Thomas L. Friedman How To Get A Job At Google

(audience applause) - thank you very much. well thank you all for comingout, it's a treat to be here. connects me with some oldfriends of mine from egypt and new friends. ted, thank you fororganizing this as well. great to be at claremont. i was here maybe a decade ago.

was there an atheneum series? yeah. i remember that fondly. so i'm gonna talk about my new book, thank your for being late: an optimist's guide to thrivingin the age of acceleration. the first question i alwaysget is where from the title of this book? and the title actually comes,

emerged quite accidentally from meeting people in washington, dcover the years for breakfast. and i don't like to wastebreakfast by eating alone when i could maybe be learningsomething from someone. so i often schedule breakfast with people downtown in dc. and every once in awhile, someone would come 10 or 15 minutes late and they'd say "tom, i'm really sorry,it was the weather,

"the traffic, the subway,the dog ate my homework." (audience laughing) and one day about three years ago, i said to one of them, peter persell, who's an energy innovator, who came late and started apologizing. i said, "actually, peter, "thank you for being late.

"because you are late,i've been eavesdropping "on their conversation. "fascinating.(audience laughing) "i've been people watchingthe lobby, fantastic. "and most importantly, i just connected "two ideas i've beenstruggling with for a month. "so thank you for being late." and people started to get into it. and they'd say, "well you're welcome."

because they understood i was givingthem permission to pause, to slow down, to rethink and reflect. and this book is an argument about why that's so important right now. the book actually was triggered in fact by an accidental pause. when i pause to engage with someone i normally might not have.

i live in bethesda, maryland and i take the subway towork about once a week or so, when it's running. almost three years ago now... involves for me driving from my home in bethesda to the bethesda hyatt, and i park, and there's apublic parking garage there. and i take the red line into dc. and i did that, went to thenew york times bureau there,

came back at the end ofthe day, got in my car, time stamped ticket. i drove up to the cashier'sbooth, gave it to the cashier, and he looked at it,looked at me and said, "i know who you are." and i said, "great." he said, "i read your column." i said "great." he said, "i don't always agree."

i thought to myself, "get me outta here." but i actually said to him, "that's great, it meansyou have to check." and i drove off thinking,"that's really great. "the car guy's reading my column." and i felt good about that. a week later i took my weekly trip in. dc, red line, came back,car, time stamped ticket, same guy's there.

and this time he says, "mr. friedman i have my own blog, "would you read my blog?" and i thought, "oh my god. "the parking guy is now my competitor." "what just happened?" so i said, "well write it down for me "and i'll look at it." so he tore off a piece of receipt paper,

and he wrote down odonomb.com. and i went home and icalled it up on my computer. and it quickly was obviousthat he's ethiopian and writes about ethiopian politics. he's from the oromo people. and from a very pro-democracy point of view. it was a good blog. i thought about him for a view days

and i told my wife and i decided that thiswas a sign from god and that i should actually pause and engage this man. i didn't have his email, though, so the only way i could do it was park in the parking lot everyday. so it took four days andwe finally overlapped, and i parked my car into the gate,

and i got out and i said, "eli," now i know his name,"i'd like your email." which he happily gave it to me and i repeat our emails back and forth. we had a rather funnyexchange to begin with. and that night i went homeand i sent him an email and i basically said, "i'm ready to teach youhow to write a column "if you will tell me your life story."

and he basically said, "isee you're proposing a deal, "i like this deal." so he asked me to meet near his work at peet's coffeehouse in bethesda and two weeks later iwas actually going to the middle east and i came back and we met at peet'sand i handed him a six page memo on how to write a column. and he told me his life story.

it's a wonderful story. he's a democracy activist student, graduate of haile selassieuniversity in economics. we're roughly the same age, i'm 63, i think he's 63. basically, his activism ledhim, essentially, to be expelled from ethiopia by the authoritarian regime. he gained political asylum in america, was working the parkinggarage just to make money,

basically, so he couldsustain his activism through the internet. he was blogging on ethiopian websites but they were too slow for him. they wouldn't turn hisstuff around fast enough, so he decided to start his own blog "and now mr. friedman, i feel empowered." his google metrics sayhe's read in 30 countries. which is amazing, it's an amazing story

of participation and the abilityof anyone to participate. i really felt we met liketwo just global columnists writin' about the world. it was a real insightfor me into how much the platform has changedand just how easily now so many people can participate. i then handed him my six page memo on how to write a columnand we had actually three sessions over time,

and on email on this. and so, if the world is a big data problem, what i'm about to sharewith you in my algorithm. it's how i, as acolumnist, write a column. and everyone does it differently. but this is how i go aboutorganizing the world, i explained to him. so i explained to eli that anews story is meant to inform

and i can do so better. worse, i can write about cgu and you'd read it and say,"he informed, better, worse." but a column is actually meant to provoke. i'm either in the heatingbusiness or the lighting business. that's what i do. i either do heating or lighting. i'm either stoking up an emotion in you, or illuminating something for you

and if i really do it well, i'm doing both and producingboth heat and light, and producing a reaction. but what i explained to him is that to produce heat and light requires actually an active chemistry. 'cause a news story comes to you. it's an event and you write about it. but a column actually has to conjured.

it has to be conjuredby an active chemistry. and you have to combine three compounds: the first is what is your value set? are you a communist, acapitalist, a neo-comm, a neo-liberal, a libertarian,a marxist, a keynesian? what is the value set your are trying to promote in the world? second, how do youthink the machine works? so the machine is my short hand.

for what are the biggest forces shaping more things inmore places in more ways on more days? as a columnist, i'm always carrying around a working hypothesis of how i think the machine works. once i called it lexus and the olive tree, once i called it the world is flat. all of these books,hot, flat, and crowded,

they're actual just a picture of the mental image ihave of how the big gears and pulleys of the world are working. because as a columnist, you're trying to take your value setand push the machine and if you don't knowhow the machine works, you'll either not push it or you'll push it in the wrong direction. and lastly, what have youlearned about people and culture?

'cause there's no column without people, and there are no people without culture. how the machine affectspeople and culture. you know, people and culture come back and affect the machine. stir those together, let it rise, bake for 45 minutes,and if you do it right, you will produce heat or light. you'll produce a reaction.

and you will know you'veproduced a reaction by what you hear and feel fromreaders coming back at you. some might say, "i didn't know that." that's a good reaction. some might say, "i neverlooks at it that way." some might say, "i neverconnected those things." your favorite, you'll live for this, it happens four times a year,

people say, "you said exactly what i felt, "but i didn't know how to say it. "god bless you." sometimes they say, "iwanna kill you dead, "you and all your offspring." that also tells you you'veproduced heat or light. so any of these reactions will work. so the more eli and i went back and forth

and the more i thought of how to explain all this to him, and thisis exactly what happened. the more i said to myself, "well if that's what a column is, "what is my value set? "where did it come from?" those of you who read me know that i'm not exactly a liberal, but i'm certainly not a conservative.

i have my own quirkypolitics, very heterodox. 'cause my politicsactually does not come from a philosopher, a book or a library. it actually emergesfrom the time and place where i grew up in minnesota. a small suburb outside of minneapolis. 'cause i grew up in a time andplace where politics worked. and that's what actually has influenced me more than anything else.

which by my chapter on that book, which is about my philosophy is called, "always looking for minnesota." 'cause that's basically whati've been doing for 40 years. how do i think the machine works today? and what have i learnedabout people and culture in 40 years as a journalistfor the new york times? and i decided that was thebook that i wanted to write. i will tell you, though,there's a personal subtext

to the book. and the personal subtextis that i spent about 30 years covering themiddle east of my life and i got to witness someof the great events there. i was on the white house lawnfor the oslo peace agreement. i was in tahrir squarefor the uprising there. i covered the arab spring. covered the iraq war. hoped it would end well, it didn't.

and after about 30 years i decided that, kind of nothing i wassupporting was working. and maybe i needed to take my idealism and invest it somewhere else. so i started writing about america, nation building at home. my last book was that used to be us: how america lost its way inthe world and invented it,

how we can come back. and then over the last seven, eight years, i started to feel like the middle east was coming to america, that we were turninginto sunni's and shiites. we just called itdemocrats and republicans. we were acting the same way. people were saying, "i wouldnever let one of my kids "marry one of them."

and they were actuallytalking about someone from another political party. and i began to hate washington, dc. and basically what happened was i started to drift back and try to rekindle my idealism bygoing back to the place and time where i realizedi had been the most happy. and that was the timeand place in this town and community i grew upin called st. louis park.

and that's why the subtext of this book is a journey back home to discover whether it was as good as i remembered. and if it was, to share those lessons with my readers in the world. so let me talk more detail,a little bit about the book, and we can open up for questions. let me talk about thecentral engine of all this. the first part of the bookis how the machine works,

and the second half is abouthow it's reshaping the world. so my argument is that, theway i think the machine works, what's shaping more things in my places in more ways on more days, is that we are in the middle of threenon-linear accelerations all at the same time, with the three largest forces on theplanet, which i call the market, mother nature, and moore's law. so, moore's law, coinedby gordon moore in 1965,

said that the speedand power of microchips will double every 24 months. it's now closer to 30. never mind, it's held up, it's the most powerful exponential in the world today. if you put it on a graph, itlooks like a hockey stick. you know one of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is actually the power of an exponential.

'cause we rarely encounterthe second derivative in our daily life. and so the engineers at intel wants to demonstrate the power of an exponential, 'cause it's hard to grasp the powerof doubling microchips. they took a 1971 vw beetle and on the back on an envelope, they tried to estimatewhat a 1971 vw beetle

would operate like today if it improved at the rate of moore's law. and they determinedthat it would go 300,000 miles per hour,(audience laughing) it would get two million miles per gallon, and it would cost four cents. and you'd be able todrive it your entire life on one tank of gas. that's the power of moore's law.

so it looks like a hockey stick. the market for me isdigital globalization, not your grandfather's globalization. containers on ships,that's actually going down. but the globalizationthat's actually weaving the world from interconnectedto interdependent, is digital globalization. everything now is beingdigitized and globalized. whether it's mooks, whether it's paypal,

whether it's facebook or twitter, we are now digitizingeverything and it immediately goes global, and that's whatdriving globalization today. what i called "the market." and mother nature ofcourse is climate change, biodiversity loss, and population growth. if you put the market digitalglobalization on a graph, it looks like a hockey stick. if you put mother nature on a graph,

we're in the middle of threehockey stick accelerations, all at the same time. with the three largestforces on the planet, and they're all interactingwith one another. 'cause more moore's lawdrives more globalization, more globalization drivesmore climate change, and more solutions to climate change. so, my

chapter on moore's law. i have three chapters, one oneach of these accelerations. and my chapter on moore'slaw is actually called, "what the hell happened in 2007?" 2007, 2007. sounds like such an innocuous year. well, here's what happened in 2007: in january 2007 at the mosconecenter in san francisco,

steve jobs unveiled theiphone for the first time. beginning a process by whichwe're putting in the hands of, eventually probably everyperson on the planet, a handheld computer you canhold in the palm of your hand, connected to the internet, in this thing we call the cloud. here's what also happened in 2007, actually late 2006, acompany called facebook, which had been confined tocolleges and universities,

opened itself to any user witha registered email address. and it exploded globally in 2007. in 2007, a company calledtwitter, which was formed in 2006, launched on its ownindependent platform in 2007 and went global. in 2007, the most importantsoftware you've never heard of, called hadoop, launched it's first algorithm onto the world. it's named after the company'sfounder's son's toy elephant.

and hadoop is the software whichbasically gave the world the ability to connect a million computers so they would operate as one. and it created the foundation for big data for everybody outside of google. basically, google pioneered this, but as doug cutting, thefounder of hadoop says, "google lives in the futureand sends us letters back."

and what google did is send a letter back to the open source community,the basic breadcrumb pathway to recreatetheir big data foundation by an open source algorithm, and we suddenly had thefoundation of big data. in 2007 the second mostimportant software company you've never heard of, calledgithub, opened its doors. it is now today, theworld's biggest repository of open source software

and just about every major company now develops software directlyand indirectly through github. in 2007, a company called google opened and unleashed into thewild an operating system called android. in 2007, the same company called google bought an obscure tvcompany called youtube. in 2007, jeff bezos gavethe world the first ebook reader called the kindle.

in 2007, ibm started the world's first cognitive computer called watson. in 2007, three designstudents in san francisco decided to rent out theirspare air mattresses to some people attendingthe design conference who couldn't get a hotel room. it worked out so well theystarted, in 2007, airbnb. in 2007, palantir launchedits first algorithm, change.org started, michaeldell retired in 2005,

came back to work in 2007. here's what else happened in 2007. solar energy began to take off in 2007. see if we can get this clicker working. ah, there it is. this is the cost of generating a megabyte ofdata, that's the white line. this is basically socialnetworking in a nutshell. so what happens is,

what year is that? oh, 2007, yeah.(audience laughing) the cost of generating amegabyte of data collapses, and in the same year, thespeed at which you can dispatch a megabyte of date explodes and the two lines cross in 2008. close enough for government work. keep going. this is what moore's law looks like.

let me just go back, we'remissing the first slide here, let's see if we can find it. this is quite important. alright, i'll just go forward. the cloud started in 2007. the first year it actuallyshows up statistically is 2008, so it actually began in 2007. i'm just gonna go ahead from these slide, maybe we'll get to the first one.

oh, this is the cost ofsequencing a human genome. in 2001, it was $100,000,000. you'll notice it hits a waterfall and goes straight down in 2007, okay. down toward $1,200. turns out, that 2007 may be known in time, as the single greatesttechnological inflection point since gutenberg inventedthe printing press.

and we completely missedit, because of 2008. so right when we hit, it was like we were on amoving sidewalk at the airport that suddenly went from five miles an hour to 35 miles an hour. our physical technologiesjust leapt ahead. all of our, what eric beinhocker calls, our social technologies: regulation, deregulation,politics, political reform,

management, learning. so much of that frozebecause the next year we went into the worst economiccrisis since the depression. and we are living, rightnow, in that dislocation. so, i was talking about this with astro teller who runs google x and he went over to his whiteboard and just did this crude etching of where we are.

so the blue line is the average rate, astro said, at whichhuman beings and societies adapt to change over time. it's very gradual, but itdoes have a positive slope. the white line is technology. you know if you lived in the11th century or 12th century, if you lived at the left end of that line, nothing actually changed. you could go a whole centuryand basically, nothing changed.

and then we get galileo and copernicus and intel and the whole thing, and the line starts to go straight north. and then astro drew this little diamond, and he wrotethe words, "we are here." that we're now actually moving... because we're beingdriven by an exponential, the change and the paceof change now is so fast that it's above the average rate at which

a lot of human beingsand societies can adapt. and i will tell you in writing this book, i had an experience i'venever had in writing a book, and i've written abouttechnology for a long time. i felt i had a butterfly net and i was chasing a butterfly,and every time i got close, it moved. so i had to interview briankrzanich, the head of intel, three times,

during the course of this book, just to make sure thateverything was up to date. i interviewed chriswanstrath, doug cutting, chris wanstrath's from github,doug cutting from hadoop. i don't remember how manytimes, just to make sure, it was almost monthly. in fact, chris wanstrath,every time i'd call him, he'd say, "we have anothermillion users on github, "it's not 11 now, it's12, then it was 13."

i felt like i neededan odometer on the page to keep pace of what was going on. so i was actually living that. so then astro went up, took out another magic marker, and he drew a little dotted line, and he called that "learningfaster and governing smarter." and he argued that's thebasic social and political challenge we face today.

how do we enable more people to accelerate their learning and governing,in order to keep pace with a changing pace of change? and that's a lot ofwhat the book is about. how did 2007 happen? well basically i argue thatthe computer has five parts: it has the cpu, the processor;it has the storage chip; it has networking; it has software; and it has a sensor.

there's many parts, butthose are the five key parts. in fact, all five havebeen under moore's law. and they all basicallycome together in 2007 into this thing we call the cloud. the cloud. but i actually don't used theword the cloud in my book. because it sounds so soft. so fluffy.(audience laughing) so cuddly, so benign.

it sounds like a joni mitchell song. ♫ i've looked at clouds from this ain't no cloud. in the book i rename it, actually, craig mundie, the former cto of microsoft, calls it a super nova. super nova is the largest force in nature, it's the explosion of a star. only this is an ever expandingand accelerating super nova.

and it really now is atthe center of so much of these accelerationsand what's happening. i mean if you think, where did you wanna build your town in the middle ages? you wanted to build it on a river. because the flows of thatriver created transportation, brought ideas, brought nourishment, and brought power. you wanted to buildyour town on the amazon.

where do you wanna build your town today? on amazon.com. you wanna build it on the flowscoming off this super nova, because it's now a worldof what john hegel calls, it's a world of flows, now. not a world of stocks. that is being touched with these flows that are now the key drivers of so much economic activity today.

so, that's basically the story of the moore's law acceleration. i then tell the samestory of globalization, i'm not gonna go into that. and i tell the samestory of mother nature. and my argument is thatthese three accelerations are not just changing the world, they are reshaping the world.

and they're reshaping fiverealms simultaneously: politics, geopolitics, ethics, the community, and the workplace. and so the first half of the book is about these accelerations and the back half is about how all five are being reshaped and how i think they need to be reimagined. and that's why it's important to slow down

and figure all this out. so i don't have time togo through all of them. i'll just do a couplejust to give you an idea and we can talk aboutthe others in the q&a. so the section of the workplace is called, "how we turn ai into ia." how do we turn artificial intelligence, into intelligent assistance, a-n-c-e, intelligent assistants, a-n-t-s,

and intelligent algorithms, so more people can accelerate their learning and governing in the age of acceleration. so i'll give you my example of each one. the section on intelligent assistance is built around the humanresources department of at&t. 360,000 employees living right on the edge of the super nova.

feels its heat every day,wakes up every morning, competes with verizon andsprint and deutsche telekom. i spent a lot of timewith their hr department, and basically this is thehr policy of at&t today. their ceo, randall stephenson, begins the years with aradically transparent speech about how he sees the world, what businesses and marketsat&t is gonna be in, and what skills you needto be an at&t employee.

then they put everyone on their own internal linkedin system. so they've got me ontheir linkedin system. i'm an employee, they've broken down... i'm making up this number i don't remember what the exact number is,but there are 10 skills you need to work in the at&t of today. and they come to me and they say, "tom, tom, tom, tom.

"you have seven of the 10 skills we need. "but you're missing three." then they partnered withsebastian thrun from udacity, who created online nanodegrees for all ten. then they came to me and said, "we'll give you $8,500 a year, tom, "to take the nano degree courses "for the skills you don't have, "on one condition:

"you have to take them on your own time. "so you have to take themafter work, at night, "early in the morning. "but the deal we have now with you "is if you take those courses, "we will offer you the new jobs first, "we will not go outside." if i say to them, "i've climbed up "just one too many telephone poles,

"and i'm just not up for this," they now have a wonderfulseverance package for me. but i won't be workin' at at&t. so their new social contractwith their employees is you can be a lifelong employee at at&t, but only if you're a lifelong learner. and that is the social contract coming to a neighborhood near you. the job of the company, ifit's a true social contract,

the job of that company is to create both the courses, the direction,and i think the resources to take those courses. the job of the employee is to take them on his or her own time. the job of the government isto enable the whole thing. but that is the new social contract. and, it is coming to a neighborhood near you.

that is what i callintelligent assistance. intelligent assistant, theexample i used is qualcomm. i profile qualcomm and irwin jacobs, the founder of qualcomm in thenetworking part of my books. i was spending a lot of time there and one day i was thereand i ended up talking to the head of their maintenance department. and he told me that theyhad just put sensors on six buildings and theybasically put sensors

on every device of these buildings. every door, window, light, hvac system, pipe, computer, absolutely everything. and then they beam all thatdata up to the super nova and then they beam it down onto an ipad for their janitorial staff on a really user-friendly interface. so their janitors can now swipe down. they know if you left your computer on,

if a pipe burst, theyhave the instructions all there, how to repairit or who to call. their janitors are nowmaintenance technologists. they give tours to foreign visitors. well think what that does for the dignity of the janitorial staff. they can live at a higher rate now because they have anintelligent assistant. my example of intelligent algorithm

is the partnershipbetween the college board, and i'm sure claremonthas experienced this, and khan academy. so i'm 63, i have twogirls, they're blessedly out of college now and in the work force. but when they were in 11th grade, in public school in maryland, we did that really neuroticthing all parents do. we went out and hired a college kid

to be their tutor for the psat to see if we could little goosetheir english and math scores. i know, you did the same thing. it's a completely rigged game, basically. 'cause if you live in a neighborhood or came from a familythat couldn't afford this or didn't even know you could do it,

you were at a huge disadvantage. it was a completely rigged game. so, two years ago, the college board partnered with sal khan of khan academy to create free onlinepsat and sat college prep. so now as an 11th grader,i take the psat exam, i get the results backand khan academy says, "tom, you really did, youdid pretty well on math, "but you have a problem withfractions and right angles."

it then takes me to apractice site just dedicated to fractions and right angles. just tailored perfectly for me. if i do well there it comes back and says, "tom, have you everthought of taking ap math?" well as a matter of fact i have been 'cause there's no one in my life who ever took ap math. i didn't even know what ap math was.

it says i can take ap math. if i do well there, ittakes me to another site with over 180 collegescholarships on it now. and another site connects me to the boys & girls clubs of america, where there are tutorsready to work with me to help me through thisprocess, all for free. last year two million american kids availed themselves of free sat prep

in the partnership between khan academy and the college board. you heard nothing about any of this during ayear and a half campaign. you heard nothing of this. because, bernie sanders' big ideawas to destroy the banks. the big banks. donald trump's big idea wasto destroy hillary clinton.

hillary clinton's big idea to tell you to go to her website, okay.(audience laughing) but nobody was telling you at all that there's actually massive social entrepreneurship going on within and outside companies around how to turn ai into ia. and i only gave you a fractionof what's in that chapter.

there's an explosion ofentrepreneurship around this issue. so i'll let you go to thechapter to read it all but people are doing amazing things. you would never know it, though, from the politicaldiscussion in this country. so let me talk to you briefly about the chapter on ethics. and then we'll go to questions. you might find it odd that,in the age of acceleration,

we need to rethink ethics. but boy do we have to. so, my chapter on that is called, "is god in cyberspace?" which comes from the best question i ever got on book tour, portland, oregon, i believe, 1999, i was sellinglexus and the olive tree, man stood up at questiontime in the balcony and said, "mr. friedman, i have a question:

"is god in cyberspace?" i said, (stutters). "i have no idea." i'd never been asked that before. and i felt like kind of an idiot. so i went home and icalled my spiritual guide, he's a rabbi i got to know,a great talmudic scholar, when i was the new yorktimes correspondent in jerusalem, his name's sphee marx.

very interesting character. he's married to a dutchpriest, lives in amsterdam. and i called him in amsterdam and i said "sphee, i got a questioni've never had before. "is god in cyberspace? "what should i have said?" and he said, "well tom,in our faith tradition, "we have two concepts of the all mighty. "a biblical and a post biblical.

"the biblical concept saysthe all mighty is all mighty. "he smites evil and rewards good. "and if that's your view of god, "he sure isn't in cyberspace. "which is full of pornography, "gambling, cheating, lying, criminality, "and we know from thiselection, fake news." but he said, "we fortunatelyhave a post biblical "view of god, which says that god

"manifests himself by how we behave. "so if we want god to be in cyberspace, "we have to bring him thereby how we behave there." i liked his answer, i wrote it up into the paperback editionof lexus and the olive tree, and nobody saw it, and icompletely forgot about it. well i started working onthis book three years ago, and i suddenly found myselfretelling that story.

everywhere i went and ifinally sat down and said, "why are you retelling that story now?" and the answer becameclear to me, and it became crystal clear in this election: it's because so much of our lives have now migrated to cyberspace. a realm where we're allconnected but nobody's in charge. that's now where weteach, that's now where we find a date, a spouse, a friend, how we

communicate with families. how we do commerce and how we educate. it's all moving to cyberspace,we're all connected there, but nobody's in charge. there is no value set there. and boy, did you seethat in this election. our election was hackedby another country, we think. or maybe it was just a groupof guys and gals somewhere.

we don't know. fake news, we just had a guy shoot up a pizza parlor in myneighborhood in washington, dc, because he thought astory that was purveyed by our future national security advisor, that hillary clintonwas running a pedophile ring in the back room of comet pizza. he thought that was news. that entire interactionhappened in cyberspace.

so, the question of whatvalues prevail in cyberspace, now is more importantthan ever, especially when the accelerations are also amplifying the power of machines and the power of one. well if you wanna makesomething today, you were born, you are going to claremontat exactly the right time. but if you wanna break something today, you're also living atexactly the right time. we have a president electwho can sit in his penthouse

at trump tower and throughtwitter communicate directly, unmediated byany news organization, with tens of millions of people. from trump tower. but we're also living ina world where the head of isis can do the samefrom raqqa province. so if you wanna be amaker or a breaker today, you were born at theright time and therefore, what values everybody hasnow matter more than ever.

to put it specifically, the golden rule has never been more relevant. now i know what you're thinking, i gave this talk as thecommencement address at olin college ofengineering last spring, this part of the talk. and i said to the parents, "i know what you're thinking, "you paid 200 grand so your kid

"could get an engineering degree "and there is a knuckleheadcommencement speaker "here talking to us about the golden rule. "is there anything more naive?" and my answer is naiveteis the new realism 'cause you wanna know what's really naive? thinking we're gonna be okay in a world whereindividuals have this much amplified power and it'sgrowing with that super nova

where we're allinterconnected if everybody doesn't get the golden rule, whatever version their faith has, and every faith has some version of, "do unto others, as you wouldwish them to do unto you." so when i step back, ifinally concluded that we're actually sittingat a moral intersection in the age of accelerations we've never sat at before.

we are now entering, in1945 we entered a world where one country, posthiroshima, could kill all of us. if it had to be one country,i'm glad it was mine. i think we're entering a world where one person can kill all of us and all of us couldactually fix everything. the same amplified powersare enabling one of us, eventually, to kill all of us, and all of us to actually feed, house,

clothe, and educate everyperson on the planet. we have never stood atthis intersection before where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could fix everything. what does that mean? we have never been moregod-like as a species. and if we are god-like,everybody needs to have the golden rule. where does the golden rule come from?

golden rule comes from, ithink, two primary places: strong families and healthy communities. that's where peoplelearn to do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you. i'm not an expert on strong families. i hope i built one, buti would never presume to lecture anyone about how you do that. everyone has to find their own way. but i am an expert on healthy communities

'cause i grew up in one. and that's why the book endsback in the little town, suburb in minnesota, called st. louis park where i grew up, and i have two chapters. the first chapter i explain that, in minnesota, minneapolis was the capital of antisemitism in the 30s and 40s until hubert humphrey became mayor and cleaned it out of city government.

a great hero in our household. humphrey, before he promoted civil rights between blacks andwhites, actually practiced on antisemitism. and in the 50s after thewar, all the men came home. the jews all lived in a ghetto in the north side of minneapolis. i call it the north side. my parents, actually,there was no bussing,

but they went to school with many, many african americans 'causethey were all basically frozen in the same ghetto. and in the mid-50s in a three year period, all the jews move out. the african americans couldn't get out, and all the jews moved to one suburb, the only one that had no red lining, covenants, and could take them all,

and they all moved. my aunt and uncle wouldlive two doors down, my other uncle lived another door down. they all moved to st. louis park. so overnight a suburb thatwas 100% protestant catholic scandinavian becomes 20% jewish, 80% protestant catholic scandinavian. so if sweden and israel has a baby, it would be st. louis park.(audience laughing)

we the jews of this frozen plain called ourselves the frozen chosen and we had a littleexperiment in inclusion of basically these neurotic jews thrown together with these incrediblydecent, pluralistic swedes, and out of that was quite an amazing explosion of creativity. 'cause i grew up in the same neighborhood, went through the same school system,

or went to the same hebrewschool, with the cohen brothers, al franken, norm ornstein, michael sandel, peggy ornstein, sharonisbin, alan wiseman, dan wilson, who wrote"someone like you" with adele, the hupman brothers, thecountry's leading stamp designers. it was a freaky place. this was not a neighborhood in the upper west side of new york. this was a one high schooltown outside of minneapolis.

and the cohen brothersmovie, a serious man, was about our town. in fact if you go seeno country for old men, and you remember the scene where chigurh blows up a car outsideof a pharmacy in mexico so he can steal pain killers inside, look at the name of the pharmacy, it's called mike zoss drugs. that was our local drug store.

so i tell the story of how all these people built an inclusive community. then i come back 40 years later. now my high school is 50%white protestant catholic, it's 10% hispanic, 10%jewish, and now 30% somali and african american. the same neighborhood that took the jews was ready to take the somalis

40 years later. now the inclusion challengeis so much deeper. it's racially more challenging and religiously more challenging. and i tell the story of how they're doin'. and they're actually doin' pretty well. as i look at the challenge,i tell the whole story, i'm reminded of what myfriend, amory lovins, is a great physicist,he is really my tutor

on chapter on mother nature. whenever you ask emory, "are you an optimist or a pessimist?" he says, "i'm neither. "'cause they're just twodifferent forms of fatalism." everything's gonna be great, everything's gonna be awful, you know. and amory says, "ibelieve in applied hope." (audience laughs)

and i believe in appliedhope and what i've seen in st. louis park and in minneapolis, is a lot of people applying hope. i don't know if it's gonna work,and they don't know either. but what is so hearteningto me, and the source of my optimism, isthere are so many people who wanna get caught trying. and that is something i find, actually in a lot

of communities around this country. in fact, if you wanna bean optimist in america, stand on your head. 'cause the country looks somuch better from the bottom up than from the top down. that all over this country, was actually propelling usforward, our healthy communities. we have troubled ones, too,we saw that in this election. but we have a lot of healthy communities,

where people are coming together, democrats and republicans,they still have politics, but it's much moremuted, 'cause there's no republican water and no democratic sewers and at the end of the day, people have to govern and live together. and at the end of theday, there are an amazing number of healthycommunities in this country and that is my source of optimism.

so let me conclude by sharing with you, my book has a theme song. i actually thought, "could i buy it?" and so when you openthe book, it would play the song like a hallmarkcard plays happy birthday. and the song is by oneof my favorite singers, brandy carlile. she's a great country folk singer and the song is called "eye," e-y-e.

and the main refrain is, "i wrapped your lovearound me like a chain, "but i never was afraid that it would die "you can dance in a hurricane, "but only if you're standing in the eye." and i believe my three accelerations, they are a hurricane. i believe we just elected someone who thinks he can stop the wind.

that he can hold the hurricane back. i don't think that's the right strategy. i think you have to build an eye that moves with the storm, draws energy from it,but creates a platform of dynamic stability where people can feel connected, protected, and respected, and moves with the storm. that for me is the healthy community.

i think the struggle in our country in the next four years,and probably globally, is gonna between the wallpeople, and the eye people. and my book is a manifestofor the eye people. thank you very much.