Sal: I thank everyone for coming.
I think we should turn this speaker series
into people who really
don't need an introduction
speaker series, but I will give
a brief introduction regardless.
This is Tom Friedman, famous writer,
3 Pulitzer Prizes, New
York Time columnist.
Many of you all might
not have realized that
we know each other and that every morning
we coordinate our outfits which is now.
Tom: What are you wearing today Sal?
Sal: Yeah I know we're
very careful about that.
Tom: Should we do pink today?
Sal: Yes, but it's a real
honor to have you here
and where I like to start is-
I mean a lot of people know you as like
the public person and
I do this really for-
Frankly a lot of people who just might be
watching Khan Academy,
young students or whatever
and I'm always curious
how a Tom Friedman becomes a Tom Friedman.
I mean what brought you on this path?
Tom: It's interesting.
I was born in Minnesota.
I grew up in St. Louis Park
a small suburb of Minneapolis.
I've always thought to
be a successful columnist
and rather I am or not
someone else can judge,
but it's really important
to be from somewhere Sal.
It's really important to
be grounded in a worldview
that you take around the world
and you measure against
other things you see
and so the thing that
you have to understand
about my column is I'm
always looking for Minnesota.
So what does that mean?
That means I grew up in Minneosta
at a particular time when
politics really sort of worked.
So I graduated from high school in 1971
and that was the year that Walt,
that our ... sorry, our governor-
I forgot his last name now, Anderson,
was on the cover of Time Magazine
holding up a walleye under the headline-
Sal: A what?
Tom: A walleye fish.
Sal: A walleye. I don't know what that is.
Tom: A walleye fish.
Yeah it's a sort of fish.
Under the headline
"Minnesota: The State that Works"
So I grew up in a totally liberal district
and my whole life my congressmen were
2 liberal Republicans not Democrats.
My senators growing up
were Walter Mondale,
Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey.
The companies I grew up with were
Dayton-Hudson, Target, Honeywell, 3M
who thought it was part of
their responsibility to do-
corporate social responsibility
to build the symphony
to fund education programs so it gave me-
I now only realize in retrospect
a very powerful sense that politics
is something that can work
that communities can come together
and so when I later, you know,
went to the Middle East
or Beirut or whatever
I carried that with me and
a lot of what I saw was-
I saw communities falling apart.
Somebody else may have said something.
My life changed in 10th grade.
I had a great teacher.
Her name was Hattie Steinberg
and she taught journalism in room 313
at St. Louis Park High School
and her class is still
the only journalism course
I've ever taken not because I'm that good,
but because she was that good.
It was the only one I ever needed
and she really inspired me
to want to be a journalist
and a writer and in that
same year my parents
took me to Israel on a
trip to visit my sister
who was going to school there.
I had never been out of
the state of Minnesota.
I was 15, except for a few
brief forays into Wisconsin
and I had never been on an airplane
and so that was my first trip.
I came to the Middle East came to Israel
and I was just kind of
blown away so I actually
lived on a kibbutz all 3
summers of high school.
I got totally fascinated
with the Middle East.
Dropped everything and
was just totally absorbed
with journalism and the Middle East.
I then went to college.
I started taking Arabic as a freshman.
I eventually did a semester
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
A semester at the American
University in Cairo
and I graduated in 1975 from Brandeis
ultimately in Middle East studies
and I had a Marshall Scholarship
to study Arabic and Middle East history
ultimately in England.
I did my first year at
the School of Oriental and African Studies
and then I went to Oxford and sort of had
a classic British Arab
education at St Antony's,
but while I was in London
I met my then girlfriend,
now wife, Ann Bucksbaum,
who was a Stanford grad
who had graduated a
year early and kind of-
She told her dad "You owe
me a year of college."
So she decided to go to LSC for a year
and we met through
mutual friends in London
and my real journalism
career started because-
This was 1975 and we were walking
down a street in London and, you know,
the Evening Standard newstand they always
have that blaring headline, you know,
"Brad to Jen we're finished," you know,
buy the Evening paper.
And we were walking
down a street in London
and I saw the headline
in the Evening Standard and it said
"Carter to Jews: If elected
I promise to fire Dr. K."
And I stopped and looked
at that and I said to my
then girlfriend, now wife,
"Isn't that interesting?"
This guy is running for
president, Jimmy Carter,
he's trying to win Jewish votes
by promising to fire Henry Kissinger
the first-ever Jewish Secretary of State
so how could that be?
And that's sort of how my mind works
and I have no idea what possessed me,
but I went back to my dorm
and I wrote a column about it.
And my then girlfriend,
now wife, really liked it.
She is from Des Moines, Iowa.
She took it home on
spring or winter break,
I don't remember now,
and gave it to a family friend
named Gilbert Cranberg who is
editorial page editor of
the Des Moines Register,
a wonderful midwest paper at that time,
and he liked it and he
printed it under op-ed page,
half the op-ed page under
an Oust cartoon and they-
Sal: Alf cartoon?
Tom: Oust a cartoonist.
Sal: Oh, oh, yeah, I though Alf.
It was the wrong timeframe.
Tom: Under an Oust cartoon
and they paid me $50.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: And I thought that
was the coolest thing
in the whole world.
I was walking down the
street. I had an opinion.
I went and wrote it. I gave it to someone
and they paid me $50.
Sal: People pay for this.
Tom: And I just thought ...
I was hooked ever after.
So during my time at Oxford
I wrote op-ed columns
about the Middle East for the
Minneapolis StarTribune my hometown paper
where I also knew the
editorial page editor
and from my wife's, then girlfriend,
wife's hometown paper.
So I graduated from Oxford in '78
and I had a wonderful time there.
I studied with Albert Hourani,
a great Arab historian and wonderful man.
So I went to apply for a job
and I decided I was going to apply-
because a friend of mine
applied at AP once in London
so I applied for a job
at the Associated Press
and the United Press
International in London
and the AP said "You've
never covered a fire.
"You've never covered
a city hall meeting,"
but I had a dozen op-ed columns
from the Middle East.
UPI kind of being Avis
and AP being Hertz said
"Look the kids never covered a fire,
"but if he can do this we could probably
"teach him that and there's just been
"a revolution in Iran
"and I think they use
the same kind of letters
"as they do in the Arab world and a
"bunch of squiggles and if
he knew the Arabic stuff
"maybe we could teach him to do that."
And so they hired me for $200 a week
on Fleet Street and I worked
there for almost a year
when the number 2 man in
the Beirut bureau of UPI
got shot in the ear by a man robbing
a jewellery store on [Humbler] Street
and he called the headquarters and said
"I want to get out of here."
I do not want to pass go.
I do not want to collect $200.
GET ME OUT OF HERE.
Sal: Where was this? This was in where?
Tom: In Beirut.
Sal: In Beirut.
Tom: Right. The Civil War started-
Sal: He got shot in the ear?
Tom: In the ear by a man
robbing a jewellery store.
Sal: At a jewellery store.
Tom: And so UPI came to me and said
"Do you want to go to Beirut?"
Sal: And you are like 20?
Tom: I'm 25.
Sal: 25 years old.
Tom: Yeah, and I'd never been to Beirut.
I'd been to Egypt, but
never been to Beirut.
So I turned to my then wife and-
Sal: There's a Civil War going on.
Tom: Civil War it's the
middle of the Civil War
just started in '75 so this was now-
It was well into its
third year this was '79
fourth year actually and we just said
"This is our moment and got to go."
Sal: And your wife went.
Tom: She signed up and
so we went off to Beirut
and my first night there
at the Commodore Hotel
I heard a gunshot fired
and it was the first time
I had ever heard a gunshot in my life.
You didn't hear a lot of
those in St. Louis Park.
We were in Beirut for 2 years.
The Civil War had a very profound
searing experience on me because what is-
And I don't mean this
in a voyeuristic way,
but when you're in one of those situations
you see how molecules behave
at very high temperatures
so what you see is what
people are capable of
from both good and evil
in a way you'll never
see in any normal environment
so the whole color
spectrum goes out to here
and you learn an enormous
amount about people
and about yourself.
So I did that for 2 years and then
the New York Times hired me.
I went back to New York
for about 11 months
as a business correspondent covering oil
and then they sent me back
to Beirut in April 1982.
And I realize that date
doesn't mean anything
to anyone in this room
they weren't born then,
but Israel invaded Lebanon 6 weeks later.
And the Lebanon story became
the biggest story in the world.
And so I covered the Israeli invasion,
the Marines coming, the Marines going,
the US Embassy bombing, Sabra and Shatila,
the massacres, all the journalists.
I covered the Hama massacre in Syria
which was the precursor
to what's going on now.
And maybe the most important
experience of that
because we're just at the
20th Anniversary, sorry 30th Anniversary
of the US Embassy bombing
and it's quite important
and it's doubly important
for what I'll share with you.
On, I think it was April 18th,
you can check the date 1983
I was sitting in my
apartment in West Beirut
and I had a transistor radio on my desk.
That was something that was used back then
in the dark ages to
actually listen to the BBC.
Sal: Yes-yes.
Tom: And there was a blast so powerful
that it actually knocked
the radio off my desk
like an earthquake almost
and so I did what journalists do back then
I just ran down to the
street to do 2 things.
One is the Israelis set
off a lot of sonic booms
by supersonic jets over
Beirut so a sonic boom
sounds a lot like a car bomb or anything.
You don't know that-
and so the first thing you
listened for are sirens.
If it's a sonic boom
you won't hear sirens.
If you hear sirens it's bad
and I quickly saw a
mushroom cloud curling up
in the distance and a big one
and so I just ran toward
it and that's what you do.
Sal: That's right, yeah, absolutely.
Tom: And I got closer and closer and said
"It couldn't be, no-no, it couldn't"-
And I sort of rounded the turn at
the American University in Beirut
and there was the US Embassy
which I used to live
across the street from
cut in half like a doll's house,
bodies hanging out, you
know, papers, desks,
a smouldering smoking ruin
and staggering around was
a young political officer
named Ryan Crocker who I
actually spoke to today
because Ryan later became
Ambassador to Beirut,
to Syria, to Afghanistan and Iraq.
I don't remember if it
was him or someone else,
but I said "What happened?" and they said
"A man drove a truck-
You remember the US Embassy in those days
had no parameter.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: You just walked up to the front door.
Sal: Right.
Tom: "A man drove a truck
through the driveway,
"up the front stairs into
the lobby and blew it up."
And I'll never forget what I said.
"You mean he blew himself up.
"You mean he committed suicide."
Sal: Right. That was unheard of.
Tom: That was un ... I mean I literally
I could not get my mind around it
and that was the beginning
that was the first one.
And that's really the way
the phenomenon started.
So anyways I did 2 more years in Beirut
for the New York Times.
It was remarkable in the sense to just see
the human drama that played out.
Sal: I have about 8 million
questions in my brain,
but I mean especially when you hear about
war correspondents people who are
in these war zones I mean did you-
and your wife is there with you.
Tom: Yeah.
Sal: Did you fear for your life?
I mean you could go back
to wherever, New York,
Minneapolis, hang out
at the Target, whatever.
Tom: That's right Mall of
America it wasn't built then.
So there were times that-
I came to Beirut in April 1982.
The war started in June and unfortunately
in the first week of the war
a massive number of refugees
came up from the south mostly Palestinian.
My driver in Beirut was a Palestinian
and he had worked for the
Times since the '50's.
Actually he was a driver for Kim Philby.
I mean Mohammed had seen like it all
and he began to fear for my safety
because refugees were
taking over apartments
any vacant apartment and this was summer
so a lot of Beiruties
had gone to, you know-
Sal: A lot of people would just break-in.
Tom: Break-in, empty apartment, move in.
And so he chose ... he
decided to move his wife
and 2 daughters into my apartment
and move me into the hotel.
He thought it would be much safer for me.
And tragically 2 groups
of refugees got in a fight
over my building and the
one that lost blew it up.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: And so the building
was completely destroyed
and unfortunately my
driver's wife and 2 daughters
were killed in my apartment.
Sal: Oh my God.
Tom: And that was in the
first week of the war.
So, you know, that was obviously
I could have been there.
My wife hadn't come over yet.
You know, people always ask you that
and I honestly don't think about it.
I remember once being
out to interview Arafat
when the Israelis bombed the neighborhood
and I just remember that when
a big concussion bomb hits how it sucked
all the oxygen out of the air.
I was once walking around Beirut airport
with the Marines when a ricochet
came over our heads and when a ricochet-
Because a ricochet slows down a bullet
you can actually hear it turning
when it gets closer to you.
So I remember those kind of things,
but most of the time
I tried to be prudent.
People said "Do you have
a bulletproof vest?"
My motto is if you need a bulletproof vest
you're somewhere you shouldn't be.
Because there's no sense in getting
yourself killed so I tried
to be as prudent as I could.
I still did some crazy ass things, but-
I used to walk home at
night after work at 11
which I still can't believe
and I wrote about this.
I wrote a book ultimately called
"From Beirut to Jerusalem"
and there was a time
where I was walking home
at night with my wife-
Sal: I bought that as a
teenager just so you know.
Tom: After a movie and
we were walking down
the streets of Beirut and
a man jumped out a window
with a pistol in his
hand and literally landed
like right in front of
us and I used to say
Beirut was so dangerous at night
you could walk home
because even the criminals
were afraid to be out,
but he looked at us and we looked at him
and he just went away.
Sal: Just like that.
Tom: Just like-
But it was almost like
Batman, you know, jumped out,
but basically we tried to be prudent.
We obviously saw many tragic scenes.
As that kid from St.
Louis Park who never had
to help dig his driver's
wife and 2 daughters
out of the rubble of an apartment
so it was a searing experience for me.
You hold a lot of stuff in because
I was there for the New York Times.
It's my first assignment for the Times.
The city was under siege they couldn't get
more reporters in so
they were stuck with me.
But at the end of the summer
my deal with the Times
was that I'm gonna stay here-
I was in the south when Israel invaded
and I'm gonna stay here
until the PLO leaves.
That was the negotiation
the PLO was going to leave,
you know what-not because
I wanted, you know-
In your career at the New York Times
if you write one 6 column headline story
for the New York Times that's a big deal.
Sal: Right.
Tom: I probably had 8
that summer, you know,
these were ... and I wanted to have
"Israel Invades" and "The War Ends"
You know what I mean?
You know, I was going to stick it out.
So the day finally came that the PLO left
and I always give this as a lesson
to young journalists.
It was a Saturday. I went down to the port
to watch them go in
trucks get on these boats
to Greece and Tunisia and what-not
and actually I was with Peter Jennings,
the late Peter Jennings from ABC,
and I remember because
we were standing there
the Palestinians were
all shooting in the air
and we were covered in shell cases.
That is one of my searing memories,
but it was an amazing scene
and I had been there all summer
and it was just the
combination of the whole thing
and I went back to the Writers Bureau
where I worked just one of those noisy,
old time newsrooms which I love.
By the way, those days
you worked on something
it was called a typewriter. Okay.
And I worked on an Adler. I was so proud.
I had a German typewriter.
It actually got blown
up, but I got another one
and I'm in the Writers Bureau
working on my typewriter.
The way you wrote stories back then,
the way you wrote your news story
you had to write it 3
paragraphs at a time,
hand it to a telex operator,
they punched it into telex tape,
and then it was telexed
to the New York Times.
It came out of this telex tape
and they fed it into a computer
and then it was edited.
That's how it all worked.
Try writing a story 3
paragraphs at a time.
Sal: Yeah.
Tom: So you have to write
the whole thing through
because you got to know where you're going
then write it through again
and then you kind of write
it through and hand it in.
So it's Saturday it's about 3 o'clock
I'm doing this I'm
writing this is my last-
this is a combination of the whole summer
and all the communications from Beirut
to the rest of the world went down.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: Somebody basically either unplugged
the PTT because they all
went through 1 PTT line.
Post telephone and telegraph.
No cell phones then, no nothing,
so the entire communications
between Beirut
and the rest of the world were cut down.
I still today have the
telex tape in a shoebox
of my last story from Lebanon.
I stayed by the telex all night
to see if it would come on.
It never did and that Sunday morning
under a 6 column headline said
"Palestinians Evacuate
Beirut" Associated Press
Sal: Wow.
Tom: And why I always
tell young journalists
about that is that it's
really my view of life
which is that it's all about the journey
not about the destination.
I love the movie "Moneyball" because
you just got to enjoy the show
and sometimes you don't
have the headlight,
you don't have the thing-
I don't mean enjoy a war,
but you know what I'm
saying you just got to-
Sal: Well no, you took a real
experience you're living.
Tom: You just got to be satisfied by
the experience because sometimes
the PTT goes down, you know.
Sal: And you never had an experience
like that gentleman who got his ear shot
where you're just like I've had enough,
I'm out of here.
Tom: Fortunately no, you know, I never-
Yeah you do get and I'm not some super guy
I mean I just ... you do
get hardened to it though.
You try to be prudent.
I mean in "From Beirut to
Jerusalem" I talked about
a scene where I was with a colleague
who they did get into Beirut at one point
and he was very jittery and nervous
about the whole thing and at one point
I was working on my story on deadline
and we were at the Writers Bureau
and there was a man
shooting at another person
in the park across the street
and he came over to me and he said
"Did you see that guy there?
"He had the gun in his
gut and he was shooting
"at him like this."
I just looked up and I said
"Bill, was he shooting
at you?" Okay? Right?
Sal: Mind your own business.
Tom: Because if he wasn't shooting at you
I am on deadline. Okay?
Honestly it was not like something-
but you're just really
focused about what you do,
you know, and I tried ... I was not-
people did much crazier things than me.
I just did not, you know,
I tried to take care of myself,
but obviously you're in
a dangerous situation.
Just by being in Beirut
you're in a dangerous
situation, but you know,
I'll tell you Sal the people
I went through that with-
I go back to Lebanon pretty
much once a year still
because they are among my closest
and dearest friends because we were all
on the Titanic together, you know,
and my friends I have who
I went through Beirut with
are like no friends I have.
There's another story
"From Beirut to Jerusalem"
that I love to tell because we had a-
our local reporter then
at the New York Times
was a guy named [unintelligible]
Brilliant Palestinian reporter
and a real teacher of mine and he tells
a story in the book because
the Israelis were bombing
Beirut all the time then
and at one point they
were in their living room,
you know, just waiting
for the bombing to end
and they had a candle going on
and a mouse appeared and it was like
he and his wife were up on the couch.
You know what I mean?
Like fear you can be
afraid of funny things.
Like the bombing is coming they can be
obliterated at any moment, but that mouse
scared the daylights
out of them, you know,
and so you get just
really funny things like-
You don't have experiences like that
anywhere else where you learn so much
about human nature.
And so I was there for
over the course of 5 years
I was there for 4 years
because I went back
for the New York Times and the Times said
"Hey do you want to go to Jerusalem?"
So the New York times had never had
a Jewish reporter in Israel.
It was a rule of the paper.
Sal: I see.
Tom: They tried to change that rule
with my predecessor [David Schipper]
but they discovered
after they appointed him
that he just looked Jewish,
but he wasn't actually Jewish. Okay?
And so they didn't make
that mistake with me
and they said "You've already done Beirut.
"Now do Jerusalem."
And no-one had ever done that before
so I thought that would
be kind of interesting
so I did that for 5 years and that was
a very different experience.
The boundaries were
much narrower, you know,
the color spectrum you didn't have
and I did that and then I took a year off.
I wrote "From Beirut to Jerusalem"
Then when I got back
to Washington they said
"Whoever becomes the next president
"you will be the Chief
Diplomatic Correspondent."
It turned out to be George Bush the Elder.
He named Jim Baker, Secretary of State
and so after my year off writing this book
I became the Chief
Diplomatic Correspondent
and travelled with-
Sal: You could be like
secretary of state yourself
at this point.
Tom: No hardly. Actually
not only should I not-
It's not false modesty in the least
I didn't know anything about anything
other than the Middle East.
Sal: Right.
Tom: So I got a great education
travelling with Baker.
The first 9 months was really boring
and I'm thinking I gave
up covering a drama
to covering a policy.
Sal: Right.
Tom: Than I gave up covering a street
to covering a hall.
Sal: Right.
Tom: Like what did you do?
And then this wall in Berlin came down.
Sal: Yeah, I heard about that.
Tom: And suddenly I
found myself travelling
750,000 miles with Baker
with a front row seat
to the end of the Cold War.
Sal: You're like in the plane?
Tom: In the plane. He
takes 10 reporters wih him.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: And it was just an
amazing front row seat
to the end of the Cold War.
So I felt like I was really lucky twice
because in this business if you're
at the right place at
the right time one time
like you're lucky and I
thought this was really lucky
so I did that for 4
years. Great education.
Then just very quickly I was
Chief White House Correspondent for
the first year of Bill Clinton.
And that was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride
I have to tell you.
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
That was such a crazy-ass experience
I got to tell you.
Sal: What was the craziest
thing that you saw?
Tom: I don't know just
the Clinton White House
was just ... they were fun and he was fun.
Thank God it was the end of the Cold War
so it wasn't a serious time
so nobody got hurt, you know.
Sal: And this is just
the stuff that you saw.
Tom: That's right that I saw, but it was-
Sal: I mean like you're
the press it was ... yeah.
Tom: I did that for a year.
Covering the White House is an experience
every journalist should have
because it's a very
interesting experience,
but none there call it
journalism, you know,
it's sort of a cross between babysitting
and stenography, you know,
because you're there,
but you know you got to go everywhere
with the president.
Sal: Who were you babysitting?
Tom: You're babysitting the president.
You go everywhere he goes, you know.
Sal: Like a ball and chain. Oh wow.
Tom: But you take turns
flying in Air Force One
because it's a pool, you know,
so I was glad I did it for a year,
but like I got the point
after a year and said
"I don't really want to do this" because
one of the things about
covering the White House
and the State Department
is back in those days,
again, the prehistoric days,
the Washington Post and the New York Times
exchanged front pages
at 10:30 every evening
so we saw what they had
and they saw what we had.
Sal: Really? Is this some type of like-
Tom: It was a little restrictive.
Sal: Mafia bosses getting
together and yeah.
Tom: Mafia restrained the
trade people don't realize
and if you're sitting at home
when you're covering the White House
or the State Department
there's just one thing
you don't want a phone
call at 10:35. Okay.
Because when the phone rings at 10:35
only bad things are going to happen.
Sal: What? The Washington Post is doing
the same story?
Tom: No, the editor
says the Washington Post
has a front page story that Jim Baker
is about to announce this
and you have to start to
match it at 10:35 at night.
You haven't lived until you've called
a senior administration official
at home at 10:35 at night. Okay?
To match a Washington Post story.
And so not only are you up until midnight
matching their story, but you know
when you come into the
office the next morning
everyone knows they've got the lead story
that you missed. Okay.
So anyway that's just part
of the prehistoric age,
you know, basically. No Twitter then.
Sal: So you would coordinate
not to be embarrassed?
Tom: Exactly.
Tom: We would give each other a chance
to match each others story,
but with the [unintelligible]
that it said as reported
in the Washington Post first, you know,
so you had to kind of
eat that crow, you know,
before you matched it and so then
they transferred me to be the
Chief Economics Correspondent
the Treasury Department
and this was early '90's.
Netscape had just been invented.
This thing called the Internet.
Remember when Bill Clinton was president
like the president and
no one had email. Okay.
No one had heard of email
and this thing called
globalization was aborning
and so I was at the Treasury Department
just as we were kind of shifting from
General Powell to General
Electric, you know,
in terms of our kind of concerns.
Sal: You have a knack for words.
Tom: Yeah, I don't know
where it comes from.
They tell me that.
Sal: Yes, you should put
that to work at some point.
Tom: And so I did that
for 3 years and then
they made me the Foreign Affairs columnist
and I've been doing that ever since
and then I came here yesterday.
Sal: You came here yesterday and I think
this is destiny because you talk about
these life moments, one,
discovering the op-ed,
how you could communicate and then
all of these other experiences.
You know there's this form-factor called
the YouTube video.
Tom: Yes.
Sal: Which I think some organizations
could get you making some videos.
Tom: Absolutely. I know I should do that
and I thought of doing a movie-
It's funny my youngest daughter went to
Williams College and Williams
is on the 4-1-4 system
and this is relevant
now for Khan Academy
I think which is that.
So the 1 is a winter
term which is kind of fun
so you take wine making, trip to Morocco,
but as a freshman you
have to stay on campus.
So in a shameless effort
to be near my daughter
I agreed ... because I had a friend there
that was teaching a course
on teaching actually.
I agreed to teach a course
on how to write a column.
It was really fun for one reason.
I realized that ...
like I've learned about
globalization and written about it.
I've learned about the Middle East
and I've written about it,
but I know how to write a column
and it was really fun
to write about something
you know really deeply and to teach it.
So the way the course was constructed
I created a little book for the class
and you had to ...
because I team taught it
with a friend who is an educator
so you had to teach a lesson, okay,
on Tuesday and then you had to write
a column off that lesson on Thursday
and I would come to class and they would
email their columns ahead of time
and then I would de-construct
them in front of them.
So your 18th draft is really the lead.
The lead is really the kicker, you know,
I showed them, I'd kind
of take it apart for them.
So what I did though was
I created a 6, a 7 chapter book
I guess on how to write a column.
I just did this mimeographed, you know,
because my view is that there's actually
just 6 kind of columns and if you write
a column that gets any
one of these 6 reactions
you have a column.
And then I give examples of all 6
and the last chapter was Tom Friedman
is a big fat idiot, right wing pink
or left wing bottom dwelling slug.
I took a days or weeks blogs about me
and I put them all in
one chapter, you know,
about what a flaming jerk I am
and just to explain to people
that being a columnist is
not a friend growth industry
and that you want my life.
Are you ready for chapter 7? Okay?
Because you better be ready for chapter 7
because I live with that
Greek chorus everyday.
Okay? So the 6 kind of columns are-
So if you write a column that gets
one of these 6 reactions you got a column.
The first is someone reads it and says
"I didn't know that." That's a column.
You tell people something they didn't know
from reporting, you know,
you reported something.
"Wow, I didn't know that."
Second is "I never looked at it that way."
You give people a new perspective.
"Yeah, Sal, I never
looked at it that way."
Third, your favorite, you live for this.
It happens half a dozen
times a year if you're lucky.
"You said exactly what I felt,
"but I didn't know how to say it.
"God bless you. (kiss-kiss) God bless you.
"Thank you so much."
The fourth is "I want to kill you dead
"you and all your offspring." Okay?
Sal: Yes.
Tom: Because your column
is defined as much
by people who are
against it as are for it.
Sal: Have you had people
actually write that to you?
Tom: Oh yeah, that's nothing.
I mean that's nothing.
That's the nice stuff. Okay.
"I'd like to dance on
your grave," you know.
Sal: Really? People have written that?
Tom: You get everything,
but you really need to-
If you don't take chances
... if you don't, you know,
so you got to be able to take people on
and be taken on, you know.
The fifth, very hard, do not
try this trick at home kids.
"You made me laugh, you made me cry."
Very hard to do. When you do it well
oh wow, it really works.
When you do it badly, bad humor
or bad sort of sentimentality
is cringe-inducing
so don't try that one unless you're really
gonna pull it off and last is what
I simply call "You challenged me."
And that is when a columnist challenges
his own readers which I believe in doing.
I do a lot of that and I
give examples of all 6.
So if you write one of
those kind of 6 columns
you got a column.
Sal: And you target one
or you just go around
and think about what you want to write.
You write it and then you say
"Oh, that's category 3 with
a little bit of 4 in it."
Tom: No, I'm not thinking about it now
because I intuitively I know what it is
so right now I've got actually 3 columns
wrestling in my head.
Before I came here I tracked down
Ambassador Ryan Crocker
in a plane at LaGuardia
after I talked to you because I had
a thought about Syria that was triggered
by something he wrote in the
Washington Post this morning.
I'm thinking about some
of the things you said
because it melds well
with the McKinsey Study
that somebody sent me yesterday.
And I did a column with a bunch
of healthcare innovators last week at HHS
I did research for it so
I got that in my head.
Sometime tomorrow I'll make a commitment
for Sunday, but right
now all 3 are wrestling
and I'm carrying all 3 around in my head.
To be a columnist you have to-
I see columns everywhere
like I do an hour here
and I could easily get a
column or 2 out of this.
And if I didn't you'd kind of die
because I do this twice a week, you know,
it's like what am I gonna
write for Wednesday.
It's Sunday. I have no idea what I'm
gonna write for Sunday.
I really don't have any idea.
All I know is I've got a
4-hour plane flight on Friday
and I will write whatever
I'm going to write
for Sunday on that
4-hour plane ride. Okay?
I will make a commitment then.
So I never worry about the ideas.
It's more which one to
choose of the ideas I have.
Sal: So we will try to convince you
to get your course on Khan Academy.
Tom: Yeah, I would love to.
Sal: It will reach millions.
Tom: No I really have thought about doing
something for you guys
because it would be fun.
Sal: Your grandchildren
will learn to write a column
through you.
Tom: It would be a great honor.
Sal: And what ... I mean
to write all of this.
Once again, a million different things.
I mean just going from the first question
of how you got started I mean
what's interesting about it is
you just started doing your career
and that's what led-
nowhere in that did someone
look at your resume and say-
Tom: Well they did they saw that
I went to Oxford I studied, you know,
Arabic and all.
Sal: That's fairly impressive.
Tom: That was a door opener,
but what really got me in was I wrote-
I had a dozen columns to show.
Sal: Right.
Tom: So whenever young
journalists come to me
and say "I want to do
what you do," you know,
they say "What do I need
to do to do what you do?"
And I say well the first thing you need
is be able to type fast.
I can type really fast. Take good notes.
You need to know English, obviously,
good grammar, punctuate,
the comma goes there.
Good to know some economics,
politics, history,
all of those things, science, environment,
but there's actually
just one thing you need
to be a good journalist I believe
you have to like people.
Sal: Right.
Tom: You have to really
enjoy sitting with them
and listening to the crazy
things they say and do
and the incredible music of their lives
and if you cannot hear the music
you'll never be able to play the music.
Now I really do like people.
I love to interview them.
I interview them wherever I go.
I'm struck at how many
journalists hate people
and I've known several of them,
but I really do like people
and I enjoy hearing the
music of their lives.
Sal: I have an unnamed
friend who is in residency,
surgical residency, really brilliant guy
and he got some negative feedback
from one of the senior residents
and the feedback was, it really just
doesn't look like you
care about the patients
and he was really taking that to heart.
Tom: Yeah.
Sal: Then I asked him. Well do you care?
And he's like no.
Tom: That's right, that's
right, that's right.
It shows. I was in San Francisco yesterday
and I went to Starbucks because I needed
some free wireless because
my wireless was out
so I just was going in there
and a woman and a guy came up and said
"We have to buy you coffee."
You know, big fans, yada yada.
And so of course I immediately said
well what do you do? Oh,
you're in big data now.
This is fascinating. Give me your card.
By 4:30 I met with them again.
I bought them a drink
and interviewed them,
so there's one good thing about notoriety
people throw shit at you.
Sal: People want to dance on your grave.
Tom: That's right, they
want to dance on your grave,
but a lot of other people want to come up
and tell you about their lives
and what they do and they are just-
I cannot tell you Sal
how many column stories and ideas
I've gotten from people
who have just come up to me
on the street, in an
airport, in a Starbucks
and tell you things about their lives.
I'm really open to that.
I'm still tickled when
someone comes up to me
and says something like that.
I think that's pretty serious
that someone stops you and says
"I want to tell you how I feel
"about what you're doing."
You know what I mean?
Sal: You invite that.
I mean you're out there
so if you see Tom Friedman in an airport.
Tom: Yeah, people do it and by the way
a lot of times people come up and say
"You know I agree with about
90% of what you write."
And I say hey, that's like
a perfect number for me
because it means you're
always going to check.
Death for a columnist is if people say
"I now what he or she is going to write.
Why should I read it?"
Like I don't know what I'm going to write
half the time because my column is very
non-ideological and very reporting centric
because I'm still a reporter I believe
the best columnists are always reporters
and I think it's actually
true in every profession.
I've had colleagues who say
"I want to do what you do.
I want to do analysis now."
To which I say your analysis
must not be very good
because all my analysis
grows out of my reporting.
It's only when you're
working with the clay
that you see the patterns.
You feel the texture and that's where
the column comes from.
Sal: Do you find it difficult to kind
of maintain ground, you know,
say you put an op-ed and you get
a bunch of people on a
message board just saying
oh you're this that, this that.
Does that affect you? Does it-
Maybe I am wrong, maybe I do need
to move more [unintelligible]
Tom: It's a really complicated thing.
I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on Facebook
because I'd just be overwhelmed.
The signal-to-noise ratio now
is the noise is so high that you can't-
No human being, you know, people tell you
"I've got a thick skin.
It doesn't bother me."
I've never met that person.
Certainly any time people
are in large numbers
saying bad things about you-
by the way many people say the opposite.
You understand so I don't
want to exaggerate it.
But here's what I find kind of about
the comments section of the Times
because we have comments under our columns
so today there may be 400 comments.
You always have to be careful because
the Times Online which
is were people comment
has a little bit of a left bias
who reads the New York Times then
who reads it Online, you know,
it's going to be a younger,
more left to center audience,
so you got to be aware
of that for starters,
but very often I confess
I go to the closet.
I put on my wetsuit. I
fix the helmet to my head,
you know, and I dive into the comments
because you find a lot
that are predictable.
You're this, you're that, they're nasty,
they're personal and whatever,
but I'll tell you Sal
invariably when I do it
I come across 1, 2, or
3 that are brilliant.
Sal: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: And I literally cut and paste them
in my notebook and say
I got to remember this.
This is brilliant and that's the beauty
of crowdsourcing.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: It just comes with the territory.
By the way you're out
there dishing it out.
You got to be able to take it
so I'm a big believer in that.
I'm not in the Internet wars.
Like you'll never see me, you know,
fighting with that because my attitude is
I got my say, you got your say,
and I'm not going to prove your right,
you're not going to-
10 years ago I wrote "The World Is Flat"
so since then people have written books,
you know, the world is not flat.
Sal: It's slightly curved.
Tom: The world is curved, the world is
spiky, lumpy, chunky, you know,
and people always said what did
you say about that book and my attitude
is to everybody and this isn't arrogance.
Look I'm either gonna be right or wrong,
but we're not gonna
know for 10 years. Okay?
So come to me in 10 years
and I'd say 10 years later
yeah, I got one big thing wrong.
It is so much flatter than I thought.
Sal: Right.
Tom: And this place is surfing on that.
What happened, you know.
Sal: You were just saying right before
we were chatting about this
I mean your most recent
op-ed piece. Tell us about it
because I think that will start to connect
with what we're trying to do here.
Tom: I'll start at just one
10,000 foot layer higher,
you know which is ...
because I really like
to think of what I do as being a plumber
that I'm always in
somewhere the plumbing is
so I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley
and I always have because
I'm very interested
in where the technology is going,
what it's enabling, what it's empowering
and what it's not and
so that's really what
produced "The World Is Flat."
I mean may I just tell that
story just for a second
because it's relevant.
After 9/11 I spent 3 years
in the Arab Muslim world
trying to understand the roots of 9/11.
I wrote "From Beirut to Jerusalem"
and then 10 years later I wrote maybe
one of the first books
about globalization called
"The Lexus and the Olive Tree." Okay.
That came out in the late '90's
and then I put that
subject down after 9/11
and really focused on trying to understand
the roots of 9/11.
I also started doing documentaries then
for the Discovery Channel.
The Discovery Channel and New York Times
created a partnership.
I did a documentary after 9/11 called
the Roots of 9/11 which
I was very proud of
and I did one then on the Wall
Israel had built in the West Bank
and in February 2004
we were sitting around
with our Discovery team what should we do
our next documentary on and Kerry
was running against Bush for president
and at the time my idea was
let's do a documentary about
why everybody hates America.
I thought that was a hot subject.
Bush was president
running for re-election.
Why does everybody hate us?
And so how should we do that?
I had this crazy idea we should go
to outsourcing centers all over the world
and interview young people
who spend their days
imitating Americans on
what they think of America.
I thought it would make a
fascinating double mirror.
You know, Joel by day, John by night.
You know Juan by day, Joe by night.
And so we literally were
budgeting that documentary.
Where do we go? Guatamala, Mexico City,
Philippines, Bangalore, and in the middle
of that budget debate John Kerry came out
with this blast against
Benedict Arnold's CEO's
who engage in outsourcing
because we just had the Y2K thing,
outsourcing was just becoming a big issue
so I came to the Times I said
"Timeout. Why don't we do a documentary
"just call it the Other
Side of Outsourcing
"and explain this phenomenon to people.
"And I know Nandan Nilekani at Infosys
"and I could go to Bangalore."
They liked that and said "Just go ahead."
That was the days when people had money.
And so we went to Bangalore
and we spent 2 weeks there
and I had just come up really 3 years
covering 9/11 and I had written this book
on globalization in the late 1990's.
And I spent 2 weeks in Bangalore
and I realized-
I just kept walking around Sal saying
I don't understand the platform
that's allowing this.
I met people ready to
trace my lost luggage
on Delta Airlines from Bangalore.
Read my x-rays from Bangalore.
Do my taxes from Bangalore.
Now this all seems now normal,
but back then it was like mind blowing
so the last interview was with
Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O. of Infosys,
the sort of Microsoft of India
and he had been out of the country
those 2 weeks and he had just come back.
I went to his office at
Electronics City in Infosys
to see him we sat on the
couch outside his office.
I had my laptop on my lap
and at one point he said
"Tom I got to tell you the global economic
"playing field is being levelled
"and you Americans are not ready."
Oh, I wrote that down in my little laptop.
The global economic playing field
being levelled-
Sal: You have to be
careful when you're typing.
Tom: You Americans are not ready.
It just really blew my mind.
I mean it connected a lot of things.
I got done with the interview.
I got back in my Jeep
to go back to my hotel
and it's about an hour drive from
Electronics City back to Bangalore
and I'm thinking now the whole time
about what Nandan said
"The global economic playing field
is being levelled."
Wow, he's really saying
the global economic
playing field is being flattened. Wow.
I think he just told me the world is flat.
And so I wrote that in my notebook.
The world is flat.
I got back to my hotel room.
I literally ran up to my room
and I called my wife in Bethesda and said
"Honey, I'm gonna write a book called
"The World is Flat."
She now says she thought
that was a brilliant idea.
That is not exactly how I
recall the conversation.
Sal: I'm looking at [unintelligible]
Tom: I got so excited about it.
It was Nandan's 50th birthday party.
I'll never forget this
and I was going back
to his house for dinner.
He had a Simon and
Garfunkel imitation duo.
He was so excited about the idea
he had all his Bangalore tech pals.
Sal: Was he Simon or Garfunkel?
He was singing?
Tom: No, no, no, he had
just an imitation duo.
Sal: I'll let that one pass.
I'll let that pass, yeah.
Tom: Nandan was so excited about it
he wanted me to-
I literally had sketched out
on the back of an envelope kind of the
just rough crude outline of a book
and he wanted me to present
it at his birthday party
to his Bangalore ... he
was so excited about it,
but I got home, I called the Times.
I said "I have to go
and leave immediately.
"My software is out of date.
"I'm a basic engineer
and it's a JavaWorld.
"And if you don't give
me a leave immediately
"I'm gonna write something really stupid
"in the New York Times
because my software."
Is a great way to get a leave.
So my software was out of date
and so they basically did. They said
"Go as soon as you can."
So I went out on leave in July
and that July I was invited to the
Allen Conference in Sun Valley.
They had invited me a bunch and
I just never could work it out to go.
So then I had it really on
the back of an envelope,
but it was more flushed
out and they asked me
to make a presentation.
Bill Gates was in the
audience and he heard it
and he came up afterwards.
He had taken all these notes and he said
"That was really interesting."
And I said
Sal: Yeah. No.
Tom: "You're talking to
me? I told you something
"about this and you didn't know."
And he said "Oh no, I knew all of that.
"I just never put it together."
Sal: Oh, it was like a
class [unintelligible]
Tom: He said "I never
connected all those things."
He said "You're 90% there
and I'm gonna help you
"with the last 10%."
Sal: Wow. That is interesting
because at that point [unintelligible]
Tom: Mentor you mean to say.
Sal: Oh yeah absolutely.
He's obviously played a
huge role here as well.
I mean that was the outsourcing craze.
People were scared.
Everything is going to go
to India and China and it seems like we're
kind of that post fear phase right now
and it's true a lot of
stuff is still going
to that part of the world,
but if you look at the US
the software engineer salaries continue
to go through the roofs.
Tom: That's right. Yeah.
In here? Is everyone's salary
going through the roof?
Sal: In here yeah.
Your salaries are going through the roof.
They are. They legitimately are.
You have more and more innovation
that is actually being focused
in 20 miles around here.
We have a great American
car, you know, the Tesla.
I mean how do we compare these 2 things.
This notion between the
US is losing its edge.
Everything is being outsourced
and it looks like more innovation
is being focused in the US now.
Tom: So let's go to what happened
between 2004 and today
because I think that
that's the story.
Between 2004 and today
something big happened
called Flat World 2.0.
I call it The Great Inflection,
but there was a merger of globalization
and the IT revolution.
They kind of merged in a way that more IT
drove more globalization.
More globalization drove
the expansion to more IT
and they merged and so something
really big happened, Sal, in my view.
We went from a connected world
to a hyper-connected world.
And I believe it's changing everything
and Khan Academy is now on that platform.
So, you know, the story I tell on my
sound byte is that when I
wrote "The World is Flat"-
so when I wrote my last
book which is about America
which in 2011 the first thing I did
was go back and get the first edition of
"The World Is Flat" off my bookshelf
just to remind myself what I had written.
I took it off the shelf.
I opened up to the index
looked under A, B, C, D, E, F, F, A,
Facebook wasn't in it.
So when I was running around the world
saying "the world is
flat, we're all connected"
Facebook didn't exist,
Twitter was still a sound,
the Cloud was still in the sky,
4G was a parking place,
LinkedIn was a prison,
applications were what
you sent to college,
Big data was a rap star
and Skype was a typo.
Okay. I mean all of that happened after
I wrote "The World Is Flat," you know,
so what does that tell you?
It tells you we've gone
from a connected world
to a hyper-connected world.
So what are the features of that?
Well the features of that is that
more people now can compete, connect,
collaborate and invent
with more other people
in more different ways
from more different places
for less money than ever before.
Sal: Right.
Tom: And it reached a difference of degree
that's a difference of kind
that allows for Khan Academy.
That for basically zero marginal cost
you can now offer the greatest
educational lessons to anyone, you know,
in the world with a web enabled cell phone
or an Internet enabled computer.
Sal: What's you sense of why-
I mean like the talent, you
know, the offshoring fear
was that all the software engineering jobs
were going to go to India.
What's your sense of why we see-
We actually saw the opposite.
Actually now we're seeing finally
an inflection point
where software engineers
are starting to become
competitive with bankers
and consultants and other types of people
in terms of income and
I mean what do you think
is allowing for that despite
the globalization phenomenon?
Tom: Well you know the way I always like
to explain it is that
there isn't something
called a lump of labor.
Sal: Right.
Tom: We've got it and now
India is going to get it.
Bring the lump back.
That's not how it works. Okay.
So the best way I used to explain it
when I talk about "The World Is Flat"
is guess what? Not everything that needs
to be invented has been invented.
Sal: Right.
Tom: And the example I always give is
your daughter goes off to college.
My daughter goes off to college.
Your kid goes off to college
and comes back after the first semester
and you say "So honey what do you think
"you're majoring in or
"what do you think you're gonna do?"
She says "Dad I want to be
a search engine optimizer
"when I grow up."
I said "What? I sent you to college.
"You couldn't be an ophthalmologist
"or an accountant?
"What the hell is a
search engine optimizer?"
So here's an industry that came from zero
to multi-billion dollars.
How do we optimize my website
so if Sal is in the tennis shoe business
and Tom is in the tennis shoe business
when I put tennis shoes into Google
Tom's tennis shoes comes up
before Sal's tennis shoes.
It is now a multi-billion dollar industry
that's a mash-up by the way between
math and Madison Avenue.
So it brings together advertising people
with mathematicians.
A whole new field for people with software
or math degrees never existed before
and so Kahn Academy the software around
distributed Online courses
didn't exist 10 years ago.
And so all these things
keep getting invented,
but there's one constant
it seems to me Sal
and that's every good
job is either going out,
up, or down faster than ever.
That is, every good job either requires
more education to do or it can be done
by more people, computers, or software,
or it's being outsourced
to the past faster.
So every job is going in all 3 directions.
Sal: Maybe not more education
in the formal sense.
It could be more-
Tom: Exactly. More competency.
Sal: Competency. Whatever
you might want to-
Tom: Exactly. One thing we know about
search engine optimizer
you needed to know more
than you did, you know, to be
a computer repair person, you know,
but what I think is
exciting about this moment
and again this is all being-
I would argue enabled
by the hyper-connected
platform is that once it
becomes a competency game
I can acquire those
competencies in any way
and that's what people
don't appreciate about globalization.
I always say globalization giveth
and globalization taketh.
Globalization just made the qualifications
for this job higher
and it just brought you
Kahn Academy where my daughter who is
applying for graduate school can go to
to get prepped for her GRE's for free.
Sal: Well she did.
Tom: She did.
Sal: You told me. I hope
she got her money's worth.
Tom: She did. She got in.
Sal: She got in.
Tom: She's there right now
and she visited here 2 weeks ago.
So it's doing both at the same time
and if you miss that if you think
it's all bad or all good you don't get it.
So the debate around
globalization tends to be that.
Oh my God, it's terrible,
it's gonna kill us,
it's gonna overwhelm us
or it's wonderful, it's great.
No, it's disruptive.
It's creative destruction on steroids,
but the opportunities it's unleashing
for all different kinds of people
and so my sort of overall summary of it
is that we're moving into a 401k world
where everyone will have
to pass the bar exam
and no one will be able to escape
the most emailed list.
Sal: So versus the pension world?
Tom: Exactly so basically we're going from
a world of defined benefits.
Sal: Yes the pension world.
Tom: To defined contributions.
For 30 years I worked
for the New York Times
I had a defined benefit.
Every year it didn't matter-
it was obviously tied to
my performance in general,
but basically I got a defined benefit
from the New York Times.
Now I get a defined contribution.
They'll give me x amount of money
and I have to take responsibility
for investing it wisely.
So I think that's happening
to the whole labor market.
We're going from a world
of defined benefits
where you're kind of
protected by walls and floors.
Sal: You go to college you're fine,
you're gonna get a job.
Tom: Exactly. That
4-year degree is a proxy
for a key in the door of a job.
Sal: That's right.
Tom: Okay. No, now we're in a world
of defined contributions.
The great thing for all the people
in Kahn Academy is there's
no ceiling anymore.
It ain't gonna matter in 5 years
whether you went to Stanford
or you got those competencies on Kahn.
The ceiling is gone,
but what's really scary
so are the floors and walls.
Sal: Right.
Tom: So we're going from
a defined benefit world
to a defined contribution world.
That's what the hyper-connectivity does.
Sal: Real global meritocracy.
Tom: Absolutely.
Sal: Because anyone
will be able to compete.
Tom: Anyone will be
able to compete. Right.
Second it's a world-
and what will enable that is we're moving
to a world where everyone
will have to pass the bar.
That is in the old days we said
your 3 years at Stanford Law School-
maybe 100 years we said
going to law school was a
proxy for knowing the law.
At some point the legal
profession said no-no
you're going to go to law school,
but then you have to take the bar
that says you actually know what you know.
That is coming I think to every industry.
You want to get a job
across the street at Google.
I don't think [unintelligible]
I have a BA in engineering,
but they test so you
actually know what you know.
Because Tony Wagner always
says the world doesn't
really care what you know
because the Google
machine knows everything.
Okay, the world only pays
off on what you can do
with what you know and we are now
going to test that.
Sal: Right.
Tom: So my motto is everyone is going
to have to pass the bar.
Third, we all are gonna have our own
most emailed machine.
So the New York Times,
go to NewYorkTimes.com
any day you have the most emailed columns.
It changes every 15 minutes.
Any journalist who says
they don't look at it is lying. Okay.
You always want to see whether your story,
your column, whatever, did it go up to
the most emailed list? Human nature.
I think what's coming
is a most emailed list
is coming to a job near you
because with big data.
So we had a story in the New York Times
that Jamba Juice has technology-
it's installed, it's in place
where they can measure which employees
sell the most juice on
5th Avenue and 63rd Street
at 80 degrees between 8
and 10 in the morning.
And because they also divide their workday
in 15 minute increments
the employees who do that
get the most overtime.
They've got their most emailed list now.
If you go to SchoolLoop.com in your world
you can track your kids school assignment,
whether she turned it in on time.
By the way whether he or she is tardy,
you know, and the kids now have
their most emailed list
so these are all most emailed lists
that will connect to your performance
and display it in real time.
Look it's all scary. It's
scary to me, you know.
Sal: I'm just wondering,
some people would fear
that, okay, this is going to become very
automatic, okay, these things matter,
how productive were
you at the Jamba Juice?
But what about the soft
skills, the arts even,
and the arts impact on society as a whole,
participation and democracy.
Some of these things that don't translate
into dollars at Jumba Juice.
Tom: So I think those are, again,
more important than ever because
what this world really enables
if you are a self-motivated person
and you're living in a
world of Khan Academy
if you're a self-motivated kid
in Kaian, Afghanistan
and there's Khan Academy
and I've got an Internet connection
you can suddenly ...
you can go to the moon.
You think of the walls and ceilings
that person lived within and so that is
just really exciting if
you are self-motivated.
If you are not self-motivated
the walls and floors
that protected you are gone
and so I think the most
important kind of leadership
for a company and leadership for teachers
and for parents and for coaches
is education that inspires.
Those soft skills, love of learning,
motivation they are going to matter hugely
in a world more than ever Sal
because when everything is out there now
for you for free if you
access it, you know,
and that's sort of one
side of the soft skills,
but also it's great to
know math and physics
and calculus and programming
and you can be creative without them,
but poetry, music, jazz,
sports, collaboration
all those things that inspire people
to take the math and turn
it into something of beauty,
something that will make people's lives
more productive, more
healthy, more entertained,
more caring, that all
comes from the other stuff
so I think the pendulum swung pretty far
to this way in terms of
rigorous, hard skills.
I think we need to make sure we come back
to the middle here and
that we're blending-
when we say blended
model we don't just mean
teacher as a tutor more and a coach
and all the Online stuff
taking care of the rest,
but blending also all these other things.
Sal: And if I read between the lines
when you talked about these new industries
the difference between
the engineering jobs
that are going to India
and the ones that are
the salaries are increasing here
is that it's fundamentally right brained.
It's totally creative. Madison Avenue.
Tom: Absolutely. India got into this game
by re-mediating Y2K computers.
Sal: Right.
Tom: Now what's cool to me about what's
going on in India a decade
later is we're seeing-
so when I wrote about "The
World Is Flat" in 2004
that was really based on
India solving our problems.
Sal: Yeah.
Tom: Y2K. Now what's so
exciting with this platform
they're using these incredibly cheap tools
of Khan activity and
collaboration and the Cloud
to solve their problems
so if you look at what innovators
in Mexico or India are doing it's
an explosion of innovation.
We've got a billion more brains
that potentially can be applied against
the biggest problems of humanity
and if that doesn't float your boat
then there's something wrong with you.
Now at the same time I
understand the challenge.
Sal: We should get them to figure out
how we can solve the outsourcing problem.
Tom: They might do that in a certain way.
Don't put it past them.
I understand for a lot
of people it's scary.
If you're a 50-year-old guy or gal
in a declining industry and somebody comes
and says "No problem, you can thrive,
"just go to Khan Academy
and take their lessons."
I have huge sympathy for that.
That's just so out of their-
they've been protected
by a wall and a floor.
They didn't do this, you know,
you can use all my
[unintelligible] you want
to help those people
and make a transition,
but what we shouldn't
do is block the change.
You know if horses could vote there never
would have been cars. All right.
It's always important to remember that
and so if you try to stand
in the way of the change.
Sal: That would be a fun party game.
If horses could vote?
Tom: What would there be?
What would there not
and what would there be?
Sal: Interesting.
Tom: I love the way your mind works.
Because then you won't have the resources
to take care of people,
but I have a huge sympathy for people
caught in that transition and no one
should ever mistake-
I get very excited talking
about the things I discover.
Just connections I make,
but do not mistake my excitement for-
I love the puzzle. You know what I mean?
Wow, that explains that
and this explains that
and people should know
that this is happening,
but don't confuse it for un-sympathy
or even that I'm not even
worried about all of this.
I see the up side and the down side,
but it leaves me Net worried in many ways.
Sal: Wow. I'm going to
ask you one last question.
Tom: Go ahead.
Sal: Where are you going next?
You hinted on it a little bit
and I found that
fascinating because you're
doing 2 documentaries
almost at the same time.
Tom: It's the same documentary.
It's called Climate
Change In The Arab Spring.
It's for the Showtime Channel.
It's part of a 6-part climate series
they're going to run next year.
I'm going to Yemen on
Sunday to look at Yemen
the first country in the world that will
probably run out of water.
You could go around Sana'a you see
water trucks all over the place.
Unfortunately, the country
has a big addiction to qat, this plant.
Sal: To what?
Tom: Qat, q-a-t, it's a drug.
I mean it's a plant
that is a mild narcotic,
but it consumes a lot of water
and somebody told me they
were on a high level,
you know, presidential visit
or either the president of their country,
the secretary of state of their country
and they went with the president of Yemen
somewhere and the pilot of the helicopter
was chewing qat.
Kind of leave me a little worried.
Get on American Airlines and the pilot
spits out a pile of qat on the floor.
And then we're going to Syria because
people don't realize Syria
had a 10-year drought.
The worst drought in their history
on recorded history as
the lead up to this.
A million farmers and grazers had
to leave the countryside
and move to the cities
put huge pressure on the infrastructure
and it didn't cause the revolution there,
but it was one of the stresses
that really helped contribute to it.
And we'll be going to
Egypt because in 2010,
in December 2010, there was a huge spike
in global wheat prices because there was
a drought in Australia,
there was a drought in Russia
and there was a drought in China or flood.
Flooding in Australia, drought in China,
drought in Russia and as a result
global wheat prices spiked.
In December 2010 the exact same time
of the revolution.
Sal: Arab spring.
Tom: Arab spring exactly.
Tunisia and Egypt then food prices hit
a record high the month of
the Tunisian revolution.
Sal: Wow.
Tom: And remember the guy who started
the revolution in Tunisia
was a fruit seller.
He was a vegetable seller, excuse me,
and so these didn't cause the Arab Spring,
but they were huge stresses on the system.
Sal: It accelerated Cadillacs.
Tom: And it shows you why you should take
climate change very seriously.
Sal: Wow. Well on that
note, fairly epic note,
not quite positive, but this has been
a huge honor I think for
all of us at the team.
Tom: Great fun for me.
Sal: Thank you so much for coming.
Tom: Real treat Sal. Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it. Thank you.
(applause)
Tom: Thank you. Thank you.
(applause)