Pat tens are do divine by prieseest priests and the priests are paid a lot of money for it. That is crazy. The truth is that people dont like taking responsibility for managing making their own Financial Decisions and so theyll always pay these priests, i think, just to get rid of the problem. A they cant get in their heads that not only is that person not an expert, theres no such thing as the expertise. They can get in anywhere head he was a bad expert, he lost my money. Chant get in their head they shouldnt be listening to anybody, and the damage that the intellectual work, the damage that can be done to wall street is minimal. Wall street is responding to psychological deep need and nothing to do with realism. You cant argue it away. So in short, i think the answer is, very little. Host where do you invest your money, just . In a mattress. Host if guest say you think wall street flows on bullshities not sag you dont think the American Economy is a incredible miracle, an engine of wealth creation. The economy is wonderful. The American Economy is one of to great miracles of human history, and i invest in it, but i dont invest in it under the direction of some wall street guru. I buy i think the two smart things to do broad thing is, you decide how much you want to put in the stock market and how much you want to put somewhere else, and then after that, how you put it in the stock market, i either boy low cost index funds so a basket of stocks, or give it to warren buffett, and i do this by buying burk shire hathaway and this is a basket of stock he has but he is the one person on the planet who is capital has a different value. People pay more for his money because of his reputation, and he gets deals that no one ever gets. So, i long lambasted him for being in this situation and then just gave up and i surrendered. I im so happy i surrendered. So i own a bunch of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Hi. I wonder approximately what percentage or to what degree you have prepared for practiced this interview and the response. [laughter] guest she asked how much we prepared this host tomorrow night were in new york. The next night in boston. Guest where were we last night . Hello detroit. Host we did this before at politics and prose up the street. This aslightly larger crowd. Guest i have interviewed joel on stage about his becomes. I dont know if you ever talked to me about my books. Host this is fake news, okay . Im always asking you about your books. Guest he wrote a book about george washington. Are you still a baseball commissioner or softball commissionerror your daughters league . Guest i retired a year ago because thank you daughter outgrew me. I ran the competitive Softball Program in the bay area. Host must have been a heady thing. Guest unbelievable. Half my life. Actually it was a fantastic social experiment. I think we have to wrap it up. But the i live in berkeley, which is filled with all of these liberal people who dont believe in competition, and so the Softball League is a recreational. Its beautiful. The the girls softball leave and if you coach the league, you have to lose have your games. Thats the rule. The perfect coach goes. 500. However, someone years ago realized that some people had a competitive streak, and so they allowed an organization on the side of it to be formed as after that the league concluded, allstars were picked and would good out into the wilds of california and play republicans. And this was always a miserable every game was custers last stan. It was a miserable experience. These little girls were sent off and get mutilated by these red and tooth and claw republicans. I took over the operations seven years ago, and i created liberal warriors. Host everyone in this room has the same thought. This is his next book. Guest and we went out and we really kicked some republican ass. It was really great. And earned their respect for the fir time. So, my 15yearold now, when she was ten, her team was number one in the country, and we got very, very good, and the way i got good was by going outside of the culture of berkeley and getting hardass College Women softball players who did not want to hear, were going to lose. Can i give you a cute little story. Host a small fraction. Guest when my daughters team is going 401, my son, walker, is seven years old, six years old, in the dugout as the bat boy. He is in the dugout as the bat boy and agreed to take the job only because theyre winning trophies and he gets a trophy. He has his wall filled perspective trophies, and walker it sitting with a coach i hired. The one game they were going to lose, met a team, bad day, superior force, down by six runs after two innings and the turn to the coach and says, shannon, were going to lose this game. And she flips. She starts creaming at him. My kid. You dont going to sit in this dugout and be on this team and be the bat boy, you need to think more positive thoughts. So walker sits there for a minute and thinks about and says, shannon, im positive were going to lose this game. And on that note, its been a pleasure. Host thank you for coming. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2. Live coverage of the 17th 17th annual National Book festival. That was michael lewis, talking about his most recent book the undoing project. Mr. Lewis will be our guest on our in depth program, callin program on the first sunday in november. So you can catch him again then. Joining us before we continue other author presentations, joining us now on our set, on the first floor of the Convention Center here in washington, dc, is thomas friedman, thank you for being late. You did an hour presentation earlier. Almost like a ted talk. Guest is that good or bad . Host it was good but in case anyone didnt see it, in a nutshell, how do market forces, moores law and Mother Nature all come together . Guest well, the core theme of the book is were the world is not just changing, its being reshaped. And being reshaped by three simultaneous accelerations. What i call the market, Mother Nature and moores law. The market for me is in digital globalization. But everything is being digitized and globalized by facebook or amazon or pay pal. On a graph looks like a hockey stake. Mother nature is Climate Change and population growth in the developing world. Looks like a hockey stick, and moores laud says the speed and power of microchips will double every 24 months. Now closer to 30. On a graph looks like a hockey stick. Were in monday ol of the the hockey stick accelerations and theyre resaming the work place, geopolitics, ethics and common. Host are the cooperating, conflicting . They good to together. Moores law, drives more globalization, so more technology and mow solutions. 2027488200 in the east and central time zone. 748. 8201 in the mountain and pacific time zones. Mr. Friedman. 2007 was a year that you brought up. One thing you brought up is that nearly half the world has a personal computer in heir hand now. Guest roughly half of the world is connected with some sort of smart device, and im sure within ten years its going to be virtually everybody. Once that happens, basically, you get a lot of changes. You get a very interesting change around education and learning bus basically with this acceleration, the single most competitive advantage is lifelong learning, the days when you can go to college for four years and dine out for 30 is over. How to what you launch in your first year may by outdated by four fourth year. So people who are lean into lovelong learning can have an enormous advantage and the wiggest divide will not be the Digital Divide because everyone will be on the internet. The biggest will be who has the selfmotivation to take up the opportunities that learning opportunities, that custom opportunities, engagement opportunities of the internet. Thats why one of my teachers in at the book says never ask your kid you want to be. Only ask your kid how you want to be. With youve have an agile learning mindset, predisposed to lifelong learn using come 20302040, how were go going to look back at this period weary now . Guest one was alive when got aing berg invent it the Printing Press and some monk said to some priest, thats really cool. I dont have to write all these bibles out long hand. We can just stan them out. Were here at a similar moment. A phase of enormous acceleration in technology. Really is a difference of degree, a difference in kind. And i think its a new world and have to think about all these things differently. Politics, geopolitics, agent thicks, community, work place. Host lets have from adrian las vegas. Youre on with thomas friedman, please go ahead. Caller hello, mr. Freudman. I just finish wedding Thomas Franks book, listen liberal, and he takes you a little bit to task for insisting that education is the path to narrowing income inequality but you justen cant take a coal miner and send him to school and make million a software programmer. If liberals want to win elections, what recommendations do you have for better government policyies. Thats good good we. I didnt hear the hour. Host thomas frank, listen liberal. Guest right. Thats kind of a caricatureat you take every coal miner and turn him interest a software engineer. Thats a strawman. The point is not that we take every miner and turn them into soft engineers. The we is can you take a miner and give him a job as a smart technician working on a assembly line, take a miner and help him become a service worker, engage with people in multiple ways. Its ridiculous to think that well ask everyone to be software engineers. Theres so many job is call in any become stem jobs that combine science, technology, engineering, math, and human empathy. One of the things i write about dish did a column recently. We did a column called holiday panned hands to head to heart. We used to work with our labs for many centuries and then we machines we started working with our heads. Increasingly well work with our hearts. More and more jobs are about connecting people to people. Going from a coal mine store software engineer. This is going to be huge number of jobs involving people to people skills. And we need to think about those every bit as much. Host another column was from afghanistan. But you talk about President Trump in that. He has become such a part of our national conversation, youre even writing about him from afghanistan in a sense. Guest well, the column i wrote was actually came out the time of the charlottesville incident, and i happened to be traveling at the time with the chief on the u. S. Air force and the air force secretary and i couldnt help but look around at the people i was traveling with in northeast, visiting the middle east, and visiting u. S. Bases there, the air force secretary is a woman, her exec officer is an africanamerican lieutenant colonel, their guard is a latino american. The chief of the air force command in qatar is ameanan. He deputy is his chief of intel is yang. Thats the real america, made it great. Having a president who appreciates that, i think is very, very important. We are who we are because we can make out of many into one, and the middle east is what it is today, is because they cant make out of many, one. Host is it as a columnist, is it tough to resist what is going on at the white house . Guest very good question. We see behavior that is so egregious. Never had a president who locked at a enemy mon straights of White Supremacists and neonazis and said theres good people on both sides. So, its hard to resist writing about these kinds of excesses. At the same time i do not want to look bat four years from now and say i only wrote about donald trump. He wasnt learning but a trump will make you stupid, suck all your brains out. If you think and write about him all the time. Host we are talking with New York Times columnist, thomas friedman, about mission become thank you for being late. About glen is calling from freeland, michigan. Youre on book tv. Duvery much. If i may, because im a trump voter, i think he gets a bad rap. He did totally condemn to the socalled neonazi, white nationalists, what war. Think he was referring to more bradley the confederate debate about the statues and symbols and all that. But theres reasonable people on both sides of that. And the reason charlottesville was all painted as White Supremacists and neonazis and all that is because we never had a chance to find out who the speakers really were on that side. They were closed down by the everyone free speech people before they even had a chance to speak. But anyway, let me ask you the question. Im told that my call has been about. Its about iranment i know iran is a bad regime full of howl cast deniers and terrorists. Whats your opinion on the Iran Nuclear Deal . Do you think President Trump should stay in it or not . Thank you very much. Guest well, its an important question, and thank you. This was not a perfect deal. Im not sure perfect was on the menu. Maybe we could have gotten a little better deal itch dont know. But at this stage i think its very important. The fact is iaeia says iran is holding up the deal. In 15 years they will not be able to develop a Nuclear Weapon and if it tries to we can take the necessary steps and isolate iran and compared to that we have already got the problem with north korea. We wouldnt want that problem in stereo where both north korea and iran are hurtling, making Nuclear Weapons so i think at this stage, not perfect, perfect not on the menu, id stay in the deal. Host gene, maryland. Good ahead. Caller good afternoon, mr. Friedman. Thank you for your nice lecture on your book. Theres a piece of good news that might be of value. China has a huge air pollution problem and mitt may just have come up with a substantial solution that will help them in a very fundamental way. That is in a report done on under the us a speak sis of dr. Ortiz, the former secretary of defers depth of energy under obama, he did a study in 2011 of a group about to do with the future of natural gas and found out one of the major conclusions was use natural gas to produce methanol as a practical fuel that is less polluting than gasoline and diesel fuel for trucks. The bottom line is, m. I. T. Engineers came out and produced two very efficient engines, one for cars and even perhaps more important one, for trucks, and sure enough, china has again full blast, galley auto of china announced theyre producing methanol engines for trucks which in their two paragraph announcement they its the only methanol engine authorized by m. I. T. Host gene, can you wrap this up . Caller right. Our technical people can help china and also, methanol can be made from carbon carbon dioxidee a solve the problem. Use it forking me until a. Host well here it there. Guest im not familiar with that technology but i know theres enormously exciting stuff going on in that field, and if that technology is being produced by m. I. T. Now and being scaled by china, thats a good thing for the world. We all bring the same air. Host well, thomas friedman, whats the connection between three of your books, the electric husband and olive trial, the world is flat and thank you for being late. Guest thats a really good question, peter. In some ways im writing about the same issue and its really in all frameworks, the tension between the things which i call all its trees, family, community, language, faith. Those things that anchor us in the world and all these new technologies that on the one hand destabilize us but on the other hand us the tools in order to make the work world better or more efficient. To me its all about how do we get those things in balance . Because when localization and globalization are at balance, they make what my friend carrie calls harmonization. When theyre not in balance, when people feel the community, the things that anchor them are being destabilized by technology, then you get the kind of disruptive politics we see today so what all these books are about is how to understand these forces and how to keep our lexus and our olive tree, the things that anchor us to the world, that give us security, give us warmth, give us connection and at the same time can balance those with all these new technologies and the power and opportunities they give us as well, thats what im writing about. Theres a real fear factor, theres fear out there because when you go to the Grocery Store in some communities and you see the cashier and shes not wearing a baseball cap, shes speaking a language you dont understand, and you go to the mens room and you see somebody may be of a different gender and you go to your office and your boss just rolled a robot up to your desk and it seems to be studying your job. When all of those are going on, its one thing for people to feel unanchored and if the candidate or politician says i can stop the wind that a lot of people are going to be open to that idea. And so really what im writing about is that tension, that challenge, thats what thank you for being late is all about. Its a book that celebrates wanting, anchoring and being connected. Host there is the cover of the book, allen in Bloomfield West virginia, good afternoon and you are on the commentary speed for mister friedman, i appreciate the thought and what you said about the golden rule and morality. And im wondering if you are aware of the difference between an ipo on a stock that is just coming to market that the Company Raises money and creates jobs and eight regular stock purchase in which money is simply transferred from one stock owner to another owner who buys up stock with the idea that its going to go up and he will make money so its like handicapping horses or gambling in other ways and i dont feel it has the same kind of tax advantage that Capital Gains advantage apply to those now. Guest its a great question that theres no doubt that with online trading now, theres a lot of people just rent stocks for an hour, a day, a week or a month and the longterm investors and as a result that puts pressure on companies to think long term, to think shortterm and the more they do that, that tends to lead to less sound decisionmaking over the long run so anything that occurs to these people will be longterm individual investors that occurs companies to dolongterm actual investors, s