You are watching the tv on cspan2 with live coverage of the 17th annual National Book festival. , talk that was Michael Lewis you are listening to talk about his most recent book. By the way, mr. Lewis will be our guest on our indepth program on the first sunday in november, so you can catch him again their. Joining us before we continue other author presentations joining us onset of the first floor of the Convention Center in washington dc is Thomas Friedman with his most recent book. Thank you for being late, an optimist guide to thriving in the age of acceleration. Mr. Friedman, you did an hour presentation earlier, almost like a ted talk . Guest is that good or bad . Its good, but in case anyone did not see it, in a nutshell how do Market Forces and Mother Nature all come together . Guest the name of the book is that with the world is not changing, its being reshaped by three simultaneous acceleration in what i call the market, Mother Nature and more slot. Market is digital globalization. Gl everything todays digitized by facebook or amazon and paypal. Put that on a graph and it looks like a hockey stick. Mother nature is Climate Change and population growth and put that on a graph and it looks like a hockey stick. Morris law, basicallyro doubles every 24 months months. Put it on a graph it looks like a hockey stick. He we are in the middle of three hockey stick accelerations reshape the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethics and community. Host are they cooperating . H are they conflicting . Guest they go together. So, more Technology Drives more globalization. More Technology Drives more Climate Change, but as your question suggests, also moreio solutions. Guest 202 is the area code if you want to talk with Thomas Friedman 748, 74880284 matching a specific time zones. Mr. Friedman, 2007 was a year you brought up your queue brought up nearly half the world has a personal computer in their hand up . St guest roughly half the world is connected with some smart device and im sure within 10 years it will be virtually everyone. Once that happens basically you get a lot of changes. U you get instant changeus ran education and learning because basically with this acceleration the singlee most Important Competitive advantage becomes lifelong learners, so the day where you go to college for four years is over. Now you learn your first year and therefore people who can lean into Lifelong Learning will have enormous advantage and that means the biggest divide in the world will no longer be so much digital divide, who is on the internet and who isnt, it will be who has the selfmotivation to take up the learning opportunities, custom opportunities and engagement opportunity of the internet and thats why one of my teachers said have you asked your kid what you want to be when you grow up because whatever it is it will be gone unless its policeman or fireman. Ask your kid how you want to be when the you grow up. Host come 2030, 2040 how willk we look back at this time we are in now . Guest one of the things i remind people is that someone was alive when gutenbergess and invented the Printing Press and some monk probably said to somee priest thats pretty cool. T. I think we are hearing a similar moment. Its a phase, phase of enormous acceleration and technology that really is the difference of degree. I think its a bornagain new world and we have to think aboutut these things differentlypo , politics, geopolitics, ethics, the workplace. Host lets take all his and hear from adrian in las vegas. You are on with Thomas Reagan friedman. Guest hello. I just finished reading Thomas Franks book and he takes you a bit to task for insisting education is the path to narrowing income inequality, but you just cant take a call minor and send him to school and make him a software programmer, so if liberals want to win elections, what recommendations do you have for better government policy . Guest i didnt hear who the author was. Host thomas frank was in liberal. Guest yes, thats kind of a caricature that i think you just take every home minor and turn him into a software engineer. Thats a straw man. The point is not that we take every minor and turn him into a software engineer. The question is can you take a minor and give him a job as a smart technician working on an Assembly Line which is all computerized. Can you take a miner and help him become a service worker, engage with people in multiple ways . Its ridiculous to think we will ask everyone to be software engineers. There are 70 jobs likence, t have in my book, jobs that combine science, technology, engineer,nd math and empathy. One of the things i write about, we did a call and called hands head to heart. Most of us used to work with our hands and with machines and computers we started to work with our head and the only thing increasingly as we will work with our heart more and more jobs will be about connecting people to people. Re you dont have to go from a minor to software engineer. Um there will be a huge number of Software Jobs involving people tonk people skills and we need to think about those ever bit as much. Host another call in the row was from afghanistan, but you talked about President Trump in that, i mean, he has become such a part of our nationalal conversation, you are even writing about him from afghanistan. Guest the call them i wrote was actually it came out roughly about the time of charlottesville incident and i was traveling with the cheat of the u. S. Air force and air force secretary and i really could not help but look around at the people i was traveling within the middle east as we visited us airbases that our air force chief of Eastern European jewish just that. Executive officer is africanamerican lieutenant colonel, their guard in latina. Chief of the air force command is lebaneseamerican. He chief of intel was namedan yang. That is the real america a presw and thats what made us great and having a president who appreciates that is 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 because they cant make out of many one. Host is it as a columnist is it tough to resist whats going on at the white house . Guest good question. On the one hand, we see behavior that is so egregious. Weve never had a president who has looked dead a demonstration of White Supremacy neonazis and opponents and said there are good people on both sides so its hard to resist writing about these. At the same time, i dont want to look back four years from now is eight i only wrote about donald trump. Will trump will make you stupid and suck your brain out if you think and write about him all the time. Host we are talking with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about his most recent book thank you for being late. Glenn is calling in from michigan. Glenn, you are on book tv . Caller thank you. If i may because i am a trump voter i reallygep. Think he gets a bad rap. Ally c he did totally condemn the socalled neonazis, whatever. I think he was referring to referring to the statues and symbols about that that there is reasonable people on both sides of that and the reason charlotte is seen as white supremacist and neonazis is because we never had a chance to find out who the speakers were on that side. They were closed down by that anti freespeechey people before they had a chance to seek, but anyway let me ask you the question. This is about iran. Wh y what is your opinion onnu the Iran Nuclear Deal . Ou think do you think President Trump should stay in . Guest its been important question. Thank you. This was not a perfect deal and im not sure perfect was on the menu. Maybe we could have gotten a better deal, i dont know. At this stage i think its important. The fact is iran is living up to the deal. We basically have a wrong in a regime that for 15 years will not be able to develop a Nuclear Weapon and if it tries to we can take home take the necessary steps and isolate them as a result and compared to that we already have the trump and north korea, we would not want that problem in stereo b stereo. I think at this stage, not perfect. Deal. Perfect not on the menu. I would stay in the deal. Host gene from maryland, please go ahead. Caller good afternoon, mr. Friedman. There is a piece of good news going on that might be of value. China has a huge air pollution problem and mit may have come up with a solution to help them in a fundamental way. A report done under the former secretary of depp fans under obama did a study in 2011, majorr group of what to do with the future of the financial gas and found a major conclusion wass was used national gas to produce methanol as a practical fuel. The bottom line is mit engineers came out and had produced two very efficient engines, one for cars and another perhaps more important one for trucks and sure enough china has gone full blast. Just announced threest months ago, china announced they are producing methanoley engines for trucks, which in their two paragraph announcement they get full credit saying is the only methanol engine authorized by mit. Host gene, can you wrap this up caller our technical peoplecanp helped china and also methanol can be made from carbon dioxide. Its been made in iceland and may also help solve the problemthe pr to sequester carbon dioxide. Until a. Host we will leave it there and hear from mr. Friedman. Guest i am not familiar withi that technology, but i know exciting stuff going on in that field and if that technology is produced by mit and skilled by china that is a good thing for the world. He we all breathe the same are. Host Thomas Friedman, was the connection between the three of your books . Is flat a guest thats a good question. In a some ways im really writing about the same issue and its the attention, it really is that framework, the tension between the things that interestall which i call olive trees, family, community , region, place, language, space,at the things that anchor us in the world and all these new technologies that on the one hand this stabilizer as an on the other hand give ushe in enormous tools to make the world better or break it bring it more o efficiently and to me its about how do we get those things in balance because when localization and globalization are in balance, then you get what my friend callsar harmonization. When they are not in balance, when people feel their community and the things that anchor them are destabilized by technology, then you getand the kind of disruptive politics you see today. Really what all these books are about our how to understand these forces and how to keep our olive trees, the things that anchor us in the world, that give us security, give us warmth, give us connections at the same time and balance those with the new technologies and the power and opportunityygive u they give us as well. Thats what im writing about. Host there is a real fuel factor isnt there . Guest there is fear out there because when you go to theou Grocery Store in some communities and you see the cashier and she is not wearing a baseball cap, wearing a different head cover in speaking like good you dont understandeo and then you go to the mens room and maybe see someone of a different gender and then you go to the office and your boss just rolled a robot that your desktoe and when all of that is going on at once its no wonder people feel unanchored. If a candidate or politician comes along and says i can stop the wind than a lot of people will be open to that idea and a so what t im writing about is that tension and that challenge. Thank you for being like late, thats what its all about. It celebrates anchoring and being connected. Host and there is the cover ofo the book. Allen in a bluefield, west virginia, good afternoon. Mas you are on with Thomas Friedman. Caller i appreciate like you said about the golden rule and need for morality. Im wondering if you are aware of the difference between an ipo, initial price offering on the stock that is just coming to market for a company to raise money and create jobs and a regular stock purchase in which money is simply transferred from one stock owner to another owner who buys that stock with the idea that its going to go up and hes going to make money like handicapping horses or gambling in other ways and i dont feel should have the same kind of a tax advantage that Capital Gains advantage that is applied to both now. Guest interesting question that there is no doubt that with online trading now there is a lot of people rent stocks for an hour, a day, a week or a month and they are not longterm investors and as a result it puts pressures on company to think long think shortterm and the more they do that it tends to lead to less sound decisionmaking. Anything that encourages people to be longtermgterm individual investors and encourages companies to be longterm actual investors is probably as net good thing. Host at the same time it wont change back to what it was before. Guest true. We are where we are, soon the question is really, there are companies now that in recent months Big Companies and i think at t was one that said we will not givee quarterly. We will tell you where we are going and if you want to join us for this ride, join us, but we wont give you every quarter prediction, guide, didnt need it or not. Term no way to make healthy longterm decisionmaking. Host next call comes from cynthia, new jersey. Cynthia, you are on book tv c3 hello, mr. Friedman. I have heard you speak and you talk about Lifelong Learning and i agree with that completely, but i am 63 years old and i have a lot of trouble with dealing with the computers and i live on a fixed income of less than 1100 a month and i have tried to teach myself and i just know have anyone to help me, so how do you address people like me with a fixed income and not the technology didnt grow up with the technology and, you know, to learn these things and be able to continue because its hard even to deal with doctors and medical professionals. Host civic, before we get anfo answer, are you do you thinkin you are willing or do you think you are resistant to do new technology . Caller i am willing i would like to be able to be a part of it, you know, because its holding me back, i feel. Host thank you maam. Guest really profound question. Thank you for calling in there is a couple thingswo i would say, never one looking to see if your local library has courses, sort of basic introduction to computer and online and the other thing i encourage you that if you have a computer, go to a site called con academy. Its a wonderful introduction, both for math, but also history programs and i think youk will find it extremely userfriendly, but there are a lot of things online. If you just put into your computer, Free Education and scroll down, you will be amazed at what youll find, but compu eating managing the basics of the computer and i understand itsdi difficult, check out your local library, your local adult learningse services. I bet there are courses you can take. Your question is important. Thank you for sharing. Host as someone who writes for a legacy newspaper, how has your life changed in the last 10 years or so because oft technology . Guest first time i was on cspan was ryan lamb for a book i wrote in 1988. When i wrote that book i had a physical researcher that sat next to me. I gave him assignments and he went to the library and got the answer. My new book thank you for being late, i had google to research and she never asked me a question and work 247, 365. She was free and found every answer. Thats really the difference. I found it now i can simply ask a question like, what kind of audience does cspan have, is cspan in the book business, what kind of people calling to cspan and it would take me to sociological studies of your audience that assistant google is getting deeper and richer all the time. Host last call for thomasas friedman from california. Goahead. Ad. Caller im 76 years old. Why should i buy an iphone . Guest good one. [laughter] one 0 guest let me just say one of my favorite lines is the in my book is when you press the pod but not a computer it stops, but when you press the pod button on a human being it starts. Thats when it reflects, rethinks and reimagines. I was on a trip to the middle east and on the two days before the end of the trip i left my phone on a helicopter so i didnt have my phone for the last two days. They were the best two days of the trip. I paid attention to everyone and listened to everyone. I wasnt trying to take a picture or scrambling for my email. God bless you. Trust me, you may want it for an emergency or to be in touch with your family, but other thenen that you will be fine. This book celebrates everything old and slow thing and all the things you cant download that you have to upload the old fashion way, good frie