Inaugural Morgan State Speaker Series

Welcome to the inaugural Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series. Tonight's event is the first in a series of talks that we will bring to Morgan State University and in doing so present to you a broad cross-section of intellectuals, writers, entertainers, athletes, and social activists who are some of this nation's most influential, insightful, and provocative. people. Tonight's program is an outstanding beginning. To get it started, please join me in welcoming to the podium a man who is already well known to you, the President of Morgan State University, Dr. David Wilson. Good evening. Thank you very much, Dean Wickham. I would like to also welcome you to the Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series. As Dean Wickham indicated, this series is designed to bring... some of the nation's leading and most provocative thought leaders from various disciplines and professional fields of study to Morgan State University. Exposing our university community to a broad range of range of views, to a broad range of perspectives, to broad angles on the myriad of opportunities and challenges we face as a nation, is in keeping with Morgan's mission of serving as a premier public urban research university rooted in the HBCU tradition. This series is designed to promote, if you will, mind expansion. It is designed to enable you to wrestle deeply with issues of the past, to challenge you with regard to where we are as a city, as a state, as a nation, and as a world today, and then to expose you and challenge you to the possibilities of tomorrow. Now more than ever, we need to hear from the best of ideas in our society. I don't know if you feel the same as I do, but when I peep in on the national in our politics, I am beyond disgusted and I am disappointed with the level of discourse. If what I am hearing in many of these quarters are supposed to be and supposed to represent some of the best ideas of those running for elected office in particular, then I think that we in America are in deep trouble. You know, it was the best of ideas that led us to believing that one day we would be able to fly an airplane. It was the best of ideas that led to President Kennedy's goal of America's landing on the moon. And it was the best of ideas that has led to major health care reform in this country for the very... for its time, moving us closer, if you will, to a society where no one would be denied a doctor if he or she couldn't pay. The dare to think critically and to challenge common thinking. is what this distinguished presidential lecture series represents. In this series, we will seek out individuals who are on the cutting edge of innovation, individuals who have the ability to see around corners, and individuals who are able to imagine, if you will, an America that is inclusive, an America that is equitable, an America that is just, an America that is inclusive. that is fair to all. And so in doing so, we will be showing our students in particular here at Morgan what it means when we say and we embrace our motto, growing the future and leading the world. You know the traditional big ideas and fighting for inclusion is not new to Morgan. It was at Morgan that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first delivered major aspects of his I Have a Dream speech. speech, not at the Washington Monument. It was at Morgan that the first college sit-in movement occurred, which led to the integration of shops and restaurants in Baltimore City. And so as I bring my brief remarks to a close, I want you to know that we here at Morgan value the freedom of speech and the freedom of speech in Baltimore. expression of ideas, we value the free expression of thoughts, and we remain and will forever remain open to diverse speakers who challenge our points of view. As president, I understand the importance of our students in particular again, being exposed to multifaceted points of view. For such views often lead to greatness in thought and to the greatness of possibilities. And so ladies and gentlemen. With that in mind, I'm very pleased to introduce to you this evening the first speaker in our series. He is Thomas L. Friedman, award-winning columnist for the New York Times and best-selling author. He is renowned for his direct journalistic reporting and sophisticated analysis of complex issues facing the world. He has won not one, not two, but three awards. but three Pulitzer Prizes for foreign and international reporting, covering monumental stories from around the globe for the New York Times since 1981. Vanity Fair called him, quote, the country's best newspaper journalist or columnist. He has been ranked number two on the Wall Street Journalist's list of influential business thinkers, named to the 2011 Thinkers 50 and the 2013 list of foreign policy's top. global thinkers, and he has been called one of, quote, America's best leaders by U.S. News and World Report. I think almost everybody in the room has read his most renowned book, The World is Flat. That book sold more than four million copies, earning him the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His latest bestseller, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, is, quote, quote, that used to be us, how America fell behind in the world it invented, and how we can come back. It has been hailed by some as, quote, a must-read for anyone who cares about America's future. In October of this year, he will release his next book, and he and I were chatting about that a few minutes ago, called Thank You for Being Late, Pausing to Reflect on the 21st Century. And so it really is an honor and a privilege to have Thomas L. Friedman here at Morgan. And I have to say this, and we'll bring him forward. As we're putting together the series, of course, we are a limited resource university. And everybody that we contacted, the first question was, how much are you going to pay me? And when Mr. Friedman was contacted, he called back and said, said, you have to pay me nothing. And so I am honored, if you will, to welcome to Morgan State University Thomas Friedman. Please join me in giving him a warm Morgan round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a treat to be here with you this afternoon. And as I was thinking about what to talk about, it really is very easy. What the heck's going on in our country? It's really easy to speak these days. David mentioned I'm working on a new book. It is called Thank You for Being Late. And the title comes from meeting people. in Washington, D.C. for breakfast over the last year. And some people would come 15, 20 minutes late. I'd say, Tom, I'm really sorry. There's the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog ate my homework. And one day I just found myself spontaneously saying to them, actually, David, thank you for being late. Because you were late, I've actually been eavesdropping on the table next door. I've been people watching the lobby. Fantastic. And I just connected to ideas I've been struggling with for months. So thank you for being late. And people started to get into it. They'd say, well, you're welcome. Thank you. What the title is really about is that we're in this really age of acceleration. And I have a friend and teacher, Dov Seidman, who wrote a book called How. And Dov likes to say, you know, when you press the... The pause button on a computer, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts. It starts to think and to reflect and to rethink. And if there was ever a time, speaking for myself, when I felt I needed to pause and figure out what's going on, it's really now. And so I want to share with you this evening. what I'm really thinking about, and how I, I can't explain Trump, I mean no one can explain Trump, but how I explain really what's roiling underneath our politics today, and some of the challenges you all face as a university and as students about to enter the world of work. Because I think we're actually in the middle of one of the greatest technological inflection points since Gutenberg. invented the printing press. I think we're in the middle of something really, really big. I started to get at it with The World is Flat and I realized that the story had continued to evolve and I needed to take more of a crack at it. One of the ways I learn is really by trying to be a really good listener. And when I hear people saying bizarre things, but they don't think they're bizarre, that's when I know something big is happening. So I've been collecting a bunch of them, and maybe I'll begin by just sharing a few with you. The first actually came out of my mouth. Because as President Wilson said, in 2004 I sat down to write... The World is Flat. In 2011, I wrote another book with my friend Michael Mandelbaum called That Used to Be Us About America. And when I sat down in 2011 to write that new book, the first thing I did was get the first edition of The World is Flat off my bookshelf just to remind myself what I'd written. And I opened it up to the index. I looked under A, B, C, D, E, F, F, A, C, E, Facebook. wasn't in it. Yeah, when I was running around the world in 2004, telling people, folks, the world is flat. We're all connected. Facebook didn't exist. Twitter was still a sound. The cloud was still in the sky. 4G was a parking place. LinkedIn was a prison. Applications were what you sent to college. Big data was a rap star. And Skype was a rap star. was a typographical error. All of that happened in just seven years between those two books. And most of it happened, if anybody's looking for a master's or PhD thesis, most of it happened in a single year, 2007. The iPhone came out in 2007. Facebook started in 2007. Twitter started in 2007, Amazon Kindle came out in 2007, and Android came out in 2007. There are vintage years in history, and that was one of them. More quotes. I'm at a lecture in Europe last year, actually a year and a half ago, by Andy McAfee, a professor at MIT, and he's talking about Gary Kasparov, the Russian chess... Grand Master. And he refers to him as the last human chess champion. I thought, wow. I never heard that before. The last human. We're in the age of the last human. last human taxi driver, the last human bus driver, the last human chess champion. A few weeks later, I was out in Silicon Valley interviewing Sebastian Thrun, the father of Udacity, the guy who actually invented the first MOOC when he was a Stanford professor of artificial intelligence. And Sebastian's telling me that he started taking flying lessons. And we got on the subject of the ASEAN air crash at SFO San Francisco Airport four years ago. And Sebastian said in passing, he said, Tom, you know, that plane crashed because of good weather. I said, no, no, Sebastian, you mean the plane crashed because of bad weather. He said, no, no, had there been bad weather, they'd have been on autopilot. The plane would have landed just fine. The plane crashed because of good weather, because the pilots engaged in human error. The plane crashed because of good weather. Never heard that before. A few weeks later I was actually out playing golf in San Francisco and Bay Area and it was a very long round and my caddy, we were just standing around one hole, we were actually down in Carmel and he said, we started talking about best hotels to stay in in Carmel. And he mentioned this hotel, he said, you know, you know Mr. Friedman, President Kennedy had a lot of fun at that hotel. before the internet. I thought, a whole new historical divide. BI and AI, before the internet and after the internet. And of course, I knew what he meant, but before privacy. and after privacy. Here's a phrase that will go down in history. One of the great, I think, turning point moments in history. The phrase is, what is a shoe? And the reason that's going to be a historically important phrase is because on February 4th, 2011, on of all places, a game show called Jeopardy. There were three contestants. The first name was Ken Jennings, all-time Jeopardy champion. Second, Brad Rutter, second all-time Jeopardy champion. The third contestant just went by his last name, Watson. Watson passed on the first question. But on the second question, Watson buzzed in in under two and a half seconds, beat the two humans, and the question was, it's worn on the foot of a horse and you can't wear it. used by a dealer in a casino. And Watson said, what is a shoe? What is a shoe? And the world was never the same. For the first time in history, a computer figured out a pun, posed in natural language, and answered in natural language before the two human competitors. What is a shoe will go down with, come here Mr. Watson, which is what Alexander Graham Bell said when he tested out the first telephone. Here's a paragraph that really jumped out at me. A few years later I read this. This was in TechCrunch, written by Tom Goodwin. And the story began like this. Uber. Sorry. Uber, the world's first. Sorry. Uber, the world's largest. The largest taxi company today owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer in the world, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. Sure is. But before we leave the weird thing... I've been hearing. Here's two words, two phrases I don't hear anymore. One is, you know what, Mr. Friedman, I'd like to sleep on that. When was the last time somebody said, I'd like to sleep on that? You never get a chance to sleep on anything anymore. And the other phrase you never hear anymore is parents telling their kids, go to your room, go to your room. Because now you have to say, turn over your cell phone. your wireless card, your laptop, your iPod, your iPad, your iWatch, then go to your room. Otherwise, go to your room is an invitation to connect with the Milky Way galaxy. So what's going on here? What's going on? Well, I read a book two years ago that really started to open my mind about what's happening. The book is called The Second Machine Age by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee. And Andy and Eric are argue that the first machine age was built on the steam engine. And the steam engine doubled in power roughly once every 70 years. And it required human direction. What they argue is that we're now in the second machine age. And the second machine age is built on Moore's Law. Moore's Law, founded by Gordon Moore 50 years ago this year, says that the speed and power of microchips will double roughly once every 70 years. roughly every 24 months. And what Andy and Eric argue is that in this second machine age, where we are now in this doubling process, we are increasingly... Entering what they call the second half of the chessboard. Now that term comes from a very famous story often heard in Silicon Valley about the power of exponential growth. What happens when something just keeps doubling? As Moore's Law has done for 50 years. and the story that's often told is about the man who invented chess and he gave the game to the king, king loved it said how can I reward you good sir and the man said your highness all I want is to be able to feed my family the king said what would you like said, I'd just like you to take one kernel of rice and put it on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the next, eight on the next, 16 on the next, 32 on the next. Just keep doubling it. My family will be fine. King said, it shall be done, not realizing that when you double something 63 times, the number you get is close to 18 quintillion. More rice than existed on the planet. Well, Andy and Eric used that image with Moore's Law. When you keep doubling the power... of microchips every two years, you start to get some really funky stuff. You start to get cars that can drive themselves. You start to get computers that can win in chess and beat any human being. You start to get some really funky stuff when you enter what they call the second half of the chessboard. And that's where we are today. We are entering the second half of the chessboard when the doubling power of technology gets really, really powerful. So what are the implications of it? Well, the best description I heard in working on my book came from John Kelly. He's actually the man who led the Watson Project for IBM. And we were talking one day. He said, Tom, you know when you buy a new car, it comes with that little sticker on the rearview mirror? it says objects in your rear view may be closer than they appear he said that actually belongs on the front windshield it's the stuff coming at us that's now much closer than it appears what are the implications of a world where we're now technologically in the second half of the chessboard and the power of microchips just keeps doubling well first of all it's a fantastic fantastic time to be a maker. If you want to make something today, as an individual here at Morgan State, this is an amazing time to be a maker. Not only here, but anywhere in the world. You know, General Electric, for the engineering students here, they may know, General Electric does something now around innovation and engineering, which they call Jump Ball. Jump Ball. So in 2013, they actually did a Jump Ball contest. They actually took a puck. It's called a fastener for fastening an airplane engine onto a plane. Key part. And they said this part, put it out on the top engineering website. They created this contest. They said this part weighs 4.5 pounds. And we are challenging anyone in the world, jump ball, for who can take the most weight out of this part using 3D manufacturing. They published all the specs for it. Within three weeks, they got 697 entries from around the world. They winnowed them down to the final 10, all their engineers, they assessed them all. They found 10 that they thought worked best. They tested each one. They winnowed it down to the winner, who took 84% of the weight out of the part. And that person won $20,000. That person was a 21-year-old engineering student from Central Java in Indonesia. None of the final 10 were Americans, and none of them were aeronautical engineers. Jump Ball. A lot of companies now are using the World Wide Web just to create Jump Ball and see who anywhere in the world with any background can rise to the challenge. I was out at Udemy. capacity, online university, working on my new book. Because I had been a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon for a lot of years, they thought it might be interesting if I interviewed one of their Lebanese students online. She was taking a Web 2.0 design course, and I interviewed her on a Skype call in Beirut. I just asked her why she was taking this MOOC course, this online learning course. course from Udacity in San Francisco, and she said, very simple, I really want to improve my web design skills to better serve my customers in Australia. I thought, run that by me again. Lebanese student in Beirut taking a web 2.0 design course from a MOOC based in Silicon Valley to better serve her customers in Australia. It's a great time to be a maker. It's also a great time to be a maker thanks to big data. Because thanks to big data, guessing is officially over. Guessing is officially over. The example I love to give is Microsoft's Connected Cow. I don't know if any of you have come across Microsoft's Connected Cow. Microsoft, a year and a half ago, partnered with Fujitsu in Japan. And they basically went to 10 dairy farmers in Japan. And they put Fitbits, basically, sensors, on the hooves of all their dairy cows. And they connected those Fitbits up to the Microsoft cloud. and they very quickly discovered something very valuable. If you're a dairy farmer, they discovered that when cows are in heat, when they're in estrus, they take more steps. And if you're a dairy farmer and you need to time exactly when you're doing your artificial insemination to know exactly that 16-hour period when cows are in heat, is enormously valuable information. Then they discovered that if you artificially inseminate these cows in the first four hours, you have a 70% chance of getting a female. And if you do it in the second four hours, you have a 70% chance of getting a male. So in the old days, if you were a dairy farmer, you relied on something called intuition. Oh, intuition. Intuition. There's old Bill. He's been around cows for 30 years. He can just tell when Bessie's in heat. You know, he can just tell. Well, guessing is officially over for all these Japanese dairy farmers. They now know, connected to the cloud, exactly when Bessie's taken a few too many steps and she's ready for a little AI, artificial insemination, supported by AI. artificial intelligence. It's a great time to be a maker. Unfortunately, when it's a great time to be a maker, it's a great time to be a breaker. Breakers are always early adopters. ISIS we see as an organization, fantastic use of social media, fantastic use we saw in Belgium of encrypted telecommunications. Unfortunately, it's a great time to be a breaker. There's a story I brought along that jumped out at me from the newspaper the other day. It was in the Washington Post. This was after President Obama complained that the knucklehead who landed the drone on his backyard while he and Mrs. Obama were abroad and their two young girls were at home in the White House, he bought that drone at Radio Shack. It's a great time to be a breaker. So I picked up the post a couple weeks ago. It had this story. It said that the Justice Department had charged a hacker in Malaysia with stealing the personal data of U.S. service members. and passing it to ISIS, which urged supporters online to attack them. The article explained that in June, Ardit Farizi, the leader of a group of ethnic Albanian hackers from Kosovo, who called themselves Kosovo Hackers Security, who knew, hacked into a server used by a U.S. retail company online and obtained data on 100,000 people. Ferizi, this guy in Kosovo, is accused of passing the data to ISIS member Junaid Hussein, a British citizen who in August posted links on Twitter to the names, email addresses, passwords, locations, and phone numbers of 1,351 U.S. military personnel. military personnel. He included a warning that ISIS soldiers will strike at your necks in your own land. FBI agents tracked for reasons. to a computer with an internet address in Malaysia where he was arrested. Meanwhile, Hussein was killed by a U.S. drone in Syria. Wow, let me run that by you again. An Albanian hacker in Malaysia collaborating with an ISIS jihadist on Twitter to intimidate U.S. soldiers online before we killed the jihadist with a drone. That's modern warfare. And that's why, unfortunately, it's a great time to be a breaker. it's a really tough time to be a leader. I'm sorry to tell President Wilson this. You don't want to lead anything in the second half of the chessboard. Because every... one you're leading today is walking around with a mobile MRI machine called a smartphone in which they can not only look inside of you, President Wilson. but they can tell the whole world what they see without an editor, a publisher, or a libel lawyer. And if you are a public figure in an age when everyone who has one of these is a paparazzi, a documentary filmmaker, and a reporter, I have to tell you, it's really scary. Okay. And what it's doing, unfortunately, is subtly shifting our country from a representative democracy to a popular democracy, thanks to Twitter. Our founding fathers thought that the will of the people should be filtered through elected representatives. And that would produce the best democratic outcomes. But in the age of Twitter now... Every politician has an instant poll all the time. I've actually stopped going to Congress to interview people. Because it is like the most unsatisfying experience you can possibly imagine. is me interviewing a senator. So, Senator, what do you think about the situation in the Middle East? Tom, the situation in the Middle East, excuse me one second, I need to take this call. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I'll call him back. Yeah, yeah, fine. What were you saying? The Middle East, yeah. The situation with ISIS in the... Say, would you get back to them with that tweet? Respond to that tweet. Now, what were you saying, Tom, about the Middle East? I mean, talk about ADHD. I mean, to interview an American politician today is the most unsatisfying experience you can possibly have. And as a result of this instant poll going on all the time, as a result of this, basically, our... Our Congress today is so much more like American Idol than it is the Continental Congress. Everyone is taking an instant poll all the time. And at a time when we have some big, complex decisions to be making, that is deeply, deeply unhealthy. It's a really tough time, I have to tell you, to be a worker of any kind. In the second half of the chessboard, it's a really tough time to be a worker. We did a piece in the New York Times last year, a year and a half ago, about dairy farmers. I'm into dairy farms. Dairy farmer in upstate New York, how all the dairy farms there have moved completely to... robotic cow milkers. No human hand touches these cows. They are completely milked by robots. So if you were a young kid growing up in Buffalo or Syracuse, and got your high school degree, thought you might work on a dairy farm one day. I hope you studied computer science because that's as close as you're going to get to any cow. So what's happening to jobs in the second half of the chessboard? Every job today is being pulled in three directions at once. It's being pulled up. It requires more skill, whatever it is. and each year more skill. It's being pulled out. More machines, robots, software, people in India and China can compete for it now. And it's being pulled down. It's being outsourced to history, made obsolete faster than ever. Every job... today is being pulled in three directions at once. What sustained the American middle class for the 50 years after World War II was something called the high-wage middle-skilled job. High-wage, middle-skilled job. There is no such animal in the zoo anymore as a high-wage, middle-skilled job. There is a high-wage, high-skilled job. There is a low-wage, low-skilled job. But this thing that sustained the American middle class for 50 years, the high-wage, middle-skilled job, is completely disappearing. And that's one of the things clearly roiling the politics of this campaign. Who was the biggest employer in Baltimore 50 years ago? The biggest employer in Baltimore 50 years ago? 50 years ago was a company called Bethlehem Steel. You could actually drop out of high school or just have a high school degree, join the steel union, get an average job at Bethlehem Steel. That would enable you actually to get an average mortgage to buy an average house with an average size yard. So you could have 2.0 average kids, take an average number of trips to Disney World in your life and go to an average number of Orioles and Ravens games. You could have a perfectly average retirement and a wonderfully average funeral. All. as a high school grad or even dropout from Baltimore. Who's the biggest employer in Baltimore today? Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. They don't let you cut the grass there without a BA. I exaggerate, but you know what I'm saying. Every job is being pulled in three directions at once. So what does that mean for you? Well, one, if jobs are being pulled up, it means a lot more of the three R's, more read and write and arithmetic to master these new jobs. It also means a lot more of the three C's, creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, four C's. because I think a lot of the best jobs going forward are not just going to be STEM jobs, those with science and technology and engineering and math required. They're going to be what I call STEMpathy jobs, jobs that combine strong grounding in STEM skills, but also a real ability to interact with human beings. Because, you know, with... Thank God. Thank God I got the empathy part, not the STEM part. So I'm applauding, too. Because think about the world we're going into. I mean, thank goodness, God forbid, anyone you know would be diagnosed with cancer. But if they were, the first question you'll ask is, does your hospital have Watson? Because IBM's Watson has now been trained as an oncologist and has read every article ever written about cancer. They've also... put millions and millions of pictures of melanoma into Watson so he can pretty well detect whether that mole you've got is something you should be worried about. The first question you're going to ask is, does your hospital have Watson? Second question you're going to ask, though, is, does your doctor ask good questions? See, we live in an age where no one really cares what you know because the Google machine knows everything. And Watson knows everything about... oncology. All people really care about, and all they'll pay you for, is what you can do with what you know. And in the case of Watson is, can you ask good questions? Can you ask the right questions? And then if you can ask the right questions, can you translate those answers in an empathetic way to a patient? So STEMpathy skills are going to be in very, very high demand. That's what happens when jobs get pulled up. When they get pulled out, when they get pulled out, when every machine, robot, software, and India or China can compete for them, it's going to take a lot more self-motivation. That's the biggest change going on in the world today. More will be on you. You know, if the world had a dial on it, for the 50 years after World War II, the dial was set to the left. And the closer you were actually to the Soviet Union, the more to the left the dial was. And it pointed to a sign that says, you live in a world of defined benefits. Do your job every day, show up, and you'll get these benefits. What's happened as we entered the second half of the chessboard is that dial is now whipped over here. And it says, you live in a world of defined contributions. Now you will be paid according to your contribution. And... And with big data, we can actually detect exactly what your contribution is. We at the New York Times now, if you go to New York Times online, have something called the most emailed list. Most emailed list. Most emailed items in the New York Times online updated every 15 minutes. Now, any New York Times reporter... Journalist who tells you, columnist tells you they don't look at that list is a liar, okay? Because how can you not? Am I on the list? Am I number 20? Am I number 15? Is my column moving up? Is it moving down? If the New York Times wanted to pay me, now... on my defined contribution, they could actually pay me on my monthly ranking on the most emailed list. Thank God they don't do that, because if they did, I would never write about anything other than Donald Trump. Sure to go to the top. that's coming to every job and lastly jobs are being pulled down, they're being outsourced to history faster than ever I mean you know the story of the modern American factory, just two employees, a man and a dog the man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines Adam Davidson Jobs are being made obsolete faster and faster, and when that happens, you need more of the three E's. More and more entrepreneurship. We need everybody thinking about how to start something. Because the days when Bethlehem was built, If lithium steel is going to come to Baltimore with 25,000 jobs, those days are over. That factory now is 2,500 robots and maybe 500 people. So we actually need everybody at Morgan State thinking entrepreneurially. why five people create jobs for 12, 12 create jobs for 20. That's how we'll get those 25,000. So think of that matrix of the three different ways that jobs are being disaggregated and divided. You have a pretty good guide where to go. Let me end before we go to questions, because I'm really here much more to hear you, by answering preemptively the first question I always get when I give my talk, which is, I have two daughters, one's 30, one's 27. And people always ask me, Mr. Friedman, what do you tell your own kids about this world? Well, they're tired of hearing it, but you're fresh meat. So I will share with you the five pieces of advice I give for my kids for surviving in the second half of the chessboard. The first piece of advice is always think like a new immigrant. Always think like a new immigrant. How does the new immigrant think? The new immigrant thinks, I just showed up in Baltimore, and there's no legacy spot waiting for me at Morgan State. or the University of Maryland, Baltimore, or Johns Hopkins. I better figure out where the opportunities are here and pursue them with more energy and vigor than anybody else. Because new immigrants, I have an Armenian friend who taught me this, new immigrants are paranoid optimists. They're optimists because they came from somewhere worse to our blessed country and we're sure that it would be better. But they're paranoid. It can be taken away from them at any moment. Friends, we are all new immigrants to the second half of the chessboard. Second, think like an artisan. Who was the artisan? I got this idea from Larry Katz up at Harvard, labor economist. The artisan was that person in the Middle Ages, before the era of mass manufacturing and factories and assembly lines. And the artisan made every item individually, every item one-off, every shoe, every belt, every stirrer. up every saddle, every chandelier, every plate, knife, fork, spoon, table, chair, and dress, the artisan made individually. And what did the best artisans do at the end of the day? They brought so much unique extra, so much personal value add to what they did, they carved their initials into their work. And we still see those carvings today. Do your job every day if you bring... As if you brought so much empathy, so much creativity, so much personal value add to it, that you want to carve your initials into it. That's a job that cannot be easily outsourced, automated, or digitized. Third, got this idea from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, always, always be in beta. So what does that mean? So Reid is, say, the founder of LinkedIn, co-founder. Reid always likes to say, in Silicon Valley, you know, there's really just... just one four-letter word. Actually, it's not four letters, but it does start with an F. And that word is finished. Finished. If you ever think of yourself as finished, you are really finished in today's world. Reed's motto is always be in beta. Always think of yourself, beta is the state of the development of a piece of technology or software when it's about 85% done. And they throw it over the wall and they test it and the community finds all the errors and the glitches and the problems and they throw it back and they work on it some more and they throw it back over the wall and the community finds the holes and the glitches and the problems and they throw it back. Reed's model is always be in beta. Always think of yourself in the process of learning, relearning, retooling and reengineering. Never think of yourself as finished because in a world accelerating this fast, if you think of yourself as finished, you're not finished. as a finished product. You are really finished. Fourth, I live by this motto with my kids, and that is that PQ plus CQ is always greater than IQ. Oh yeah, you give me a young person with a high passion quotient, and a high persistence quotient, and a high curiosity quotient, high PQ and CQ, I'll take him over the kid with a high IQ seven days a week. 65 days of the year. Especially in a world where everyone you know, it's all out there on Google. It's all about people, when everything is out there, who has the passion and who has the curiosity, not only to go get it, but to keep going to get it. Lastly, always think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis, my favorite restaurant. So I was working on... on my last book, I was out in Minneapolis Sunday morning having breakfast with my best friend, Ken Greer, at Perkins Pancake House, Highway 100 and France Avenue. 7 a.m. on Sunday morning. I ordered three buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs. Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit. And after 15 minutes, the waitress came. She put our two plates down. And all she said to Ken was, I gave you extra fruit. That's all she said. I gave her a 50% tip. Why did I give her a 50% tip? Because that waitress didn't control much, but she controlled the fruit ladle. And that was the source of her extra, her unique value add. What was that waitress doing in her own little world? She was thinking entrepreneurially. I think I'll just give these two guys a little extra fruit. and see what happens. And the lesson I have from that is whatever job you have, here at Morgan State or anywhere else, think entrepreneurial. Think how I can fork off and start something else. How I can take this thing and create a new business. Where there's a new opportunity, always think entrepreneurially. Because we do need, one, creating jobs for seven, seven creating jobs for 12. That's how we're going to get the employment we need. So friends, if you take nothing else away from this talk tonight, please take this. Think like an immigrant. Stay hungry. Think like an artisan. Take pride. Think like a starter-upper in Silicon Valley and always be in beta. Remember that PQ plus CQ will always trump IQ. And always think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House. And be relentlessly entrepreneurial. Because this little Minnesota boy can... tell you. We all really do now live in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. Where all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the children need to be above average. Thank you very much. Friedman has agreed to take questions, a few questions. If you have questions, please make your way to the mic. You see mics on either side. Mics here and here, yeah. Come forward with your questions, please. I give you a moment to step forward, let me say, and ask you to join me in again thanking Mr. Friedman for his wonderful presentation and for being on time. Not the only way. Thank you. Come on down here. We'll start over there and then we'll come to you, okay? Please. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Hudson Luma. I'm actually a grad student here. Great. What are you studying? Community College Leadership Doctoral Program. Great. But I hear you. I'm listening and, you know, I have a four-year-old and my wife. My wife, she's a school counselor, and every time I'm listening to the news, I'm hearing about the percentage of growth, the wage stagnation. Right. You know, I own a home back in 07, when all the crash and everything. But I'm noticing money is becoming tight. And Internet is slow. We talk about access, but I don't see it. Internet access, or you're saying access in general? Access, when you mean about the power of the computer. Some of us are still using broadband, DSL. But I'm noticing... a lot of stuff because I try to keep up with current events because I don't want to be at the end of the ballgame when the economy shifts. And I'm hearing these things, but I'm saying, why as a community we're not getting information at a faster rate? Meaning, like I'm hearing, cryptocurrency. The new Bitcoin. Right. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Blockchain. Blockchain. And I'm getting scared because money is becoming scarce. Yeah. So I'm trying to tell, so the question to you as a person who explore, who've been around Silicon Valley, who've been around the high thinkers. Yeah. What can you tell us as students and individuals who are trying to make it, who has the ability, the energy, the mindset to go get it? Because I'm looking around, I'm seeing my. peers they're shaking their head and they get it. They get what you're saying. But yeah. Is something not connecting? Yeah we're talking about the presidential election. I mean but we're not. Every time I turn on Facebook I'm seeing somebody getting shot by a cop. Yeah. It's confusing. I mean and then you're talking about go out here get a job but the job's not there like you just mentioned. Right. So again some folks got high-powered computer who have access to the deep web. Right. But at home I'm still running with broadband. I mean, if I get onto a website that's quite heavy, it shuts down. Tell me again, what's your study? Community college leadership, doctoral program. It's the community colleges to be a leader at a, like a vice president or a dean. Are you an academic? I just want to understand where you're from. Well, I'm a business person as well. Yes. And. Like you said, you have to think like an immigrant. I'm always looking for opportunities, so the doctor just gave me an opportunity to give me a platform. But I'm trying to keep ahead with the financial market as well because economics plays a major part in our community because of lack of resources. And again, when I'm speaking about lack of money, we're scarce, meaning that you work, you get paid twice a week, but everything is getting high, but your wages are not getting up. So again, 1.2 percent of... economic. I got you. So what advice can you give us? You know, I You know, I don't have Much more I can tell you other than what I've told you here, which is that all I can tell you is what I do in my life, which is that I am scrambling all the time to stay on top of every big trend I possibly can. I'm not suffering from the digital divide, so I have Internet access through the New York Times and whatnot. But I don't think there's a... I wish I had a magic cure for what you're talking about. But the only real advice I have for you is what I tell myself, which is I am constantly learning. I am learning, relearning, retooling all the time. I do it through books because that's my way of learning, and it gives me an excuse to go out in the world. It's beyond my control kind of what access people get or what they're doing. what salary they get. I wish I could wave a magic wand. I guess I'll tell you, maybe the best way I can answer for you is I'll tell you my politics. Because I'm a non-partisan extremist. That's my politics. So I'm actually to the left of Bernie Sanders and to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. At the same time. Because I actually think in the world we're going into, I think we need much stronger social safety nets. Because this world is fast and it is scary and it's leaving a lot of people behind. I'm actually going to left a Bernie on that. I think we should have a minimum income tax. Okay, I think we should have, you know, universal pre-K. I think we should have, you know, many more Pell Grants, much more earned income tax credit. I'm actually, believe we need to, I'm saying this for your benefit, I wrote this as a column. I think we need to be much more conscious of the need to have both safety nets and trampolines to catch people who are going to be left behind in the fast world. At the same time, to pay for that, I'm actually to the right of the Wall Street Journal. Journal. I want to abolish all corporate taxes, all personal income taxes, and replace them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar, and a tax on bullets. So I want to get radically entrepreneurial here in order to pay for more safety nets over there. And so my problem with Sanders, I think he's got the right diagnosis, but the wrong prescription. I think the others have completely the wrong prescription and the wrong diagnosis. But a lot of what the book I'm writing is basically saying we're at such a profound inflection point that we need to really rethink, not just rejigger or reform. We need to fundamentally rethink a lot of what's going on now. And part of this election, I think... is the beginning of that process. You know, Trump is mad as a hatter, but if you think of what he's done, it is part of this process because he's basically said, well, actually, I think being a Republican today means protecting Social Security, not like all these right-wingers want to do to cut it. He says, no, no, I'm a... He says, I'm an isolationist. I don't want to go invading anybody else. And then he's got his own other wacky stuff, but for the first time, you saw someone say, you know what, the usual left-right divide? Not going to play by those rules. I'm going to mix up the game here and in the process he's blowing up the Republican Party which I think is the Lord's work myself but I mean don't tweet that I just didn't mean that it just came out so that's all I wish I had a more perfect answer for you but that's my way of getting at it I really think we need to rethink a lot of of these things. But it sounds to me like you're actually quite an entrepreneurial person, and all I would tell you is keep doing more of that. Keep running. I'm running all the time. I think it'll pay off in the end as long as you're learning, relearning, retooling, and reengineering. Thanks for your question. Yeah. Mr. Friedman, first let me thank you for coming to Morgan. I want to introduce you to PBS NewsHour. And I really appreciate your diligence in being nonpartisan. Well, thank you. So I was glad that you came. My pleasure. One, around 2001, you wrote an op-ed piece about your views on the Middle East, how to resolve that. Yes. And Nelson Mandela sent you a memo. No, that was fabricated. Well, it was. Yeah. Well, tell me now. I wish Nelson Mandela would have sent me a letter, but that was a fabrication. Tell me now. Unfortunately, part of the world we live in, people can do that. From the technology perspective, your evolution in thought, looking at how the technology, looking two facets. It's one. the development of technology to reduce collateral damage and war, the other side of the technology to impose on societies as far as their freedoms. And the second question I wanted to ask you, you talked about how the founding fathers were looking, believed that governing should be through the filters of our elected officials. But some people say that filters become so distorted that the populace input into that filter. with social media has expanded the thought and allowed for evolution and ideas that may have been impacted certain communities. Good point. Yeah, that's a very good point, actually. So on the first question, one of the things you learn when you study about technology is that it's everything and its opposite. It can be incredibly empowering and incredibly disempowering. We can use the Internet in America to give voice to people who never had it. Right? Chinese can use it to spy on their population. Same technology. It's incredibly democratizing, and it's incredibly authoritarian at the same time. And so when you're talking about technology, it's all about actually what values you bring to it. It's why I really believe, you know, in my own personal life, I'm actually, I talk the talk of technology and globalization, but I don't walk the walk. I'm actually a pretty different person. disconnected person in general, because I actually like talking to people face-to-face. I know who my friends are, and so one of the ways I like to explain this values question is people sometimes ask me, what's the best question you ever got speaking to a public audience? It's a very easy question for me to answer. It was 1999. I was in Portland, Oregon at the Portland Theater. a young man stood up in the balcony. I was out talking about my book then, Lexus and the Olive Tree. This young man stood up and he said, Mr. Friedman, I have a question. Is God in cyberspace? I thought, whoa. Is God in cyberspace? I don't know. Didn't have a good answer. So I got home, I called my spiritual teacher, he's a rabbi in Amsterdam, his name is Svi Marx. I met him when I was a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, married to a Dutch priest, very interesting guy. And I called him up, I said, Svi, I got a question while I was on book tour. and I didn't know how to answer. Is God in cyberspace? What should I have said? And he said, well, Tom, you know, in our faith tradition, we have a biblical view of the Almighty and we have a post-biblical view. So the biblical view of the Almighty is that he's almighty. And he smites evil and rewards good. And if that's your view of the Almighty, he sure isn't in cyberspace. Because it's full of pornography, crime, lying, cheating, gambling, and cybercrime. But he said we have another post-biblical view of the Almighty. And that is God reveals himself by how we behave. How we act. How we treat each other. So if you want God to be in cyberspace, you've got to bring him there. by how you behave there. Because cyberspace is just an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information. So we need to bring our values to it. Now I would argue that, and this is what my new book is about, we're standing at a junction today that we've never stood at before as a human species. So in 1945, we entered a new world where one country could kill everyone. That was us. I'm glad if it had to be anybody, it was us. It was us. We now are entering a world where one person will be able to kill everyone, and all of us will be able to fix everything. That is, we actually now live in a world where one person, if we're not there, we're getting there, will be able to kill everyone, but with the same technology. If we brought the right values to it, if we applied ourselves, we could actually feed, house, and clothe. every person on the planet. So we've never lived in a world where down this road we can kill everyone and on this road we could fix everything. So when you're in a world like that, what does it mean? We've never been more godlike. as a species. And if we're going to play God, we sure as hell better have the Ten Commandments. So values are going to matter more than ever. And those things, the golden rule, has never been more important. I actually have a whole section in my book where I say, now this is where your spouse jabs you in the ribs, dear reader, and says, can you believe we paid $32.95 for this, honey? But I really just have one piece of advice. And it's the first lesson you learned in Sunday school. It's the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Because we now live in a world where so many people can now do unto others farther away than ever before. And we, as you alluded to in your question, can do unto others farther away than ever before. So values really need to make a comeback. And my view is those values, you can't download them. them. You can only upload them the old-fashioned way. Good parenting, good spiritual leadership, whatever your faith community is, good teachers, good neighboring. All the stuff you can't download is going to matter more than ever. So thanks for your question. We'll take one more. Thank you. Well, Mr. Freeman, I'm to the left of Karl Marx. Okay, so... So you feel me, right? I got you, baby. I like that you're wearing all black today. I'd like you to simply speak to a film I think you were associated with, Earth 2100. And in a world where over half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day... Hey, when and where does that become a sustainability imperative? Well, there's no question about it. The big challenge we have, and I wrote a book on this too called Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and the reason it was called Hot, Flat, and Crowded is that there's a whole big part of the world that's still suffering from... energy poverty, no access to electricity. Young kids can't study at night, can't do homework. But at the same time, when all these people enter the middle class and get American American-sized cars drive on American-sized highways, eating American-sized Big Macs. That's going to be a huge environmental challenge to the world as well. So we're in kind of a race, and the race is can we invent the clean power technologies so people in India and China who are making $2 a day, hopefully one day will make $4, $8, $10, $20, $50, and $100, when they can join the middle class, we don't burn up, choke up, heat up, and smoke up the planet. planet irrevocably. And that's going to be one of the big, huge challenges we have going forward. That's the challenge of being able to fix everything. I better go home. I've got to go back to Washington, D.C. I've enjoyed being here very much. Thank you for having me, and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Thank you.

Tonight's program is an outstanding beginning. To get it started, please join me in welcoming to the podium a man who is already well known to you, the President of Morgan State University, Dr. David Wilson. Good evening.

Thank you very much, Dean Wickham. I would like to also welcome you to the Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series. As Dean Wickham indicated, this series is designed to bring...

some of the nation's leading and most provocative thought leaders from various disciplines and professional fields of study to Morgan State University. Exposing our university community to a broad range of range of views, to a broad range of perspectives, to broad angles on the myriad of opportunities and challenges we face as a nation, is in keeping with Morgan's mission of serving as a premier public urban research university rooted in the HBCU tradition. This series is designed to promote, if you will, mind expansion.

It is designed to enable you to wrestle deeply with issues of the past, to challenge you with regard to where we are as a city, as a state, as a nation, and as a world today, and then to expose you and challenge you to the possibilities of tomorrow. Now more than ever, we need to hear from the best of ideas in our society. I don't know if you feel the same as I do, but when I peep in on the national in our politics, I am beyond disgusted and I am disappointed with the level of discourse. If what I am hearing in many of these quarters are supposed to be and supposed to represent some of the best ideas of those running for elected office in particular, then I think that we in America are in deep trouble.

You know, it was the best of ideas that led us to believing that one day we would be able to fly an airplane. It was the best of ideas that led to President Kennedy's goal of America's landing on the moon. And it was the best of ideas that has led to major health care reform in this country for the very...

for its time, moving us closer, if you will, to a society where no one would be denied a doctor if he or she couldn't pay. The dare to think critically and to challenge common thinking. is what this distinguished presidential lecture series represents.

In this series, we will seek out individuals who are on the cutting edge of innovation, individuals who have the ability to see around corners, and individuals who are able to imagine, if you will, an America that is inclusive, an America that is equitable, an America that is just, an America that is inclusive. that is fair to all. And so in doing so, we will be showing our students in particular here at Morgan what it means when we say and we embrace our motto, growing the future and leading the world. You know the traditional big ideas and fighting for inclusion is not new to Morgan.

It was at Morgan that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first delivered major aspects of his I Have a Dream speech. speech, not at the Washington Monument. It was at Morgan that the first college sit-in movement occurred, which led to the integration of shops and restaurants in Baltimore City.

And so as I bring my brief remarks to a close, I want you to know that we here at Morgan value the freedom of speech and the freedom of speech in Baltimore. expression of ideas, we value the free expression of thoughts, and we remain and will forever remain open to diverse speakers who challenge our points of view. As president, I understand the importance of our students in particular again, being exposed to multifaceted points of view. For such views often lead to greatness in thought and to the greatness of possibilities. And so ladies and gentlemen.

With that in mind, I'm very pleased to introduce to you this evening the first speaker in our series. He is Thomas L. Friedman, award-winning columnist for the New York Times and best-selling author. He is renowned for his direct journalistic reporting and sophisticated analysis of complex issues facing the world.

He has won not one, not two, but three awards. but three Pulitzer Prizes for foreign and international reporting, covering monumental stories from around the globe for the New York Times since 1981. Vanity Fair called him, quote, the country's best newspaper journalist or columnist. He has been ranked number two on the Wall Street Journalist's list of influential business thinkers, named to the 2011 Thinkers 50 and the 2013 list of foreign policy's top. global thinkers, and he has been called one of, quote, America's best leaders by U.S. News and World Report.

I think almost everybody in the room has read his most renowned book, The World is Flat. That book sold more than four million copies, earning him the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His latest bestseller, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, is, quote, quote, that used to be us, how America fell behind in the world it invented, and how we can come back. It has been hailed by some as, quote, a must-read for anyone who cares about America's future. In October of this year, he will release his next book, and he and I were chatting about that a few minutes ago, called Thank You for Being Late, Pausing to Reflect on the 21st Century.

And so it really is an honor and a privilege to have Thomas L. Friedman here at Morgan. And I have to say this, and we'll bring him forward. As we're putting together the series, of course, we are a limited resource university. And everybody that we contacted, the first question was, how much are you going to pay me? And when Mr. Friedman was contacted, he called back and said, said, you have to pay me nothing.

And so I am honored, if you will, to welcome to Morgan State University Thomas Friedman. Please join me in giving him a warm Morgan round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a treat to be here with you this afternoon.

And as I was thinking about what to talk about, it really is very easy. What the heck's going on in our country? It's really easy to speak these days. David mentioned I'm working on a new book.

It is called Thank You for Being Late. And the title comes from meeting people. in Washington, D.C.

for breakfast over the last year. And some people would come 15, 20 minutes late. I'd say, Tom, I'm really sorry.

There's the weather, the traffic, the subway, the dog ate my homework. And one day I just found myself spontaneously saying to them, actually, David, thank you for being late. Because you were late, I've actually been eavesdropping on the table next door. I've been people watching the lobby. Fantastic.

And I just connected to ideas I've been struggling with for months. So thank you for being late. And people started to get into it.

They'd say, well, you're welcome. Thank you. What the title is really about is that we're in this really age of acceleration. And I have a friend and teacher, Dov Seidman, who wrote a book called How.

And Dov likes to say, you know, when you press the... The pause button on a computer, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts. It starts to think and to reflect and to rethink. And if there was ever a time, speaking for myself, when I felt I needed to pause and figure out what's going on, it's really now.

And so I want to share with you this evening. what I'm really thinking about, and how I, I can't explain Trump, I mean no one can explain Trump, but how I explain really what's roiling underneath our politics today, and some of the challenges you all face as a university and as students about to enter the world of work. Because I think we're actually in the middle of one of the greatest technological inflection points since Gutenberg. invented the printing press. I think we're in the middle of something really, really big.

I started to get at it with The World is Flat and I realized that the story had continued to evolve and I needed to take more of a crack at it. One of the ways I learn is really by trying to be a really good listener. And when I hear people saying bizarre things, but they don't think they're bizarre, that's when I know something big is happening.

So I've been collecting a bunch of them, and maybe I'll begin by just sharing a few with you. The first actually came out of my mouth. Because as President Wilson said, in 2004 I sat down to write... The World is Flat.

In 2011, I wrote another book with my friend Michael Mandelbaum called That Used to Be Us About America. And when I sat down in 2011 to write that new book, the first thing I did was get the first edition of The World is Flat off my bookshelf just to remind myself what I'd written. And I opened it up to the index.

I looked under A, B, C, D, E, F, F, A, C, E, Facebook. wasn't in it. Yeah, when I was running around the world in 2004, telling people, folks, the world is flat.

We're all connected. Facebook didn't exist. Twitter was still a sound.

The cloud was still in the sky. 4G was a parking place. LinkedIn was a prison. Applications were what you sent to college.

Big data was a rap star. And Skype was a rap star. was a typographical error.

All of that happened in just seven years between those two books. And most of it happened, if anybody's looking for a master's or PhD thesis, most of it happened in a single year, 2007. The iPhone came out in 2007. Facebook started in 2007. Twitter started in 2007, Amazon Kindle came out in 2007, and Android came out in 2007. There are vintage years in history, and that was one of them. More quotes.

I'm at a lecture in Europe last year, actually a year and a half ago, by Andy McAfee, a professor at MIT, and he's talking about Gary Kasparov, the Russian chess... Grand Master. And he refers to him as the last human chess champion.

I thought, wow. I never heard that before. The last human. We're in the age of the last human. last human taxi driver, the last human bus driver, the last human chess champion.

A few weeks later, I was out in Silicon Valley interviewing Sebastian Thrun, the father of Udacity, the guy who actually invented the first MOOC when he was a Stanford professor of artificial intelligence. And Sebastian's telling me that he started taking flying lessons. And we got on the subject of the ASEAN air crash at SFO San Francisco Airport four years ago.

And Sebastian said in passing, he said, Tom, you know, that plane crashed because of good weather. I said, no, no, Sebastian, you mean the plane crashed because of bad weather. He said, no, no, had there been bad weather, they'd have been on autopilot.

The plane would have landed just fine. The plane crashed because of good weather, because the pilots engaged in human error. The plane crashed because of good weather. Never heard that before.

A few weeks later I was actually out playing golf in San Francisco and Bay Area and it was a very long round and my caddy, we were just standing around one hole, we were actually down in Carmel and he said, we started talking about best hotels to stay in in Carmel. And he mentioned this hotel, he said, you know, you know Mr. Friedman, President Kennedy had a lot of fun at that hotel. before the internet. I thought, a whole new historical divide. BI and AI, before the internet and after the internet.

And of course, I knew what he meant, but before privacy. and after privacy. Here's a phrase that will go down in history. One of the great, I think, turning point moments in history.

The phrase is, what is a shoe? And the reason that's going to be a historically important phrase is because on February 4th, 2011, on of all places, a game show called Jeopardy. There were three contestants. The first name was Ken Jennings, all-time Jeopardy champion. Second, Brad Rutter, second all-time Jeopardy champion.

The third contestant just went by his last name, Watson. Watson passed on the first question. But on the second question, Watson buzzed in in under two and a half seconds, beat the two humans, and the question was, it's worn on the foot of a horse and you can't wear it. used by a dealer in a casino.

And Watson said, what is a shoe? What is a shoe? And the world was never the same. For the first time in history, a computer figured out a pun, posed in natural language, and answered in natural language before the two human competitors. What is a shoe will go down with, come here Mr. Watson, which is what Alexander Graham Bell said when he tested out the first telephone.

Here's a paragraph that really jumped out at me. A few years later I read this. This was in TechCrunch, written by Tom Goodwin. And the story began like this.

Uber. Sorry. Uber, the world's first. Sorry. Uber, the world's largest.

The largest taxi company today owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer in the world, has no inventory.

And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. Sure is.

But before we leave the weird thing... I've been hearing. Here's two words, two phrases I don't hear anymore. One is, you know what, Mr. Friedman, I'd like to sleep on that. When was the last time somebody said, I'd like to sleep on that?

You never get a chance to sleep on anything anymore. And the other phrase you never hear anymore is parents telling their kids, go to your room, go to your room. Because now you have to say, turn over your cell phone. your wireless card, your laptop, your iPod, your iPad, your iWatch, then go to your room.

Otherwise, go to your room is an invitation to connect with the Milky Way galaxy. So what's going on here? What's going on?

Well, I read a book two years ago that really started to open my mind about what's happening. The book is called The Second Machine Age by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee. And Andy and Eric are argue that the first machine age was built on the steam engine.

And the steam engine doubled in power roughly once every 70 years. And it required human direction. What they argue is that we're now in the second machine age.

And the second machine age is built on Moore's Law. Moore's Law, founded by Gordon Moore 50 years ago this year, says that the speed and power of microchips will double roughly once every 70 years. roughly every 24 months.

And what Andy and Eric argue is that in this second machine age, where we are now in this doubling process, we are increasingly... Entering what they call the second half of the chessboard. Now that term comes from a very famous story often heard in Silicon Valley about the power of exponential growth. What happens when something just keeps doubling? As Moore's Law has done for 50 years.

and the story that's often told is about the man who invented chess and he gave the game to the king, king loved it said how can I reward you good sir and the man said your highness all I want is to be able to feed my family the king said what would you like said, I'd just like you to take one kernel of rice and put it on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the next, eight on the next, 16 on the next, 32 on the next. Just keep doubling it. My family will be fine. King said, it shall be done, not realizing that when you double something 63 times, the number you get is close to 18 quintillion. More rice than existed on the planet.

Well, Andy and Eric used that image with Moore's Law. When you keep doubling the power... of microchips every two years, you start to get some really funky stuff.

You start to get cars that can drive themselves. You start to get computers that can win in chess and beat any human being. You start to get some really funky stuff when you enter what they call the second half of the chessboard. And that's where we are today.

We are entering the second half of the chessboard when the doubling power of technology gets really, really powerful. So what are the implications of it? Well, the best description I heard in working on my book came from John Kelly. He's actually the man who led the Watson Project for IBM. And we were talking one day.

He said, Tom, you know when you buy a new car, it comes with that little sticker on the rearview mirror? it says objects in your rear view may be closer than they appear he said that actually belongs on the front windshield it's the stuff coming at us that's now much closer than it appears what are the implications of a world where we're now technologically in the second half of the chessboard and the power of microchips just keeps doubling well first of all it's a fantastic fantastic time to be a maker. If you want to make something today, as an individual here at Morgan State, this is an amazing time to be a maker.

Not only here, but anywhere in the world. You know, General Electric, for the engineering students here, they may know, General Electric does something now around innovation and engineering, which they call Jump Ball. Jump Ball.

So in 2013, they actually did a Jump Ball contest. They actually took a puck. It's called a fastener for fastening an airplane engine onto a plane.

Key part. And they said this part, put it out on the top engineering website. They created this contest. They said this part weighs 4.5 pounds.

And we are challenging anyone in the world, jump ball, for who can take the most weight out of this part using 3D manufacturing. They published all the specs for it. Within three weeks, they got 697 entries from around the world. They winnowed them down to the final 10, all their engineers, they assessed them all. They found 10 that they thought worked best.

They tested each one. They winnowed it down to the winner, who took 84% of the weight out of the part. And that person won $20,000. That person was a 21-year-old engineering student from Central Java in Indonesia. None of the final 10 were Americans, and none of them were aeronautical engineers.

Jump Ball. A lot of companies now are using the World Wide Web just to create Jump Ball and see who anywhere in the world with any background can rise to the challenge. I was out at Udemy. capacity, online university, working on my new book. Because I had been a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon for a lot of years, they thought it might be interesting if I interviewed one of their Lebanese students online.

She was taking a Web 2.0 design course, and I interviewed her on a Skype call in Beirut. I just asked her why she was taking this MOOC course, this online learning course. course from Udacity in San Francisco, and she said, very simple, I really want to improve my web design skills to better serve my customers in Australia. I thought, run that by me again.

Lebanese student in Beirut taking a web 2.0 design course from a MOOC based in Silicon Valley to better serve her customers in Australia. It's a great time to be a maker. It's also a great time to be a maker thanks to big data. Because thanks to big data, guessing is officially over. Guessing is officially over.

The example I love to give is Microsoft's Connected Cow. I don't know if any of you have come across Microsoft's Connected Cow. Microsoft, a year and a half ago, partnered with Fujitsu in Japan. And they basically went to 10 dairy farmers in Japan.

And they put Fitbits, basically, sensors, on the hooves of all their dairy cows. And they connected those Fitbits up to the Microsoft cloud. and they very quickly discovered something very valuable.

If you're a dairy farmer, they discovered that when cows are in heat, when they're in estrus, they take more steps. And if you're a dairy farmer and you need to time exactly when you're doing your artificial insemination to know exactly that 16-hour period when cows are in heat, is enormously valuable information. Then they discovered that if you artificially inseminate these cows in the first four hours, you have a 70% chance of getting a female.

And if you do it in the second four hours, you have a 70% chance of getting a male. So in the old days, if you were a dairy farmer, you relied on something called intuition. Oh, intuition.

Intuition. There's old Bill. He's been around cows for 30 years. He can just tell when Bessie's in heat. You know, he can just tell.

Well, guessing is officially over for all these Japanese dairy farmers. They now know, connected to the cloud, exactly when Bessie's taken a few too many steps and she's ready for a little AI, artificial insemination, supported by AI. artificial intelligence.

It's a great time to be a maker. Unfortunately, when it's a great time to be a maker, it's a great time to be a breaker. Breakers are always early adopters. ISIS we see as an organization, fantastic use of social media, fantastic use we saw in Belgium of encrypted telecommunications.

Unfortunately, it's a great time to be a breaker. There's a story I brought along that jumped out at me from the newspaper the other day. It was in the Washington Post. This was after President Obama complained that the knucklehead who landed the drone on his backyard while he and Mrs. Obama were abroad and their two young girls were at home in the White House, he bought that drone at Radio Shack. It's a great time to be a breaker.

So I picked up the post a couple weeks ago. It had this story. It said that the Justice Department had charged a hacker in Malaysia with stealing the personal data of U.S. service members. and passing it to ISIS, which urged supporters online to attack them. The article explained that in June, Ardit Farizi, the leader of a group of ethnic Albanian hackers from Kosovo, who called themselves Kosovo Hackers Security, who knew, hacked into a server used by a U.S. retail company online and obtained data on 100,000 people.

Ferizi, this guy in Kosovo, is accused of passing the data to ISIS member Junaid Hussein, a British citizen who in August posted links on Twitter to the names, email addresses, passwords, locations, and phone numbers of 1,351 U.S. military personnel. military personnel. He included a warning that ISIS soldiers will strike at your necks in your own land. FBI agents tracked for reasons.

to a computer with an internet address in Malaysia where he was arrested. Meanwhile, Hussein was killed by a U.S. drone in Syria. Wow, let me run that by you again.

An Albanian hacker in Malaysia collaborating with an ISIS jihadist on Twitter to intimidate U.S. soldiers online before we killed the jihadist with a drone. That's modern warfare. And that's why, unfortunately, it's a great time to be a breaker. it's a really tough time to be a leader. I'm sorry to tell President Wilson this.

You don't want to lead anything in the second half of the chessboard. Because every... one you're leading today is walking around with a mobile MRI machine called a smartphone in which they can not only look inside of you, President Wilson. but they can tell the whole world what they see without an editor, a publisher, or a libel lawyer.

And if you are a public figure in an age when everyone who has one of these is a paparazzi, a documentary filmmaker, and a reporter, I have to tell you, it's really scary. Okay. And what it's doing, unfortunately, is subtly shifting our country from a representative democracy to a popular democracy, thanks to Twitter. Our founding fathers thought that the will of the people should be filtered through elected representatives. And that would produce the best democratic outcomes.

But in the age of Twitter now... Every politician has an instant poll all the time. I've actually stopped going to Congress to interview people. Because it is like the most unsatisfying experience you can possibly imagine.

is me interviewing a senator. So, Senator, what do you think about the situation in the Middle East? Tom, the situation in the Middle East, excuse me one second, I need to take this call. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I'll call him back.

Yeah, yeah, fine. What were you saying? The Middle East, yeah.

The situation with ISIS in the... Say, would you get back to them with that tweet? Respond to that tweet. Now, what were you saying, Tom, about the Middle East?

I mean, talk about ADHD. I mean, to interview an American politician today is the most unsatisfying experience you can possibly have. And as a result of this instant poll going on all the time, as a result of this, basically, our... Our Congress today is so much more like American Idol than it is the Continental Congress.

Everyone is taking an instant poll all the time. And at a time when we have some big, complex decisions to be making, that is deeply, deeply unhealthy. It's a really tough time, I have to tell you, to be a worker of any kind. In the second half of the chessboard, it's a really tough time to be a worker. We did a piece in the New York Times last year, a year and a half ago, about dairy farmers.

I'm into dairy farms. Dairy farmer in upstate New York, how all the dairy farms there have moved completely to... robotic cow milkers. No human hand touches these cows.

They are completely milked by robots. So if you were a young kid growing up in Buffalo or Syracuse, and got your high school degree, thought you might work on a dairy farm one day. I hope you studied computer science because that's as close as you're going to get to any cow.

So what's happening to jobs in the second half of the chessboard? Every job today is being pulled in three directions at once. It's being pulled up.

It requires more skill, whatever it is. and each year more skill. It's being pulled out. More machines, robots, software, people in India and China can compete for it now.

And it's being pulled down. It's being outsourced to history, made obsolete faster than ever. Every job... today is being pulled in three directions at once. What sustained the American middle class for the 50 years after World War II was something called the high-wage middle-skilled job.

High-wage, middle-skilled job. There is no such animal in the zoo anymore as a high-wage, middle-skilled job. There is a high-wage, high-skilled job.

There is a low-wage, low-skilled job. But this thing that sustained the American middle class for 50 years, the high-wage, middle-skilled job, is completely disappearing. And that's one of the things clearly roiling the politics of this campaign. Who was the biggest employer in Baltimore 50 years ago?

The biggest employer in Baltimore 50 years ago? 50 years ago was a company called Bethlehem Steel. You could actually drop out of high school or just have a high school degree, join the steel union, get an average job at Bethlehem Steel. That would enable you actually to get an average mortgage to buy an average house with an average size yard. So you could have 2.0 average kids, take an average number of trips to Disney World in your life and go to an average number of Orioles and Ravens games.

You could have a perfectly average retirement and a wonderfully average funeral. All. as a high school grad or even dropout from Baltimore.

Who's the biggest employer in Baltimore today? Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. They don't let you cut the grass there without a BA.

I exaggerate, but you know what I'm saying. Every job is being pulled in three directions at once. So what does that mean for you? Well, one, if jobs are being pulled up, it means a lot more of the three R's, more read and write and arithmetic to master these new jobs. It also means a lot more of the three C's, creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, four C's.

because I think a lot of the best jobs going forward are not just going to be STEM jobs, those with science and technology and engineering and math required. They're going to be what I call STEMpathy jobs, jobs that combine strong grounding in STEM skills, but also a real ability to interact with human beings. Because, you know, with... Thank God. Thank God I got the empathy part, not the STEM part.

So I'm applauding, too. Because think about the world we're going into. I mean, thank goodness, God forbid, anyone you know would be diagnosed with cancer. But if they were, the first question you'll ask is, does your hospital have Watson?

Because IBM's Watson has now been trained as an oncologist and has read every article ever written about cancer. They've also... put millions and millions of pictures of melanoma into Watson so he can pretty well detect whether that mole you've got is something you should be worried about. The first question you're going to ask is, does your hospital have Watson? Second question you're going to ask, though, is, does your doctor ask good questions?

See, we live in an age where no one really cares what you know because the Google machine knows everything. And Watson knows everything about... oncology.

All people really care about, and all they'll pay you for, is what you can do with what you know. And in the case of Watson is, can you ask good questions? Can you ask the right questions?

And then if you can ask the right questions, can you translate those answers in an empathetic way to a patient? So STEMpathy skills are going to be in very, very high demand. That's what happens when jobs get pulled up.

When they get pulled out, when they get pulled out, when every machine, robot, software, and India or China can compete for them, it's going to take a lot more self-motivation. That's the biggest change going on in the world today. More will be on you.

You know, if the world had a dial on it, for the 50 years after World War II, the dial was set to the left. And the closer you were actually to the Soviet Union, the more to the left the dial was. And it pointed to a sign that says, you live in a world of defined benefits.

Do your job every day, show up, and you'll get these benefits. What's happened as we entered the second half of the chessboard is that dial is now whipped over here. And it says, you live in a world of defined contributions.

Now you will be paid according to your contribution. And... And with big data, we can actually detect exactly what your contribution is. We at the New York Times now, if you go to New York Times online, have something called the most emailed list.

Most emailed list. Most emailed items in the New York Times online updated every 15 minutes. Now, any New York Times reporter...

Journalist who tells you, columnist tells you they don't look at that list is a liar, okay? Because how can you not? Am I on the list? Am I number 20?

Am I number 15? Is my column moving up? Is it moving down?

If the New York Times wanted to pay me, now... on my defined contribution, they could actually pay me on my monthly ranking on the most emailed list. Thank God they don't do that, because if they did, I would never write about anything other than Donald Trump. Sure to go to the top. that's coming to every job and lastly jobs are being pulled down, they're being outsourced to history faster than ever I mean you know the story of the modern American factory, just two employees, a man and a dog the man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines Adam Davidson Jobs are being made obsolete faster and faster, and when that happens, you need more of the three E's.

More and more entrepreneurship. We need everybody thinking about how to start something. Because the days when Bethlehem was built, If lithium steel is going to come to Baltimore with 25,000 jobs, those days are over. That factory now is 2,500 robots and maybe 500 people. So we actually need everybody at Morgan State thinking entrepreneurially.

why five people create jobs for 12, 12 create jobs for 20. That's how we'll get those 25,000. So think of that matrix of the three different ways that jobs are being disaggregated and divided. You have a pretty good guide where to go.

Let me end before we go to questions, because I'm really here much more to hear you, by answering preemptively the first question I always get when I give my talk, which is, I have two daughters, one's 30, one's 27. And people always ask me, Mr. Friedman, what do you tell your own kids about this world? Well, they're tired of hearing it, but you're fresh meat. So I will share with you the five pieces of advice I give for my kids for surviving in the second half of the chessboard. The first piece of advice is always think like a new immigrant. Always think like a new immigrant.

How does the new immigrant think? The new immigrant thinks, I just showed up in Baltimore, and there's no legacy spot waiting for me at Morgan State. or the University of Maryland, Baltimore, or Johns Hopkins. I better figure out where the opportunities are here and pursue them with more energy and vigor than anybody else. Because new immigrants, I have an Armenian friend who taught me this, new immigrants are paranoid optimists.

They're optimists because they came from somewhere worse to our blessed country and we're sure that it would be better. But they're paranoid. It can be taken away from them at any moment. Friends, we are all new immigrants to the second half of the chessboard. Second, think like an artisan.

Who was the artisan? I got this idea from Larry Katz up at Harvard, labor economist. The artisan was that person in the Middle Ages, before the era of mass manufacturing and factories and assembly lines.

And the artisan made every item individually, every item one-off, every shoe, every belt, every stirrer. up every saddle, every chandelier, every plate, knife, fork, spoon, table, chair, and dress, the artisan made individually. And what did the best artisans do at the end of the day? They brought so much unique extra, so much personal value add to what they did, they carved their initials into their work.

And we still see those carvings today. Do your job every day if you bring... As if you brought so much empathy, so much creativity, so much personal value add to it, that you want to carve your initials into it. That's a job that cannot be easily outsourced, automated, or digitized. Third, got this idea from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, always, always be in beta.

So what does that mean? So Reid is, say, the founder of LinkedIn, co-founder. Reid always likes to say, in Silicon Valley, you know, there's really just...

just one four-letter word. Actually, it's not four letters, but it does start with an F. And that word is finished. Finished. If you ever think of yourself as finished, you are really finished in today's world.

Reed's motto is always be in beta. Always think of yourself, beta is the state of the development of a piece of technology or software when it's about 85% done. And they throw it over the wall and they test it and the community finds all the errors and the glitches and the problems and they throw it back and they work on it some more and they throw it back over the wall and the community finds the holes and the glitches and the problems and they throw it back. Reed's model is always be in beta. Always think of yourself in the process of learning, relearning, retooling and reengineering.

Never think of yourself as finished because in a world accelerating this fast, if you think of yourself as finished, you're not finished. as a finished product. You are really finished. Fourth, I live by this motto with my kids, and that is that PQ plus CQ is always greater than IQ. Oh yeah, you give me a young person with a high passion quotient, and a high persistence quotient, and a high curiosity quotient, high PQ and CQ, I'll take him over the kid with a high IQ seven days a week.

65 days of the year. Especially in a world where everyone you know, it's all out there on Google. It's all about people, when everything is out there, who has the passion and who has the curiosity, not only to go get it, but to keep going to get it. Lastly, always think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis, my favorite restaurant. So I was working on...

on my last book, I was out in Minneapolis Sunday morning having breakfast with my best friend, Ken Greer, at Perkins Pancake House, Highway 100 and France Avenue. 7 a.m. on Sunday morning. I ordered three buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs.

Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit. And after 15 minutes, the waitress came. She put our two plates down.

And all she said to Ken was, I gave you extra fruit. That's all she said. I gave her a 50% tip. Why did I give her a 50% tip?

Because that waitress didn't control much, but she controlled the fruit ladle. And that was the source of her extra, her unique value add. What was that waitress doing in her own little world? She was thinking entrepreneurially. I think I'll just give these two guys a little extra fruit.

and see what happens. And the lesson I have from that is whatever job you have, here at Morgan State or anywhere else, think entrepreneurial. Think how I can fork off and start something else. How I can take this thing and create a new business. Where there's a new opportunity, always think entrepreneurially.

Because we do need, one, creating jobs for seven, seven creating jobs for 12. That's how we're going to get the employment we need. So friends, if you take nothing else away from this talk tonight, please take this. Think like an immigrant. Stay hungry.

Think like an artisan. Take pride. Think like a starter-upper in Silicon Valley and always be in beta. Remember that PQ plus CQ will always trump IQ.

And always think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House. And be relentlessly entrepreneurial. Because this little Minnesota boy can...

tell you. We all really do now live in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. Where all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the children need to be above average.

Thank you very much. Friedman has agreed to take questions, a few questions. If you have questions, please make your way to the mic.

You see mics on either side. Mics here and here, yeah. Come forward with your questions, please. I give you a moment to step forward, let me say, and ask you to join me in again thanking Mr. Friedman for his wonderful presentation and for being on time.

Not the only way. Thank you. Come on down here.

We'll start over there and then we'll come to you, okay? Please. Can you introduce yourself?

My name is Hudson Luma. I'm actually a grad student here. Great. What are you studying?

Community College Leadership Doctoral Program. Great. But I hear you.

I'm listening and, you know, I have a four-year-old and my wife. My wife, she's a school counselor, and every time I'm listening to the news, I'm hearing about the percentage of growth, the wage stagnation. Right. You know, I own a home back in 07, when all the crash and everything.

But I'm noticing money is becoming tight. And Internet is slow. We talk about access, but I don't see it.

Internet access, or you're saying access in general? Access, when you mean about the power of the computer. Some of us are still using broadband, DSL.

But I'm noticing... a lot of stuff because I try to keep up with current events because I don't want to be at the end of the ballgame when the economy shifts. And I'm hearing these things, but I'm saying, why as a community we're not getting information at a faster rate? Meaning, like I'm hearing, cryptocurrency. The new Bitcoin.

Right. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Blockchain.

Blockchain. And I'm getting scared because money is becoming scarce. Yeah.

So I'm trying to tell, so the question to you as a person who explore, who've been around Silicon Valley, who've been around the high thinkers. Yeah. What can you tell us as students and individuals who are trying to make it, who has the ability, the energy, the mindset to go get it?

Because I'm looking around, I'm seeing my. peers they're shaking their head and they get it. They get what you're saying. But yeah. Is something not connecting?

Yeah we're talking about the presidential election. I mean but we're not. Every time I turn on Facebook I'm seeing somebody getting shot by a cop. Yeah.

It's confusing. I mean and then you're talking about go out here get a job but the job's not there like you just mentioned. Right. So again some folks got high-powered computer who have access to the deep web.

Right. But at home I'm still running with broadband. I mean, if I get onto a website that's quite heavy, it shuts down. Tell me again, what's your study?

Community college leadership, doctoral program. It's the community colleges to be a leader at a, like a vice president or a dean. Are you an academic?

I just want to understand where you're from. Well, I'm a business person as well. Yes. And. Like you said, you have to think like an immigrant.

I'm always looking for opportunities, so the doctor just gave me an opportunity to give me a platform. But I'm trying to keep ahead with the financial market as well because economics plays a major part in our community because of lack of resources. And again, when I'm speaking about lack of money, we're scarce, meaning that you work, you get paid twice a week, but everything is getting high, but your wages are not getting up.

So again, 1.2 percent of... economic. I got you.

So what advice can you give us? You know, I You know, I don't have Much more I can tell you other than what I've told you here, which is that all I can tell you is what I do in my life, which is that I am scrambling all the time to stay on top of every big trend I possibly can. I'm not suffering from the digital divide, so I have Internet access through the New York Times and whatnot. But I don't think there's a... I wish I had a magic cure for what you're talking about.

But the only real advice I have for you is what I tell myself, which is I am constantly learning. I am learning, relearning, retooling all the time. I do it through books because that's my way of learning, and it gives me an excuse to go out in the world.

It's beyond my control kind of what access people get or what they're doing. what salary they get. I wish I could wave a magic wand.

I guess I'll tell you, maybe the best way I can answer for you is I'll tell you my politics. Because I'm a non-partisan extremist. That's my politics. So I'm actually to the left of Bernie Sanders and to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

At the same time. Because I actually think in the world we're going into, I think we need much stronger social safety nets. Because this world is fast and it is scary and it's leaving a lot of people behind. I'm actually going to left a Bernie on that. I think we should have a minimum income tax.

Okay, I think we should have, you know, universal pre-K. I think we should have, you know, many more Pell Grants, much more earned income tax credit. I'm actually, believe we need to, I'm saying this for your benefit, I wrote this as a column.

I think we need to be much more conscious of the need to have both safety nets and trampolines to catch people who are going to be left behind in the fast world. At the same time, to pay for that, I'm actually to the right of the Wall Street Journal. Journal. I want to abolish all corporate taxes, all personal income taxes, and replace them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar, and a tax on bullets. So I want to get radically entrepreneurial here in order to pay for more safety nets over there.

And so my problem with Sanders, I think he's got the right diagnosis, but the wrong prescription. I think the others have completely the wrong prescription and the wrong diagnosis. But a lot of what the book I'm writing is basically saying we're at such a profound inflection point that we need to really rethink, not just rejigger or reform. We need to fundamentally rethink a lot of what's going on now. And part of this election, I think...

is the beginning of that process. You know, Trump is mad as a hatter, but if you think of what he's done, it is part of this process because he's basically said, well, actually, I think being a Republican today means protecting Social Security, not like all these right-wingers want to do to cut it. He says, no, no, I'm a...

He says, I'm an isolationist. I don't want to go invading anybody else. And then he's got his own other wacky stuff, but for the first time, you saw someone say, you know what, the usual left-right divide?

Not going to play by those rules. I'm going to mix up the game here and in the process he's blowing up the Republican Party which I think is the Lord's work myself but I mean don't tweet that I just didn't mean that it just came out so that's all I wish I had a more perfect answer for you but that's my way of getting at it I really think we need to rethink a lot of of these things. But it sounds to me like you're actually quite an entrepreneurial person, and all I would tell you is keep doing more of that.

Keep running. I'm running all the time. I think it'll pay off in the end as long as you're learning, relearning, retooling, and reengineering.

Thanks for your question. Yeah. Mr. Friedman, first let me thank you for coming to Morgan.

I want to introduce you to PBS NewsHour. And I really appreciate your diligence in being nonpartisan. Well, thank you. So I was glad that you came.

My pleasure. One, around 2001, you wrote an op-ed piece about your views on the Middle East, how to resolve that. Yes. And Nelson Mandela sent you a memo. No, that was fabricated.

Well, it was. Yeah. Well, tell me now.

I wish Nelson Mandela would have sent me a letter, but that was a fabrication. Tell me now. Unfortunately, part of the world we live in, people can do that. From the technology perspective, your evolution in thought, looking at how the technology, looking two facets.

It's one. the development of technology to reduce collateral damage and war, the other side of the technology to impose on societies as far as their freedoms. And the second question I wanted to ask you, you talked about how the founding fathers were looking, believed that governing should be through the filters of our elected officials. But some people say that filters become so distorted that the populace input into that filter.

with social media has expanded the thought and allowed for evolution and ideas that may have been impacted certain communities. Good point. Yeah, that's a very good point, actually. So on the first question, one of the things you learn when you study about technology is that it's everything and its opposite.

It can be incredibly empowering and incredibly disempowering. We can use the Internet in America to give voice to people who never had it. Right? Chinese can use it to spy on their population.

Same technology. It's incredibly democratizing, and it's incredibly authoritarian at the same time. And so when you're talking about technology, it's all about actually what values you bring to it. It's why I really believe, you know, in my own personal life, I'm actually, I talk the talk of technology and globalization, but I don't walk the walk. I'm actually a pretty different person.

disconnected person in general, because I actually like talking to people face-to-face. I know who my friends are, and so one of the ways I like to explain this values question is people sometimes ask me, what's the best question you ever got speaking to a public audience? It's a very easy question for me to answer.

It was 1999. I was in Portland, Oregon at the Portland Theater. a young man stood up in the balcony. I was out talking about my book then, Lexus and the Olive Tree. This young man stood up and he said, Mr. Friedman, I have a question.

Is God in cyberspace? I thought, whoa. Is God in cyberspace? I don't know.

Didn't have a good answer. So I got home, I called my spiritual teacher, he's a rabbi in Amsterdam, his name is Svi Marx. I met him when I was a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, married to a Dutch priest, very interesting guy. And I called him up, I said, Svi, I got a question while I was on book tour. and I didn't know how to answer.

Is God in cyberspace? What should I have said? And he said, well, Tom, you know, in our faith tradition, we have a biblical view of the Almighty and we have a post-biblical view. So the biblical view of the Almighty is that he's almighty. And he smites evil and rewards good.

And if that's your view of the Almighty, he sure isn't in cyberspace. Because it's full of pornography, crime, lying, cheating, gambling, and cybercrime. But he said we have another post-biblical view of the Almighty.

And that is God reveals himself by how we behave. How we act. How we treat each other.

So if you want God to be in cyberspace, you've got to bring him there. by how you behave there. Because cyberspace is just an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information. So we need to bring our values to it.

Now I would argue that, and this is what my new book is about, we're standing at a junction today that we've never stood at before as a human species. So in 1945, we entered a new world where one country could kill everyone. That was us. I'm glad if it had to be anybody, it was us. It was us.

We now are entering a world where one person will be able to kill everyone, and all of us will be able to fix everything. That is, we actually now live in a world where one person, if we're not there, we're getting there, will be able to kill everyone, but with the same technology. If we brought the right values to it, if we applied ourselves, we could actually feed, house, and clothe.

every person on the planet. So we've never lived in a world where down this road we can kill everyone and on this road we could fix everything. So when you're in a world like that, what does it mean?

We've never been more godlike. as a species. And if we're going to play God, we sure as hell better have the Ten Commandments. So values are going to matter more than ever.

And those things, the golden rule, has never been more important. I actually have a whole section in my book where I say, now this is where your spouse jabs you in the ribs, dear reader, and says, can you believe we paid $32.95 for this, honey? But I really just have one piece of advice.

And it's the first lesson you learned in Sunday school. It's the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Because we now live in a world where so many people can now do unto others farther away than ever before. And we, as you alluded to in your question, can do unto others farther away than ever before.

So values really need to make a comeback. And my view is those values, you can't download them. them.

You can only upload them the old-fashioned way. Good parenting, good spiritual leadership, whatever your faith community is, good teachers, good neighboring. All the stuff you can't download is going to matter more than ever. So thanks for your question.

We'll take one more. Thank you. Well, Mr. Freeman, I'm to the left of Karl Marx. Okay, so... So you feel me, right?

I got you, baby. I like that you're wearing all black today. I'd like you to simply speak to a film I think you were associated with, Earth 2100. And in a world where over half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day... Hey, when and where does that become a sustainability imperative?

Well, there's no question about it. The big challenge we have, and I wrote a book on this too called Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and the reason it was called Hot, Flat, and Crowded is that there's a whole big part of the world that's still suffering from... energy poverty, no access to electricity. Young kids can't study at night, can't do homework.

But at the same time, when all these people enter the middle class and get American American-sized cars drive on American-sized highways, eating American-sized Big Macs. That's going to be a huge environmental challenge to the world as well. So we're in kind of a race, and the race is can we invent the clean power technologies so people in India and China who are making $2 a day, hopefully one day will make $4, $8, $10, $20, $50, and $100, when they can join the middle class, we don't burn up, choke up, heat up, and smoke up the planet.

planet irrevocably. And that's going to be one of the big, huge challenges we have going forward. That's the challenge of being able to fix everything.

I better go home. I've got to go back to Washington, D.C. I've enjoyed being here very much. Thank you for having me, and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Thank you.

Transcript for:Inaugural Morgan State Speaker Series

Transcript for:
Inaugural Morgan State Speaker Series