Good afternoon and welcome everyone. Thank you all for joining us for today's Compton Lecture. I'd like to express my gratitude to the Compton Lectures Advisory Committee for their excellent choice of speaker. I also want to thank a very special guest, Mr. Tom Friedman, for joining us on campus today to write the next chapter in this distinguished lecture series.
After the lecture, I'll lead a conversation with Mr. Friedman drawing from questions that the MIT community members submitted in advance. First, some context. In 1957, MIT established the Compton Lectures to honor the memory of MIT's 10th president, Carl Taylor Compton. Dr. Compton had led MIT for almost a quarter of a century in two roles, first as president for 18 years, and then as chairman of the MIT Corporation.
He guided MIT through the Great Depression. and World War II. In the process, he helped the Institute transform itself from an outstanding technical school for training hands-on engineers to a great global university. A distinguished physicist, President Compton brought a new focus on fundamental scientific research, and he made science an equal partner with engineering at MIT. In addition, during the war he helped invent a partnership between the federal government and America's research universities.
In the best tradition, in the best MIT tradition, President Compton was known for the scope of his understanding, his integrity, his creative vision, his inspiring service to society, and his charismatic charm. Today we celebrate his legacy by honoring someone who brings these same gifts to his role as an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist. At MIT, we believe deeply in the critical role our community plays in inventing the future. But to invent the future, you have to be able to see around corners.
I don't know anyone who does that better. than Tom Friedman. He has the same facts and witnesses, the same events as we do, but with a keen eye for detail and a masterful understanding of history and context, he notices what most of us miss.
A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, Tom is a global citizen and an advocate for creative solutions. to complex problems. He's known for his original thinking and writing about his big global issues, such as war, trade, poverty, energy, and for doing so with a sense of clarity, purpose, and most of all, accessibility.
Through all the noise, he remains focused, offering a perspective that is unique, thoughtful, often provocative, and always essential. In the process, he has helped shape the national conversation on the most important issues of our time. He has written seven New York Times bestsellers. In his most recent, Thank You for Being Late, an optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations, he makes the case that the world is being reshaped by the acceleration of three giant forces, digital globalization, climate change, And technology, forces that matter deeply to all of us at MIT. Seeing around corners, noticing what we miss, and having the courage to tell us what he concludes are just a few of the many qualities that set Tom Friedman apart.
He leads by the saying, if you don't go, you don't know. Well, he's here. And we're all looking forward to hearing from him this afternoon. Please join me to give a warm welcome to Tom Friedman. Thank you.
Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to be here.
Rafael, thank you. It's a treat to be here. I've been able to come to MIT.
a lot of times over the last 20 years. I could never get in as a student, so it's a fantastic way to be able to visit your wonderful campus. I've had a great day today.
I'm going to talk to you today basically about how I write a column for The New York Times. That's really what this talk will be about. It's really about how I look at the world, how I organize events, and how I interpret and analyze things.
My basic method. It was best described by one of my teachers, Lynn Wells, who's a systems analyst. And Lynn always says, never think in the box today.
Never think out of the box. Today you must think without a box. And what I'm going to share with you today is how I basically think without a box.
And the formula comes from my last book, Thank You for Being Late. An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration. First question I always get from people is, where from comes the title, Thank You for Being Late? It actually comes from meeting people in Washington, D.C.
for breakfast, where I live, and I don't like to waste the breakfast when I'm downtown at the New York Times Bureau. By eating alone, I always try to learn from somebody, so I schedule a lot of business breakfast, and every once in a while, someone comes 10, 15 minutes late. And they inevitably say, Tom, I'm really sorry.
It was the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog, eating my homework. Anyways, about three and a half years ago, I had scheduled a business breakfast with an energy entrepreneur, Peter Corsale, and he came 15 minutes late and did the usual, Tom, I'm really sorry, the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog, eating my homework. And I just interrupted him.
I said, actually, Peter, thank you for being late. Because you were late, I've... I've been eavesdropping on their conversation. Fascinating. I've been people watching the lobby.
Fantastic. And best of all, best of all, I just connected two ideas I've been struggling with for a month. So thank you for being late.
People started to get into it. They'd say, well, well, well, you're welcome. Because they. understood I was actually giving them permission to pause, to slow down, to reflect. In fact, my favorite quote from the front of the book is from my teacher and friend, Dov Seidman, who says, you know, when you press the pause button on a computer, it stops.
But when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts. That's when it starts to reflect, rethink, and reimagine. And boy, don't we need to be doing a lot of that right now. This book was actually triggered when I paused and engaged with someone I wouldn't normally engage with. So I actually live in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of D.C., and I take the subway to work about once a week.
And for me, that means driving from our home in Bethesda on Bradley Boulevard to the Bethesda Hyatt, and I park in the public parking garage beneath the Bethesda Hyatt, and I take the red line down to the New York Times Bureau near the White House. And lo, three and a half years ago now, I did that. Drove to the Hyatt parking lot.
I got my time stamp ticket, parked my car, got the red line to D.C., spent the day at the New York Times, took the red line back, got my car, time stamp ticket, drove to the cashier's booth, handed it to the cashier. He looked at it and looked at me and said, I know who you are. I said, great. He said, I read your column. I thought, great, the parking guy reads my column.
He said, I don't always agree. I thought, get me the hell out of here. But I said, no, no, that's good. It means you always have to check.
And I drove off thinking, parking guy reads my column. That's great. And it was a week later, I took my weekly trip into DC, parking garage, timestamp ticket, red line, Office Day, New York Times, red line, back car, timestamp ticket, cashier's booth, same guys there.
This time he says, Mr. Friedman, I have my own blog. Would you read my blog? I thought, oh my god, the parking guy is now my competitor. What just happened? So I said, well, write it down for me and I'll look it up.
So he tore off a piece of receipt paper and he wrote on it, odinambi.com. I got home, fired up my computer, called it up. Turns out he's Ethiopian, writes about Ethiopian politics from the perspective of the Oromo people, real democracy advocate.
It was a little rough, but it was pretty good. I shared it with my wife. I thought about him for a couple days, and I eventually concluded that this was a sign from God that I should pause and engage this guy. But I didn't have his email, so the only way I could do it was park in the parking garage every day, which I did for four days.
We eventually overlapped at 7 a.m. one morning. I stopped under the gate so it couldn't come down.
I got out of my car, and I said, Ayile, now I know his name, Ayile Bujia, Ayile, I want your email. I'd like to send you a message. And he gladly tore off another piece of receipt paper, gave me his email, and that night we began an email exchange. I repeat, save them all, they're in the front of the book, they're kind of funny, in which I basically said to him, I have a proposition for you.
I will teach you how to write a column in the New York Times if you will tell me your life story. And he basically said, I see you're proposing a deal. I like this deal.
So we agreed to meet at Pete's Coffeehouse in Bethesda two weeks later, at which point I showed up with a six-page memo on how to write a column for the New York Times. And he came with his life story. Basically, Ethiopian grad of Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa, economics grad, was a political democracy advocate, an advocate for the Romo people there.
Eventually, so much so, he got thrown out of the country. We welcomed him here as a political exile. We used to do that.
And he was blogging on Ethiopian websites, of which there turns out to be a lot. I discovered this whole universe. But he told me they weren't fast enough.
They wouldn't turn his stuff around fast enough. So he decided to start his own blog. And now, Mr. Friedman, I feel empowered.
His Google metrics say he's read in... 30 different countries. This is my parking guy.
And it's a wonderful story about how anyone today can participate in the global conversation. And he's a wonderful man, and we've become friends as a result of this. Well, I then gave him my six-page memo on how to write a column for the New York Times. I explained to him that a new story is meant to inform.
I could write a new story about This event tonight, and Rafe would tell me whether I inform better or worse, but a column, what I do, an opinion piece, is actually meant to provoke. It's meant to produce a reaction. You see, I'm either in the heating business or the lighting business. That's what I do. I'm either doing a heating or a lighting.
I'm either stoking up an emotion in you or illuminating something for you. And if I really do my job well, I do both and produce heat and light. And I know I've done that by what reaction I get. You read my column and you say, I didn't know that.
That's a good reaction. I taught you something. You read my column and say, I never connected those things.
That's good. You read my column and say, I never looked at it that way. That's good. More light. Your favorite, you live for this as a columnist, happens twice a year.
Someone reads your column and says, Mr. Friedman, you said exactly what I felt, but didn't know how to say it. God bless you. God bless you.
I want to kill you dead, you and all your offspring. I get that too. That tells me I produce more heat. In any event, I explained to Yilei that to produce heat and light as a columnist requires actually an act of chemistry.
And you have to combine three compounds. The first is what is your value set as an opinion writer? Are you a communist, a capitalist, a neocon, a neoliberal, a libertarian, a Keynesian, a Marxist?
What is the set of values you're trying to promote into the world? Second, and this will be the guts of my talk today, how do you think the machine works? So the machine is my shorthand for what are the biggest forces shaping more things in more places in more ways on more days?
You see, as a columnist, I'm always carrying around in my head a working hypothesis of how the machine works. And my books are all attempts at Really understanding the biggest gears and pulleys of the world. Because why?
Because I'm actually trying to take my values and push that machine in their direction. And if I don't know how the machine works, I either won't push it or I'll push it in the wrong direction. And lastly, what have you learned about people and culture?
How different people and cultures are affected when the machine moves and how their reactions affect the machine. Because there's no column without people and there are no people without culture. Now mix those three together, stir, let it rise, bake for 45 minutes, and if you do it right, you too can be a columnist at the New York Times. Well, the more I explained this to Ayili, we had several sessions at Pete's and online, the more I started to think about my own career and ask myself, well, if that's what a column's about, what's your value set?
Those of you who read me know I'm not quite a liberal. I'm certainly not a conservative. That's because my values have actually emerged from the small town of Minnesota, where I grew up in the 50s and 60s and early 70s, at a time and place where politics worked. And that's why I'm sort of a congenital optimist and can't we all get along. My values actually emerged from there, not from a library or a philosopher.
Second, how do I think the machine works today? And lastly, what have I learned about people and culture? And that's what Thank You for Being Late is all about. The first half of the book. is about how the machine works.
And the second half is about how this machine is not just changing your world, it's reshaping our world. And it's reshaping five realms in particular. Politics, geopolitics, ethics, the workplace, and community.
So let's talk about both. How do I think the machine works today? Well, I think what is shaping more things in more places in more ways in more days is that we're in the middle of three giant accelerations and the three largest forces on the planet, which I call the market, Mother Nature, and Moore's Law. Now, Mother Nature for me is climate change, biodiversity loss, and population growth in the developing world. If you put them all on a graph or a picture, well, they look like...
So it looked like that. They looked like Glacier National Park 1913 and Glacier National Park 2012. By the way, that glacier's been there for 7,000 years. They looked like Lake Chad, Lake Chad 1963 and Lake Chad 2013. They looked like a graph of global average temperature. They looked like a hockey stick, mother nature.
They looked like a graph of reported instances of extreme weather since 1988, another hockey stick. and the mother of all hockey sticks. They look like a graph of world population growth through history. So if you put Mother Nature on a graph today, she looks like one hockey stick after another.
The market for me is globalization, but not your grandfather's globalization. That was containers on ships and planes. That's actually been flat lately. What's actually knitting the world together through globalization today is much more digital globalization. Everything's being digitized and globalized through Facebook and MOOC and Twitter and PayPal.
Put that on a graph, it looks like total data consumed per month, another hockey stick. Or it looks like mobile earth subscriptions in the United States. And the last acceleration, I don't have to tell the students, of this campus is in Moore's Law. Coined in 1965 by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, in a famous article in Electronics Magazine, Moore's Law argued that the speed and power of microchips would double roughly every 24 months. The place would actually go down.
Gordon Moore coined that in 1965. Moore's Law is alive and well 53 years later. Now every year across those 53 years, someone has written an article saying, Moore's Law is over, Moore's Law is over, Moore's Law is over. Run its course.
And what all those authors have in common is they were all wrong. Moore's Law... is alive and well. It's driven by some different factors today, but never mind. This PowerPoint's actually running, I suspect, on an Intel 14 nanometer chip.
It has 37.5 million transistors per square millimeter. In January, a little earlier, Intel began shipping its 10 nanometer chip. It has 100 million transistors per square millimeter.
And Intel can tell you exactly how they're going to do the 7 nanometer chip. got a pretty good idea what they're going to do for the 5 nanometer chip. Now, eventually, this will reach some kind of limit. But right now, Moore's Law is alive and well.
And when you double and double and double and double something, over a period of 53 years, you start to get to some really high numbers, and you start to see some really funky stuff, like cars that can drive themselves, and computers that can beat any human in chess jeopardy. or go. That's basically where we are today.
Now, it's very hard for the human mind to grasp what's the difference between 37.5 million transistors and 100 million. It's really the difference between a self-driving car that needs the entire trunk of the car to carry the brains of that car and a self-driving car that will need just a little box under the front seat. In fact, a couple of years ago, Intel, to try to drive home this point, they actually asked their engineers to take a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. and estimate what would have happened had this VW Beetle improved at the same rate of Moore's Law on microchips since 1971. And they estimated that if it had, today that Beetle would go 300,000 miles an hour, it would get 2 million miles per gallon, and it would cost you 4 cents. You'd be able to drive it your entire life on a single tank of gas.
That's the power of the technological. Exponential driving our lives today. Well, the third acceleration, sorry, my argument is that this third acceleration plus the second and the first, these three accelerations in the market, Mother Nature, and Moore's Law, these three hockey stick accelerations, they're actually melding together into one giant force for change that is not just changing our world. It's reshaping our world, politics, geopolitics, ethics, the community, and the workplace. Before I get to that, let me just do a little deeper dive.
I'm not going to talk about Mother Nature more. I'm not going to talk about the market more. I want to do a little deeper dive, because I'm here at MIT, on Moore's Law.
My chapter on Moore's Law is actually called What the Hell Happened in 2007? What the hell happened in 2007? I know what you're thinking, 2007? What's this guy talking about?
Well, here's what happened in 2007. The year was kicked off at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9th when a guy named Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone. The iPhone, of course, is actually a handheld computer with more compute power in it than the Apollo space mission, and I'm told it doubles as a phone and a camera. That's how the year was kicked off.
In 2007, actually late 2006, a company called Facebook opened its platform to anyone with a registered email address and broke out of high schools and universities and in 2007 went global as all the old people in this audience suddenly could have Facebook pages. In 2007 a company called Twitter split off on its own independent platform and went global. In 2007 Maybe the most important software that most people have never heard of, not the students here, called VMware went public.
VMware is what enables any operating system to work on any computer. It was the basis, really, of cloud computing. In 2007, maybe the second most important software most people have never heard of called Hadoop was launched into the wild. Hadoop is named after the founder's son's toy elephant. It's what enables a million computers to work together as one.
I think they call it big data. As Doug Cutting, the founder of Hadoop, explains in the book, they didn't invent these algorithms. They were actually invented by Google. They're called GFS and MapReduce. But as Doug explains, Google lives in the future and sends us letters back home.
And what Google did was leave a trail of breadcrumbs of its big data algorithms for the open source community to reverse engineer. They reverse engineered it into Hadoop, which is now being run. by virtually every big company in the world. The third thing that happened in the software realm in 2007 was a company called GitHub opened its doors.
GitHub today is the largest repository of open source software with over 14 million users, and in a great act of irony for those who live in that space, was recently bought by Microsoft. In 2007, A company called Google bought a little-known TV company called YouTube. And in 2007, the same company called Google launched into the wild its own operating system.
They called it Android. In 2007, IBM launched the world's first cognitive computer. They called it Watson.
In 2007, a guy up in Seattle named Jeff Bezos launched the world's first e-book reader. He called it the Kindle. In 2007, an obscure and anonymous Japanese cryptocurrency expert Wrote this essay on cryptocurrency. It turned into Bitcoin.
In 2007, three design students in San Francisco were attending the design conference that year and they noticed all the hotel rooms were sold out. But one of them had three spare air mattresses. And they thought it might be cool to see if they could rent out these three spare air mattresses to people who couldn't get rooms, hotel rooms for the design conference.
And it worked out so well for them. In 2007, they started a company called Airbnb. That's where the name comes from, from the founding three air mattresses.
In 2007, a company called Netflix streamed its first video. Here's what else happened in 2007. This is a graph of the cost of sequencing a human genome. A lot of people here are familiar with that.
$100 million in 2001 falls to $10 million in 2006. And then in 2007, you'll notice it falls off a cliff like an EKG heading for a heart attack, down to $10,000. Interesting that it happened in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale called fracking. Between 2006 and 2008, America's total natural gas reserves increased by 35%, a staggering number for an 18-month period. Ah, this is a graph of social networks. Comes from Qualcomm.
You'll notice the white line, that's the cost of generating a megabit of data. And it collapses from $8 basically down to $2 in 2007. The blue line is the speed of generating that data. The two lines crossed in 2008. That's close enough for government work.
This is a graph of cloud computing. You'll notice the first year we really get data of any significance. is 2008, which suggests that the cloud was born in 2007. In 2007, the internet, late 2006, crossed a billion users, seems to have been a tipping point.
In 2007, Intel, for the first time, went off silicon to extend Moore's Law. They introduced non-silicon materials into their transistors. In 2005, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, retired.
And in 2007, he decided he better come back to work. Turns out, friends, 2007 may be understood in time as one of the greatest technological inflection points since Gutenberg. And we completely missed it.
Why? Because of 2008. Yeah, right when our physical technologies just took off, like we're on a moving sidewalk in the airport that suddenly went from 5 to 50 miles an hour, right when that happened, all of our social technologies, the learning reform, management reform, political reform, regulatory reform, you'd want with such an acceleration, completely froze because we entered the deepest recession since 1929. And in that dislocation between what happened to our physical technologies And what happened to our frozen social technologies? A lot of Trump and Brexit voters were born because a lot of people got completely dislocated. You know, someone was alive when Gutenberg invented the printing press.
And you can bet that some monk said to some priest, now that is really cool. You mean I don't have to write these Bibles out longhand anymore? I mean, we can just stamp these things out? Well, I think we are here for a similar moment.
So what actually happened in 2007? Well, the computer running this PowerPoint, like all computers, basically has five key components, all laptops. They've got the microprocessor, that Moore's Law chip. They've got a storage chip. They've got networking.
They've got software. And they've got a sensor, a camera. And what I do is I use that model in the book, and I trace the history of all five and how all five basically were in their own Moore's Law.
I think basically what happened is that they all melded together right around 2007 into this thing we call the cloud. The cloud. But I never used the term the cloud in my book because it sounds so fluffy, so soft, so cuddly, so benign. Sounds like a Joni Mitchell song. I've looked at clouds from both sides.
This ain't no cloud folks. I call this in my book the supernova. The astrophysics students among you will know the supernova is the largest force in the natural world.
It's the explosion of a star. And what happened in 2007 I believe was an explosion of energy, a release of energy into the hands of men, women, and machines. That basically changed four kinds of power almost overnight.
It first changed the power of one. What one person can do today as a maker or a breaker is unlike anything we have seen before in human history. We have a president who can sit in his pajamas in the east wing of the White House and tweet directly now to a billion people without an editor, a libel lawyer, or a filter.
But what is really scary is that the head of ISIS could do the exact same thing from his bunker in Raqqa province in Syria. Oh, the power of one to be a maker or breaker has fundamentally changed today. The power machines have changed. I spent all morning hearing from amazing professors and students here about that, how machines are acquiring all five senses, but particularly sight and manipulation and the ability to reason and think.
In many ways, we crossed that line for the first time on February 14th. 2011 on, of all places, a game show. There were three contestants.
Two were the all-time Jeopardy! champions and the third contestant simply went by his last name, Mr. Watson. Mr. Watson, of course, of course, was an IBM cognitive computer. He passed on the first question of the show. But he buzzed in before the two humans on the second question.
See if you can get it. The question was, it's worn on the foot of a horse and used by a dealer in a casino. And in under 2.5 seconds, Mr. Watson said in perfect Jeopardy style and artificially generated voice, what is a shoe?
What is a shoe? And for the first time, we all got to watch a cognitive computer. solve a pun riddle faster than two human beings.
And the world kind of hasn't been the same since. It's changed the power of flows. Ideas now flow and scale and accelerate and meld and change at a speed we have never seen before.
Where did you want to build your town in the Middle Ages? Where did the people want to build Boston? You wanted to build it on a river. Because that river is flows.
brought you food and power and ideas and transport. You wanted to build your town on the Amazon. Where do you want to build your town today? On Amazon.com. You want to build it on the digital flows and the data flows that will now drive everything.
And finally, it's changed the power of many. We, men and women, empowered by these machines, have become the largest forcing function on and in nature, which is why the new climate era, the new geophysical era, has been named for us. Anthropocene.
These four changes in power, they're not just changing your world. They're fundamentally reshaping politics, geopolitics, the community ethics. in the workplace. So let me go through all of those quickly. Let's talk about the workplace.
But before we do, I want to share with you a simple, this is just a made up graph. I was working on the book and went out to see Astro Teller, who runs Google X. And I was giving him the thesis of the book, and Astro got out three magic markers, and he went over to his whiteboard. And he just sketched this out. I said, what's that, Astro?
He said, well, that blue line across the middle, again, this is just me. made up, is the average rate at which human beings and communities adapt to change over time. It has a positive slope, but it's very gradual. The white line, he said, that's technology.
So over there in the 11th and 12th century, it was very flat. Because you could go a whole century, and your bow and arrow didn't get better. There was no bow and arrow 2.0 in the 13th century after the 12th century. But then we got the scientific revolution in Copernicus and Galileo.
Then ultimately, Steve Jobs and Microsoft and Intel, and the line starts to go straight north. Then he took out a magic marker. He drew that little diamond there. I said, what's that little diamond, Astro? He said, that's where we are.
We're at a point now where technology is simply under Moore's law accelerating at a pace that the average human and community cannot keep up with. Then he got out another magic marker, and he drew that little diamond there, that little dotted line there. Sorry. And I said, what's that, Astro?
He said, that's learning faster and governing smarter. And ain't that the job of MIT? Ain't that the job of every government today? How do we enable more and more citizens and students to learn faster and govern and operate smarter in this age of acceleration?
And that's why my chapter on the workplace is called How Do We Turn AI into IA? How do we use artificial intelligence to create intelligent assistance, A-N-C-E, intelligent assistance, A-N-T-S, and intelligent algorithms so more people can learn faster and govern smarter? Let me just give you a quick example of each one.
My chapter on intelligent assistance is built on the human resources department at AT&T. I spent a lot of time there. AT&T, giant telecom, 330,000 employees living right next to the supernova. competing in the most intensely competitive space, global telecom.
Pretty good chance that whatever is going on in the HR department at AT&T is coming to a neighborhood near you. So what's going on there? Well, basically what they do now, their CEO, Randall Stephenson, begins the year with a pretty radically transparent speech about where the company's going, what businesses they're going to be in, and what skills you need to be a rising employee that year at AT&T. Then they put all their managers, 110,000 people, in their own in-house LinkedIn system.
So say I'm there, and I'm just making this up, and they've got my CV there, and they've got all the places I've worked at AT&T. And then matching that, they created, and the number changes every year, but 10 skill sets that they think you're going to need to be a rising employee that year at AT&T. And they match that up with my skill sets.
And it turns out I've got seven of the 10, but I'm missing three. Then they partnered with Sebastian Thrun from Udacity, and Sebastian created nano degrees, mini courses online for all 10 skill sets. Then they came back to me and said, Tom, here's the deal.
We will give you up to $8,000 a year to take the nano degree courses for the skill sets you're missing. In fact, we heard you're interested in the Middle East. You want to take a course in archaeology? Hell, we'll pay for that as well.
In fact, we know you have an interest in computing. We just created a $6,000 a year, one year master's degree. online with Georgia Tech, we're in for that as well. Just one condition, Mr. Tom. You have to take all these courses at home at night on weekends on your own time, not on company time.
Now, if I say, you know what, Mr. AT&T, I've actually climbed up one too many telephone poles. I'm not into this anymore. They now have a wonderful severance package for me, but I won't be working at AT&T much longer.
What is AT&T's new social contract with their employees? It's very simple. You can still be a lifelong employee at AT&T, but only if you're a lifelong learner. If you are not ready to be a lifelong learner, you can no longer be a lifelong employee at AT&T. And that is the social contract coming to a neighborhood near you.
Which is why another of my teachers, Heather McGowan, an educator, Likes to say, mom, dad, never ask your kids anymore what you want to be when you grow up. Because whatever it is, is not going to be here unless it's policemen or firemen. Only ask your kid how you want to be when you grow up.
Will you have an agile learning mindset? Will you be predisposed to be a lifelong learner? And that leads to what I think is maybe the thing most roiling the country today.
It's a point that another of my teachers, Marina Gorbache, from the Institute of the Future makes. If I were giving this talk 15 years ago, a big part of the talk would be about the digital divide. Boston's got internet.
Upstate Massachusetts doesn't. America's got internet. Cameroon doesn't. There was a digital divide. There's still a digital divide, but it's rapidly disappearing.
In five years, certainly 10, I believe anyone who wants a network access will be able to have it. And when that happens, Marina argues, The most important divide in the world is going to be the self-motivation divide. Whose kids have the self-motivation to be lifelong learners long after they've left home and mom and dad are not there to say, Raphael, have you done your homework?
And that has a lot of people rightly freaked out because a lot of people were built to do what they were told. In fact, they built our country. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Not everyone is built to be a self-motivated, lifelong learner.
Unfortunately, that's going to be hugely differentiating in the world we're going into. My example of intelligent assistant is the janitorial staff at Qualcomm, another company I spent a lot of time with. Qualcomm, you may know, made a lot of the chips and software that actually run your iPhone.
They weren't made by Apple. That's why Apple is always suing Qualcomm over patents, you may have noticed. So I spent time on their 64 building campus profiling their founder, Erwin Jacobs, and they've done something interesting.
Three years ago, they took six of their buildings on their 64 building campus and they affixed sensors to everything, to every light, door, window, faucet, drain, computer. They put sensors everywhere. Then they beamed all that data up to the supernova, up to the cloud, and they beamed it back onto an iPad with an incredibly friendly user interface for their janitorial staff. So if I left my computer on at night or a pipe burst above my head, they would know at the exact same time, if not sooner than I did, and they could just swipe down to see how to repair it or who to call to fix it. Qualcomm turned their janitors into maintenance technologists.
Their janitors actually now give tours to foreign visitors. What do you think that does for the dignity of a janitor? Because he or she now has an intelligent assistant, enabling them to learn faster and operate smarter. My last example of intelligent algorithm is the partnership between the College Board, who administer the PSAT and SAT exams, and Khan Academy, the online learning platform. We all know, I don't have to tell this crowd, that in 11th grade, we have to take the PSAT exam to measure.
Our skills in verbal and math to see if we can get an MIT or wherever. And prepare us for 12th grade to take the actual SAT that will make that determination. We also know that many parents who can afford to go out and hire a tutor from Kaplan for $200 an hour to goose their kids'scores. Nothing wrong with that, except it's a completely rigged game.
Because if you come from a neighborhood or a family that cannot even imagine rustling up that amount of money, or that you could even do it, you are at a huge disadvantage. So three and a half years ago, the college board partnered with Khan Academy to create an intelligent algorithm for free PSAT and SAT prep. Some of you may have availed yourselves of it.
The way it works, for those of you who haven't, is in ninth grade, I take the PSAT exam. I get the results back. They say, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. You did really well in verbal. You could be a journalist.
But you have a problem with math. Particularly, you have a problem with fractions and right angles. It then takes me to a practice site just for fractions and right angles, just for my specific weakness. If I do well there, it takes me to another site that says, Tom, you could be in AP Math. What?
In AP Math? No one in my family has been in AP Math. No one in my neighborhood is in AP Math. I could be here.
You could be in AP Math. Do well there takes me to another site with 180 college scholarships and another site where young boys and girls from around the country through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, are volunteering to be tutors to shepherd people through this intelligent algorithm. Last year, 3 million American kids got free PSAT and SAT prep through this intelligent algorithm.
Now, I'm going to bet you that none of you have heard of any of this. And that's because you've been following our politics. Where the biggest idea was how Donald Trump could destroy Hillary Clinton, how Hillary Clinton could destroy Donald Trump.
In fact, there is massive innovation going on in the country on the pipeline of education to work. In fact, there's so much innovation, I almost thought of writing a book just about that. And nobody is telling anybody.
And that's a good segue to how politics is being reshaped in this age of acceleration. Now, basically, the way I think of politics today is to go back to the metaphor of the climate. I think we're actually in the middle of three climate changes at once.
I think we're in the middle of a change of the climate of the climate. We're going from later to now. So when I was growing up in Minnesota in the 50s and 60s, later was when I could clean that river, purify that lake, rescue that orangutan. I could do it now or I could do it later.
Today, later is officially over. Later will now be too late. So whatever you're going to save, please save it now.
That is a climate change. We're going through a change in the climate of globalization. We're going from a world that was interconnected to a world that is interdependent.
And in an interdependent world, you get a geopolitical inversion. Your friends start to be able to kill you faster than your enemies. If Greek and Italian banks had gone under last night, this room would be half full. Greece, Italy, wait a minute, they're in NATO, they're in the EU, they're allies.
In an interdependent world, they can kill us. And in an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China had taken six more islands in the South China Sea last night, don't tell anybody, couldn't care less.
Had China lost 6% growth last night, this room would be empty. That is a climate change. And lastly, we're going through a change in the climate of business.
Every business today, using big data and AI, can and therefore must analyze, find the needle in the haystack of their data as the norm, not the exception, prophesize, customize, localize, digitize, and automatize at a speed, scope, and scale we have never seen before another climate change. So that's how I begin my thinking about politics. What do you want when the climate changes?
You actually want two things. You want resilience. You need to be able to take a blow because stuff happens. And secondly, you want propulsion.
You want to be able to move ahead. You don't want to be curled up in a ball under your dorm bed. waiting for the climate change to pass.
So then I thought, who do I talk to about how, who do I interview about how you get resilience and propulsion when the climate changes? And then I realized, I knew this woman, she was 3.8 billion years old, her name was Mother Nature, and she dealt with more climate changes than anybody. So I called her up, made an appointment, went out to see her.
I said, Mother Nature, how do you produce resilience and propulsion when the climate changes? She said, well Tom, I have to tell you everything I do, I do unconsciously. But these are my strategies. First of all, she said, I am incredibly adaptive. In my world, in my ecosystems, it's not the strongest that survive.
It's not the smartest that survive. It's the most adaptive that survive. And I teach that through a rather brutal mechanism I call natural selection.
You may have heard about it. Secondly, she said, I am incredibly entrepreneurial. Wherever I see a blank space in nature, I fill it with a plant or animal perfectly adapted to that niche. I'm incredibly entrepreneurial.
Third, she said, I'm incredibly pluralistic. Oh, Tom, I'm the most pluralistic person you've ever met. I try 20 different species of everything. I see who wins.
I love diversity, she told me. In fact, she told me something interesting, and this audience reminds me of that. She told me that her most diverse ecosystems are her most resilient and propulsive ecosystems. Oh, Tom, I love diversity. Four, she said, I'm incredibly sustainable.
Nothing's wasted in my world. Everything is food. eat food, poop seed, eat food, poop seed.
Nothing is wasted. Fifth, she said, I am incredibly hybrid and heterodox in my thinking. Nothing dogmatic about me.
I'll try any trees with any soils, any bees with any flowers. Sixth, she said, I build feedback loops into all my systems. I'm very attentive to what's going on. Seventh, she said, my most healthy ecosystems are all complex adaptive coalitions. That is, all the organisms, plants and animals, network themselves together into a complex adaptive system to increase their resilience and propulsion.
Lastly, she told me, Tom, I do believe in the laws of bankruptcy. I kill all my failures. I return them to the great manufacturer in the sky, and I take their energy to nourish my successes. Well, I believe that the country, the company, the university... That most closely mirrors Mother Nature's strategies for building resilience and propulsion when the climate changes is the one that will thrive in this age of three accelerations.
And since I was writing my book during the 2016 election, I imagined what if Mother Nature had been running against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So I created Mother Nature's political party with an 18-point platform. Of course, it's just a proxy for my own politics. But never mind. Anyways, I won't bore you with the whole platform, but suffice it to say, on some issues, Mother Nature's out there to the left of Bernie, because she would be for universal health care, and she would be for universal lifelong learning systems, because she would understand this world's going to be too fast for too many people, and we need to strengthen our safety nets and trampolines.
But to pay for them, she'd be to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Mother Nature actually would have abolished all corporate taxes, all of them. But she would have replaced them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar, a tax on bullets, and a small financial transaction tax.
She would understand we have to tax the hell out of our bads because we cannot afford our bads anymore. Carbon is going to kill us, bullets are going to kill us, and sugar through diabetes is going to bankrupt our health care system. So she would get radically entrepreneurial over here.
to pay for stronger safety nets over here. But what do we know about our current politics? If you're for stronger safety nets, you're never for radical entrepreneurship. If you're for radical entrepreneurship, you're never for stronger safety nets.
What would Mother Nature call that? Stupid, that's what she would call it, because she would understand you will never be resilient and propulsive. And that's basically why all of our parties are frozen today.
We can talk about that more in the question time. How is geopolitics being reshaped? My chapter on that is called, well, it's actually built on the sitcom Get Smart.
I don't know how many of you are my age. I'm 65, just went on Medicare, loved the sitcom Get Smart from the 60s. Don Adams was a spoof on James Bond. He had a shoe phone, age in 86. We'll have a little quiz here. Who can remember the name of the organization Don Adams worked for?
No, no. Control, give that man a free book, okay? It was called Control.
Who was their worldwide enemy? Chaos, exactly right. The authors of that sitcom.
Oh, they were ahead of their time, because I believe the central geopolitical divide of the world today is no longer East, West, North, South, communist or capitalist. It's between the world of control and the world of chaos, or what I call the world of order and the world of disorder. And basically, I think to understand geopolitics today, you have to understand that in the 20th century, Something really big happened. The world went from being governed by vast empires to being governed by 192 individual nation states, birthed by decolonization and the end of World War I and the end of World War II. And the 50 years after World War II were a great time to be an average state.
Oh, it's a wonderful time to be a weak little state. Why? First of all, there are two superpowers out there throwing money at you.
educating your kids at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, or Wichita State in America, giving you foreign aid, building your government house. You could be Syria and lose three wars to Israel and get your army rebuilt for free all three times. Populations, a lot of people had demographic dividends, lots of young people, few old people.
Climate change was incredibly moderate. And China was not in the World Trade Organization. So everybody could be in the textile business.
and have lots of low-wage industries. My argument is in this age of acceleration, all of that flips in the early 2000s. Now, no superpower wants to touch you because all they win is a bill.
People either have huge demographic deficits or vast population explosions in more and more developing countries. Climate change is hammering countries now. Senegal, where I recently did a documentary, is already at 2 degrees rise average temperature since the Industrial Revolution. 2 degrees rise average temperature, where have I heard that number?
Oh, 2 degrees rise average temperature is what the Paris Climate Agreement was designed to prevent by 2100. Senegal is already there, they're going to 4 degrees. And lastly, China is in the World Trade Organization, so nobody can be in the textile business. It affected everyone's low-wage industry. Well, I would argue that shift, basically, is completely stressing out weak and average states.
Some are imploding, a couple we blew up, and many are fracturing and hemorrhaging people. In our hemisphere, it's Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Guatemala, all three actually are the most deforested countries in Central America. They cut down their trees, we got the kids. And in Africa, it starts in West Africa.
And the world of disorder stretches all the way across North Africa, through the Middle East, right up to the border of India. And the biggest thing happening in the world today is that millions of people are trying to get out of the world of disorder into the world of order, and it is fundamentally reshaping the politics of the world of order. How we rise to that challenge, we can talk to in questions.
Let me close by talking about two areas that you probably haven't thought much about that are being reshaped. One is ethics, ethics, and the other is community. So my chapter on ethics is called, Is God in Cyberspace?
Happens to be the best question I ever got on book tour. In 1999, I'd written a book called Lexus and the Olive Tree. I was at the Portland Theater in Portland, Oregon, talking about the book.
Came to question time, young man raised his hand on the balcony, said, Mr. Friedman, I have a question. Is God in cyberspace? I said, ah, ah, ah, ah. I have no idea. And I felt, frankly, like a complete idiot.
So I got home, I called my spiritual teacher. He's a rabbi I got to know when I was the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute. His name is Svi Marks, a brilliant Talmudist, now living in Amsterdam, married to a Dutch priest, interesting character.
I tracked him down in Amsterdam. I said, Svi, I got a question I've never had before. Is God?
in cyberspace. What should I have said? And he said, well, Tom, in our faith tradition, we actually have two concepts of the Almighty, a biblical concept and a post-biblical concept. The biblical concept says the Almighty is almighty. He smites evil and rewards good.
And if that's your view of God, he sure isn't in cyberspace, which is full of pornography, gambling, cheating, lying, prevarication, people smearing one another on Twitter, and now we know fake news. But fortunately, he said, we have a post-biblical view of God. And the post-biblical view of God says God manifests himself by how we behave. So if we want God to be in cyberspace, we have to bring him there by how we behave there.
Only we can bring God. into cyberspace. I really liked his answer.
I put it into the paperback edition of Lexis and the Owl Tree, which came out in the year 2000, where none of you saw it, and it sat there for 16 years. I sat down to write this book, and after a year of working on it, I suddenly found myself retelling that story. And I finally stopped myself one day and said, why are you retelling that story?
And the answer became clear to me for two reasons, and one just happened. The first reason, the one that just happened, is I believe somewhere in the last year or two, in the developing world, we began living 51% of our lives in cyberspace. That's where you go to find a date, find a spouse, buy a book, write a book, do your banking, do your brokerage, buy your clothes, communicate with your family, get a mortgage.
We're now living 51% of our lives in cyberspace. And what's my definition of cyberspace? It's a realm where we're all connected and no one's in charge.
Yeah, there are no stoplights in cyberspace, you may have noticed. No courts, no judges, no police, no 1-800-PLEASE-STOP-PUTIN-FROM-HACKING-MY-ELECTION. Yet that's where we're now living 51% of our lives. In other words, we're living 51% of our lives in a realm that is fundamentally God-free. And at the same time...
Thanks to these accelerations, we're now standing at a moral intersection we have never stood at before as a human species. In 1945, post-Hiroshima, we entered a world where one country could kill all of us. It had to be one country. I prefer it be mine.
I think we're entering a world today where one person can kill all of us, and where at the same time, all of us could actually fix everything. These accelerations are creating powers where one of us could kill all of us, and all of us, if we now actually put our minds to it, we have or will have the power to actually feed, house, close, and educate every person on the planet. We have never been to this intersection before.
And what is this intersection? What does it really mean? It means we've never been more godlike as a species.
than we are today because of these accelerations. What does that mean? What that means is what every person today thinks, feels, and believes matters more than ever. It means every person must be in the grip of sustainable values, at a minimum, the mother of them all, the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you, because you now live in a world where more people can do unto you.
Farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before. Putin did unto us in our last election, and we can do unto others. Farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before.
We have never been more godlike than we are today. I know what you're thinking. Everybody having the golden rule.
I mean, like, that's so fanciful. I actually gave this part of my talk as the commencement address at Olin College of Engineering a couple years ago. And I said to the parents there, I know what you're thinking. You paid 200 grand so your kid could get an engineering degree. And who do they think you are?
bring in as the commencement speaker, but a knucklehead promoting the golden rule. Is there anything more naive? And what I told them is what I will tell you. In a world where men, women, and machines get this super empowered, and this interconnected and interdependent, naivete is the new realism. Because I'll tell you what's really naive.
Thinking we're gonna be okay in a world where men, women, and machines get this super empowered, if more people are not grounded in the ethics, sustainable values embodied by the golden rule. Matters now. now more than ever. Where do you learn the golden rule?
Actually learned, I think, in two places primarily. First, strong families. And second, healthy communities. I'm not an expert on strong families.
Hope I built one, but would never be so presumptuous as to lecture you on that subject. But I am an expert on healthy communities because I grew up in one. And that's why my book, after 12 chapters about all this technology and all this climate change and all this globalization. actually ends up with me going back to the little town in Minnesota where I learned. the golden rule and telling that story.
A short story is my parents, grandparents, excuse me, immigrated from Eastern Europe in the early part of the 20th century. They ended up in Minneapolis. I have no idea how from the pale of settlement.
were born there, as was I. Minneapolis in the 30s and 40s was the capital of anti-Semitism until Hubert Humphrey became mayor and cleaned it out of city government. Humphrey practiced on anti-Semitism before he took on the larger issue of civil rights in the country. A real hero. in our house.
I was born in 1953, and in those years, the entire, virtually the entire Jewish community in Minneapolis lived in a ghetto in the north side of the city with African Americans, not because we were integrated there, but because we were isolated there. Anyways, after the war, the world opened up for the Jews, not for the African Americans, and the Jews were able to escape that ghetto, and in a three-year period in Minneapolis between 53 and 56, virtually the entire Jewish community moves out of the north side of the city. city to one suburb on the edge of town, the outer outskirts of Minneapolis, called St. Louis Park. In basically a three-year period, a town that had been 100% white Protestant Catholic Scandinavian became 20% Jewish, 80% white Protestant Catholic Scandinavian.
If Sweden and Israel had a baby, it would be St. Louis Park, okay? So it was as if God threw us all together there and said, let's just throw them all together and see what happens. and what happened was kind of an interesting experiment.
We, the Jews of Minnesota, we called ourselves the Frozen Chosen, were thrown together with these incredibly pluralistic Swedes. We were like shot out of a ghetto like a cannon, these neurotic Jews thrown together with these pluralistic Swedes and I tell the story about our little community because it was kind of a freaky place. You see, I actually went to high school, a Hebrew school, lived in the same neighborhood in the same sort of eight-year period with the... Cone Brothers, Al Franken, Michael Sandel, the political theorist, Norm Wernstein, the political scientist, Mark Trestman, the coach of the Chicago Bears, Sharon Yzman, the guitarist.
The list goes on. We have our own Wikipedia page. It was a freaky place. This is not a neighborhood in the Upper West Side of New York. This was a one high school town in Minnesota.
And it had a huge impact on all of us because the civic culture was so powerful. We all took it into the world. Michael Sandel into political theory.
theory, Ornstein and Franken into politics, the Coen brothers into film, and me into journalism. The Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man, was about our town. In fact, if you saw No Country for Old Men, you may remember a scene where Chirga blows up a car outside of a pharmacy in Mexico in order to go in and steal drugs, and at the end of the scene, the camera pans to the pharmacy. It's called Mike Zoss Drugs.
That was our little St. Louis Park drugstore. So I basically tell the story of how we built an inclusive community. And it was hard, and there were struggles, there were broken friendships and broken dates.
But over time, as I said, we built a really interesting place that for... propelled people into the world with this deep civic ethic, born of this thing called Minnesota Nice. Got to be from Minnesota to fully understand Minnesota Nice.
Had a huge impact on all of us. Hard to explain. I give a couple of examples.
samples in the book. I was home working on the book and my friend Ken Greer, his daughter was getting married. My friend Jay came, sat down at the table and he told me over dinner, he said, Tom, my wife Eileen was driving around the ring road of Minneapolis today and a driver almost drove her off the road. And she came home and said, Jay, I was so mad I almost honked. That's Minnesota for road rage.
There was a Jewish mafia in Minnesota in the 30s and 40s of prohibition. My dad grew up with these guys. I swear he wasn't in the mafia, but he did grow up with them.
And when I was five years old, my dad came home one day and told me one of his friends had been sent to jail. When you're a five-year-old kid and your dad knows someone who was sent to jail, that freaks you out, which is why I never forgot what he said when I said, Dad, what did he do? And he said, son, he was shopping in a store before it was open. That's Minnesota for breaking and entering. So that was the political culture I kind of grew up in and had a big impact on me to this day.
Anyways, I left Minneapolis and St. Louis Park in 1971 to discover the world. And I came back 40 years later to write the last chapter of the book, How the World Had Discovered St. Louis Park. Now my high school is 50% white, Protestant, Catholic, Scandinavian, 10% Jewish.
10% Latino, and now 30% Somali. Because the little town that took the Jews 50 years ago took the Somalis this time around. Now the inclusion challenge is much deeper, racially and religiously, and I tell the story of how they're doing.
But ain't that the story of America today? Ain't that the story of the world? How do we meld together now a much more diverse country and bring education and opportunity to a much wider rainbow of our population?
They're doing pretty well. My high school is still the fifth rated high school in the state of Minnesota, but it's a struggle. It's hard.
hard, hard work. But the reason my book is called An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration is that what actually is working in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park, to go back to my analogy of nature, is that they're building complex, adaptive coalitions where business, educators, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and local government are all working together to build resilience and propulsion. From the bottom up at a time when America completely has stopped working from the top down. If you want to be an optimist today about our country, stand on your head. It looks so much better from the bottom up than from the top down.
It's not that we don't have failing communities. We do. We have them aplenty. But it is amazing to me how many people out there today want to get caught trying to build these complex adaptive... coalitions from one end of the country to the other.
Which is why my teacher for the physics in this book, Amory Lovins, always likes to say when people ask him, Amory, are you an optimist or a pessimist? He says, Tom, I'm neither, because they're just two different forms of fatalism. Everything will be great, everything will be awful.
Amory says, I believe in applied hope. I believe in applied hope. Not sure it's gonna work, but gonna apply myself. And I believe in applied hope.
And I can tell you, The country is still full of people at the community level who are applying hope. And therefore, my talk and my book end with a theme song. My book has a theme song I actually explored. Could I buy this song so when you open the book, you would play this song like a Hallmark card plays Happy Birthday.
The song is by one of my favorite singers. Her name is Brandi Carlile, and her song is called The I, E-Y-E. And I believe it is the anthem of our time. The main refrain is, I wrapped your love around me like a chain, but I never was afraid that it would die.
You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye. You see, my three accelerations, they're a hurricane. We have politicians in this country and all over the world today who are trying to build a wall to the hurricane. I'm actually arguing for building an eye. An eye that moves with the storm, draws energy from it.
but creates a platform of dynamic stability, like riding a bike, where people can feel connected, protected, and respected. That is the healthy community. I believe the great struggle in this country going forward is going to be between the wall people and the eye people.
And my book is a manifesto for the eye people. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I see students running out to do their problem sets for the morning. That's okay. I understand. That was quite an extremely rich and intellectually stimulating talk, Tom. A few questions that I want to ask you from the audience that asked ahead of time.
Let me do just a quick plug while people still move around the aisles. A quick MIT plug. You mentioned in your presentation, this is not from the audience, I just thought of it writing, you mentioned Qualcomm, VMware, Intel, Khan Academy.
Tom, what do those four companies have in common? I think it has something to do with MIT. Yes, indeed. Right answer. They're all funded by MIT.
OK, let me just a few questions that I got from the audience before you started. In 2011, you published a book titled, That Used to Be Us, How America Fell Behind in the World Invented and How We Can Come Back. Seven years later, how do you see America placing the world today?
And do we still can make a comeback? That's a really good question. Next question you have there, Ray.
No, no. OK, number two. No, no. Well, as explained to some of your amazing faculty I got to have lunch with today here, this book is actually the product of my own personal emotional journey.
So for 30 years I covered foreign affairs in the Middle East, you know, for the New York Times. After the failure of sort of the Iraq war and then the Arab Spring, I really just sort of emotionally just kind of checked out of that part of the world. I just felt like everything I had supported failed, you know.
And if it were... where baseball, I was batting 0-0-0. So I decided to really sort of in my head bring my game home and try to think more about America.
And so I wrote that book with Michael Vandenbaum that used to be us, and it was really about how we do nation building at home. And then something started to happen over the last few years. I discovered the Middle East had kind of followed me home, that we had become Sunnis and Shiites.
We called them Democrats and Republicans, but our politics moved from partisan, to tribal. And it became so profoundly depressing to me, I decided actually to go home to my little town in Minnesota to see where the source of my optimism, first of all to see whether I had made it all up, whether I just remembered it in a kind of gauzy way, or if there was something real there. What was going on that was still working at the local level that I could maybe bring back to the national and regional level? And so that was where the book arrived.
originally came from. That was the emotional journey that I was on. I'm still a huge believer in America, but I'll tell you the lead of my column for Wednesday if you don't tell anybody.
I started my career covering a civil war in Lebanon. I fear I'm going to end my career covering a civil war in America. That's what it feels like to me right now.
And I am deeply, deeply worried. about where our country is going. We've moved from partisan, that's okay, politics should be partisan, to tribalism.
Tribal is rule or die. And I believe that when... When Mitch McConnell prevented Barack Obama, when he was president, from appointing a Supreme Court justice with basically a year left in his term, which was his constitutional right and duty, when he was blocked from doing that, I think that will go down in our history as a terrible, terrible thing.
It broke something. And now Democrats, when they get the chance, are going to do the same thing. And that's how a great constitutionally-based country starts to unravel.
So I'm quite worried. Well, I would like to ask a follow-up, which is how do we get out of this mess, but let's go to question number two. A two-part question. What did you major as an undergraduate at Brandeis, and if you were to start college today, what would you choose as a major? So my major was actually, maybe I'll just go back and put it all in context.
So I grew up in this little town, and up until 10th grade, I was a teacher. grade, I actually wanted to be a professional golfer. And that's all I wanted to do. And then in 10th grade, my life changed.
I had that teacher, that teacher who changes your life, Hattie Steinberg, journalism teacher at St. Louis Park High in room 313. And I took her journalism course, and I just fell in love with journalism. And when she died, I wrote a column about her, called My Teacher. And it's still the most widely read column I've ever written.
it. And she was 63 years old when I had her. She was a woman of certainty in an age of uncertainty. And we gathered around her room after school like it was the mall shop and she was Wolfman Jack. She was just a remarkable teacher.
And the only journalism course I've ever taken in my life was hers. And in 10th grade my, not because I was that good, because she was that good. And in 10th grade my parents also took me to Israel. over a winter break.
I had never been out of the state of Minnesota, except for some brief forays into Wisconsin, and I had never been on an airplane. And I went to the Middle East, and it kind of blew my mind. I ended up living on the kibbutz all three summers of high school. And when I started college as a freshman, I started taking Arabic.
And I eventually got my B.A. from Brandeis in Mediterranean Studies. They really didn't have a Middle East program called Mediterranean Studies.
I had a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford. I eventually got a Master's in... Arabic and Middle East studies from St. Anthony's. And I got my start in journalism in 1975. I was walking down the street in London with my then-girlfriend, now wife.
Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford for president, and the Evening Standard had a blaring headline. You know, the Evening Standard always has those blaring headlines to entice you to buy the paper. It said, Carter to Jews, colon, if elected, I promise to fire Dr. K. And I stopped my then girlfriend, now wife, and said, look at that, isn't that funny, that headline, it says, Jimmy Carter's running for president, and to win Jewish votes, he's promising to fire the first ever Jewish Secretary of State. And it just struck me as... Incredibly ironic, and I have no idea what possessed me.
But I went back to my dorm room, and I wrote a column about it. And my then-girlfriend, now-wife, who came from Des Moines, Iowa, took it home on break and gave it to Gilbert Cranberg, who was then the legendary editor-in-chief of the New York Times. editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register.
And he loved it and liked it and he printed it on a half page of the Des Moines Register with an Outh cartoon and they paid me $50. And I thought that was the coolest thing in the whole world. I had been walking down the street, I had an opinion, I wrote it up, and someone paid me $50. And I was hooked ever after. So I then I wrote actually op-ed pieces.
for the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Star and Tribune throughout my graduate school at Oxford. And when I graduated, I wanted to be a reporter in the Middle East. I applied at AP and UPI in London.
AP said, kid, you've never covered a fire. You've never covered a city hall meeting. Yes, sir, but I've got these 10 op-ed pieces.
And then UPI said, well, you've never covered a fire. You've never covered a city hall meeting. But if you can write those, you can probably learn how to do this.
So they took a chance. They hired me in London. I started on Fleet Street.
and I worked there for a year. Then the number two man in the Beirut Bureau of UPI got shot in the ear by a man robbing a jewelry store on Hamra Street. He said, get me out of here.
I do not want to come home. I do not want to pass go. I do not want to collect $200.
Get me out of here. And they came to me and said, would you like to be the number two man in Beirut? Your predecessor just got shot. And I said I would. So I went off to Beirut in 1979 as the number two man. in the Beirut Bureau of UPI, and the first two stories I covered were the Iranian Revolution and the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
And those two events shaped my entire life ever after. You speak both Arabic and... I studied, but I'm not fluent at all, but enough that I can get by and find my way through.
Well, okay, let's move to another part of the world. This fellow wrote, as a non-U.S. and non-Chinese... as a citizen are worried that the US and China may be moving toward a protracted and destructive clash.
Where do you see the country's relationship headed? And what, if anything, can MIT do to help promote improved relations between the two nations? Well, I wish you'd been at our, I had the privilege of having a China lunch with your China experts today.
And it was the theme of our whole lunch. So basically, my view is that China and America are the real one country, two systems, not China, Taiwan. in China, Hong Kong. I think China and America, that we are so intertwined, and our fates are intertwined, not just economically, but you heard my little thing on geopolitics. I think that it's going to be for China and America to come together to stabilize the world of order and stabilize the world of disorder, that that is our big project.
Unfortunately, we don't understand that, and so we each think that our threat is the other, when the complete threat that will destabilize both of us is disorder. I think that requires some changes on our part. It's going to require some changes on China's part.
But I'm a huge believer that we are doomed to rise together or fall together. And the sooner we discover that, the better. Anything that a place like MIT can do to help us discover that faster?
Well, I'm just all for, I think, the more interaction, the more Chinese students. that can come here. I wrote my column about this last week that I'm for entanglement. I'm not for containment.
I'm for entanglement. I want to entangle more Chinese students in the very best sense that we're coming here. I want more American students going there. I want more American businesses there.
I want more Chinese businesses here. Because I think it's so interesting talking to your AI team and just how much they, as MIT professors, now need to partner with you. and drawn AI specialties in China.
We're never going to get where we need to go collectively without collaborating. And I just think we're going about this in a completely ass-backward way with this trade war. I think there are issues that China needs to give on in trade and should be taking the initiative. But it's a subject I spend a lot of time thinking about and worrying about, because I think we are going to be the two... big pillars of the world.
And we have to engage. I'm for entanglement. You mentioned some of this but this question was proposed I think is still valid.
With our politics and our society increasingly polarized, how do you think consumers should approach reading or watching the news? Well I think that long before young people get to MIT that we need to start in kindergarten. I think the first class in kindergarten has to be called digital.
civics. How do you read the internet? And that you do not read something, when you read something on the internet that says the Minneapolis Sun Sentinel reported that unbeknownst to the New York Times, you know, Tom Friedman had a criminal record before he joined the New York Times.
The first thing you need to do is Google if there is a Minneapolis Sun Sentinel. Because it turns out there isn't. And I think teaching the internet, in my view, is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information.
It's full of diamonds and rubies and gold and silver. It's fantastic stuff, and it's full of rusty nails, broken glass, toxic materials, and tin cans. And unless we teach our young people in building them, and our citizens, the filters, for how to filter the diamonds and rubies and gold from the toxic materials, we're going to get the kind of politics we're getting now.
And it's not a small thing. People know I'm not on Twitter, I'm not on Facebook, I've never smoked a cigarette, and I hope to die saying all three. You know, so... I'm on Twitter because the New York Times tweets my column. If you come to me, Ralph Van, and say, will you tweet this about MIT, I'd happily do that.
I'd give it to my secretary because I don't know how. I know who my friends are. They're not a thumb-up or a thumb-down.
And anything said about me in 142 characters by an anonymous person, I'm not altogether interested in. So I have the privilege of having a column at the New York Times, so I don't need it. If I didn't, I'd be on Twitter every day.
But all I'm saying is that I think that the first... The first inning of these social networks were fantastic. God, they were fun, the first inning. But the second inning's been a real bitch.
And the second inning was learning that Facebook, and if you haven't read Evan Osnos'piece in New York about Facebook, you should really read it. It's about, I worked for this thing called a newspaper. You shouldn't have started me on this question, right? So I worked for this thing called a newspaper. And we have, at this thing called a newspaper, is we have regulators on one side, editors on another.
And therefore, if you want to take out a political ad in the New York Times, you had to identify who you were. And if I made a mistake in the New York Times, my editor said I had to correct that mistake. And in between, we had readers and advertisers. And then Facebook came along and said, we're not a newspaper.
We're a platform. And by the way, we're cool. So we actually don't need your regulator, and we don't need your editors, but we want all your readers and all your advertisers, and we didn't know what to do, and those, so they scarfed up all our readers and all our advertisers, and, but they said, we don't need these regulators and editors, you need to trust us, and we trusted them, and they fundamentally violated our trust, and they did it for money, they did it for scale, and they have a lot of a lot to answer for, I believe.
That could be almost a way to end. But just one last question, because I think this person would want this question answered. You repeated that today.
You said that your dream as a child was to become a professional golfer. So do you ever think about turning off the keyboard and hitting the links as a profession? Well, I do.
You know, it's a little known fact in my biography that I actually caddied in the US Open at Hazeltine in 1970 for the famous Puerto Rican golfer, Chichi Rodriguez. Rodriguez. And he was in second place after the first day. I was a 17-year-old kid at the time. And he ended up 26th.
And he paid me $175 and all the balls and gloves in his bag. And it's still one of the high points of my life. Anyways, about 25 years later, some family friends of ours were in Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico, his home course.
And they ran into him. They said, Chi-Chi, do you remember who caddied for you at the US Open? Hazelty in 1970. Without missing a beat, he said, Tommy. And as family friends will do, they said to him, do you know he's more famous than you are today?
And Chi Chi thought about that for a second and said, not in Puerto Rico. Thank you very much. Please, thank you.
Thank you.