On behalf of everybody at p and p and the staff here at sixth i welcome. You know we and pnp have been doing jointly sponsored author talks for a number of years. As much as we would have liked to have had you at our store on connecticut avenue, you just all would not have fit. So we really are very excited to be able to use this spacious and very beautiful and comfortable setting for author talks like the one this evening. And what a treat to have Thomas Friedman with us. And im sure youre familiar with his columns of the New York Times in his books. Note how great explain on just about everything he is. You can cut through the complexity of something and write about them as clearly as tom can. He says that the start of his new book that he went into journalism in part because he loves translating from english to english. And that has been evident in his work. When he focuses on in his new book, thank you for being late. Our several portions that he singled out as defining the world these days and defining our lives of dizzying these forces are reshaping our lives and how we can cope with them. Thinking this through, tom toward the end of the book with the community in which he grew up. The st. Louis park, suburb of minneapolis. For lessons on remaining anchored and connecting with others and trusting and succeeding. Tom of course has had a storied career as a journalist. Dating back to well ahigh school in minnesota. That is when his passion for journalism was sparked by 10th grade teacher and his interest in the middle east is also ignited with his parents on a trip to israel. In college and school to focus studies on the mediterranean and middle east. So it seemed only fitting that soon after becoming a journalist he ended up more part of the world. It was United Press International the first sent him to beirut and after he moved to the New York Times it wasnt long before they sent him back to beirut and then on to jerusalem. His reporting during those years garnered him to pulitzers for National Coverage and his first book from beirut to jerusalem. Relocating to washington, tom was assigned as a quick succession to three of the papers reporting jobs. Chief diplomatic correspondent, chief White House Correspondent and International Economics correspondent. In 1995, 21 years ago he took over the papers Foreign Affairs column and has been at it ever since. Winning one third pulitzer, this one for commentary in 2002. Those who follow toms columns no that theyre not just about Foreign Affairs and the traditional sense of diplomacy and conflict. The deal with globalization, environment, finance, technology and a number of other issues relevant to how the world works today. His six previous books have also exhibited a wide range of interests. As well as the same engaging conversational writing style that has characterized his columns. Tom writes for the general reader and as we are about to hear, his talks to the general listen at you. Please join me in welcoming Thomas Friedman. [applause] thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. [laughter] the last time i was here, my daughter was here and my soninlaw was here and there was athey were getting married. They are in the front here. [applause] thank you all for coming out. Thank you for not being late. I am going to talk tonight about my book. I will talk about 40 minutes to give you a general overview and that will give out microphones in the front and im looking forward to your questions. Let me get right to it. The title of the book. Thank you for being late an optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations where does that come from . The title actually comes from meeting people in washington d. C. For breakfast over the years as a columnist. And once in a while someone would be 10, 15, 20 minutes late. And there was a time im really sorry was the weather the trap of the subway, homework. And one day i just spontaneously said to one of them, peter, my friend peter i said actually peter, thank you for being late. Because you are late, i have been eavesdropping on their conversation fascinating. I have been people watching the lobby, fantastic. And they just connected to ideas ive been struggling with for a month. So thank you for being late. And people started to get into it. They would say well, well you are welcome. [laughter] because they recognize what i was doing was actually giving them permission to pause. To slow down. To reflect. In fact my favorite quote in the beginning of the book is from my friend doug seidman. He says you know when you press the pause button on a computer, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts. It starts to reflect. You think and reimagine. And this book was really my attempt to press the pause button on myself. In order to reflect, rethink and reimagine where we are. And the book indeed began with a pause. Where i stopped and engaged someone who i normally would not have. And it ended up through a sequence of events producing this book. I work for the New York Times and you know i live in bethesda maryland. About once we do take the subway to work. So for me that means driving down the boulevard in a park in the Public Parking garage beneath the bethesda hyatt. And i did that almost 3 years ago. When i started this project. I parked there, take the red line into dc. I come back, get in my car get my timestamp ticket. Idrive to the cashier booth, give the ticket to the cashier. He looked at it, looked at me and said i know who you are. I said great. He said i read your column. I said great. He said i dont always agree. And i actually said will that is good. It means you always have to check. And we both had a laugh and i drove off. A week later i took my weekly subway ride. Redline into dc, back, car, timestamp ticket, cashier booth, same guy is there. This time he says, mr. Friedman, i have my own blog. Would you read my blog . I thought aoh my god, the parking guy is now my competitor. [laughter] what just happened . So i said write it down for me and i will check it out. So he brought it down and he took a piece of cashiers tape, ripped in half and wrote it down. I turned it on my computer when i got home and it turns out he was ethiopian. He wrote about the democracy in his point of view on his website. And i started to think about this guy. And i wondered who he was and what his story was. And i eventually concluded that this was a sign from god. I should pause and engage him. But i did not have his email. So the only thing i could do was park in the parking garage every day. So i start taking the subway every day. It was for five days, i dont remember now how many. I parked my car under the gate. I got out and i said now i know his name and i invited him tonight of course he was ill. And i said, i want your email. And that night he happily gave it to me. I wrote him an email. I repeat all of the emails in the front of the book. And i basically said to him i have a proposition for you. I am ready to teach you how to write a column. If you will tell me your life story. And he basically threw a couple of emails said, i see her proposing a deal. I like this deal. [laughter] so he asked that we meet in his office. At peace coffeehouse in bethesda. Which we did two weeks later. I presented him with a six page memo on how to write a column. And he told me his life story. And it was the first time i had ever actually put all of this together. I once taught a course on how to write a column at my daughters college. But i largely sat down and reflected on what it was about. And this is and if this was an ethiopian immigrant. The dust was blogging on ethiopian websites but they were too slow. So he decided to start his own blog. And now mr. Friedman he said i feel empowered. He knows his google metrics. You have to to love a parking guy who loves his google metrics. He is writing over 30 countries. My parking guy. What an amazing world. That he can get his voice out there. So, i then presented him with my memo. And we actually went over three times. Three different sessions. I explained to him that a new story is meant to inform. And it can do so better, i can write a news story about sixth i. What a column, is meant to provoke. I am neither in the heating business nor the lighting business. That is what i do, okay . I either spoke up and emotion inside of you aif i do both i will produce one of several reactors. I did not know that. I never looked at it that way. I never connected those things. Your favorite, he said exactly what i felt but did not know had to say. God bless you. I want to kill you and your offspring. Any of these reactions will tell you you produced that heat or light. And to produce heat or light i said to him actually requires a chemical reaction. And you have to combine three chemicals. The first is, what is your value set . How do you lean into the world . What are the ideas awhat does awhat is the world idea . What is the values that you are trying to promote . Second, how do you think the Machine Works . So the machine is my shorthand. What are the Biggest Forces shaping more things and more places in more ways on more days . As a columnist i am always carrying around a working hypothesis of how the Machine Works. Because im trying to take my values and push the machine. If i dont know how the Machine Works, i either will not push it or i will push it in the wrong direction. And all of my books, they really have been one take or another and how i think the Machine Works. Lastly, what have you learned about people . And culture. How the machine affects people and culture and how people and culture affect the machine. Stir those three together, let it rise, think for 45 minutes. And if you do this right you will produce a column that produces heat or light. So the more i explained this, the more i thought to myself a well, if that is what a column is about what is your value set . Where did it come from . How do you think the Machine Works today . And what have you learned about people and culture . And i decided that was the book i wanted to write. And that is what thank you for being late is all about. So i do not have time obviously to go through the whole thing so i will focus on the core engine of the book. How the Machine Works today. So i think what is shaping more things in more places in more ways and more days, is that we are in the middle of three accelerations. One of them is a exponential, they all may be in fact. In the three Largest Forces of the planet. All at the same time. I called them the market, Mother Nature and moores law. So moores law coined by gordon moore 50 years ago now the cofounder of intel says that the speed and power of microchips will double roughly every 24 months. And while it is probably 30 months now that is basically held up for over 50 years if you port moores law intergraph it looks like a hockey stick. Mother nature for me is Climate Change, biodiversity loss and population growth. If you put that on a graph, that looks like a hockey stick. And lastly, the market for me is globalization. But not your grandfathers mobilization. Not containers on ships, that is actually declining. Digital globalization. Twitter, facebook, paypal, all things that are not being digitized and globalized. Put it on a graph and it looks like a hockey stick. We are actually in the middle of three hockey stick accelerations all at the same time with the three Largest Forces on the planet and they are all interacting with one another. One is moores law, globalization, more globalization drives more Climate Change. Also solutions as well. But they all whirled around each other. And i think that is what is shaping more things in more places in more ways on more days. Now the real thing is moores law. And that is why the Second Chapter of the book, i will go through the three accelerations quickly. This is the first one. Moores law, Second Chapter is called what the hell happened in 2007 . 2007. Sounds like such an innocuous year. 2007, what is this guy talking about . Well, here is what happened in 2007. The iphone came out in 2007. January 2007, steve jobs in San Francisco. Beginning a process whereby we are putting in internetenabled handheld computer into the hands of every person on the planet. But that is not all that happened in 2007. He spoke came out of high schools and universities in 2000 aactually late 2006. And became available to anyone with an email address. In 2007 a Company Called twitter awhich was launched a few months before went global. In 2007, a company anot a company, a software called a the most Important Company in your life that youve never heard of named after the founders sons white elephant. Created a foundation for big data. By creating an open Source Software platform that made a Million Computers work like one computer. In 2007 a Company Called aalso launched itself. The biggest now open Source Software repository in the world is roughly 14 million users. Got an idea . No problem. Just go to the library, pulled off the shelf, use it, fix it, improve it and put it back on the shelf. It is one of the most Important Companies in the world today. That is not all that happened in 2007. In 2007, google him out with something called android. In 2007, google bought a Company Called aa guy name jeff came out with something called the kindle. In 2007 ibm started a cognitive computer called watson. In 2007 three roommates in San Francisco thought it would be a really cool idea to rent out their air mattresses to some guys coming for a Design Conference and they started a Company Called air b b. Ever seen a graph of the price of sequencing of human genome . Looks like this. Straight down. Up here, 100 million. Down here, 1200. It goes over the cliff, 2007. 2007 asomething called fracking started. 2007, look at a graph of solar energy. It takes off in 2007. In 2007, something we call the cloud started. Go back to the beginning, it looks just like that. Look at the first date a2007. 2007 changed astarted. In 2005 michael dell retired. He had seen it all. In 2007 he decided he had to come back to work. In 2007, intel for the first time, extended moores law. And introduced nonsilicon metals and transistors. Turns out the 2007 may be seen in time as the single greatest technological Inflection Point since gutenberg invented the printing press. And we completely missed it. Why . 2008. [laughter] so think about what happened. All right, right when our physical technologies just took off. Like we were on a moving sidewalk at an airport that suddenly went from five miles an hour to 35 miles an hour. All of our, what to call the social technologies athe learning systems and management systems, the regulation and deregulation. You need it to get the most out of this acceleration and push a they all basically froze. And in that disjunction, we have been living the last seven or eight years. Think about this election in the context of 2007 and 2008. Let me digress for one moment. So, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, if you were an average worker with an average education a high score above. You actually could get something called a high wage middle skill job. I called a congressman from minnesota, will get that later. But he said minnesota in the 60s and 70s you actually needed a plan to fail. If you are an average worker you needed a plan to fail. Because there was so much wind and so much bluecollar work and even whitecollar work that you could get with a High School Degree. My uncle only had a High School Degree and worked in a bank in the minneapolis area in the 60s. Then globalization starts to hit and technology stuff to accelerate. 80s, 90s, early 2000s. What do we do for the average worker to help them compete . We actually didnt. We didnt improve education. We give them credit cards and home mortgages. And a lot of the athe average worker was able to sustain themselves there huge expansion of credit and rising up the values of their homes. Then in 2007 and 2008 happened. What happens in 2007 is, and i will explain this in a second, machines and software. Now start ravenously eating whitecollar and bluecollar jobs at a pace weve never seen before. And people lost their homes. Because of the 2008 crisis. And that shock i would argue, produced this election. Produced a lot of very dislocated and angry people. But i digress. So basically, what happened, what produced 2007 was the fact that it wasnt just microchips. That were in moores law. Microchips were accelerating, software was accelerated, networking was accelerating, storage was accelerating, sensors were accelerating. And in 2007 they all meld into something we call the cloud. The cloud. I never use the term, the cloud. Because it sounds so soft. [laughter] so cuddly. So fluffy. Sounds like a Joni Mitchell song. I looked at clouds from athis aint no cloud folks. This is a supernova. Supernova is the Largest Force in nature. An explosion of a star. Only this is an ever accelerating supernova. And it has basically atwo things came together. I was here on the stage around 2005. To tell the story of a massive collapse in the price of fiberoptic cable. It happened as a result of the. Com boom jump bubble and bus. Made fiberoptic cable so cheap, we accidentally wired the world. And i gave that moment a name. I said the world was flat. Because we had so collapse the price of conductivity, th