on behalf of everybody at p and p and the staff here at sixth&i welcome. you know we and pnp have been doing jointly sponsored author talks for a number of years. as much as we would have liked to have had you at our store on connecticut avenue, you just all would not have fit. so we really are very excited to be able to use this spacious and very beautiful and comfortable setting for author talks like the one this evening. and what a treat to have thomas friedman with us. and i'm sure you're familiar with his columns of the new york times in his books. note how great explain on just about everything he is. you can cut through the complexity of something and write about them as clearly as tom can.he says that the start of his new book that he went into journalism in part because he loves translating from english to english. and that has been evident in his work. when he focuses on in his new book, thank you for being late. our several portions that he singled out as defining the world these days and defining our lives of dizzying -- these forces are reshaping our lives and how we can cope with them. thinking this through, tom toward the end of the book with the community in which he grew up. the st. louis park, suburb of minneapolis. for lessons on remaining anchored and connecting with others and trusting and succeeding. tom of course has had a storied career as a journalist. dating back to well ãhigh school in minnesota. that is when his passion for journalism was sparked by 10th grade teacher and his interest in the middle east is also ignited with his parents on a trip to israel. in college and school to focus studies on the mediterranean and middle east. so it seemed only fitting that soon after becoming a journalist he ended up more part of the world. it was united press international the first sent him to beirut and after he moved to "the new york times" it wasn't long before they sent him back to beirut and then on to jerusalem. his reporting during those years garnered him to pulitzers for national coverage and his first book from beirut to jerusalem. relocating to washington, tom was assigned as a quick succession to three of the papers reporting jobs. chief diplomatic correspondent, chief white house correspondent and international economics correspondent. in 1995, 21 years ago he took over the papers foreign affairs column and has been at it ever since. winning one third pulitzer, this one for commentary in 2002. those who follow tom's columns no that they're not just about foreign affairs and the traditional sense of diplomacy and conflict. the deal with globalization, environment, finance, technology and a number of other issues relevant to how the world works today. his six previous books have also exhibited a wide range of interests.as well as the same engaging conversational writing style that has characterized his columns. tom writes for the general reader and as we are about to hear, his talks to the general listen at you. please join me in welcoming thomas friedman. >>. [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. thank you. [laughter] the last time i was here, my daughter was here and my son-in-law was here and there was ãthey were getting married. they are in the front here. [applause] >> thank you all for coming out. thank you for not being late. i am going to talk tonight about my book. i will talk about 40 minutes to give you a general overview and that will give out microphones in the front and i'm looking forward to your questions. let me get right to it. the title of the book. "thank you for being late: an optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations" where does that come from? the title actually comes from meeting people in washington d.c. for breakfast over the years as a columnist. and once in a while someone would be 10, 15, 20 minutes late. and there was a time i'm really sorry was the weather the trap of the subway, homework. and one day i just spontaneously said to one of them, peter, my friend peter i said actually peter, thank you for being late. because you are late, i have been eavesdropping on their conversation fascinating. i have been people watching the lobby, fantastic. and they just connected to ideas i've been struggling with for a month. so thank you for being late. and people started to get into it. they would say well, well you are welcome. [laughter] because they recognize what i was doing was actually giving them permission to pause. to slow down. to reflect. in fact my favorite quote in the beginning of the book is from my friend doug seidman. he 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. it starts to reflect. you think and reimagine. and this book was really my attempt to press the pause button on myself. in order to reflect, rethink and reimagine where we are. and the book indeed began with a pause. where i stopped and engaged someone who i normally would not have. and it ended up through a sequence of events producing this book. i work for "the new york times" and you know i live in bethesda maryland. about once we do take the subway to work. so for me that means driving down the boulevard in a park in the public parking garage beneath the bethesda hyatt. and i did that almost 3 years ago.when i started this project. i parked there, take the red line into dc. i come back, get in my car get my timestamp ticket. i-drive to the cashier booth, give the ticket to the cashier. he looked at it, looked at me and said i know who you are. i said great. he said i read your column. i said great. he said i don't always agree. >> and i actually said will that is good. it means you always have to check. and we both had a laugh and i drove off. a week later i took my weekly subway ride. redline into dc, back, car, timestamp ticket, cashier booth, same guy is there. this time he says, mr. friedman, i have my own blog. would you read my blog? i thought ãoh my god, the parking guy is now my competitor. [laughter] what just happened? so i said write it down for me and i will check it out. so he brought it down and he took a piece of cashiers tape, ripped in half and wrote it down. i turned it on my computer when i got home and it turns out he was ethiopian. he wrote about the democracy in his point of view on his website. and i started to think about this guy. and i wondered who he was and what his story was. and i eventually concluded that this was a sign from god. i should pause and engage him. but i did not have his email. so the only thing i could do was park in the parking garage every day. so i start taking the subway every day. it was for five days, i don't remember now how many. i parked my car under the gate. i got out and i said now i know his name and i invited him tonight of course he was ill. and i said, i want your email. and that night he happily gave it to me. i wrote him an email. i repeat all of the emails in the front of the book. and i basically said to him i have a proposition for you. i am ready to teach you how to write a column. if you will tell me your life story. and he basically threw a couple of emails said, i see her proposing a deal. i like this deal. [laughter] so he asked that we meet in his office. at peace coffeehouse in bethesda. which we did two weeks later. i presented him with a six page memo on how to write a column. and he told me his life story. and it was the first time i had ever actually put all of this together. i once taught a course on how to write a column at my daughter's college. but i largely sat down and reflected on what it was about. and this is and if -- this was an ethiopian immigrant. the dust was blogging on ethiopian websites but they were too slow. so he decided to start his own blog. and now mr. friedman he said i feel empowered. he knows his google metrics. you have to to love a parking guy who loves his google metrics. he is writing over 30 countries. my parking guy. what an amazing world. that he can get his voice out there. so, i then presented him with my memo. and we actually went over three times. three different sessions.i explained to him that a new story is meant to inform. and it can do so better, i can write a news story about sixth&i. what a column, is meant to provoke. i am neither in the heating business nor the lighting business. that is what i do, okay? i either spoke up and emotion inside of you ãif i do both i will produce one of several reactors. i did not know that. i never looked at it that way. i never connected those things. your favorite, he said exactly what i felt but did not know had to say. god bless you. i want to kill you and your offspring.any of these reactions will tell you you produced that heat or light. and to produce heat or light i said to him actually requires a chemical reaction. and you have to combine three chemicals. the first is, what is your value set? how do you lean into the world? what are the ideas ãwhat does ãwhat is the world idea? -- what is the values that you are trying to promote? second, how do you think the machine works? so the machine is my shorthand. what are the biggest forces shaping more things and more places in more ways on more days? as a columnist i am always carrying around a working hypothesis of how the machine works. because i'm trying to take my values and push the machine. if i don't know how the machine works, i either will not push it or i will push it in the wrong direction. and all of my books, they really have been one take or another and how i think the machine works. lastly, what have you learned about people? and culture. how the machine affects people and culture and how people and culture affect the machine. stir those three together, let it rise, think for 45 minutes. and if you do this right you will produce a column that produces heat or light. so the more i explained this, the more i thought to myself ã well, if that is what a column is about what is your value set? where did it come from? how do you think the machine works today? and what have you learned about people and culture?and i decided that was the book i wanted to write. and that is what "thank you for being late" is all about. so i do not have time obviously to go through the whole thing so i will focus on the core engine of the book. how the machine works today. so i think what is shaping more things in more places in more ways and more days, is that we are in the middle of three accelerations. one of them is a exponential, they all may be in fact. in the three largest forces of the planet. all at the same time. i called them the market, mother nature and moore's law. so moore's law coined by gordon moore 50 years ago now the cofounder of intel says that the speed and power of microchips will double roughly every 24 months. and while it is probably 30 months now that is basically held up for over 50 years if you port moore's law intergraph it looks like a hockey stick. mother nature for me is climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth. if you put that on a graph, that looks like a hockey stick. and lastly, the market for me is globalization. but not your grandfather's mobilization. not containers on ships, that is actually declining.digital globalization. twitter, facebook, paypal, all things that are not being digitized and globalized. put it on a graph and it looks like a hockey stick. we are actually in the middle of three hockey stick accelerations all at the same time with the three largest forces on the planet and they are all interacting with one another. one is moore's law, globalization, more globalization drives more climate change. also solutions as well. but they all whirled around each other. and i think that is what is shaping more things in more places in more ways on more days. now the real thing is moore's law. and that is why the second chapter of the book, i will go through the three accelerations quickly. this is the first one. moore's law, second chapter is called what the hell happened in 2007? 2007. sounds like such an innocuous year. 2007, what is this guy talking about? well, here is what happened in 2007. the iphone came out in 2007. january 2007, steve jobs in san francisco. beginning a process whereby we are putting in internet-enabled handheld computer into the hands of every person on the planet. but that is not all that happened in 2007. he spoke came out of high schools and universities in 2000 ãactually late 2006. and became available to anyone with an email address. in 2007 a company called twitter ãwhich was launched a few months before went global. in 2007, a company ãnot a company, a software called ã the most important company in your life that you've never heard of named after the founder's sons white elephant. created a foundation for big data. by creating an open source software platform that made a million computers work like one computer. in 2007 a company called ãalso launched itself. the biggest now open source software repository in the world is roughly 14 million users. got an idea? no problem. just go to the library, pulled off the shelf, use it, fix it, improve it and put it back on the shelf. it is one of the most important companies in the world today. that is not all that happened in 2007. in 2007, google him out with something called android. in 2007, google bought a company called ãa guy name jeff came out with something called the kindle. in 2007 ibm started a cognitive computer called watson. in 2007 three roommates in san francisco thought it would be a really cool idea to rent out their air mattresses to some guys coming for a design conference and they started a company called air b&b. ever seen a graph of the price of sequencing of human genome? looks like this. straight down. up here, $100 million. down here, $1200. it goes over the cliff, 2007. 2007 ãsomething called fracking started. 2007, look at a graph of solar energy. it takes off in 2007. in 2007, something we call the cloud started. go back to the beginning, it looks just like that. look at the first date ã2007. 2007 changed ãstarted. in 2005 michael dell retired. he had seen it all. in 2007 he decided he had to come back to work. in 2007, intel for the first time, extended moore's law. and introduced non-silicon metals and transistors. turns out the 2007 may be seen in time as the single greatest technological inflection point since gutenberg invented the printing press. and we completely missed it. why? 2008. [laughter] so think about what happened. all right, right when our physical technologies just took off. like we were on a moving sidewalk at an airport that suddenly went from five miles an hour to 35 miles an hour. all of our, what to call the social technologies ãthe learning systems and management systems, the regulation and deregulation. you need it to get the most out of this acceleration and push ã they all basically froze. and in that disjunction, we have been living the last seven or eight years. think about this election in the context of 2007 and 2008. let me digress for one moment. so, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, if you were an average worker with an average education ã high score above. you actually could get something called a high wage middle skill job. i called a congressman from minnesota, will get that later. but he said minnesota in the 60s and 70s you actually needed a plan to fail. if you are an average worker you needed a plan to fail. because there was so much wind and so much blue-collar work and even white-collar work that you could get with a high school degree. my uncle only had a high school degree and worked in a bank in the minneapolis area in the 60s. then globalization starts to hit and technology stuff to accelerate. 80s, 90s, early 2000's. what do we do for the average worker to help them compete? we actually didn't. we didn't improve education. we give them credit cards and home mortgages.and a lot of the ãthe average worker was able to sustain themselves there huge expansion of credit and rising up the values of their homes. then in 2007 and 2008 happened. what happens in 2007 is, and i will explain this in a second, machines and software. now start ravenously eating white-collar and blue-collar jobs at a pace we've never seen before. and people lost their homes. because of the 2008 crisis. and that shock i would argue, produced this election. produced a lot of very dislocated and angry people. but i digress. so basically, what happened, what produced 2007 was the fact that it wasn't just microchips. that were in moore's law. microchips were accelerating, software was accelerated, networking was accelerating, storage was accelerating, sensors were accelerating. and in 2007 they all meld into something we call the cloud. the cloud. i never use the term, the cloud. because it sounds so soft. [laughter] so cuddly. so fluffy. sounds like a joni mitchell song. i looked at clouds from ãthis ain't no cloud folks. this is a supernova. supernova is the largest force in nature. an explosion of a star. only this is an ever accelerating supernova. and it has basically ãtwo things came together. i was here on the stage around 2005. to tell the story of a massive collapse in the price of fiber-optic cable. it happened as a result of the.com boom jump bubble and bus. made fiber-optic cable so cheap, we accidentally wired the world. and i gave that moment a name. i said the world was flat. because we had so collapse the price of conductivity, that we could suddenly touch people we could never touch before. and we could be touched by people who could never touch us before. and i wrote a book called the world is flat. i wrote the 2.0 edition in 2006. at the root 3.0 edition in 2007. and then i stopped.i had it figured out. [laughter] 2007 as my broker says to me, a bad year to stop sniffing glue. okay? [laughter] i basically stopped. in 2011, i wrote another book and was here for that with my colleague. about america, they used to be asked. and when i wrote that book that i had missed something. i'd missed something. because i suddenly realized that when i was running around the world in 2005 telling people the world is flat, facebook didn't exist. twitter was still a sound. the cloud was still in the sky. 4g was a parking place. [laughter] linked in, for most people was a prison. application is what you sent to college, big data was a rap star. and skype was a typographical error. [laughter] all of that had happened between just 2005 and 2011. of course, only when i wrote this book that i understand it all really came together in 2007. and what produced that? another price collapse. only this time it wasn't the collapse of conductivity, it was the collapse in the price of complexity. we made computing and storage so cheap ãthat we could make complexity fast, free, easy for you and invisible. think of what it was to catch a taxi five years ago. and what it is today, what you can now do with one touch. you can page a cab, directly, pay the cab and rate the cab. massive amounts of complexity have now been abstracted away. and it is happening everywhere. it is like a phase change from solid to liquid. it is putting grease and leverage everything. so when you make conductivity free, fast, free and easy for you and your big eunice. and he makes complexity fast, free, easy for you and invisible ãyou get an incredible release of energy that changes four kinds of power. and that is what we are now living with. it changes the power of one. what one person can do today as a maker or a breaker is phenomenal. we have a president-elect who can sit in his penthouse now. and on his iphone, to two 20 million people and to them, almost the entire globe. unmediated. it has changed the power of machines. machines can now think. in february 2011, the world changed. of all places on a game show. it was called jeopardy. they had the two all-time champions.jennings and broder. and it just went by his last name, watson. mr. wotton passed on the first question. but he buzzed and before the two humans on the second question. and the question was, it's used by a dealer in a casino and worn on the foot of a horse. and under 2.5 seconds, watson said in his unique voice ãwhat is a shoe. the world has not been the same since. a cognitive computer figured out a pun. not what year was american-born. figured out a pun faster than to human beings. it change the power of machines. it is changed the power of flows. and flow and change at a speed we've never seen before. five years ago barack obama said marriage is between a man and a woman. today barack obama says marriage is between two and human beings who love each other. and he is following ireland in that. think of how quickly ideas now flow and melt away.and lastly, it has changed the power of many. we as a collective are now a force of nature. in fact, the newest geological era is being named for us.the anthropic city ãso these four kinds of power, they aren't just changing the world. they are fundamentally reshaping the world. and they are reshaping five rounds. the first part of my book is about these accelerations. the second part is about the five realms that are being reshaped and how i think we need to reimagine them. the workplace is being reshaped. politics is reshaped. geopolitics is being reshaped. ethics and community. let me go through a couple of those just to give a flavor of what i'm talking about. so my chapter on how the workplace is being reshaped is called how we cope ai into ia. we turn artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance. eight and -- so people can learn faster and govern smarter to live in an age where there is this change in the pace of change. one of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is a power of an exponential. and that's what we are in the middle of. my friend sandy and her friend wrote a book called the second machine age.like to tell the story of the man who invented chess.very well known story. the king said how can i reward you good sir. the man said i just want to be my family. well what would you like the king said? is it i just like you to put two on the first square, four on the second, eight on the next, just keep doubling it. my family will be fine. the king said, no problem. it shall be done. not realizing we double something 63 times the number you get is like 18 ãand as andy and eric point out we just -- where the doubling starts to get really big and you start to see really funky stuff. you start to see cars that can drive themselves. machines that not only can win at jeopardy but watson has now basically ingested every article written on cancer. you start to see really funky stuff. the power of an exponential is so hard to demonstrate that intel decided just to give its users some feel for this. it's engineers on the back of an envelope basically said what if a 1971 volkswagen beetle improved at the same exponential rate as microchips? and they calculated today that the beetle would go 300,000 miles an hour, it would get 2 million miles per gallon and it would cost four cents. [laughter] that's the kind of exponential we are in. and therefore, we are all feeling it, the change in the pace of change in our workplace. i was like to say when i get out of college i got to find a job. when my girls got out of college they had to invent a job. and i think this will increasingly be true. so i checked on the workplace is called how we turn artificial intelligence into this kind of intelligent assistant and algorithms. the example i gives our, first of all the hr policies of at&t. a big company, 360,000 employees living on the edge of the supernova. competing every day with verizon, deutsche telecom, t-mobile. very interesting to understand what their hr policies are like. so i spent a lot of time with their hr team.quite simply, this is what at&t does. randall stephenson their ceo begins the year with a radically transparent speech about what worldly things therein. what the competitive environment is like and what skills you're going to need as an at&t employee this year. then they put every employee on their in-house linkedin system. then they look brad graham, brad graham. then with 10 skills we think we you need to drive this year at at&t. you have got seven of them. but you are missing three. then they partner with sebastian through audacity the online learning platform and he created nano degrees for all 10. then they came to employees is that we will give it up to $8000 or $8500 to take all of these courses. on one condition. you have to take them on your own time. if you take these courses, our deal with brad is that when new jobs open up, brad will get the first crack at them. we won't go outside. their new social bargain with their employees is very simple. if you want to be a lifelong employee at at&t, you have to be a lifelong learner. for if your lifelong learner, you can be a lifelong employee. if brad says you know what?i have too many cell phone poles, i am tired, i don't want to take these courses they have a wonderful severance package for brad. but brad will not be working at at&t anymore. that social contract is coming to a neighborhood near you. intelligent assistant. what is the example of that? the example i give is qualcomm did a lot of work with ãone of the most important companies you never heard of. they made all of the software for your iphone. so qualcomm has a campus of 64 buildings in san diego. in a couple of years ago they basically retrofitted a bunch of these buildings with sensors on every pipe, every electric socket, every computer, every door, window, every hvac system. and just have sensors on everything. they being all that data up to the cloud and they beam it down onto an ipad for the janitors. there janitors now walk around with an ipad. you leave your computer on and they know it. that label goes out, they know it. you leave a door or window open and they know it. they can also sweep down with the repair process, manuals are all there. it did there janitors in intelligent assistance. to enable them to live above the line. there janitors now give tours to foreign visitors. now think what that does for the dignity of that person. because now they've got an intelligent assistant enabling them to operate at this higher level. intelligent algorithm? that is, my example is the partnership between the college board and khan academy. so i see this crowd looks like roughly my age and ãmy demographic. we all have kids in college, we know when they're in high school he had to take a psat exam and sat exam. and i know you did, you hired a tutor to get your kids psat and sat score of. and get ãyou had to pay some college kid $200 like for two hours in order to lift your kid above the line. wonderful thing for your kids. for you and me, completely rigged game. if you come from a family that can afford that ãyou are behind the april from day one. so what happened is the college board who administers the psat partnered with qualcomm and they created free psat and sat prep courses online. now brad takes his psat exam in 11th grade. any guess the results back from khan academy and says brad, you did really well. they have a problem with fractions and right angles. then it takes brad to a website, con academy. devoted just to fractions and right angles. just for him. tailored to exactly his weaknesses. if he does well, comes back and says brad, have you thought of taking an ap math in your senior year? and then they've got another link that will take into college scholarships. it's an intelligent algorithm. last year, 2 million american kids got free sat prep through this intelligent algorithm. so what you actually fine and you would never have known it from this campaign, was the biggest idea of bernie sanders was to take down the banks. that people actually doing amazing stuff to try to help people live at this higher pace of change. but it's a real, it's a real challenge. i'll talk briefly about my chapter on how we need to reimagine politics.so i believe we are just in the middle of one climate change. where in the middle of a changing climate. were also in the middle of a change of the climate of technology and a change in the middle of the climate of globalization. the reason people feel so on mored today is where going through three climate changes at once. what do you want in the climate changes? want to things. resilience, you need to be able to take a blow. because this can be really disruptive. and you want propulsion. you want to be able to move ahead. you don't want to be curled up in a ball. so thought to myself who do i talk about play about how we produce resilience and propulsion when the climate changes? who would know? and then i realized i knew a woman. she was 3.8 billion years old, her name was mother nature and she had been through more climate changes than anybody. so i sat her down and i interviewed mother nature. i said, mother nature, how do you produce resilience and propulsion when the climate changes? she said well tom percival i do all of this unconsciously. but i am percival incredibly adaptive. in a brutal way through natural selection, but i am incredibly adaptive. only the adaptive survived in my world. second, she said, i love diversity. a low pluralism. try 20 different species, see who wins my most pluralistic ecosystems of the most resilient. third, she says i do believe in sustainability and the circular sustainability. everything is food for me. eat food, poop, seed, i am very sustainable. fourth, she said i am incredibly entrepreneurial. wherever i seen opening in nature that is empty i fill it with a plant or animal perfectly adapted to that niche. fifth, she said a very patient. you can't build anything resilient without time. you can't speed the growth of a 1000-year-old tree for the gestation of an elephant. six, she said i believe in ownership. you know when an ecosystem is in balance it really owns that speech and it is highly resilient to invasive species. parentheses, the republican party lost ownership of their ecosystem and donald trump was an invasive species. that came in. [laughter] that is exactly what happened by the way. lastly, she says -- for eight, she said i believe in hybrid solutions. i mix things. i put the right bees with the right flowers, the right trees with the right soil. i'm very hybrid. there is nothing dogmatic about me. lastly she said, i do believe in the laws of bankruptcy. i kill all my failures. return them to the great manufacturer in the sky. and i take their energy to nourish my successes. but what i did in that chapter i basically argue is that the political system that must consciously mirror mother natures killer apps will be the most resilient in the age of acceleration. and then i just for fun took it one step further. i said to myself what if mother nature were running in this election? if she had a party ãwhat would her platform be? and i invented mother natures political party. just to give you a sample of it, because it's obviously my own politics. there are some issues i am pretty left of bernie sanders. i think we should have single payer healthcare system. sweden and singapore can do i can understand why we can't. at the same time, and to the right of the wall street journal editorial page. i would abolish all corporate taxes. replace them with a carbon tax, tax on bullets, tax on sugar and a small financial transaction tax. i think we need to get radically entrepreneurial over here in order to pay for the safety nets were going to need over here. because the world is going to get too damn fast for some people. but to me, the two go together. unfortunately in our politics if you are for radical entrepreneurs them, you can't be for safety nets. if you are forsaking if you can't before radical entrepreneurialism.that has got to go it is not sustainable. which is why i believe all our political parties are blowing up. that is what is happening. whether it's the uk or europe or here, the reason there blowing up as they were designed as responses to the industrial revolution. the new deal, the early it revolution and civil rights. and civil rights. and what you have to respond to is a political party today are the three accelerations. how you get the most out of them and question the worst. let me close by talking about in some ways my favorite chapter in the book. it is called is god in cyberspace? and the title of the chapter comes from the best question i ever got on a book tour. in portland oregon, 1999. i am selling lexis ãand a man stands up in the balcony and says mr. friedman i have a question. is god in cyberspace? and i thought ãgod. [laughter] i said, i don't know. i have never been asked that question before. i felt like a complete idiot. so i got home and i called my rabbi. [laughter] and ãone of my real spiritual teachers at the time, a great -- a great scholar. i met him at the hartman institute in jerusalem. i called him and said i have a question i've never done before. is god in cyberspace? and he said to me well tom, you know in our tradition we have two concepts of the almighty. one is biblical, one is postbiblical. the biblical view of the almighty is, he is almighty. he smites evil and rewards good. and if that is your view of god, he sure isn't in cyberspace. which is for the pornography gambling cheating, lying, crazy conspiracy theories and bad talk. but as importantly, we have a postbiblical view of god. in the postbiblical 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 behaved. so i took the interview and i put it into the paper back addition data came out in the year 2000 and i completely forgot. as i started writing this book, i found myself retelling a story. and i finally set myself dennis and why are you telling that story? and is obvious. and it became starkly obvious in this election. everything has moved to cyberspace. how we do commerce, how we educate, we build friendships, how we find spouses. how we learn. everything is moved to a realm where we are all connected but no one is in charge. what does that mean? it means you get fake news. it means the word of the year is post-truth. it means you can go into a realm now and say anything about anybody. so much of our lives moving into a realm where we are all connected and no one is in charge. therefore, values ãwhat each one of us believes matters more than ever. especially when now you can be a super empowered maker and a super empowered breaker. when the world is good for makers it is good for breakers. so for those two reasons, values, the golden rule matters now more than ever. what every single person believes now matters. so i gave this ãtalk, just about that chapter as a commencement address at a college of engineering last spring. and i said to the parents, i know what you're thinking. you paid $200,000 so your kid can get an engineering degree. and there's a knucklehead up there preaching the golden rule. is anything more nacve? oh, there is one thing more nacve. and that is thinking we are going to be okay if we don't scale the golden rule. nacvetc is a new realism. you see friends, we stand at an intersection that the human species ãi would argue, has never stood at before. a moral interception. in 1945 we entered a world where one country could kill all of us. post-hiroshima. it had to be one country ãi'm glad it was ours. i think we are entering a world where one person can kill all of us.and at the same time, all of us could fix everything. with the same amplified powers. we've actually never stood at this place before we one of us could kill all of us. and all of us can actually fix everything. all of us can feed, house and clothes and educate every person on the planet. with the same powers. what does that mean? it means we have never been more godlike as a species. we have never been more godlike as a species. we have never stood at this intersection before. and therefore, what values we have and whether we can bring those values to this realm called cyberspace ãnow matters more than ever. where do values come from? places like this. whatever your faith is. values basically come from strong families and healthy communities. and that is why the book ends with two chapters. i don't know, i'm not an expert on strong families. i like to think i built one but i'm not an expert. i am an expert on healthy communities because i grew up in an amazing little town/suburb. call st. louis park. i went to the same high school, grew up in the same neighborhood with the cohen brothers, al franken, norm orenstein, alan weisman, we all grew up in the same neighborhood at roughly the same decade and 1/2. this wasn't a neighborhood in the upper west side. this was a one high school suburb in minneapolis. and i basically tell its story. in the short story is in minneapolis in the 40s, the 50s, the jews all lived basically in a ghetto in the north side with african-americans. and the jews were able to get out. in the mid-50s. 21 suburb, the one that didn't have redlining. so basically at the rear. all the jews of minneapolis moved to one suburb called st. louis park. i suburb that had been 100 percent protestant catholic, white, scandinavian. overnight became 20 percent jewish. protestant, catholic, white, scandinavian, if israel had a baby it would be st. louis park. [laughter] and it produced this freaky explosion of energy that the cohen brothers movie was about our hebrew school. if you want no country for old men you will notice in the scene where ãblows up a car outside of pharmacy in mexico, the camera pans up in the pharmacy is called ãthe same name as i will local drugstore. and i tell the story of how we got to know each other. and build an inclusive community. of trust. my friend also says, trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug. where there is trust in the room in a community, you've got people applying the golden rule. i tell the whole story of how we did it. it wasn't easy but we did it. with amazing community leaders. then i come back 40 years later to my same high school. which is now 50 percent white protestant catholic scandinavian. 10 percent jewish, 10 percent hispanic and 30 percent somalian. and a small african american contingent. same stubborn that took the jews in the 50s, and the 50s took the somalis, in the 90s. now in inclusion challenge is so much more challenging. but ain't that the story of america? and ain't that the story of the world? i left st. louis park 50 years ago to discover the world. and i came back and found the world had discovered st. louis park. so i conclude the book and i will conclude my talk tonight with the book's theme song. has it been sung. i thought of buying it so when you open the book you will play the song. like a hallmark card plays happy birthday. in the song is by a wonderful singer who i really like, brandi carlisle. a great country folk singer. her song is called the. [inaudible] five. and as a director love around like a chain but i was never afraid it would die. you can dance in a hurricane, but only if you are standing in the eye. and i believe right now folks, these accelerations ãthey are like the winds of a hurricane. we just elected a man who thinks that you can manage them by building a wall. i don't think so. i think you have to build and eye. the. [inaudible] five that moves with the storm, draws energy for it and creates a platform of dynamic stability within it. that eye for me is the healthy community. and the struggle in this country and globally i believe going forward, is going to be between the wall people and the 25 people. and i am voting for the. [inaudible] five people. thank you very much. [applause] ãthank you. thank you. [applause] thank you. we had time for some questions. will take about 10 minutes. go ahead.>> mr. friedman i'm a college student here in the washington area and have read with great interest several of your books. my question is, what ãwhat do you think are some of the most meaningful and important things that you have learned throughout your career ãwhat one has to communicate and educate in the context of writing?>> that's a good question. next question back there please. [laughter] no, that is a wonderful question.i will tell you the ãwhat i have learned most, that to me the most important lesson. two most important lessons that you want to be a journalist for me. people come to me and say want to be a journalist, then i say well, what ãthey say what do i need to know? i say it's good if you can talk fast. type fast. but if you know history, literature and certainly good grammar and english. but there is one thing you need to be a good journalist. i believe you have to like people. you have to enjoy hearing the crazy things they say and do. and people can tell. and if you like people, they will open up to you. and they will really share what is on their mind. it's amazing to me how many journalists hate people. [laughter] and ãyou know, one of the many criticisms of me out there is that i just talked to cabdrivers. okay? i've actually never interviewed a cabdriver for any of my books but never mind. if a few more posters had interviewed cabdrivers in the last election they might not have been so surprised because you know what? talking to another human being is a form of data. and a lot of people forget that. especially today in the age of big data. especially another thing though i think you need is to ãyou have to be a good listener. for two reasons. one is what you hear but the other is much more important. it's because listening is a sign of respect. and it is amazing what people will let you say to them if they feel you respect them. it is amazing what you can say to people if they feel you are listening. not just waiting for them to stop talking. but deep listening. and it is amazing to me how many journalists don't understand that. because of people think you don't respect them, and again we saw that in the selection, it is ãyou can't tell them it is dark outside. and if they think you do respect them, they will listen to you all day. thank you. [applause] >> so much of what you said today resonates with me personally. i operate a solo consultancy by myself. it is called linkages. and i manage global trade, biotechnology and food around the world. sitting at my desk, singapore in the evening, london in the morning. i am the epitome of what you call diverse, adaptive, inclusive, entrepreneurial and resilient. and the people i talked to ? >> i am the same. >> the people that talk in my ear every day and yet this election showed me that the biggest lack of listening, or lack of linkages is with my hometown in detroit. where so many of the people are older, they don't want the diversity, they don't want to adapt anymore. they were told one job for life. they don't want to learn anymore. so there's tremendous dislocation my heart and in my life. how do we bridge this divide? >> is a really powerful question. thank you for that, thank you for sharing all of that. and it is ãfirst well let me say that i was humbled in writing this book. i worked on it longer than any other book i did. i worked on it for three years. the first thing i experienced on this but i never had before. i felt like i had a butterfly net and i was chasing a butterfly. every time i got close, it moved. so i had to interview the head of intel three times. and each time, just to make sure that moore's law was still going i learned something new. and often things change in between. like going to the press.i was sending them you know, paragraphs, is this still correctly and so i know how fast it is getting. and when i say i am humbled it is that i don't have the answer. you know, i really don't. but here is what everything i have learned has taught me. number one, we have been here before. you know, the most dangerous time to be on the streets of new york city was when automobiles were first being introduced by horses and buggies had not been phased out. you could get hit from any direction, okay? and we are one of those moments. if horses could have voted there never would have been cars. okay? so â[laughter] you always have to remember these moments and unfortunately, those people are hurt by change know who they are. and they protest. people who will benefit from it are too busy garnering the benefits. and you see that asymmetry in our politics. but when it comes to that average worker, i don't have a simple answer. i wish i did. i looked for it but i don't have a simple answer when the change in the pace is this fast and you have to be a lifelong learner. and i know, i was in central iowa last week giving a talk and a man came up to me after my talk. and he said all of these trunk voters out here in central ohio. ãthey all wanted to be in 1965 again. other people pointed this out. the most important line is the word again. and believe me, i understand that. i mean i live in this world, i thrive on it and i've nothing but sympathy for it. so i don't have the simple answer for each person. i do have a macro answer though. in my macro answer is not one that any trump portable want to hear. that is when you have a really fast changing moment, you want to be as open as possible. because you will get the signals first. you will attract the most high-risk entrepreneurs. right? and at the same time you want to be educating everybody as much as you can.be open and educate everybody is much as you can.then let the miracle of america happen. you know, i was at a conference in september. a charlie rose and there was a woman there, pretty sure this is what she said. her job was tagging sharks for twitter. i thought, who knew there was a job tagging sharks for twitter? do you know what i mean? your kick was at the college, comes home and says mom and dad i want to tag sharks for twitter. you couldn't be an ophthalmologist? you have to tag sharks for twitter?your job up to five years ago did not exist. you know? if you let it happen, and that is what scares me about donald trump.i understand the angst that produced them. i respect it. the column i wrote before the election was addressed to his voters. i said he is an indecent man but i know where you're coming from.and he is not going to get you there. because ford is not coming back to this country with a 25,000 person factory outside of dearborn. if that factory is 2500 people and 500 robots. you know the modern factor just has two employees. a man and a dog. the man is a repeat the dog and the dog is to keep the man away from the machines. [laughter] that's where it is going. okay? but, let me share with you the most important thing i learned in this book. in doing this book. and it was surprising for me. if you'll indulge me i will just read a little bit. we may have to close if we can't get to all of the questions but i want to share this with you. because you know what i learned in doing this book? the thing that set out everywhere is that the things that mattered most to people where the human to human connections. gallup did a giant study, they do a lot of education holdings five years ago. they study people have been out of college for five years. they asked them, are you happy with the direction of your career? and they called out that group we said yes. en they drilled down to see what they had in common. and they determined they had two things in common. they had an internship somewhere along the way. in the area of interest. and they had a mentor who took an interest in their hopes and dreams. there is such a message and that. i profile in this book a website. most big retail companies today, their hr policies are to weed people out. so stay away, you know apply for old navy or walmart. they get millions you know applications. they are overwhelmed. so now you have to take a test like a two hour test. on dena how to fold a shirt? operating cash register, dealing with the customer. and if you pass the test, it weeds out already thousands of people. they then make your job appointment for you. but if you go to their website, you will notice in the upper right corner ãthere is a button. a little smiley face on it. it is called the coach button. it gets press more than any button on their website. and i listed all of the questions that it gets. coach, what do you wear to my job interview? coach, what if i'm going to be late? coach, what might the first question be? everywhere i turned ãit was the human to human stuff that stood out. let me just read you, this is from the last pages of my book. that's why when i asked surgeon general, what was the biggest disease in america today? without hesitation, he answered ãis not cancer. it's not heart disease, it is isolation. it is a pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today. how ironic. we are the most technologically connected generation in human history. and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. this only reinforces the point that the connections that matter most are in the most short supply today. the human to human ones. don't get me wrong. technology has so much to offer to make us more productive. healthier, more secure. i am awed by the intelligent assistance i discovered in researching this book and the potential it had to lift so many people out of poverty and discovered talent. and make it possible for us to fix everything. and partly technophobe. but we won't get the best 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 that you can't download. the high five from a coach. the praise from a mentor. the hug from a friend. the totally unsolicited gesture of kindness from a stranger. the smell of a garden. not the cold stare of a wall. can you imagine, how many jobs are going to be in human to human connection over thanksgiving ãand i'll stop here.this is such an important question.at our thanks giving table had a friend who is a food consultant hired by company called ãi am not up to this. they have bars where adults come in and other people and a paint by numbers. in the bar. ? [indiscernable] >> who ever thought there would be an industry and teaching people to paint in bars. [laughter] but maybe people so crave these connections. so somebody will on that bar, someone would teach painting. those are good jobs. if someone is going to give a massage at the end of the day. so, let it happen.but if you put up a wall against this, we will all suffer. thanks for your questions. [applause] [indiscernable] >> i will do as many as i can. >> in addition to reading a new book what do you recommend as an action plan for citizens -- i can take what i'm going to do the comments.i'm going to go all out. you know i kind of spent 15 months trying to prevent donald trump from winning. right now i am in a phase where i'm focused on one thing, climate change. there is one thing he can do that will be reversible. and that is turn america away from global leadership on climate. and so right now i'm doing every thing i can to sort of you know, push that direction one way or another. [applause] but ãif he goes against that for me, it is all out war. this is a really pivotal moment. and everyone will have to find, i haven't column in the new york times so i can use that but everyone will have to find their way to resist this. we will not, we should not and i don't think people will ã they won't take this handing. they want take it sitting down. thanks. sorry. [indiscernable] >> i am hearing voices. >>. [indiscernable] >> right. to, to connect. 42 ? [indiscernable] >> i think you really have to do with the other side did very well. they had statehouses all over the country they got control of congress and through that they really dominated the legislative process. and unless, even saying democrats. i think all the people who feel different about that don't get organized. you know i am actually not a big facebook user. i am not a big twitter user because i find they are fake forms of activism. because you talk to people and say well i tweeted ãreally you tweeted about it? that's like, that's like firing mortar into the milky way galaxy. and exxon mobil, they are not on facebook. they are in-your-face. there in the cloakroom, not the chat room. and there in the cloakroom with bags of money. answer get out of facebook into somebody's face. and all of this, all of this online stuff has soaked up so much activism that it's really given a pass. you know to a lot of people. quickly, yes. >> so in the spring of 2013 you came and spoke to eric ã seminar. and i was one of the students. one of the last things you said, you give a forecast for the middle east coming and he basically said it was going to be in casper 50 years. little did we know that summer that the egyptian army would throw ãmorrissey would be out and siri would still be progressively getting worse. even later. >> i was right? [laughter] >> i was going to ask how has that changed, considering the election but also how has that changed the world entering 50 years, not just the middle east and the unstable parts of the world but ãis the world as a whole even the developed parts entering some 50 years of chaos? >> i have to confess. i can run any dinner party. okay? [laughter] and i do weddings and bar mitzvahs as well. [laughter] so i don't want to ruin this one but i have a chapter on that in the book. and it is built around the television show get smart. you are literally too young to know but it was a famous spoof on james bond in the 60s. and don adams was a agent, agent 86 and agent 99. he worked for an organization called control. and their worldwide enemy was called chaos. spelled kaos. and the chapter is about that tomorrow today, there actually ãit is no longer east-west, north-south, communist capitalist. it is between the world of order and the world of disorder. in the mediterranean and the rio grande are increasingly dividing line. why is that? because basically the 50 years after world war ii were a wonderful time to be an average little state. because you two superpowers. throwing money at you, educate your kids, or in moscow or in america. they give you foreign aid. if you were in syria -- they would be build your army. climate change is moderate. china was not -- not in the wto and populations were moderate in the age of acceleration. all of that is gone. now climate change is hammering these countries. they have demographic deficits a lot of them. the climate in fact is ãso much that the males are leaving. i just did a documentary for this for national geographic. globalization is leaving them behind and china is now in the wto. so i felt ãthere were stories in egypt. i was gone from my wife for three weeks. i'm at a souvenir store in cairo airport. by my honey little something to remind her where hunting was for a few weeks. let's see, what do they have here? pyramid ashtrays. and my pumpkin doesn't smoke okay.now have a stuffed camel and if you squeeze it's hump, it honks. now my honey does not have a honking hump camel. i took it to the cash register and i turn it over and what's it say the bottom? stay with me now, made in china. during the lowest wage country in the eastern mediterranean. there is now a country have a continent away that can make it cheaper than you can, ship it and take the prophets back home.so what is happening? all of these average states ã they are actually cracking up. and we are just at the beginning. because they can't handle these accelerations. they are like caravan homes in a trailer park. there built on slabs of cement with no basement and no foundation. accelerations are like a tornado going through a trailer park. it is starting in west africa, going to india, states that collapse first are those whose borders are primarily straight lines. because there the most artificial. and it is creating a new divide between order and disorder. and that's what it says in the book. mama ãtell your daughters not to grow up to be secretaries of state. it is the worst job in the world. okay? [laughter] if donald trump comes to you and says he would like you to be secretary of state, [laughter] tell him you had your heart set on agriculture. okay?[laughter] because ãwoe be unto whoever takes his job. to me it is a question relay. managing state collapse, they'll think it was because obama was a web. now they have discovered that managing weakness is hell on wheels. i better stop