MIT Milestone Celebration Keynote Address

[APPLAUSE] MODERATOR: today our keynote speaker is Tom Friedman. I have a story Tom doesn't know. I first heard him speak at a graduation ceremony. I think it was his daughter and my son were classmates. And it was the graduation ceremony at Yale. And I recall him giving the graduation speech. And it was truly a tour de force of both deep insight and personal commentary about their futures. It occurred to me then, my universal answer to the question when you're in a meeting and you are planning an event, well, who should we get to come speak? It made it real simple. I just kept saying. Thomas Friedman. And I continued to do that for several years in a row. And guess what? We finally got it to work. So it's my honor to introduce Tom Friedman, who actually needs very little in the way of introduction. But, being polite, I will give you some of the highlights of what's an extraordinary career. He is one of the keenest observers and commentators on the issues around globalization. He's a world renowned author and a journalist. His foreign affairs column, which appears twice weekly in The New York Times, is syndicated in over 700 newspapers around the world. He's won the Pulitzer Prize three times, and he's the author of several books. The most recent book is The World Is Flat 3.0, A Brief History of the 21st Century. With that, I'll turn the podium over. Please join me in welcoming Tom Friedman. [APPLAUSE] TOM FRIEDMAN: Thank you so much. Thank you. well, it's a treat to be back here. I feel a certain proprietary interest in the OpenCourseWare, as Ann and Chuck Vess know. I wasn't here quite as the creation, but shortly after they got me to come up. And, Susan, I think you were just starting then. And so we were all kind of present at the creation. And I gave one of the very first lectures I ever gave about The World Is Flat. And they put it up on the OpenCourseWare site. And it still sits there today. I think it's been downloaded 70,000 times or something like that. And I now use it when people want me to speak, and I just can't. And some people from far-off places I can't get to, I just say, go to OpenCourseWare. Download it. It's yours for free. And it's been a great vehicle for me. So it's really a treat to be back here. Susan, thank you for having me. What I thought I would do-- Steve said I've got to update my site, my OpenCourseWare site. So that's really why I came, you know. And we're filming this. And so what I thought I'd do is share with you what is now the 3.0 edition of The World Is Flat-- it's gone through a couple more iterations-- my kind of latest thinking on that subject. I know some of you have read the book. Those of you who haven't, I know who you are, know where you teach, where you go to school. And so there'll be a little repetition to just sort of start from ground zero and then try to take it forward. And then I'd like to just spend a few minutes talking about my new book, which will be out in August, called Green is The New Red, White, and Blue., which is about energy and environment, because the two books are actually very much connected. I hope it'll come together. Every time I try to do this, I'm always reminded of this story when they were digging the Chunnel under the English Channel connecting Britain and Europe. They put it out for bids. And they got bids of $3 billion from Bechtel and $3.1 from Halliburton, all these big industrial engineering firms. Got one bid from Goldberg and Cohen firm on the Upper East End of London for 100,000 pounds. And for fiduciary reasons, they had to check it out. So they sent a team out to Goldberg and Cohen knocked on the door. Cohen answered. Goldberg was on the road. And they said, Mr. Cohen how can you possibly dig a chunnel under the English Channel for 100,000 pounds? He said what's the problem? Goldberg will start on one side. Cohen will start on the other. We'll each have a shovel. We'll dig until we meet. They said, what if you don't meet? So you have two tunnels. [LAUGHTER] So maybe you'll have one lecture, one, maybe later two. I don't know. I hope they'll meet. It's all for the same price. The first thing you really need to know about The World Is Flat is that this book came about completely by accident. I wish I could tell you I was as smart as a MIT professor. This was all cooking in my head. I unveiled it to the world. It was all an accident. I became the New York Times foreign affairs columnist in January 1995. I spent basically from January 1995 until September 11, 2001-- my column really oscillated between what I call Lexus issues and olive tree issues, issues of finance, technology, trade, and issues of traditional geopolitics and ethnic conflict. And I was really going between Silicon Valley and the Bekaa Valley. . In light of what happened on September 11th, I really dropped the globalization side of my column, which had really been an abiding interest, and spent the next three years almost exclusively in the Arab Muslim world trying to understand the roots of 9/11. I was really in that mode right up until January of 2004, when I started doing documentaries for the Discovery Channel. We had done one on the roots of 9/11. We had done one on the wall Israel had built in the West Bank. And in January of 2004, we were sitting around with our Discovery team trying to figure out, what should we do our next documentary on? And at the time, a big issue out there, the obvious issue to take on, was why does everyone hate America? And that's how this all got started, because I had this crazy idea that what we should do is go to call centers all over the world and interview young people, foreigners, who spend their days imitating Americans, on what they think of America. That's how the whole thing started. And right in the middle of our budgeting meetings, while we we're trying to figure out which call centers to go to, John Kerry came out with his blast against Benedict Arnold CEOs who engage in outsourcing. And suddenly this issue of outsourcing just exploded onto the world stage, the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune. So I said, wait a minute, time out, why don't we just go to Bangalore, India? And let's do a documentary called The Other Side of Outsourcing, where we try to explain this phenomena from the ground up. That's how it started. So we went off to Bangalore on February 15, 2004, with our Discovery crew. We shot about 60 hours of film in 11 days. And across those 11 days, I got progressively sicker and sicker. It was nothing I ate. It was somewhere between the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to prepare my Maryland tax returns from Bangalore and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to write my new software from Bangalore and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to read my x-rays from Bangalore and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to trace my lost luggage on Delta Airlines from Bangalore that I got this really sick feeling that while I had been sleeping, while I had been off covering the 9/11 war, something really big, transformative, and fundamental had happened in the globalization world. And I had completely missed it. And it all came together with the last interview we did, which as with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, one of the crown jewels of India's high tech firmament. Nandan was an old friend, and we are sitting on the couch outside his office. I had my laptop in my lap. He's putting up a little plaque there now, where The World Is Flat was born. And Nandan said at one point, Tom I've got to tell you. The global economic playing field is being leveled. The global economic playing field is being leveled, and you Americans are not ready. Oh, I wrote that down on my little laptop. The global economic playing field is being leveled, and you Americans are not ready. Well, after the interview, I got in my Jeep, went back to my hotel. And along the way I kept rolling over in my mind, as is my habit, what Nandan said. The global economic playing field is being leveled. After a while, it occurred to me that what he was really saying was that the global economic playing field is being flattened. And then in the crazy chemical way these things happen, it just popped into my head that what Nandan Nilekani, India's premier engineer entrepreneur, was really telling me was that the world is flat. And I wrote that down in my notebook. The world is flat. I got back to my hotel. I ran up to my room. I called my wife in Bethesda. I said, honey, I am going to write a book called The World Is Flat. She now says she thought that was a brilliant idea. [LAUGHTER] It's not how I remember the conversation, but men are from Mars, women are from Venus. But in any event, I did come home and basically call my owners at The New York Times and say, ladies and gentlemen, I need to go on sabbatical immediately. I need to go on sabbatical immediately because my software, the intellectual framework through which I look at the world, is out of date. I'm a basic engineer, and it's a Java world. And if I don't go on leave immediately and update my software, I am going to write something really stupid in The New York Times. It's a great way to get a leave, I have to tell you. [LAUGHTER] So I started this book in March of 2004. I turned it in in December. Do not try this trick at home, kids. I blew out my forearms along the way, but in a fit of energy and passion, produced kind of the core thesis of this book. And the core thesis, sort of the meta-argument of this book is very simple. The meta-argument is that there have been what I would call three great era of globalization. The first I call globalization 1.0. It began in 1492 and lasted until the early 1800s, with the beginning of global arbitrage. That era of globalization shrunk the world from a size large to a size medium. And that era of globalization was really spearheaded by countries globalizing. That is, you went global through your country. Nation states were the dynamic agent of globalization. So it was Spain exploring the Americas, Britain colonizing India, Portugal, East Asia. You went global through your country. Globalization 2.0 began in the early 1800s, lasted till the year 2000. That's right, it just ended. It shrunk the world from size medium to size small. And that era of globalization was really spearheaded by companies, companies going global for markets and for labor. You went global through your company. Well, while you were sleeping, or at least while I was sleeping, we actually entered globalization 3.0, from the year 2000 to the present. It's shrinking the world from size small to size tiny and flattening the global economic playing field at the same time. Only what's really new, really different, really exciting, and really terrifying is that this era of globalization is certainly not spearheaded by countries. And it's not exclusively spearheaded by companies anymore. What's really new, really different, really exciting is that this era of globalization is spearheaded by individuals. We've gone from a globalization built around countries to one built around companies to one built around individuals. How did we get here? How did we move down this progression to a point where individuals can now compete, connect, and collaborate globally as individuals? Well, we had to create a platform, really, for that to happen. Now, I'm not going to talk about the whole platform, what I call the 10 flatteners. But I'm going to talk about the four key ones, basically, that are relevant both to OpenCourseWare and, I think, to where we are today. Basically, the first of these four key flatteners was-- I'm going to do this really quickly-- the PC. And what the personal computer allowed-- and this is really the beginning of the whole individual nature of globalization-- the PC allowed was for individuals, individuals, to author their own content in digital form. It's great deal to be able to talk about this at MIT. I don't have to explain what those things mean. What the PC allowed was, for the first time in the history of the world, for individuals to author their own content in digital form. Now, individuals have authored their own content ever since cavewomen and cavemen etched on cave walls. But with a PC, individuals could author their own content-- words, photo, data, spreadsheets, video, music-- in the form of bits and bytes, in digital form. And once your content was created in digital form, it could be manipulated in so many more ways by individuals and dispatched so many more places. It was the first basic flattener. Second flattener-- some of these are technologies. Others are dates. The second flattener is a date, 8/9/95, August 9, 1995, which I consider to be possibly the most important day in your lifetime, certainly in our kids lifetime up to now. Because on 8/9/95, a small startup company in Mountain View, California, called Netscape went public. And the world has never been the same since. Netscape gave us two basic flatteners that changed the world. The first was Netscape's invention. This simple point and click device called a browser. And what the browser did was actually give us a tool that brought the internet to life. It was really the Netscape browser that brought the internet to life, because it allowed us to illustrate on computer screens everything locked away in internet files and, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, soon to be websites. It was actually the Netscape browser that made the internet this incredible tool of connectivity that grandma and grandpa, grandson and granddaughter, not just MIT computer scientists, could all use together. So it was really the Netscape browser that brought the internet to life. But that wasn't the only reason Netscape was a huge flattener. It's because Netscape's IPO-- Netscape going public on the morning of 8/9/95 at 9:00 AM is what actually started the dot-com boom. And that triggered the dot-com bubble. And that triggered the crazy, absurd, ridiculous, utterly outrageous overinvestment of $1 trillion-- that's trillion with a T-- into fiber optic cable in five years. And what that crazy, ridiculous, absurd, massive overinvestment into fiber optic cable in five years did was accidentally wire the world with nobody having planned it. So all those individuals authoring their own content in digital form could suddenly send their bits and bytes anywhere in the world, basically for free. It was that fiber optic explosion that accidentally, with nobody having planned it, made Beijing, Bangalore, and Boston all next door neighbors. How did it happen? Well, on the morning of 8/9/95, Netscape went public priced at $28. Their investment bankers, Morgan Stanley, wanted the stock to be priced at $32. But Jim Barksdale, the Netscape CEO at the time, said no, no, no, if this fails, I want it to be remembered as a $20 stock. Netscape opened that morning at $71, closed the first day at $56. And we all looked at that, and we said, whoa, there is gold over them there hills. And we went out, and we bought every dot-com that moved. Yeah, we bought every dot-com that moved, called Global Crossing and Nextel and JDS Uniphase. Oh, you can't fool me. I know what's in your 401(k)s I was born at night. It wasn't last night. And when we did, we accidentally funded the massive overwiring of the world with fiber optic cable. So every individual authoring content on their PC could suddenly send their digital content anywhere for free. Third key flattener was a quiet revolution. It was a revolution in transmission protocols, happened across the 1990s. It was the alphabet soup of TCPIP and HTML and HTTP and XML and soap and Ajax. You don't need to know, even though most people here do, what all that alphabet soup meant. It just meant one key thing for the flattening of the world, critical to this phenomenon. It meant everyone's computer and software became interoperable. We forget today what a revolution that was. We forget today what it was like when MIT's administration first got computers. And the bookkeeping department got rid of the abacus and adding machine they had down there and got a computer. And admissions got computers. A very exciting day around here at MIT when that happened. There was just one problem, though. Bookkeeping got SAP and administration got Windows and they didn't connect. They didn't connect anymore than you on your CompuServe could connect with your wife on AOL. Well, what happened, thanks to all those transmission protocols, is that we made everyone's computer and software interoperable. It was a quiet revolution. I call it the workflow revolution, because it truly allowed work to flow. And when that happened, when you could suddenly sit at your computer terminal, or someone in India, and not have to think for a moment, what is the computer and software that OpenCourseWare is running on? And what computer and software do I have? What it meant was we could all suddenly become collaborators. So put it all together. First, I could author my own content in digital form. Then I could send it anywhere in the world for free. And then, thanks to the workflow revolution, suddenly everyone could collaborate with everyone else on their digital content. What we created, right around the year 2000, right around the time of the millennium, was this crude flat world platform, a global platform for multiple forms of collaboration. Suddenly more people could collaborate with more other people, on more different kinds of things, in more different kinds of ways, from more different places, for less money, than ever before. That is built on this platform. Now, this flat platform then gave rise to a whole new set of collaborations, outsourcing, offshoring. To me, the most interesting one, which again is critical to OpenCourseWare, I call uploading, a term coined by Kevin Kelly of Wired, not uploading in the conventional sense. You see, when the world was round, you downloaded as an individual. But when the world is flat, individuals can now upload and globalize their own content globally. Uploading comes in many forms. Open source software was the most early variant and probably still the most popular. Open course software-- you just uploaded your university online. Blogging-- geez, in the old days, if you wanted an opinion on foreign affairs, you had to read a fuddy duddy like me. Not anymore. Now I go to Iraqi bloggers, see what they're uploading as individuals from Baghdad when I want to know what's going on there. YouTube, uploading video, and, of course, the mother of all uploads, Wikipedia. The people are now uploading their own encyclopedia. Now, it's not perfect. All you have to do is be a subject of Wikipedia to know how imperfect it is. And anyone who thinks the network will get it all straightened out doesn't have their biography on Wikipedia. But never mind, we won't go there. But the fact is, we're going from a world where, when I grew up Minneapolis in the 1950s, I remember when the Encyclopedia Britannica salesman came to our house with all those books. It was so exciting, put them down in the living room. And then we got the coolest thing. We got in Encarta, and you could download an encyclopedia. I think Encarta, 2007, had about 38,000 entries, wow. Wikipedia today has about 1.3 million 840, 846. And they'll have 847 real soon. So people aren't downloading their encyclopedia. They're now uploading it. So uploading is an incredibly new form of creativity that sprung off this platform. Now, basically what happened around the year 2000 is that all these flatteners converged, as I said. And they converged into a platform that is what I talk about when I say the world is flat. I talk about the world is flat. I don't mean it's equal. I don't mean that there's no more terms of trade. I am talking about a platform that allows individuals more equal ability to plug and play, compete, connect, and collaborate globally. And that's really what OpenCourseWare is an incredible manifestation of. It's living on this platform. So we've really gone from a world where value was created in vertical silos of command and control to a world where value is being created horizontally on this platform by who you connect and collaborate with. We're going from vertical to horizontal. I think that shift, which is happening in a million universities, a million businesses, a million governments all over the world, is going to be seen in time as the mother of all inflection points. We are going from vertical to horizontal. And it, in time, is going to change, I believe, everything. Now, there's sort of three things I'd keep in mind about this new platform. The first is what I call the iron rule of business on the flat world platform. And the iron rule of business on the flat world platform is whatever can be done, will be done. When the world is flat, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question, the only question left is will it be done by you or to you. Just do not think it won't be done. Promise me, if you have a good idea here at MIT, you will do it. Because I promise you, someone at IIT Madras will have it a second later. When the world gets this flat, and there are this many distributed tools of connectivity and creativity at the individual level, whatever can be done, will be done. Now, I see this everywhere I go now. And I'm not sure economics has fully been able to capture what is happening far below the firm level, at the individual level. I call it gross individual product, because individuals on this platform are now doing whatever can be done. My wife and I were in Peru last year. We were on a ecotour. Our guide, Alfredo Ferreyros, head of ecotourism in Peru-- we were there with Conservation International. We were down in Rio Tambopata. He says to me one day-- you notice, I like these stories. He says, Tom, I've got a friend. I got to tell you. He's selling Peruvian dishware now from a village near Cusco on the internet. Great, the world is flat. It's a Peruvian village. Then he adds this. He's checking to see if he can get his dishes made cheaper in China now. [LAUGHTER] OK, why not? If it can be done, it will be done. And if he doesn't do it, the villager in Cusco next to him will do it. Whatever can be done, will be done. I was out in Budapest a year ago. They did a seminar on The World Is Flat, all these European scholars screaming at me. It was really interesting and dumb. They gave me a driver when I got there. And he stayed with me for three days, and he took me back. We're going back Sunday morning to the airport. And on the way the airport, he says, Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom, I have to tell you. If you have any friends coming to Budapest, would you please tell him about me? I do diplomatic driving, tourism, business service. I said, oh, that's great. I was sort of bleary-eyed Sunday morning. I said, give me your phone number or whatever, and if I ever think of anybody coming. He said, no, they just go to my website. I said, now, you have your own website? And he said, yeah, and he gives me his card. Soon as I got home, I looked it up. It's in three languages, Magyar, German, and English. All the pictures of his different services, multi pages, with music, and suddenly I had this vision of something Secretary Baker said to me after he retired as Secretary of State. He said, how do you know you're out of power in Washington, DC, Tom? You know you're out of power in Washington when your limousine is yellow and your driver speaks Farsi. How do you know you're in a flat world? When your Hungarian cab driver has his own website now in Magyar, German, and English, with music. I interview people everywhere I go. So I'm out in South Sioux City, Nebraska. I don't even remember, I think I was speaking at the university out there. Guy picks me up at the airport. So I like to interview people wherever I am. Hi, what do you do? He says, well, I used to be in the chocolate business, imported chocolate. So you're from Nebraska. But Brazil could import them into this country, finished chocolates, cheaper than I could make them. Then went into the tack business, you know, horses, stuff. China came into that business, wiped us out. What do you do now? He says, now what do we do? We imported a machine from South Korea that can be placed at building sites that produces building siding and insulation together. I don't know that much about construction. Evidently there's a great efficiency there. We import this machine. We add a little IP here from some folks in South Sioux City. And we re-export it to Kuwait. I said you're doing all that from here? Yeah, he said. I say, interesting, I mean, how did you communicate with the Kuwaitis? This is actually in the 3.0 edition of the book. I'm not making this up, folks. He says, well, we got the Winnebago Indians here, in Winnebago Indian tribes. And the Winnebago Indians have a casino called WinnaVegas. And WinnaVegas spins off an enormous amount of cash. So the Winnebago Indians from WinnaVegas created the Winnebago Indian Development Corporation, which created an ad agency for Winnebago kids, who went out and hired Arabic speakers from the local university. And they write the brochures so we can import the machine from South Korea, add our IP here. They write the directions for it from the Winnebago Indian Development Corporation. And we re-export it to Kuwait. You show me where that shows up in the economic statistics. I'm sure it does somewhere, but that is people doing whatever can be done. And so much of that is happening today. I see it everywhere I go, which leads to me the second rule of the flat world platform. And the second rule, for me, is the most important economic competition going forward in the world today is, I don't believe, going to be between countries and countries. Although it's obviously still important. It's not even going to be between companies and companies, although obviously still important. I think the most important economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Because when you have a world this flat and individuals are this empowered to act on their own imagination globally, what individuals imagine really matters. And therefore, how well a university, a country, a state, a school inspires, enables, and empowers individual imagination I think will be the single greatest competitive edge in the world we're going into. The third rule of this platform is how well you horizontalize. How well you learn to collaborate on this platform will, I think, produce the most important productivity gains and, therefore, huge competitive advantage. I've spoken about this before. I learned this lesson really right when I was starting to write the book, quite by accident. I was going to visit my daughter, who was going to school in New Haven, Connecticut. I live in Bethesda, Maryland. To get from Bethesda, Maryland, to New Haven, Connecticut, is a complete pain in the behind. You have to drive almost an hour to Baltimore Airport, take Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford Airport, then drive one hour from Hartford to New Haven. I could almost go to London quicker. Never mind, I'm a Southwest fan. Don't know if many of you have flown Southwest, but you don't look like a Southwest crowd to me. But that's OK. And Southwest Airlines you know is el cheapo airlines. You don't get a reserved seat. You just get a ticket. This is A, B, or C. A's board first, B's board second, C's board last. Only thing you need to know about Southwest Airlines is you do not want to be a C on Southwest Airlines. Especially if you have two bags of spring clothing for your daughter, and you don't want to get stuck in the middle seat. No problem, I'm a hip guy. I did the e-ticket thing ahead of time. But just in case, I got to BWI, Baltimore Airport, 95 minutes before my flight, because I was going to be an A. Got to the machine, took out my Visa card, stuck it in the Southwest e-ticket machine, out came my ticket, and it said B. And I said, son of a-- this thing is fixed. This is rigged. This is worse than Las Vegas. There is no way I'm a B. I'm here 95 minutes before this flight. There is no way I'm a B. Ooh, I was mad. Got my Cinnabon and sat in the back of the B line stewing. Well, 45 minutes went by, and then they called the flight. And then I saw it. All the A's seemed to be getting on carrying what looked to me like just crumpled white home printer paper, as if they had gone online at 12:01 AM the night before and downloaded and printed out their own bar codes and boarding passes. Well, what I didn't know back then was what Southwest Airlines knew was that the world was flat. And on this new platform, they could empower their customers to go online and download, print out their barcodes and boarding passes, and take up all the A seats before Tom Friedman got to the airport. Oh, I looked at that, friends. I said, Friedman, you are so 20th century. I mean, really, think. You're so globalization 1.0, globalization 1.0. There was a ticket exchange. Go down, pull the number, thank you, ma'am. I want to go to Baltimore. Then we got to a e--ticket machine. We thought that was cool. And then, while you were sleeping, you the individual became your own ticket agent. Or to look at it another way, you the individual became an employee of Southwest Airlines. [LAUGHTER] Or look at it, actually, still another way. You the individual, if you value your own time, staying up at 12:01 AM the night before, are actually paying Southwest Airlines to be their employee. Have a nice day, OK? [LAUGHTER] So I get smart. Next time, I stay up till 12:01 AM. I download my own barcode and boarding pass. I get to the gate 35 minutes before the flight this time, because I've interacted with Southwest Airlines horizontally now, not vertically. And what happened? I captured 60 minutes of productivity by interfacing with Southwest Airlines on this platform horizontally, not vertically. Well, that move from vertical to horizontal, it's happening, as I said, on a million campuses, in a million businesses. And when we get to the other side of it, the people who do it best are going to capture enormous productivity. Think of the productivity gains, if you could measure them, of all these people interacting with MIT horizontally, not vertically. Not getting on a plane, coming here to a lecture, but interacting with MIT horizontally. I would be fascinated if someone could actually measure the incredible educational productivity gain you've given birth to here. So those are, to me, the three rules of this platform. Now, that means several things, I think, for our society and how we organize ourselves. Which makes the current election campaign make you want to really weep, because it means several things. First of all, I used to be a free trader. I'm not anymore, I have to tell you, I'm not a free trader anymore. Now? Now I am a radical free trader. Oh, I'm a wild, crazy, paint on my face, radical free trader. Because if whatever can be done, will be done, and if the greatest single advantage is what you can act on, your individual imagination, who's going to win? It's going to be the most open society that gets the signals first of what's being done and empowers and enables its citizens to react and do it before it's done to them. So just at a moment when we have this incredible cultural advantage as a free-trading society, we do not have one single candidate, basically, in this election campaign, truly, in a full-throated way, standing up for free trade. It is really, in my view, really, really dangerous. I think the second rule that I pull off this new platform and its new capabilities is also what it means for education. I have to say, I was always a fan of liberal arts. I'm an even bigger fan of liberal arts today. Lord knows, what MIT does here around math and science is irreplaceable and is one of the crown jewels of this country. But bringing liberal arts into the equation is more important than ever, because we're in a world now where imagination and mashups-- the ability to mash things together through really imaginative, I think, thinking-- is going to be such a huge advantage. And I don't know about you all, but where my imagination comes from is having two different specialties, Arabic Middle East history and globalization and technology, and mashing them together. I think edgy inspiration, innovation comes from having two or more specialties and applying the framework of one specialty to the framework of another. And so it is great, it is essential, it is critical. We have people who are expert at dots. But we also need, as individuals and collectives, to be encouraging the connecting of those dots and the mashing of them together. That is where inspiration comes from. Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist. He was an artist. He was an inventor. And that's what made him special I always point people to Steve Jobs' graduation speech at Stanford a couple years ago, where he talked about where his own inspiration came from for the Mac. Steve went to Reed College. He dropped out, like all great American entrepreneurs, after one term. Think about that. Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs all dropped out. But he had nowhere to go. So he hung around Reed College. He had nothing to do, so he decided to take a course in calligraphy. And he learned the beauty of typeface, of serif and sans serif type. And 10 years later, he said it all went into the Mac keyboard. The first Mac keyboard was exactly what it was, which had at that time the most innovative typeface In computing, popular computing, because Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College and took a course in calligraphy. I don't know if anyone is out there looking for a job. We are desperate at The New York Times for engineers. They've asked me to actually make this appeal. [LAUGHTER] We can't hire engineers. No one thinks we're cool. We're not Google, I know, but we're not that bad. We would love, if any of you want to give me your card, you're looking for a job in engineering, we'd love you to come interview at The New York Times. Just one thing, please don't come if you've never read The New York Times. Please don't come if you don't read at least three newspapers a day, because we need people who can mash up those things. We can get engineers. We can outsource. We can get people to do programming. We need people who can really imaginatively mash those things together. These are the kind of things that I'm really looking at now as I look at America, as I look at our election, and as I look at things that we need. I'm still a big believer that we have, culturally, so many things that work for this new world. But we've kind of lost our groove since 9/11. I go around the world now and hear it everywhere. People say the 19th century belonged to Britain, the 20th century belonged to America, and the 21st century will belong to China. And what's happening in China today is truly impressive. And what makes it impressive is it's from hard work and it's from the ground up. And you just cannot go there and not be impressed at what China's doing. But I'm just not quite ready to cede the 21st century to anyone yet, because we're not going to win it if we don't get our act together and be smart about these natural attributes we have, free trade, innovative culture. We don't need to have an hour of creativity class in this country. But we need to get our act together. We cannot go on being dumb as we want to be. And right now that is the motto of the US Congress, dumb as we want to be. [LAUGHTER] Washington today is brain dead. I am talking about beep. There isn't even a bip, OK? Brain dead, as far as I'm concerned, both parties, both houses, the White House, brain dead-- but I have to tell you, as someone who is a reporter, who spends a lot of time out in the country, thank God, our country is alive. Because all these individuals-- I should show you my desk. Boy, I got a pile here from energy entrepreneurs. Come see my flywheel. It turns a [? duck. ?] It jumps up. It makes methane. I mean, come to my class, another pile from educators. We're teaching young women how to do science and math in these really innovative ways. Thank God our country is alive. If we had a government that was as alive as the country, no one would touch us. So I'm not ready to cede the 21st century to anyone just yet, because our culture of creativity, it's hard to duplicate. My grandmother in Minnesota had a saying. Grandma Friedman, God bless her. She used to sit in her rocking chair in the dead of winter. And she would say to me, Tommy, I have to tell you. Remember one thing, said Grandma Friedman. Never cede a century to a country that censors Google. [LAUGHTER] It was just a little thing Grandma used to say and sitting by the fire. So I'm not ready to cede the 21st century yet to anyone. But I think a lot of who is going to own the 21st century-- and I'm going to close with this-- is really going to be defined by who addresses this clean power challenge, this clean energy challenge, first, best, and most productive. And that's really the segue to my next book. Because when the world is this flat, what's happening is three billion new players, God bless every one of them, have come through portals like this to the flat world, all with their own version of the American dream, a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave, and a refrigerator. If we don't find a cleaner, more non-emitting way to power their dreams, we are going to burn up, choke up, heat up, and smoke up this planet so much faster than even Al Gore predicts. So the flattening of the world is critical to this. Now everyone says, oh, but Mr. Friedman, there's a Green Revolution going on. There's a Green Revolution going. I read it in the special green issue of my local magazine, my local newspaper, special green issue even Amtrak's magazine. I say, oh, really? Really, there's a Green Revolution going on here? You don't say? Really, a Green Revolution? Have you ever been to a revolution where no one got hurt? That's the Green Revolution. Yeah, the Green Revolution we're having is a revolution where nobody gets hurt. You get to consume your way out of it. Oh, that's not a revolution, friends. That's a party. We're having a green party. And it's great fun. I have to tell you, I get invited to all the parties. It's great fun. I've never been to a revolution where no one got hurt. Many of you here attended, drove, and participated in the IT revolution. That was a revolution. It operated on the true business revolutionary principle, change or die. Change or die. Wayne Computer, Data General, Burroughs, they're not with us anymore. They're in that great computer company heaven in the sky, because they were in the middle of a real revolution, change or die. The Green Revolution we're having is a complete fraud, as far as I'm concerned, because in this revolution everyone's green. Yeah, Exxon's green. BP's green. I read their ad, the Beyond Petroleum. GM is green now. They give you a little yellow cap to put your flex fuel in. They don't tell you you're driving a flex fuel car, but never mind. That's not a revolution. That's a party. And if we don't do what it takes to spark a real revolution, in a flat world the climate and energy impacts are going to swamp us. I wrote about this a few weeks ago. Somebody may have seen. By accident, I happened to visit two cities you've probably never heard of, two weeks apart. I went to Iraq, and on my way I stopped in Doha, Qatar, capital of Qatar, a tiny peninsular state off the east coast of Saudi Arabia. And 10 days later, I went to Dalian, China. Now, I happen to have been to Doha and Dalian several times, but I hadn't been to either one for three years. I go to Doha, and what do I find? I get off the plane, I look downtown, and they have grown a Manhattan, a little mini Manhattan, since I was there last, like a wildflower that sprouted from a desert rainstorm. I just looked. I said, you have a skyline now. That's like a little Manhattan. Two weeks later, I go to Dalian, 10 days later. I see they already had a Manhattan. They've added two more since I was there. So I'm really glad you changed all the CFL, your lights here, from incandescent to compact fluorescent. Doha and Dalian ate that for breakfast. Oh, no, you got a Prius, God bless you. Doha and Dalian ate that for lunch. Oh, you added more insulation to your home. You did the 205 easy ways to go green, according to Working Woman magazine. Doha and Dalian snacked on that after dinner, like so much popcorn. Two cities you've never heard of have grown Manhattans in the last three years. The global economy today, friends, is like a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck, and we have lost the key. And the only way we are going to catch that truck is with a disruptive breakthrough. And the only way we're going to get a disruptive breakthrough is with a completely different mix of standards, regulations, incentive, and taxes that will trigger that disruption. Which is why my fundamental rule is change your leaders, not your light bulbs. Oh, it's great to change your light bulbs. But if you don't change your leaders-- [APPLAUSE] If you don't change the leaders who write the rules who trigger the innovation, we are cooked. So what I've been trying to do in the new book I'm writing is basically, in my own little way, to try to reshape how we think about this problem. Because we actually think we're having a revolution, and we're actually having a party. But one of the real problems in getting people to rethink this problem is getting them to rethink the meaning of green. One of the big problems around green is that-- I'm a big believer to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own an issue. The world is flat. And the problem with green is all these years it was named by its opponents, basically. They named it liberal, tree hugging, sissy, girly man, unpatriotic, vaguely French, just vaguely French-- [LAUGHTER] --something about, it vaguely French. Well, what I'm really out to do is to rename green, rename it geopolitical, geostrategic, economic, capitalistic, entrepreneurial, patriotic. Green is the new red, white, and blue. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you. MODERATOR: Well, first of all, thank you very much for you remarks. I'm glad you kept them low key and-- [LAUGHTER] --and certainly-- TOM FRIEDMAN: Want to know what I really think? MODERATOR: Yeah. But thank you very much for an extraordinary presentation. We're going to take a 15-minute break. And I will be ruthless in bringing you back. But I shouldn't need to because we have an extraordinary panel as the next session. So take a break, come back when lights start flickering, and I start making noises. And I'll see you in 15 minutes.