>>  From the Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. 
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>>  It is my pleasure and honor to yield the floor to the great Tom Friedman.
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[ Applause ]
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>>  Thomas L. Friedman: Thank you, I really appreciate that.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Wow, it's great to do a neighborhood concert.  This is fantastic.  Marty, thank you.  We are in a golden age of journalism at least as regards to 2 newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post.  We are going at it every day and one of the people centrally responsible for that golden age is Marty Baron and it's, it's an honor for me to be introduced by him.  And if you would silence your cellphones or put them on stun, I'll be forever grateful.  So, thank you for being late.  An optimist guy de-thriving in the age of acceleration.  First question I always get from people when they hear the title of the book is where from comes the title, Thank You for Being Late.  And it actually comes from meeting people in Washington D.C, I live in Bethesda.  For breakfast, I like too not waste not waste breakfast when I'm downtown eating alone, I like to learn from someone so I often organize business breakfast and every one in a while someone comes in 15 minutes late and they say; Tom, I'm really sorry, it was the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog ate my homework.  And one day, over 3 years ago, now, my friend Peter Corsell, energy entrepreneur came, we were meeting at the Hey Adams, he came a few minutes late, said the usual; Tom, I'm really sorry the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog out my homework, and I just spontaneously said to him; actually Peter, thank you for being late.  Because, you're late, I've been eavesdropping on their conversation.  Fascinating.  I've been people watching the lobby, fantastic, and best of all, best of all, I just connected 2 ideas I've been struggling with for a month, so thank you for being late.  People started to get into it, they'd say, well you're welcome, because they understood I was actually giving them permission to pause, to slow down, to reflect.  My favorite quote from the front of the book is from my teacher and friend Dov Seidman who says, you know, when you press the pause button on a computer it stops, but when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts.  That's when it starts to reflect, rethink and reimagine, and boy, don't we need to do a lot of that now.  Now this book, thank you.  This book actually was triggered when I paused and engaged with someone I wouldn't normally engage with.  So, as I said, I live in Bethesda, Maryland with my wife Ann and about once a week I take the subway to work, and so for me, that means driving from the Bethesda, from our home on Bradley Boulevard to the Bethesda Hyatt.  I park in the basement of the Bethesda Hyatt, in the public parking garage there and I take the Red Line into D.C., down to the New York Times office, not far from the white house and low of 3 years ago, now I did that.  I parked my car, took the Red Line in, spent the day at the office, took the Red Line back, got in my car, time stamp ticket, drove to the cashier's booth, handed it to the cashier.  I looked at him looked at me and said I know who you are.  I said great.  He said I read your column.  I said, great, parking guy reads my column.  He said, I don't always agree, I thought, get me out of here.  But, I actually said well that's good, it means you always have to check then and I drove off thinking it's great the parking guy reads my column.  Anyways, a week later, I took my weekly trip into D.C.  by subway, parking garage, Red Line, office, Red Line back, parking garage, car, time stamp ticket, cashier's booth, same guy's there.  This time he says, Mister Friedman, I have my own blog, would you read my blog.  I thought, oh my god, the parking guy is now my competitor.  What just happened?  So, I said look, right it down and I'll look it up.  So, he tore off a piece of receipt paper and he wrote on it odenoby.com.  I got home, I call, told Ann, I called it up on my computer.  Turns out he's Ethiopian, wrote about, was writing about Ethiopian politics from the perspective of the Aroma people, a real democracy advocate and it was pretty good, it was a pretty good blog.  I thought about him for a few days and I eventually concluded this was a sign from god, that I should pause and engage this guy, but I didn't have his email, so the only way I could do it was park in the parking garage every day.  So, that took 3 or 4 days.  I don't remember how long anymore, but we overlap one morning at 7 A.M.  I parked under the gate so it couldn't come down, I got out of my car and I said Elia, now I know his name, Elia Bojerre.  Elia, I would like your email, I'd like to send you a message, which he gladly gave me and that night we began an email exchange.  I've saved them all and most of them are in the front of book, they're kind of funny.  But, I basically said to him, in essence, I have a proposition for you.  I will teach you how to write a column for the New York Times, if you will tell me your life story.  And he basically said, I see your proposing a deal, I like this deal.  So, he asked that we meet near his office out in Bethesda at Pete's Coffeehouse across from the Hyatt.  Pete's has since sent me a gift certificate for putting them in the book, which we did 2 weeks later.  And I came with a 6-page memo on how to write a column and he came with his life story.  His life story as an economics grad from [inaudible] university in Addis Ababa, was a political activist, a democracy advocate.  His democracy activism eventually earned him a one-way ticket out of Ethiopia.   We welcomed here, him here in our country as a political exile, yes, we did that.  And, and he told me he was blogging on Ethiopian websites, different ones, but they wouldn't turn his stuff fast around, turn stuff around fast enough, so eventually he decided to start his own blog and now Mr.  Friedman, I feel empowered.  His good metrics say he's read in 30 different countries, he's my parking guy and it's a wonderful story and he's a wonderful man of how anyone today can participate in the global conversation and he taught me so much about that and about his own country, Ethiopia.  Well I then presented him with a 6-page memo on how to write a column.  So, if the world is a big data problem, this is my algorithm, this how I go about cutting through it.  And I thought about some of this before, but I never put it together until I did it in the memo for Elia.  I basically explained to him that a news story is meant to inform and it can do so, better or worse.  The post tomorrow will write a story about this festival and Marty will tell whether they did better or worse, but a column, an opinion article, is meant to provoke, it's meant to produce a reaction.  So, I'm either in the heating business or the lighting business, that's what I do.  I'm either doing a heating or a lighting, I'm either stoking up an emotion in you or I'm illuminating something for you and if I really do it well, I do both and create heat and light and a reaction.  And I can tell if I created heat or light by the reaction I get from readers.  Some might read your column and say, I didn't know that, that's a good reaction, you created some light.  Some might say, never looked at it that way, that's a good reaction, I never connected those things, more light, your favorite, you live for this as a column.  This happens 4 times a year, Mr.  Friedman, you said exactly what I felt but didn't know how to say, God, God bless you.  I want to kill you dead, you and all your offspring, I get that.  That's usually heat and light also, okay.  So, but I explained to Elia to produce heat and light, actually required a chemical reaction and you had to combine 3 chemicals.  The first is what is your value set, what are the set of ides, values and principles you're promoting in the world.  Are you a communist, a capitalist, a neo-comm, a neo-liberalist, libertarian, a [inaudible], a Marxist, what are the set of values you're pushing? 
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 Second, how do you think the machine works.  So, the machine is my shorthand for what are the biggest forces shaping more things in more places in more ways in more days.  As a columnist, I'm always carrying around in my head a working theory of how the big gears and pullies of the world work.  Why?  Because I'm trying to take my values and push the machine in their direction and if I don't know how the machine works, I either won't push or I'll push it in the wrong direction.  And in many ways, all my books have been an exploration about how the machine works.  Lastly, what have you learned about people and culture?  How the machine effects different people and culture and how they come back and affect the machine, because there's no column without people and there's no people without culture.  Stir those 3 together, mix it up, let it rise, bake for 45 minutes and if you do it right, you will produce a column that produces heat or light.  Well, the more I engage with Elia on this, we had 3 sessions at Pete's Coffeehouse and several emails in between.  The more I step back and would say to him, well that's what a column is about, what's my value set.  Those of you who read me know that I have a rather quirky set of values.  I'm not quite liberal, I'm certainly not a conservative, that's because my values actually emerge from the small community I grew up with in Minnesota in the 1950's, 60's and 70's, at a time and place where politics works.  And that had a huge impact on me, to this day.  How do I think the machine works today and what have I learned about people and culture and I decided that was the book I wanted to write.  And that's what Thank You for Being Late is all about.  The first half is about how the machine works and the second half is about how this machine, today, is not just changing your world, it's reshaping your world.  And it's reshaping 5 realms in particular, the work place, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.  So, let me try to give you a quick run through.  How does the machine work today?  Well I think what is shaping more things in more places in more ways and more days is the fact that we're in the middle of 3 non-linear accelerations, all at the same time, with the 3 largest forces on the planet, which I call the market, mother nature, and Moore's law.  And I should tell you that I mixed these 3 together for a reason.  One of my teachers in this book, Linwells, something he's really taught me, which is, I think essential to doing proper journalism today, is never think in the box and never think out of the box, today you must think without a box, okay.  You need to be melding all of these disparate things together and in my case, they're the market, mother nature, and Moore's law.  So, the market for me is digital globalization, not your grandfather's globalization, that was containers on ships, planes and trains.  If you chart that today, it's actually flat to going down, but digital globalization, the way everything is being digitized and globalized, whether it's through Facebook or Amazon, or Google or Twitter or Paypal or Mooks, if you put that on a graph it looks like, looks like a giant hockey stick.  Mother nature for me is climate change, biodiversity loss, and population growth in the developing worlds.  If you put that on a graph, it looks like a hockey stick.  And Moore's law, get that first slide up here for a second, coined by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel in 1965.  Gordon Moore, positive, that the speed and power of microchips would double roughly every 24 months and the price would stay roughly the same.  Moore's law has held up for 52 years and it is the engine driving all technological change today, because Moore Moore's law drives more globalization, more globalization drives more climate change.  Now, about once a year for the last 52 years, someone has written an article saying, Moore's law is over, it's going to run out and for 52 years, what they all have in common, is they were all wrong.  Moore's law is alive and well, it's now about 30 months, but your computer at home now, is probably operating on an intel workhorse chip that's a 14-nm chip.  It has 37.5 million transistors per square millimeter, you cannot see them, at the end of 2017, Intel will introduce its, under Moore's law, 10 nanometer chip.  It will have 100 million transistors per square millimeter.  Now I know that's very abstract, hard to conceive what that means.  Basically, what it means is, the difference between those 2 chips is the difference between a self-driving car that needs to whole trunk to contain the brains of that car, so it can drive itself, and a self-driving car that will just need a little box under the front seat.  So, if you think your world is fast now, wait till the end of the year.  In fact, Intel's engineers wants to try to explain the power of Moore's law.  One step back and said what if a 1971 Volkswagen Beatle had improved at the same rate microchips have, what would it be like today.  And they calculated that that 1971 VW Beatle today would go 300,000 miles an hour, it would get 2 million miles per gallon and it would cost 4 cents.  You'd be able to drive it your entire life on one tank of gas.  That is the power of the technological exponential now driving our lives.  So, my chapter though, on Moore's law, and I'm really just going to talk about that today, not the climate and the market.  My chapters actually called, What the hell happened in 2007?  What the hell happened in 2007?  What's this guy talking about?  2007, such an innocuous year.  Well here's what happened in 2007.  The year was kicked off in January of 2007, when one Steve Jobs introduced this, the first Iphone at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, beginning a process by which we're about half way through putting one of these into the hands of virtually, well we're about half way now, to everyone on the planet.  That is a handheld computer with more compute power in it than the Apollo Space Mission that doubles as a phone and a camera.  That's how the year began.  But in 2007, a company called Facebook, which had been previously confined to high schools and universities, in late 2006, opened its platform to anyone with a registered email address.  And in 2007, Facebook went global.  In 2007 a company called Twitter split off on its own independent platform and went global.  In 2007, the most important software you may have never heard of called Hadoop, named after the founder's son's toy elephant, launched its algorithm into the wild.  Hadoop is what enables a million computers to work together as if they're one, seamlessly, that's actually I think we call it big data now.  Hadoop actually didn't invent the algorithms, it's based on 2 algorithms invented by google called [inaudible] and MapReduce, but as the founder of Hadoop, Doug Cutting, explains to me in the book, Google lives in the future and sends us letters back home, and what google did was leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the open source software community of its algorithms, they reverse engineered it, Hadoop is the public version of it, there isn't a major company in Washington D.C that isn't somewhere in the background running Hadoop.  In 2007, the second most important software you may have never heard of called VMware went public.  VMware is what enables any operating system to work on any computer.  Well you're used to that now, but that actually was very unique back then and that's what enables Cloud computing.  So, we can have all these commodity servers and anyone can run any operating system on them.  In 2007, a company called GitHub, the world's, now largest, repository for open-source software, opened its doors.  In 2007, this company called Google bought a little know T.V.  company called YouTube.  And in 2007, Google launched its own algorithm into the wild called Android.  In 2007, Marty's boss Jeff Bezos introduced the world's first e-book reader, called the Kindle.  And in 2007, IBM started the world's first cognitive computer called Watson.  In 2007, 3 design students in San Francisco, were attending a design conference that year and they noticed all the hotel rooms were sold out, but one of them had 3 spare air mattresses and they decided to rent them out to people who couldn't get hotel rooms and it worked out so well, in 2007, they started a company called Airbnb.  That's why it's called Airbnb, because of the 3 air mattresses. 
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In 2007, the internet crossed a billion users for the first time, it was actually late 2006, really scaled in 2007.  Here's what else happened in 2007, this is a graph for the cost of sequencing a human genome.  So, for those of you in the back who can't see, in 2001, it cost us 100 million dollars to sequence a human genome, in 2006, it fell to 10 million and then you'll notice in 1 year it goes over a cliff, like an EKG heading for a heart attack, that year is 2007, the price of sequencing a human genome collapses to $10,000.  In 2007, solar energy took off.  As did a process for extracting a natural gas from tight shale called fracking.  Between 2006 and 2008, America's total natural gas reserves increased 35%, that is a spectacular number in 2007.  This is a graph of what social networks look like.  So, that white line over on the left that's actually the cost of generating a megabit of data.  You'll notice the line goes straight down in, what year is that, 2007.  And then the blue line is the speed of transmitting that data, you'll notice the 2 lines cross in 2008, close enough for government work.  Oh yeah, I forgot the Cloud.  This thing we call the Cloud, it was born in 2007, first year, the statistics show up as 2008.  In 2007, Intel for the first time, went off silicon to extend Moore's law and introduce non-silicon materials into its microchips.  In 2005, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers retired and in 2007, he decided he better come back to work.  Turns out friends, 2007 may be understood in time as surely, one of the greatest technological inflection points since Gutenberg.  And always remember, someone was alive when Gutenberg invented the printing press and surely some monk turned to some priest and said, now that is really cool, okay.  You mean I don't have to write all these bibles out long hand anymore, we can just stamp them out.  Well I think you were alive at a similar inflection point in 2007, unfortunately we all completely missed it.  Why?  Because of 2008.  So, right when our physical technologies just took off, like we're on a moving sidewalk in an airport that went from 5 to 50 miles per hour, right when that happened, all of our social technologies, the regulatory reform, the political reform, the manager reform, the learning reform, you'd want to go with it, all completely froze because we entered the deepest recession since 1929.  And in that dislocation, many Brexit and Trump voters were born.  You cannot understand what's going on if you don't understand that disjunction.  So, what happened in 2007?  Well, I argue what happened is your computer basically is 5 key parts, it's got that processor chip, it's got a storage chip, it's got networking, it's got software and it's got a sensor.  And what I trace in the book is how 5 are actually in a Moore's law and what happened in 2007, is they all melded together into this thing we call the Cloud.  The Cloud.  But I never use the term the Cloud in my book, because it sounds so soft, so fluffy, so cuddly, so nice, sounds like a Joanie Mitchell song.  I've looked at clouds from both sides.  This ain't no cloud folks, what I call it in the book is the supernova.  Those of you who are science fans know the supernova is actually the largest energy force in nature, it's the explosion of a star.  And I think what happened in 2007, was a release of energy in the hands of men, women and machines, the likes of which, we have never seen before, and it overnight, changed 4 kinds of power.  First it changed the power of 1, what 1 person can do today as a maker or a breaker is amplified to a degree we have never seen before.  We have a president who can sit in his pajamas in the West Wing and tweet to a billion people, directly, without an editor, a liable lawyer or a filter.  Okay, so.  But, but here's, here's what's really scary, the caliph of Isis can do the exact same thing from his bunker in Raqqa Province in Syria.  The power of 1 today to be a maker or breaker is fundamentally changed.  The power of machines have changed.  Machines are acquiring all 5 senses.  We have never lived in a world where machines had all 5 sense and as a result, machines can now analyze, optimize, prophesize, customize and automatize anything.  They can analyze, they can find the needle in the haystack of that data as the norm now, not the exception.  They can optimize, they can tell United Airlines exactly what altitude to fly that GE engine for every mile of its flight to get the premium energy efficiency.  They can prophesize.  Oh, you've seen the IBM Watson add, the repairman comes to the building, says I'm here to repair the elevator and the guy says the elevator's not broken and the repairman says I know, but it will be in 6 weeks.  Because with big data, we know that.  We can customize just for you and we can now digitize and automatize everything and anything.  That is a new world, one we've never inhabited before.  We kind of cross that line, I would argue, in February 2011 on all places, a game show.  There were 3 contestants, 2 we're the all-time Jeopardy champions and the 3rd contestant simply went by his last name Mr.  Watson.  Mr.  Watson passed on the first question, but he buzzed in before the two humans on the second question, see if you can get it.  The question was, it's worn on the foot of a horse and used by a dealer in a casino, and in under 2.5 seconds, Mr.  Watson said, in perfect Jeopardy style, what is a shoe.  And for the first time, we watched live on T.V, a cognitive computer figure out a pun faster than 2 human beings and the world kind of hasn't been the same since.  It's changed the power of flows, ideas now flow, circulate, meld, fracture, and change faster than we've ever seen before.  Confederate statues were up for, you know, a century and a half and bam, one day, we decided to take them down and they're all gone.  Barack Obama ran 6 years ago, saying marriage between a man and a woman, today blessedly so, he says marriage is between any 2 humans who love each other and he followed Ireland in that opinion.  Ideas now flow and change and congeal at a pace we've never seen before.  And lastly, it's changed the power of many.  These amplified powers of men, women, and machines have become so great that we have become the biggest foresting function on and in nature and that's why the new climate era has been named for us, the Anthropocene.  Well the argument I make in this book, is that these 4 changes in power, they're not just changing your world, they are reshaping your world and that requires fundamental rethinking of everything and they're reshaping 5 realms; politics, geopolitics, ethics, the community and the workplace.  So, let me spend the next, I can have with this talk, talking about what I mean.  So, basically the workplace is being changed in large part because of this graph.  I was out working on the book, I was interviewing Astro Teller, the CEO of Google EX, Google's research arm.  And I went to see him and I told him the thesis of the book and he got up from his desk and went over to his whiteboard and he drew this very crude, simple graph.  So, the blue line across the middle, you'll notice it has a positive slope, but it's very gradual.  I said, what's that Astro?  He said, that's the average rate at which human beings and societies adapt to change over time.  It has a positive slope, but it's gradual.  The white line that starts below and then loops up, that's technology.  So, if you lived at the left end of the line in the 11th or 12th century, we forget, if you lived in the 11th century or 12th century, your bow and arrow did not get better between the 11th century and the 12th century.  There was no bow and arrow 2.0 in the 12th century, okay.  The line of innovation was very flat, but then we got the scientific revolution, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Steve Jobs and Intel, Bill Gates and the line starts to go straight north.  
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And then Astro drew that little diamond there, and I said what's that Astro.  He said that's where we are.  We're at a point now where technology is evolving faster than the average human being in society can adapt.  Then he went out and got a 3rd magic marker, it's hard for you in the back to see maybe, but, and he drew a little dotted line off the blue line.  And I said what's that Astro?  He said, that's learning faster and governing smarter and that is the challenge of the workplace today.  How do we enable more people to learn faster and how as a society do we govern smarter so we can lift the adaptation line to meet technology where it's taking us?  So, let me give you some samples of what I'm talking about.  So, my chapter in how the workplace is being reshaped is called How do we turn AI into IA.  How do we take artificial intelligence and turn it into intelligent assistance, a, n, c, e, intelligent assistants, a, n, t, s, and intelligent algorithms so more people can learn faster and govern smarter?  I believe that's the central managerial governing and education challenge of our time today.  So, I'll give you a couple of examples.  My examples of intelligent assistance, ance, is actually the human resources department at AT&T.  I spent a lot of time with AT&T, giant global telecom company living right next to the supernova, competes everyday with Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and all these great telecom companies.  Pretty good chance that AT&T with its 360,000 employees, whatever is going on in their human resource department, coming to a neighborhood near you.  So, what's going on here?  Well, this is, in shorthand, basically what's going on is this; their CEO Randall Stephenson begins the year with a radically transparent speech about where the company is going, what markets their going to be in and what skills you need to be an AT&T employee that year.  Then they put all 110,000 managers of a non-unionized staff in their own in-house LinkedIn system.  And so, they've got me in there, you know, Tom Friedman, Tom Friedman, and then they determine that there are, I'm estimating this roughly, 10 different skill sets you need to be a thriving employee and rising employee to AT&T given where they're going as a company in the world today.  And on my LinkedIn profile, turns out I have 7 of the 10 skills, but I'm missing 3.  Then they partnered with Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, the online learning university.  He created nanodegrees and courses for all 10 skill sets.  Then they came back to me and said Tom, here's the deal, we will give you up to $8,000 a year to take all the nanodegree courses for the skills you're missing, in fact we heard you're interested in the middle east, you we're in, if you want to take an archaeology class, in fact if you want to take our 1 year master's degree for $6,000 that we built with Georgia Tech.  we'll pay for that as well.  Just one condition Tom, one condition.  You have to take all these courses on your own time at night, at home and on weekends, not on company time.  Now, if I say, you know, Mr.  AT&T, I've climbed up one too many telephone poles, I'm not into this anymore.  They now have a wonderful severance package for me.  But I won't be working there much longer.  If I do take the courses, they're social contract for their employees, is they will offer them the new jobs first, they will not go outside.  What is AT&T's social contract with their employees today?  It's very simple, you can be a lifelong employee today at AT&T, but only if you are a lifelong learner.  If you are not ready to be a lifelong learner, you can no longer be a lifelong employee at AT&T.  And that is the social contract coming to a neighborhood near you.  The days when you could go to college for 2 or 4 years and then dine out on that knowledge over the next 30 are completely gone in the age of acceleration.  What you learn now in your 1st year, may be out of date by your 4th year and therefore being a lifelong learner becomes the single most important competitive advantage you can have in the age of acceleration.  Which is why my friend Heather McGowan likes to say, today never ask your kid what do you want to be when you grow up, because whatever it is, unless it's a policeman or fireman, not going to be there.  Only ask your kid how you want to be when you grow up.  Will you have an agile learning mindset, will you be predisposed to lifelong learning.  And that's why another friend of mine Marina Gorbis, CEO of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto likes to say, the biggest divide in the world we're going into now, is no longer the digital divide.  We remember the digital divide, Washington D.C.  had internet, upstate Maryland didn't, you know, American had internet, central Africa didn't.  The digital divide is going to be gone in 5 years if it isn't already, and when it's gone, the biggest divide in the world is going to be the self-motivation divide.  Who has the self-motivation to be a lifelong learner after you've left home or graduated school and mom and dad are not there to say Tommy, have you done your homework?  And I believe one of the things roiling our society today, is this issue of the rising importance of self-motivation, because a lot of people were built to show up to work and do what they were told.  And by the way, these are good people, and they built our country.  We ask them to show up, we asked them to do what they were told, and they did it, and they did it damn well, but the world has changed now, and one of the things roiling the society is the necessity of lifelong learning and how more important self-motivation is becoming.  That's my example of intelligent assistance, my example of intelligent assistant is the janitorial staff at Qualcomm.  So, I spent a lot of time at Qualcomm because I profiled their founder Irwin Jacobs in the book for networking and when I was there, I discovered that Qualcomm had taken 6 of their building and they affixed sensors everywhere, on every door, window, faucet, sink, air conditioning, heating system, computer, light, they put sensors everywhere.  And then they beamed all that data up to the Cloud, up to the supernova, and now they beam it down onto an Ipad with an incredibly user-friendly interface for their janitors.  So, if I leave my computer on or a pipe bursts above my head, they know it just when I do, if not faster and they just swipe down to see who can fix it or how to repair it themselves.  Qualcomm has turned their janitors into maintenance technologists.  Their janitors now give tours to foreign visitors.  What do you think that does for the dignity of a janitor, because he or she is now and intelligent assistant, enabling them to live and learn at a higher pace?  My example of intelligent algorithms is the partnership between the college board and Khan Academy, the online learning platform.  For free PSAT and SAT prep.  Now we all know the story in 11th grade, you have to take your PSAT exam your preparatory SAT exam to see how well you do and to get you ready for your SAT exam to get into the college of your choice.  We all know that many parents will go out and hire a tutor for $200 and hour to boost their kid's PSAT and SAT scores.  Don't worry, many of us did it.  A completely rigged game.  A completely rigged game, because if you come from a neighborhood or a family that can't possibly afford such a tutor, you are at a real disadvantage.  So, 3 years ago, David Coleman of the college board and Sal Khan of Khan Academy created an intelligent algorithm for free PSAT and SAT prep.  The way it works is I take my PSAT in 11th grade and I get the results back and the results say Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom.  You did really well in verbal, you could have a career in writing maybe, but you have a problem in math, in fact you specifically have a problem with fractions and right angles.  It then takes me to a practice site just for fractions and right angles, just for the things that I'm weak at, doesn't waste any time on my strength.  If I do well there, it takes me to another site that says, you know, you could be in AP math.  Me, in AP math?  I don't know anyone who is in AP math, no one in my neighborhood was in AP math, you know, you could be in AP math.  Another site for college scholarships and another site where young boys and girls at the boy's and girl's clubs of America are volunteering to shepherd other young people through this intelligent algorithm.  Last year, 3,000,000 American kids got free PSAT and SAT prep through this intelligent algorithm.  Last example is, is opportunity at work.  So, we have a real problem in this country, we have less count, roughly 32,000,000 people who started college but never finished.  Some went 1 year, 2, 2 and a half, 3, 3and a half years.  They drop out before they did get a degree, they go to apply for a job, where's your BA, no BA, no job.  So, there are groups like Opportunity at Work, that have come along that will now, you can come to them, they will badge what you learned in 1 year, 2 years, 2 and a half, 3 year, and they will then partner with employees to slot you in based on what they have determined you know. 
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So I profile in the book, Young African American Women, Lashawn Lewis who is going to Michigan Tech studying computer science.  She had to drop out for family reasons after three and a half years, ended up having to drive a bus to and from computer school, couldn't make that up, and working on the help desk at a law firm helping lawyers rediscover their lost passwords.  She was discovered by a group like Opportunity at work.  They partnered with Mastercard, slotted her in as a systems engineer at Mastercard.  Today she is a senior systems engineer at Mastercard and in the last line in her interview in my book she says and Mr. Freedman, I still don't have my BA.  That is an intelligent algorithm.  Now, I'm going to make a bet with every one of you.  I'm going to bet none of you have heard of any of this.  And, that's because you weren't paying attention to our last election.  You see, the fact is there is massive innovation going on in our country on the pathway of education to work.  In fact, there's so much innovation, I thought at one point I could just write a book on that.  Whatever you can think of I promise somebody in some community is already doing it, it just needs to be shared and scaled.  Unfortunately, what was our last election about?  Berny Sander's big idea was to tear down the big banks.  Donald Trump's big idea was to tear down Hillary Clinton.  And Hillary Clinton's big idea was to direct you to her website www.hillaryclinton.com.  But, the fact is there is massive innovation going on around this centrally important subject of education to work.  It touches every home and no one's telling anyone about it.  So that brings me to my second world that needs to be reshaped and that is politics.  So, I use a lot of parallels from nature in my book and my thinking in general.  And, I believe, to think about politics today you have to understand that we're actually in the middle of three climate changes at once.  We're in the middle of a change of the climate of the climate.  We're going from what I all later to now.  Later, was when I was growing up and I could fix that lake in Minnesota, repair that forest, save that orangutan, I could do it now or later.  Not anymore.  Later is officially over.  Later will be too late.  So, whatever you're going to save, you better think of saving it now.  That's a climate change.  We're in the middle of a change of the climate of globalization.  We're going from a world that's interconnected to a world that is interdependent.  That's a difference of degree that's a difference of kind.  The interdepended world, your friends can kill you faster than your enemies.  Oh my God, if Greece and Italy's banks go bankrupt, we'll all feel it here.  Greece and Italy, well they're in the EU, they're allies, they can kill us today.  And, your rivals falling in an interdependent world become more dangerous than your rivals rising.  Frankly, if China takes more islands in the South China Sea, I couldn't care less.  If China's growth goes from 0%, from 6% to 0% this festival will not be held next year.  That's what happens in an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising.  That's a climate change.  And lastly, we're going through this climate change in technology.  Machines can now, as I said, analyze, optimize, prophesy, customize, anathematized, anything.  There's a thought about that and thought about politics.  I said to myself, well, if we're going through all these climate changes, who can I interview?  Because, what do you want when the climate changes?  You want two things.  You want resilience.  You need to be able to take a blow.  But, you also want propulsion.  You want to be able to move ahead.  You don't want to be curled up in a ball under your bed just because three climates are changing at once.  So, as I said, I thought who can I talk to about how you get resilience and propulsion when the climate changes?  Then, I realized I knew a woman, she was 3.81 billion years old.  Her name was Mother Nature and she dealt with more climate changes than anybody.  So, why don't I interview her?  So, I called her 800 number, made an appointment and went out to see her.  I sat her down and said Mother Nature, how do you produce resilience and propulsion when the climate changes?  She said, well Tom, first of all I have to tell you everything I do, I do unconsciously.  But, these are my strategies.  She said, first of all I'm incredibly adaptive.  In my world, only the adaptive survive.  And I do it through a very brutal mechanism I call natural selection.  A second, she said, I am incredibly entrepreneurial.  Wherever I see a blank place in nature, I fill it with a plant or animal perfect adapted to that niche.  Lastly she said, thirdly she said I am incredibly diverse and pluralistic.  I love pluralism I try 20 different species and see who wins.  I love diversity.  Fourth, she said, I am incredibly sustainable, everything is food, eat food, poop seed, eat food, poop seed, nothing wasted in my world.  Fifth, she said I'm incredibly hybrid and heterodox.  I try all kinds of ideas and mix them together, mix any birds with any trees, any flowers any bees, any plants with any soils.  Lastly, she said, I do believe in the laws of bankruptcy.  I kill all my failures.  I return them to the great manufacturer in the sky and I use their energy to nourish my successes.  I got it thank you.  You can, you can put the sign down, I got it.  Yeah thanks.  Now, thank you.  So, as I thought about that, it occurred to me that the political party that's going to thrive in the age of acceleration is the one that most closely mirrors Mother Nature's strategies.  And, as I thought about that, I thought, because it was 2016, why don't I start my own political party.  And so, I created, in the book, Mother Nature's political party based on those ideas.  I won't go into the details with you on that.  But, basically the core idea is, on some issues, of course this is all just a proxy for my own politics, but, mother nature's actually to the left of Berny Sanders.  Mother Nature would be for universal healthcare.  She would understand that, in an age of acceleration, we need to improve are safety nets and trampolines because more people are going to find this world too fast.  But, at the same time, because she's hybrid and heterodox, Mother Nature would be to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.  She would be for abolishing all corporate taxes and replacing them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar, a tax on bullets, and a small financial transaction tax.  Mother Nature would want to radically stronger safety nets over here.  And, to pay for them, she'd want to get radically entrepreneurial over here.  Unfortunately, in our politics, if you're for stronger safety nets you're never for radical entrepreneurship, if you're for radical entrepreneurship, you're never for stronger safety nets.  What would Mother Nature call that?  Stupid, that's what she would call it.  She would tell you, you could never build resilience and propulsion that way.  I won't spend any more on politics.  Quickly the last two areas and I finish with this that need to be reshaped.  The first is ethics.  You're thinking ethics, ethics what does that have to do with Moore's law?  Well, thank you.  My chapter on this subject is called Is God in Cyberspace, Is God in Cyberspace.  And, it actually comes from the best question I ever got on book tour in 1999 on the Portland Oregon.  And the man stands up in the balcony, I'm selling a book called Lexus and the Olive Tree and he says Mr. Friedman I have a question.  Is God in cyberspace?  And, I said ah, ah, ah.  I have no idea.  So, I got home, I called my spiritual teacher, he's a rabbi Saint Mark, he's a great Talmudist I met at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and now lives in Amsterdam married to a Dutch priest, interesting character, I said [inaudible] I got a question I've never had before.  Is God in cyberspace?  What should I have answered.  And, he said Tom, well basically in our faith tradition, we have two concepts of the Almighty.  One is that He's Almighty, He smites evil and rewards good.  If that's your view of God He sure isn't in cyberspace which is full of pornography, gambling, cheating, lying, prevarication and now we know fake news, okay.  But, he said fortunately, we have a postbiblical view of God which says God manifests Himself by how we behave.  So, if we want God to be in cyberspace, we have to bring Him there by how we behave there.  Only we can bring God into cyberspace.  Well, as I thought about that, put it in the paperback edition of my book Lexus and the Olive Tree, it sat there for 20 years where none of you saw it.  And, and there it was.  Anyways, I started writing this book and suddenly I start asking myself that question again.  I said why are you asking that question?  And, the answer immediately became clear to me, it's for two reasons, the first happened just last year.  I think 2016 was the year when we started living 51% of our lives in cyberspace. \
^M00:49:59
That's where we went to get our news, write a, find a book, buy a book, buy a house, buy a car, meet with our friends, find a date, find a spouse.  We are now living in the developed world, at least, 51% of our lives in cyberspace.  And, my definition of cyberspace is that it's a realm where we're all connected and no one's in charge.  It's the ultimate God free realm.  There are no stop lights there, no police, no ethics code, no 1-800 please stop Putin from hacking my election.  We are living our lives in a realm that is ethics and God free.  And, at the same time, because of these accelerated powers that I've written about, we're now standing at a moral intersection, we have never stood up before as a human species.  In 1945, we entered a world where one country could kill all of us post Hiroshima.  If it had to be one country, I'm glad it was mine.  I believe we're entering a world where one person can kill all of us and where, at the same time, all of us could actually fix everything.  These same amplified powers are creating a world where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could actually feed, house, clothe, and educate every person on the planet if we put our minds to it.  We have the power to do that now.  We have never stood at this intersection before.  And what does that mean?  It means we have never been more Godlike as a species than we are today.  And, what does that mean?  That we're living most of our lives in a realm that is God free and we are increasingly Godlike, that means what everyone thinks, feels, and believes matters now more than ever.  And, that means that everyone today has to be in the embrace of sustainable values particularly the one everyone shares, the Golden Rule, do unto others as you wish them to do unto you because we now live in a planet where more people can do unto you farther away, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before and you can do unto others farther away, deeper, cheaper than ever before.  Everyone today has to be in the embrace of the Golden Rule.  I know what you're thinking, how naive.  No, what is naive is thinking we're going to be okay if everyone isn't in the embrace of the Golden Rule.  Naivety today, in the age of acceleration is the new realism.  Where does the Golden Rule come from?  It comes from two places in my view, strong families and healthy communities.  I'm not an expert on strong families.  I hope I've built one.  I never lecture anyone on that subject.  But, I am an expert on strong healthy communities because I grew up in one in Minnesota in the 50s, 60s, and 70s called Saint Louis Park.  And, that's why my book and talk ends here.  Basically, the short story is in Minnesota in the 40s.  Minnesota was the, Minneapolis was the capital of antisemitism until Hubert Humphrey became mayor.  My grandparents came from Europe, my parents were born in Minneapolis and I was born in the north side of the city which was a ghetto basically with just Jews and African Americans, not because we were integrated there but because we were isolated there.  My parents couldn't join AAA in the 50s.  antisemitism was a real problem until Huber Humphrey became mayor of the city.  After the war, the entire Jewish community, virtually, of North Minneapolis moves out in a three year period unmasked to one little town called Saint Louis Park, about 20 minutes half hour away outside of Central Minneapolis.  And, overnight, a town that had been 100% white, protestant, catholic, Scandinavian, became 20% Jewish 80% white, protestant, catholic, Scandinavian.  If Sweden and Israel had a baby, it would be Saint Lois Park, okay.  And, I tell the story of how we built a community together, how we built an acute inclusive community together.  And there were warts and there were problems and there were broken hearts and broken days.  But in the end, we built a really interesting community.  I went to high school or religious school or grew up in the same neighborhood roughly the same time with the Coen Brothers, Al Franken, Norm Ornstein, the philosopher Michael Shandel, Sharon Isbin the Guitarist, Marc Trestman the coach of the Chicago Bears, Dan Wilson was someone like you with Adel.  It was a freaky place.  The Coen Brother's movie A Serious Man was about our Hebrew school.  And, if you saw No Country For Old Men, you remember the scene where Chigurh blows up a car outside of a grocery, outside of a pharmacy excuse me in Mexico to go in and steal drugs and at the end of the scene the camera pans to the pharmacy and it's called Mike Zoss Drugs which was the little Saint Louis Park Drugstore.  I tell the story of that community and how I learned something there and it effected all of us, Frank and Sandel, a myself we all took it into politics in different ways.  Some become Minnesota nice, hard to explain Minnesota nice if you're not from Minnesota.  But, you know, in the book I tell the story of home bread in the book and I went to my friend Jay Goldberg's wedding, [inaudible] daughter's wedding and my friend Jay Goldberg was there.  We sat at the table and Jay told me Tom my wife Ilene was driving on the ring road around Minneapolis today and a driver almost drove her off the road.  And she came home and said Jay I was so mad I almost honked.  Okay.  That's Minnesota for road rage okay.  I tell another story.  There was actually a Jewish mafia in Minnesota in the 30s and 40s.  My dad grew up with these guys.  He wasn't in the mafia, I swear.  But, when I was a young boy five or six years old, my dad came home one day and told me a friend of his had been sent to jail.  And, when you're a six year old or five year old kid, the idea your dad knows someone who went to jail, that is freaky.  And, I said to him dad what did he do?  And, rejoinder I never forgot.  He said son he was shopping in a store before it was open.  That's Minnesota for breaking and entering.  Okay.  Anyways, I tell all the story of Minnesota, I left in 1971 to discover the world, and I came back 40 years later to write this book, and found that the world had discovered Saint Louis Park.  Now, my high school's 50% white, protestant, catholic, Scandinavian, 10% Jewish, 10% Hispanic, and 30% Somali, small African American, same community.  And now the diversity challenge both religiously and racially is much bigger, the chasm that has to be built.  And, I tell the story of how they're doing it.  And, they're doing pretty well.  Washington Post says they're still the fifth rated high school in the state of Minnesota.  But it's a struggle, it's a struggle every day.  But, if you want to know why the book, and I conclude here, is an optimist guide, is because the problems are huge.  But, when you go to these communities, it is amazing the number of people who want to get caught trying.  My teacher and friend Emory Lovens likes to say, whenever anyone asks her about Emory what are you an optimist or a pessimist, Emory says I'm not neither because they're just two different forms of fatalism, everything will great, everything will be awful.  Emory says I believe in applied hope.  And, I believe in applied hope.  You want to be an optimist about America today, stand on your head.  The country looks so much better from the bottom up than the top down, okay.  It's not that we don't have communities that are struggling and failing, but we also have a huge number where people are applying hope.  And, that's why my book and this talk ends with a theme song.  My book had a theme song.  I actually thought can I buy this song so when you open the book it would play this song like a Hallmark card plays happy birthday?  And it's really, I think, the anthem of our time.  It's by one of my favorite singers, Brandy Carlyle.  And, the song is called The Eye, E Y E.  And, the main refrain is I wrap your love around me like a chain but I never was afraid that it would die.  You can dance in a hurricane but only if you're standing in the eye.  You see, I think these accelerations I've written about, they're a hurricane.  They are a hurricane.  We have a president who is trying to build a wall against the hurricane.  I'm advocating an eye, an eye that moves with the storm, draws energy from it that creates a platform of dynamic stability, a healthy community, where people can feel connected, protected, and respected.  I think the great struggle in our politics going forward is going to be between the wall people and the eye people.  And, my book is a manifesto for the eye people.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.
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