write these Bibles out longhand? I mean, we can just stamp them, that is really cool. I think 2007 was one of those years. And basically, if you put, I was very sensitive to it because I wrote, I think basically what happened in the early 2000s were two price collapses that have really reshaped our world. The first happened right around the year, 2008, 90s, because of the dot-com boom, bubble and busts, we collapsed the price of fiber optic cable and we accidentally wired the world. Honey, I didn't mean to, but I shrunk the world because we made the price of fiber optic cable so cheap we could turn a engineering back room into Bangalore as if it was a back room here. We all woke up and said, wow, I am touching someone. I've never touched before and I'm being touched by someone who could never touch me before. I remember calling my mom in Minneapolis around that time. She was 80 years old. She clearly sounded distracted. I said, what's wrong, mom? She said, you're bothering me. I'm playing bridge on the internet with someone in Siberia, okay? And so I gave that moment a name. I said the world is flat. And I wrote the book in 2005. I did a 2.0 edition in 2006 and I did a 3.0 edition in 2007. And then I stopped. I thought I had the machine figured out. As my broker said to me, 2007 was a really bad year to stop sniffing glue, okay? And so right when I put my feet up, I didn't realize we were on the cusp of another massive price collapse. And it was a collapse in the price of storage and computing. And it happened for a lot of the reasons of the technologies of 2007. And what this price collapse did, if the fall in the price of fiber optic cable made connectivity fast, free, easy for you and ubiquitous. What happened as a result of 2007 was we made complexity fast, free, easy for you. 2000 was all about who you could touch and who could touch you. And 2007 was about all the things you could do now with one touch. Taxi, I'm at Carnegie five years ago, 30 minutes, and they didn't believe it neither did you. When I get done tonight, I will take out and with one touch, I will page a driver, direct the driver, rate the driver and pay the driver. And we are abstracting complexity now everywhere. And it's like grease that we're putting into everything. And you can now lift everything with just so much less effort. When you make connectivity fast, free, easy for you and ubiquitous and you make complexity fast, free, easy for you and invisible and you put those together, you get an incredible release of energy. And it changes four kinds of power. Changes the power of one while a one person can do that. We have a president-elect who can sit in his penthouse and tweet to the world, to hundreds of millions of people directly unfiltered by an editor, a libel lawyer, anybody. But we also have a world where the head of ISIS can do that exactly the same way from Rockefeller's. The power of one is fundamentally changed. The power of machines have fundamentally changed. They now have all five senses. They have cognition. I did the IBM Watson Developer Conference five weeks ago in Las Vegas and when I got there, they told me that Watson had just co-written a song with Alex the Kid that in 48 hours went to number four on iTunes. You know, the world kind of changed on February 14th, 2011. Went on all places, a game show. There were three contestants. Two were the all-time Jeopardy champions and the third just went by his last name, Watson. Watson passed on the first question. But he did buzz in before the two humans on the second question. And the question was it's worn on the foot of a horse and used by a dealer in the casino. And in under 2.5 seconds, Watson answered in perfect Jeopardy language, what is a shoe? And for the first time we saw a cognitive computer figure out a pun faster than two human beings. It's changed the power of flows. Ideas now flow at a speed and scale we've never seen before. Dillon Ruth, this terrible person who shot up a black church in South Carolina. Remember what happened afterwards? The Confederate flag, it flown over the statehouse there for 15 years. And in a world of Twitter and Facebook, gone. Okay, Barack Obama five years ago said marriage is between a man and a woman. Today, blessedly so, he says marriage is between any two people who love each other and he will follow Ireland in that position. So we're seeing ideas now flow and change at a rate we've never seen before. And lastly, it changes the power of men. We as a collective are now a force of and in nature so much so that the new geophysical era is being named for us, the Anthropocene. And these four changes in power I think, David, are really reshaping the world. I think they are reshaping the world and interestingly, you mentioned Gutenberg and it took 350 years to get from the Gutenberg Bible to the First Amendment. It took about roughly the same period of time to get from the Gutenberg Bible to about 100 million books. It took about 90 years to get from the first phone to 100 million telephones. It took 33 days to get from the first copy of Angry Birds to 100 million copies of Angry Birds. So the change is happening very fast but we haven't had the ability to internalize that change as we did in the 350 years. Between Gutenberg and the First Amendment, there was John Locke, there was the Glorious Revolution, there were philosophical debates. What is freedom of the press? How do we deal with this? We're having massive changes on a massive scale. And every so often, and you and I've talked about this but I think every so often in history, you get to a moment where technology and social change happen much faster than institutions and systems of belief can keep up with it. And you get a disruption. It's called the Reformation. It's called the Industrial Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. And I have this sense that we're in one of those moments now. You talk about 2007 happened in 2008, it was a curve ball and it caused us to misperceptive. But I think 2007 happened. But actually, 2001 kind of made us stupid. In other words, there was 9-11. We became mesmerized about terrorism. We became mesmerized about one threat and we stopped seeing all these other changes that are happening around us. And we still over focus on that and we don't notice that we're rewiring society, changing the answer to the question, who am I? What is a community? What is governance? What is money? What's a job? What's war? What's peace? Fundamental things are being reframed. And yet, around here, I don't mean Carnegie built, Carnegie is at the cutting edge of everything, but outside of Carnegie and around this building, these are not the discussions that we're having. And one of the things that I take away from your book, and this would be my last question, and then we're gonna take a couple from the audience. But one of the things I take away from the book is the answer to coping with these changes is not coming from governments. Governments are lagging this. In fact, the rise of ethno-nationalists here in the Philippines, in Europe, orchestrated by bad dude in Moscow is a reaction to all of this. This is people's, the sound that you're hearing politically is people's fingers scraping on the sidewalk, trying to be kept in the past. Somebody else is doing it. And the thing I took away from your book, whether it's the ATASCA project or these technologists, is that it's artists and scientists and technologists, it's clergy, it's students, almost everybody else is leading the way to this change, and governments and institutions are lagging behind. And you, I know, I like that a lot. Does somebody have a copy of mine, but can I just borrow it for a second? Sorry, didn't bring one out here, thank you. Cause I wanna read something before we go to questions. So really your question, I think it's so appropriate, David, and it brings two things to mind that I learned. One is that I think the proper governing unit for the 21st century, that is the central governing unit, is not gonna be the federal, national government wherever it is, because these governments are simply too slow now to adapt to this scale of change. And especially when we get this tribalized, they become even slower. It's not gonna be this, to go to the other extreme, it's not gonna be the single family, cause these accelerations are just too powerful for a single family to manage, and we have too many single families that are no single parent. It's gonna be the healthy community. So I think the healthy community, town, whatever you want in the neighborhood is going to be the proper governing unit of the 21st century. And that's where I think our great strengths as a country is, because we have actually many more healthy communities than you'd realize. They're much more apolitical, so they can adapt so much more quickly. But the other point, I think you're looting to, and we've talked about this before, is the reason the book is called Thank You for Being Late, is in part, I could have called this The World is Fast. Very cute, The World is Flat, Then It's Fast. But it's not called that at all, because the subtext of the book is, I argue that everything that is important today is all the stuff you can't download. It's all the stuff you have to upload the old fashioned. One human being to another. And I came across this everywhere I went in this book. Now there's a very interesting Gallup study, which I wrote about as a column five years ago, and I retell in the book, Gallup does a huge amount of education polling. So it was about five years ago, it's in the book, you can see the details up. They had 25,000 people who had been out of college for, I forget it's four or five years, and they interviewed them, asked them one question, are you happy with the direction of your career, your life? And then they broke out everyone who said yes. And they drilled down and found that they had three things in common. One is where they went to college had zero correlation with happiness, okay? Which is to state, Harvard, Yale, where you went to college was irrelevant. Second, they had all or majority had had an internship somewhere along the line in their area of interest. Some really hands-on experience. And the third was that they had all had a mentor who somewhere along the way had taken an interest in their hopes and dreams. So it was all this stuff you can't download. I tell the story of a startup called learnup.com, which is one of my really favorite started by a woman named Alexis Ringwald, who I got to meet in India first. And so learnup works this way. We have big retail companies, the Gap, the Limited, Old Navy, Walmart, and their HR systems are basically designed to weed people out. They basically designed to keep people away because they get inundated with applications every day, thousands. So learnup came along as an interface between all those people applying in the company and they insist you have to take actually a two-hour test before you can apply for a job. And the test really is just, do you know how to fold a shirt? Do you know how to work a cash register? You know how to deal with a customer, among other things. And just asking people to sit down, take a two-hour test, weeds out a lot of people. If you pass that, they then make your job interview appointment for you. But if you go to learnup's website, what you'll notice in the upper corner is a kind of smiley face. It's called the coach button. No button gets pressed more on their website than the coach button. It's actually a human being coach. What should I wear to my interview? Coach, what if I'm gonna be late? Coach, what do you think the first question might be? Coach, there's someone that's already applied there from my neighborhood I might be able to talk to. Turns out everybody needs a coach. Whether you're running Walmart or applying to Walmart. And I came up against, not against, but this overwhelmed me in working on the book, how many times when you peel down, it was the human to human things that were the differentiate. All the things you can't download. So maybe before we go to questions, I'll just read one paragraph of the book which really summarize how I feel or what I concluded. And it's right toward the end. I said, don't get me wrong. Technology has so much to offer to make us more productive, healthier, more learned and more secure. I'm awed by the intelligent assistance that I discovered in researching this book and the potential it has to lift so many people out of poverty and discover talent and make it possible for us to actually fix everything. I'm hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best out of these technologies only if we don't let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings and inspiring these deep human energies. And whether we do that depends on all that stuff you can't download. The high five from a coach, the praise from a mentor, the hug from a friend, the hand up from a neighbor, the handshake from a rival, the totally unsolicited gesture of kindness from the stranger, the smell of a garden and not the cold stare of a wall. And that's why it's called thank you for being late because I think people who know me and you know, I talk the talk of globalization technology. I do not walk the walk. If you're talking to me on Twitter, I have to tell you, I don't go there. So if you're looking for my Facebook page, all the Facebook pages up there are phony because I don't have one, okay? So I talk the talk, I do not walk the walk. I know who my friends are. They're not a thumb up or a thumb down. If you want to communicate with me, write me a letter. And the biggest compliment I can give you when you come to have breakfast with me is thank you for being late. I actually take the different approach. I am a bot. I'm not even real anymore. We'll take a question or two if you can keep the questions short. I see there's a microphone in the back. Let's start right up here in the front and then we'll do one from the back. Keep coming, keep coming, keep coming this gentleman here. Just identify yourself and ask a quick question. John Nelson and we had an acceleration of news today. We had the president announcing that the Russians have been hacking and there may be consequences including probably cyber warfare. We had the Saudis decoupling their distribution of oil and you have Aleppo, the peace of Aleppo. So what is this? And it's all revolving around the Tsar of Vladimir. So what do you say about that in the context of the peace temple that we live in right here? Well, I feel several things. I watched the president's news conference before I came out here and actually did a quick interview with Charlie Rose about it. And the first question Charlie asked me was, what do you feel after what you heard from the president? And I was, it just came out of me. I said, I feel profoundly depressed. I'm really gonna miss this man. I'm gonna miss his decency. I'm gonna miss his integrity. I'm gonna miss his reflectiveness. I'm gonna miss the way he goes about making decisions and I'm gonna miss the respect he has for our institutions. So I'm not running for anything. Don't, thank you, but I, but that's what came out of me, you know? And I disagree with Obama on several things. Siri is one of them. So this is not about being totally supportive. I think the biggest thing going on right now, when we look back at this moment, this election, and it really is right out of a chapter in this book. And it's, for me, the most important chapter and what I read you was from the end of it. It's called Is God in Cyberspace? And a chapter comes from one of the best questions I've ever got on a book tour. In 1999, I'm out selling a Lexus dialetry. A guy stands up and says, Mr. Friedman is God in Cyberspace. And I had no answer. I didn't know what to say. 1999, you know, and so I was five years after Steve started AOL. Yeah, I mean, just like who knew, you know what I mean? And so I got home, I felt really stupid. So I called my spiritual guide. He's a rabbi, Tzvi Marx, who lives in Amsterdam. I got to know him in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute. And he's married to a Dutch priest, really interesting guy. And a great Tom Udik scholar. I said, Tzvi, I got a question I never had before. Is God in Cyberspace? What should I have said? And he said, well, Tom, in our faith tradition, we have two concepts of the Almighty. One is that the Almighty is 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, pervercation. And now we know fake news, okay? But he said, fortunately, we have a post biblical view of God. And the post biblical view of God is that God manifests himself by how we behave. So if you want God to be in cyberspace, we have to bring him there by how we behave there. But I wrote up his answer in the paperback edition of Lexus Nality, where nobody saw it, and parked it there for 20 years. So then I start working on this book. And I find myself getting that story a lot. And I finally sat myself down and said, why are you retelling that story? And what's happened in the last few months just crystallized it. It's because our lives have moved to cyberspace. A critical mass of our lives, now where we find a date, find a spouse, communicate with friends, do our business, buy things, source things, educate, learn. We have migrated our lives now to a digital realm where we're all connected, but nobody's in charge. There are no stoplights there. There's no 1-800-STOP-LATAMIR from hacking. Unless we bring values there, they're not gonna be there. And when I think what's happened in the last six months has been a tipping point, think of the news. This morning I read Yahoo had a million of their accounts, a billion of their accounts hacked in 2013. People's passwords, everything spilled out there. The other day I'm reading a Russian bank plus $31 million by cyber hack. Putin hacked our election. So everywhere you turn now, what we're confronting is the fact that we're all connected, but no one's in charge. And that our lives have migrated there. And I think this is the biggest legal, philosophical, and social challenge that we face today. And this period, these six months, is when it all sort of tipped. And so what I say in the book is I think we're at a moral intersection today. We have never stood at before because of these accelerations. We've never stood at before as a human species. In 1945, we entered a world where one country could kill all of us. If it hadn't been one country, post-hero regime I'm glad it was mine. I think we're entering a world where one person can kill all of us and where all of us can fix everything. That is these same amplified powers are enabling one of us to kill all of us eventually and all of us could actually feed, house, code, and educate every person on the planet now if we put our minds to it and our heads together. We have never been at this intersection before where one of us can kill all of us and all of us could fix everything. What does it mean? We've never been more god-like as a species. And if we are more god-like as a species we all better have the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you because we now live in a world where you can do unto others farther away, faster, cheaper than ever before and others can do unto you. So I gave this talk actually as the commencement address at Olin College of Engineering last May. This riff and I said to the parents I know what you're thinking. You pay 200 grand so your kid could get an engineering degree and they brought in a knucklehead commencement speaker who's actually preaching the golden rule. I mean like what was the administration thinking? My answer is I know that sounds naive but naivete is the new realism. Do you wanna know what's really naive? You saw it this six months thinking we're gonna be okay if everyone doesn't embrace the golden rule. And this ties up really the whole talk today. Where does the golden rule come from? Comes from strong families and healthy communities. That's where you learn to do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Don't know much, I would never presume to lecture anyone about a strong family. Hope I built one but everyone has their own way but I do know something about healthy communities because I grew up in one which takes us back to where I started and why the book ends. I see a couple of hands here and I'm absolutely committed to make it as diverse as possible. So let's go to Adrienne over here. You mentioned that. Oh well that's just what I was talking about. When I say that the ethical realm has to be reimagined. It's precisely because of this. If our lives are migrating to a realm where we're well connected and no one's in charge and if individual and machine power is being amplified this much then finding ways to ground people in the golden rule, in the Ten Commandments or whatever your faith's system has of its equivalent. These ethical questions I think matter more than ever because they're really, in the old days you could count on fences, police, stop lights, but in cyberspace there's nobody there. There's nobody there but what we bring there and therefore how we as a species learn to bring more things there is really gonna be vital. And my friend, Dove Seidmer, I quote in the book several times, Dove says the problem is there's no Moore's law for ethics. It doesn't accelerate at an exponential rate. And so this is really about all about how we build trust. Dove also has a good quote in the book that I really like which is that, a trust is the only legal performance enhancing drug. So where there's trust in the room, where there's a hard floor, oh man, people can jump so high, where there's no trust in the room, no one can jump at all. So compare Iraq today with Minnesota, Minnesota is a hard floor, Iraq is all sand so the reason the place doesn't work is there's a government, there's another quote in the book which government moves at the speed of trust. So what's happening in our country is trust is totally breaking down here and actually we're doing it to ourselves. We're actually out with sludge hammers. And this is my beef with Trump, which is that I don't dispute that he's won. You know, you've got 59 minutes. That's right, that's right. I got went along with mentioning. Exactly, but I have to because he's out with it. When you say, I don't believe in climate change but I'm not gonna get a briefing from NASA and NOAA, scientists about climate. When you say this thing about Putin, it's all a lie that they manufactured but you don't even ask for a briefing from the director of national intelligence. You're taking a sludge hammer to these institutions which you're about to inherit and boy, you're gonna discover the morning after how much you need them. When the CIA comes to you and says that North Korea is about to build an intercontinental missile that can hit Los Angeles and you decide you have to pre-empt and then you're gonna say, oh, but I built it all on the CIA which I've just taken a sludge hammer to destroying. So what people are doing is eroding trust. One of my favorite stories is I tell about St. Louis Park. I put this all in a nutshell which is so useful. So my little town, my little 44,000 person town. First of all, why is it unique? If you go to St. Louis Park, what you'll discover it is completely indistinguishable from the other suburbs. There's no motor around it. There's no drawbridge. We don't have passports. It just totally looks the same as all the other suburbs. So what distinguishes it? It's leadership. It had amazing communal leaders who passed down a certain inclusive ethic and down and down and down. So today, only 15% of the residents had kids in the public school. The school bond issues passed 80, 20. And most of these people have no kids in the public school. That's all about leadership. So 2007, my little suburb or 2009, I forgot the date, it's in the book, they decide they're gonna be the first, very St. Louis Park, they're gonna be the first town in Minnesota to have free public Wi-Fi. So they contract out to a company in Annapolis for solar-powered Wi-Fi towers. So St. Louis Park. They pay 1.7 million to get it installed and the first winter, it completely fails. Ice freezes on the solar panels, doesn't come off. The whole thing's a white elephant. They have to take it down and sue the company. 1.7 million dollars for my little town. That was a lot of money. So I'm interviewing Clint Pireas who is the CTO of the city who was in charge of the project. He actually had a heart attack over this. But before he did, they had a press conference with the mayor and he announced to the community, we're taking this down. It was a complete failure. And afterwards Clint described going to the harvest moon cafe, little cafe near city hall in St. Louis Park. And he walks in, the first guy comes up to him and says, you're the Wi-Fi guy, aren't you? He says, yeah, I am. He said, too bad that failed. What are we gonna try next? I compare that to Cylindra. The Obama administration does a venture capital project around solar energy, cylinder it fails. A lot of money got lost. That's why they call it venture capital. And what is the response here? Who can I destroy? Who can I put in jail? Who can I blame? Who can I impute the worst motives to? So who's gonna start another project here? If that's what it is. So there's no trust here. There's total trust there. They can move at the speed of trust really fast. And here, what's happening? Cause everyone's just taking a sledgehammer. And I wrote three columns, Adrian, the night of the election. Okay, because I'm a Tuesday for Wednesday columnist. So I get all of these in the election. So the first column kind of was tilted toward Hillary Clinton. Then about 1030, I made it 50-50. And at 230, I wrote the Trump one, okay? But they all had the same lead. And the lead was, I was speaking a few years ago to an immigrant friend of mine from Zimbabwe, Leslie Goldwasser, came here in the late 80s and has made an amazing career on Wall Street as a trader. And a few years ago, she said to me, you know, you Americans kick around your country like it's a football, but it's not a football. It's actually a Faberge egg. You can drop it. You can break it. And I think we're testing that proposition right now. Thank you. That may not sound like the kind of optimism you're trying to say. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. But I'll tell you. To me, what I hear and listening to Tom, and I'm fortunate enough to talk to Tom a lot, and what I got in reading the book, did leave me with a really indelible sense of optimism. And it comes from, in response to the first question, what they might call in Hollywood, pulling focus. Start as we often do in Washington with a focus on today's headlines. Today's problem, the person in the news. And that shows you something. But what Tom does better than anybody I know is he pulls the focus. He pulls you back. He says, let's put this in context. Let's put this in the context of the world. Let's put this in the context of history. Let's put this in the context of what might yet be. And when you put it in that context, you become more optimistic. You become optimistic when you put it in historical context because if you study history, it's my deep belief that if you study it seriously with real intellectual rigor, you can come to no conclusion except to be an optimist. We live longer than ever. We are healthier than ever. We are better educated than ever. People have more money than ever. There are fewer wars than ever. Fewer people die violent deaths than ever in history. The trend lines of history are positive trend lines. Then you say, well, we're in a tough moment. Could we still be optimistic even in this moment? How do we know those trend lines will continue? And the great thing that Tom has done in this book and the great thing that Tom has done in this conversation is it reminds you that the thing that drives us forward isn't governments. It isn't the people that we elect. It's the people. It's all people. It's fundamental values. It's the fact that each and every one of us has the power to make positive change. When I've gone out and given speeches over the course of the past few weeks, people say, what can I do about it? And my response is just do something. Help one person change one life and you change the universe. And everybody has the power to do that. And they do. That's what history is about. Artists, scientists, technologists, doctors, individuals help each other. They create places like St. Louis Park. St. Louis Park creates people like Tom. Tom brings these ideas out to the world. It infuses people in dark moments with optimism and a road forward. And that's a cause for optimism. So, with that note. No, David, before you finish, I want you to talk about... No, I want you to add one thing, but talk about... I had everybody up here. We're gonna be back down at the back of J.A.G. I want you to talk about the title of your book, which is the title of my book. Oh, well, this is the chapter that you like. Because I think it's really important. I really do. That's what ties up all this feeling. It goes, the thing that I'm working on, and I gave a TED Talk, and in the TED Talk, coming out of conversations like this, and we actually, you may not have picked up on this, but every few weeks we get together like a couple of old Jewish guys, which is weird. And we have this kind of conversation. But I said, all this stuff is happening, and my question is, where are the philosophers? All these big changes are coming. We need philosophy. We need ethics. We need these things. But I think bigger changes are right around the corner. Tom talks about the three accelerations. I talk about two accelerations. I was talking to Deb here about it the other day. There's the fast one and the slow one. The fast one is technology. The slow one is demographics. People living longer. This is transformational. Society's moving more freely. But all of us leads us to a singularity, a moment you've made a reference to, and that singularity is gonna happen in 10 years. For the first time in the history of humankind, everybody on the planet is gonna be connected in a man-made system. Everybody will have the ability to touch everybody else, and it changes everything. Who am I? What is a community? What is governance? We know it changes. What is money? What is war? What is peace? Massive change right around the corner. We don't have the tools to analyze that. And the title that Tom's talking about, it actually comes from a conversation that I had with my dad. Who was a scientist at Bell Telephone Library Choice. And actually, I was a kid and I was watching television. That's a very Tom Friedman story. I was in a cab, and I was watching television, and there was a television show talking about nuclear winter. And it said, if there was gonna be a nuclear war, and then hundreds of millions of people would die, and I was 17, I got pale, I went to my dad, I said, oh my God, dad, I'm shaken. And he's like, well, what's wrong? And I said, well, there could be a nuclear war, and 100 million people would die. And my dad was a contrarian and kind of scientist. He said, well, 100 million people died in the 14th century, and the result was the renaissance. I know your optimism comes from it. And I was like, what? But his point was that these things happen in history, and we don't see everything else that's happening around them. And in the period of the bubonic plague, you'd look at the bubonic plague, you might have seen the little ice age also happened then, the great schism also happened then. There's a lot of bad stuff going on, and you wouldn't have noticed Petrarch, and you wouldn't have noticed water mills changing and giving you a middle class, and you wouldn't have noticed Dante emerging, and you wouldn't have noticed that the renaissance was starting, and that this big change was coming, because we were looking backwards. We were looking at 9-11, and here is this giant tsunami of change coming, and so the title that he's referring to, and this is the title of the chapter in the next book, is that this is the day before the renaissance. We are living in the day before the renaissance. There is this massive change coming. We are looking that way, most of us, but Tom is looking that way, and that's what we need from everybody, and that's why I'm glad you joined us here. Please join me in giving a great appreciation for Tom for his views. And somewhere out there is your AARP Lifetime Thinker Award, and we'll give that to you, but we'll have somebody help you carry it, okay, sir.