>> Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Male Speaker: -- publishing books that tell us about America, and its role on the global stage. Tom Friedman has written six books: on the Middle East, on terrorism, on globalization. His first book, "From Beirut to Jerusalem" came out more than 20 years ago and has become a standard text for understanding the Middle East. It was on the best-seller list for more than a year and won the National Book Award. But these men do far more than just write books. Michael Mandelbaum is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and director of its School of Advanced International Studies. He has worked with the State Department on security issues, and was an advisor to President Bill Clinton. Tom Friedman has had a career at the New York Times that all journalists dream of. He knows everyone and has been everywhere. And his prowess as a journalist has earned him countless awards. Among them are three Pulitzer Prizes: two for international reporting and a third for commentary. You can chart the ups and downs of America's world leadership through the books of these two distinguished men, from the influence of our democratic ideals, to the assertion of our global power as a gentle Goliath, to our soul searching over war and terrorism. Now the two men have teamed up on a book the probes America's latest dilemma, how to maintain its place in a rapidly shifting global landscape. The title of the book sums up the issue, "That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back." These men are at their best when they explain our complex world in simple, easily understood language. It's something that sets them apart from many other big thinkers. And now I'll get out of the way so they can do what they do best. Please join me in welcoming Tom Freidman and Michael Mandelbaum. ^M00:02:06 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:15 >> Tom Freidman: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Steve, and thank you all for coming out on this beautiful morning. Michael and I are gonna sort a do a little tag team here for about a half hour, talk about our book. I know some of you have read it. Those of you who haven't, we know who you are. [laughter] And there's a signing tent back there afterwards. We like to think that the short way to describe this book is that this book is about what this election would be about if we were having a real election. And -- ^M00:02:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:51 -- that's about the best way we can describe it. Now you may wonder, "That Used to Be Us." You know, whenever Michael and I tell people the title of the book their first question usually is, "But does it have a happy ending?" And we tell everybody it does, absolutely. The only question is that we don't know yet whether it's fiction or non-fiction, okay. They've fortunately put us in the non-fiction tent, so we're hopeful. Now you may wonder, how did two foreign policy geeks end up writing a book about domestic American politics? The answer is very simple. Michael and I are very old friends, we're actually neighbors. We talk almost every morning, much to our wives' chagrin. We've been having a conversation for 20 years. But we started to notice something in recent years, and that is, we would start every day talking about the world, but we would end every day talking about America. And we eventually concluded that America, its fate, future, vigor, and vitality was actually the biggest foreign policy issue in the world. And unless we wrote about that, we really couldn't write intelligently about the world. Michael and I are for better or for worse description, we are kind of old-fashioned American nationalists. We believe America makes a lot of mistakes in the world, but we do believe America plays on its best days a hugely constructive roll stabilizing the global order and facilitating the global economy. And because of that we are convinced that if America goes weak, your kids and mine won't just grow up in a different America, we will grow up in a fundamentally different world, ordered by other powers or by no powers at all. And that's what really drove us to write this book. Now, Michael and I are both movie buffs and the book is really built around a lot of movie themes. And if there's one movie that really sums up our deepest concern, it's that 1958 classic "Touch of Evil." I'm sure many of you have seen it, an Orson Welles classic about murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, and corruption in a town on the Mexican-American border. Orson Welles plays a crooked cop who tries to frame his Mexican counterpart for a murder. At one point Welles stumbles into a brothel and finds the proprietor Marlene Dietrich, who is also a fortune teller, with cards spread out in front of her. "Read my future for me" Welles says. "You haven't got any," she replies, "Your future is all used up." Your future is all used up. Is that us? Is that America? Well we don't think so. We don't think so at all, but we also believe we can't just go on riding on our laurels -- resting on our laurels and talking about our exceptionalism. We need to get our act together and this book is about how and why. Now I'd like to indulge you just for a couple of minutes and read you the opening pages of the book. Michael and I so rarely get to actually do this in Washington D.C. I will read you just the first few paragraphs and you'll understand why. "This is a book about America that begins in China. In September 2010 I attended the World Economic Forum Summer Conference in Tianjin, China. Five years earlier getting to Tianjin had involved a three and a half hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted crowded Chinese version of Detroit. But things had changed. Now to get to Tianjin you head to the Beijing South Railway Station, an ultra-modern flying saucer of a building with glass walls. And an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels. You buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in English and Chinese. And board a world-class high-speed train that goes right to another roomy modern train station in downtown Tianjin. Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008, the Chinese bullet train covers 72 miles in 29 minutes. The conference itself took place in Tianjin MeiJiang Convention and Exhibition Center, a massive, beautifully appointed structure, the like of which exists in few American cities. As if the convention center wasn't impressive enough, the conference's cosponsors in Tianjin gave some facts and figures. They said the building contained a total floor area of 2.5 million total square feet and that construction of the MeiJiang Convention Center started on September 15, 2009 and was completed in May 2010. Reading that line, I started walking around my room counting on my finger, September, October, November, December. That's eight months. Returning home to Maryland from that trip, I was describing the Tianjin complex and how quickly it was built to Michael and his wife Anne. At one point Anne interrupted and asked me, 'Excuse me Tom, have you been to our subway stop lately?' [laughter] 'We live in Bethesda and often use Washington Metro Subway to get to work in downtown Washington D.C..' I had just been at the Bethesda station and knew exactly what Anne was talking about. The two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months. While the one being fixed was closed, the other had to be shut off and converted into a two-way staircase. At rush hour this was creating a huge mess. Everyone trying to get on or off the platform had to squeeze single file up and down one frozen escalator. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to get out of the station. A sign on the closed escalator said its repairs were part of a massive escalator modernization project. What was taking the modernization project so long? We investigated. Cathy Asato, spokeswoman for Washington Metro told the Maryland Community News that repairs were scheduled to take about six months and are on schedule. 'Mechanics,' she said, 'needed 10 to 12 weeks to fix each escalator.'" A simple comparison made a startling point. It took China's Teda Construction Group 32 weeks to build a world class convention center from the ground up, including giant escalators in every corner. And it was taking Washington Metro 24 weeks to repair two tiny escalators of 21 steps each. On November 14th 2010, the Washington Post ran a letter to the editor from one Mark Thompson of Kensington, Maryland who wrote, "I have noted with interest your reporting on the study that Metro hired to conduct in the sorry state of our systems escalators. I am sure the study has merit, but as someone who has ridden Metro for more than 30 years I can think of an easier way to assess the health of the escalators. For decades they ran silently and efficiently. But over the past several months when the escalators are running, aging or ill-fitting parts have generated horrific noises that sound to me like a Tyrannosaurs Rex, trapped in a tar pit screeching its dying screams." The quote we found most disturbing though, came from Maryland Community News. It was a story about the long lines at rush hour caused by the seemingly endless metro repairs. Excuse me. "My impression standing on line there," said Benjamin Ross, a frequent rider from Bethesda, "is that people have sort of gotten used to it." People have sort of gotten used to it. Indeed that sense of resignation, that sense that, well this is just how thing are in America today. That sense that America's best days are behind it and somehow China's best days are ahead of it have become the subject of water cooler, dinner party, grocery line and classroom conversations all across America today. So do we buy the idea, increasingly popular, that Britain owned the 19th century, America dominated the 20th century and China will inevitably reign supreme in the 21st century? No, no we do not. And we have written this book to explain why no American, young or old, should resign himself or herself to that view either. The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America and its future. We are optimists, but we are also frustrated. We are two frustrated optimists." The opening chapter of this book is called, "If You See Something, Say Something." ^M00:11:45 [ Applause ] ^M00:11:49 You know where that's from. That is the motto of the Department of Homeland Security. And it plays over and over on loud speakers in airports and bus stations and train stations across our country. Well we have seen and heard something and it is hiding in plain sight. It is much more dangerous than any package from al-Qaida buried under a stairwell. What we've seen and heard is a country in the worse kind of decline, a slow decline. Just slow enough for us to not to drop everything and do what it takes to pull together and put this country on the trajectory we know and can be what it is capable of. This book is our way of saying something about what's gone wrong, why it's gone wrong, and what we can and must do to make it right. Thank you. Michael. ^M00:12:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:12:59 >> Michael Mandelbaum: Well let me add my thanks to all of you for coming. And tell you that "That Used to Be Us," our book, is organized around what we see as the four major challenges the United States faces, the four challenges that will define our future and our country's future for decades to come. The first of these challenges is the challenge presented by globalization. And among its other consequences, globalization has virtually doubled the global labor pool over the last two decades. There are twice as many people participating in the global economy now as there were two decades ago, which means that there's much more competition for all American workers. And that's a huge challenge. The second great challenge is the challenge presented by the revolution in information technology. Now that's a revolution with which we are all intimately familiar. We carry it around in our pockets. And it has had many consequences, many of them helpful and benign, but one of its consequences has been to destroy, to eliminate whole categories of jobs, jobs that millions of American's used to do, jobs at which those Americans used to make pretty good livings. Those jobs are now gone. They've either been outsourced to Asia, or outsourced to the past. They're history, they're not coming back, and that too is a huge challenge for all of us. The third great challenge is the challenge presented by deficits and debt on the part of the government. Now in Washington, we hear a lot about the federal deficit and the federal debt, the cumulative total of all the annual deficits. We've seen these debt clocks that seem to rack up increases in the money we owe at dazzling lightning speed. And that's a huge problem and I think we're all becoming aware of that, but unfortunately it's not the only problem we face. It's not just the federal government that owes a lot of money. All over America in states and municipalities, most notably I regret to say in my native state of California, governments have made promises to the future, mainly in the form of benefits to public employees that at current rates they are simply not going to be able to keep. So the debt and deficit problem is not just one of the federal government. It's spread all around the country. It's a huge problem; we're going to have to face it. The fourth and final problem is the problem of our pattern of energy consumption and its impact on many things including our earth's environment. The impact of our consumption of fossil fuels is potentially catastrophic for the air we breathe and the environment in which human societies function. We've got to face that challenge as well, and we're not doing it. Indeed the stakes in whether or not we meet these challenges could not be higher. Tom's already mentioned that were moved to write this book because of our conviction that America plays a unique and uniquely constructive role in the world, most if not all of the time. And that if we are not able to meet these challenges, we will not be able to sustain that role and that will mean that we will all live in a world that is poorer and more dangerous. And that would be a terrible thing. But the consequences of our success or failure in meeting these challenges will also be felt powerfully here at home. On whether and to what extent we are able to meet these challenges will depend the rate of economic growth that the United States is able achieve in the years ahead. And the rate of economic growth that we achieve will determine whether the next generation will be able to aspire to do even better in economic terms than we have. Now there's a term for that pattern in American history that goes back all the way to the beginning of the republic. And that term is the American Dream. The American Dream is now at stake and if we don't meet these challenges successfully, this two centuries long pattern of American history, something that has benefited us all and on which we have all depended will disappear and that would be terrible. How are we doing in meeting these challenges? Well alas, as we speak, we Americans are not doing as well as we should be doing and as we need to be doing. Why are we not doing as well as we should be doing? Well there are a number of reasons that we list in "That Used to Be Us." These challenges date from about 20 years ago and their rise coincides with the end of the Cold War which we regarded as a great victory for us, our way of life, and our allied countries. And so it was, but the end of the Cold War also presented us with a whole new set of challenges just as formidable in their way as the challenges we faced for four decades in confronting the Soviet Union and global communism. And we as Americans have been slow to awaken to those challenges. Moreover some of these challengers are subtle, incremental. They operate below the radar. They're not grab you by the throat and shake you by the shoulders challenges such as the one we faced as a result of the attacks on this city and on New York City on September 11, 2001. They're a little bit hard to discern, and yet, how and whether we meet these challenges will do far more to determine the kind of country that we and future generations have than will the way we meet the challenge of terrorism. Well there's a third reason that we discuss at some length in "That Used to Be Us," that we're not measuring up to these challenges, and that reason I regret to say does us no good. It is no compliment to us. Meeting each one of these challenges, in different ways will require sacrifice from Americans. And sacrifice not just from the most fortunate and well-to-do among us, but sacrifice from everybody. Now sacrifice was something we as Americans used to be good at. American history is full of examples of one generation making sacrifices for the sake of the common good or for the sake of future generations. So we know how to do this, but in recent years we've fallen out of that habit. We've forgotten what it is to make sacrifices for the sake of our future. And we have to remember and get that habit back if we are to secure a better future for ourselves and for succeeding generations. Now there's yet another problem that we discuss in this book that's important enough for me to mention it here in the little time that we have. We as Americans have been ignoring, in fact in some ways we seem almost to have forgotten, our historic formula for a public-private partnership for national wellbeing and economic success. That formula has five parts and I want to mention them because they are so important. The first part is education. Historically we have educated our people up to the level of the most advanced technology, so that Americans could use that technology to become the most productive and therefore the wealthiest people in the world. But we're not doing that anymore. We have much more to say about education in "That Used to Be Us." The second part of this important, I'm tempted almost to call it a magic formula for success is infrastructure. Since the building of the Erie canal at the outset of the 19th century, we Americans have built the best canals, the best roads, the best bridges, the best tunnels, the best power and water supplies. And these have formed the framework for productive economic activity. We're not doing that anymore either. By the estimate of one study of civil engineers that we quote in "That Used to Be Us," we Americans are $2.2 trillion, $2.2 trillion in arrears in upgrading our infrastructure to world standards. The third part of this formula is research and development. Especially since 1945 the federal government, but not only the federal government, has invested in research and development that has produced new ideas, new technologies, new techniques, new products that Americans have made and sold to each other and to the rest of the world to sustain the highest standard of living in the world. Well we know that in the future science and technology, research and development will be even more closely connected to economic growth than they have in the past. And so logically we ought to be spending proportionately more on research and development now than we have in the past. But we're not doing that either. We are spending less. The fifth and final part of this historic American formula that we have to recapture, reinvigorate, and reinvent to move forward as a country in a way that we would wish is regulation. Historically, we Americans have tried and often succeeded to have government regulation of business that was not so loose as to permit excesses such as the financial meltdown of 2008, but also not so tight, not so restricted, not so binding as to stifle the innovation, the entrepreneurship, and the risk taking that we need for economic growth. Well these days we seem to be getting the worst of both worlds. We're not fulfilling the terms of our formula in this fifth part either. Finally, immigration, as my co-author reminds me, and as we read in the paper recently. America has historically been a country that has attracted, welcomed, and retained what we call in "That Used to Be Us," high IQ risk-takers. That is people who came from other countries who used their drive, their imagination, their energy, and their initiative to make this a better, more prosperous, more dynamic country. Well we're not doing that either. Our immigration system and our immigration laws are a mess and we've got to fix them in order to attract the kind of people we have always attracted who have made such a remarkable contribution to our country. So, we need to reinvent and reinvigorate and reinvest in these five parts of our historic formula in order to meet these four great challenges that we face. Now all of these challenges are important. But two get particular attention in "That Used to Be Us," the challenge of globalization and the challenge of the information technology revolution. They get particular attention because they're so important and because they've merged to have a profound impact on our economy and on our future. That merger and the implications and consequences of that merger for our future is something Tom will tell you about now. ^M00:26:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:26:09 >> Tom Freidman: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Michael. Well as Michael said, we've got these great challenges, debt and deficit, energy and climate, and the merger of these two things called globalization and the information technology revolution. It's our view that this merger of globalization and the IT revolution which has been happening over the last decade, but really gaining pace over the last decade, has been happening over a couple decades, is actually the single most important thing happening in the country today. But it's been disguised by the sub-prime crisis and by 9/11. So we actually haven't been talking about the single most important thing that is impacting the workplace, schools, and the nature of work. So let's do that for a few minutes before we close because it's really central to this book. Now I know a little bit about globalization cause in 2004 I sat down and wrote a book called "The World is Flat." And the argument of that book was that the world is getting connected. [applause] Thank you. So when I sat down with Michael to write this book, 2011 we started. The first thing I did is get the first edition of "The World is Flat" off my bookshelf. I cracked it open to the index; I looked under A, B, C, D, E, F, Fa. Facebook wasn't in it. So when I was running around at this book festival in 2004 and 2005 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. And for most people, Skype was a typo. Okay? [laughter] All of that -- I love doing that, can I do that again? [laughter] So, all of that happened after I said the world was flat. So what's actually happened, just over that last seven, eight years is we've actually gone from a connected world to a hyper-connected world. That's what's happened. But we're not talking about it, it's been completely disguised by the kind of subprime crisis and kind of post-9/11. Now what are the signs of a hyper-connected world? Well we give a lot of them in the book, but just give you a couple. When I travel, I travel a lot and I love to read small newspaper articles. I always look, they always tell you the most when I'm travelling. I was in India in October 30, 2010. The India newspaper, The Hindustan Times ran a news story reporting that a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing 3G mobile network service at the summit of Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain. The story said this would, quote, "Allow thousands of climbers and trekkers access to high-speed internet and video calls using their mobile phones." Do you know how many calls are now being made every day from the top of Mount Everest that begin, "Mom, you'll never guess where I'm calling from." Okay, that's a hyper-connected world. When I wrote "The World is Flat" I said we connected Boston and Bangalore in India. We've now connected Boston, Bangalore and Sirsi. You say where's Sirsi. That's a town 90 miles to the interior in India, where thanks to these web-enabled cell phones, their kids are on the global grid with yours and mine. [unintelligible] When I wrote "The World is Flat," I said we connected Detroit and Damascus. We've now connected Detroit, Damascus, and Daraa. Say where's Daraa? Daraa's the dusty Syrian border town where the Syrian uprising began. Where thanks to these and Flip cams, Syrians have been telling the story of their revolution, creating a virtual YouTube network that we get to watch every day despite the fact that the Syrian government had banned every international news organization from their country. That's a hyper-connected world. You see it in other ways as well. My wife's from Iowa, my mother-in-law went to Grinnell College in Iowa. Wonderful, small, liberal arts college in central Iowa. Great school. 1,600 students. Wonderful school, Grinnell. Last year, 9 percent of all applications to Grinnell College came from China, 9 percent. Of those, 43 percent had perfect 800s on their math SATs. Okay? Not making that up, that's a story in the New York Times. Okay? That's also a hyper-connected world. Now what is the significance of this hyper-connected world? Well we argue in the book is that what it really means is if the world were a single math class, the whole global curve just rose. The whole global curve just rose because every employer now has cheaper, easier, faster access to more above-average talent, above-average software, above-average automation, above-average robotics, above-average cheap labor, and above-average cheap genius. And hence, maybe the central chapter in this book, which we consider to be the central socio-economic fact of our time is that average is officially over. Average is over in a hyper-connected world. You know that old saying in Texas, "If all you ever do, is all you've ever done, all you ever get is all you've ever got." That is as they say, NA, no longer applicable. If all you've ever done, all you'll ever get is not all you've ever got. You will now get below average. Average work will no longer lead to an average lifestyle. Average is officially over. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking very easy for you to say, Mr. smarty-pants New York Times columnist. No let me tell you about my job, my office is just up the street there in Farregut Square. In January 1995 I became the Times foreign affairs columnist. And I inherited James Reston's office in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. What a great honor, okay. This great editor and columnist from the '60s and '70s. Now I suspect Mr. Reston used to come to the office back in the '60s and say to himself every morning, "I wonder what my seven competitors are going write today." And he personally knew all seven: Walter Lippmann, Mary McGrory, Stewart Alsop, Joseph Kraft, Tony Lewis. He knew all seven. I do that same thing. I come to the office every morning and I say, "I wonder what my 70 million competitors are going to write today." [laughter] I have 70 million competitors and I'm keenly aware of that. I'm keenly aware that when I'm in China last week, my stuff will be read in China. New York Times is just going to a Chinese translation edition online and the 400 million micro bloggers in China, one or two of them, maybe just a half a percent of 400 million, may even choose to comment and correct and criticize what I write. I am keenly aware of that today. Average is over everywhere you turn. Now I will just give you a few thoughts before we close on what this means for the labor market and therefore what it means for education. Historically the labor market has been divided into three sort of tiers. The top tier, the tier we all want to be in is called non-routine work. That's work that requires critical thinking and problem solving: engineers, scientist, teacher, professor, artist, painter, performers, writers, they all do non-routine work. That's what we all want to do and that's what we want our kids to be doing. Second is routine work. Routine work is repetitive work that can be described by an algorithm. And anything that can be described by an algorithm today can be outsourced, automated, or digitized. You do not want to be doing any routine work. Routine work has been crushed, as anyone who works in the back room of the bank or on a factory assembly line knows. Last is non-routine local work. This is work that has to been done face-to-face in a specific location. That's your butcher, your baker, your candlestick maker, your massage therapist, your divorce lawyer. They all have to be done locally face-to-face. But the wages of non-routine local workers will be determined ultimately by the number, the critical mass of non-routine high skilled workers. It is much better to be a butcher or baker in Cupertino, California outside Apple headquarters than it is in the middle of Montana. Okay? So we all want to be doing non-routine work. Well we have a chapter in the book called, "Help Wanted" which is interviews with employers. And what you'll see when you read that chapter is that every employer today is actually looking for the same employee. What are they looking for? They are looking for employees who can do critical reasoning and problem solving, non-routine work, dot, dot, dot, in order to get an interview. Yeah, non-routine work, critical thinking, and problem solving, that's now table stakes. What you'll see from these interviews is what every employer is really looking for is people who can not only do their non-routine job in a non-routine way, but can bring something extra. Can -- that extra is can they reinvent, reengineer, and redesign their job while they are doing it? Because in a hyper-connected world the pace of change is so fast now that every employer needs people that can now only do their non-routine job, in a non-routine way, in a critically and creative way, they need people who can reengineer and redesign and reinvent their job while they are doing it. Hence all of us, this is a lot what the chapter is about, have to find our extra. That extra thing we can bring to every job to make our contribution a unique value contribution that will not be outsourced, automated, or digitized. Does this mean we all need to be Steve Jobs? No. I can't be, a lot of us can't be, most of us can't be. But what it means is everyone has to look for their extra in their job. My mom was in a nursing home for 10 years out in Minneapolis. I can't tell you how much I would have paid and did pay for that health care worker who didn't just do their job non-routine in a routine way, but who did their job in a way that brought a smile to my mom's face. They brought something extra. We all need to think about what is that extra we can bring to whatever it is we do that will create a unique value contribution that cannot be outsourced, automated, or digitized. It's not enough anymore to say, "I'm a lawyer, I'm non-routine." No, you've gotta be a creative lawyer now, if you want to really advance. It's not enough to say, "I'm a radiologist, I'm non-routine." Hey, I can get your X-rays read in Bangalore now. What else can you do? It's not enough to say, "I'm an accountant, I'm non-routine." You have to be a creative accountant. Well, not a creative accountant. But you know -- [laughter] We've got a lot of those. But you know what I mean. Everybody needs to bring their extra. Now let me just close by, people often ask well if that's the case, what do you tell your own kids? And I tell my own kids couple things. One, which I think is becoming more and more obvious is, girls when I graduated from college, I'm 59 -- I graduated in 1975. When I graduated from college, I got to find a job. You will have to invent a job. That is going to be the biggest difference between us and our kids. We got to find jobs; they will have to invent them. May not be their first job, but to keep that job, you will constantly be having to think about how to reinvent, reengineer, and redesign that job. A wonderful quote by Alvin Toffler, the futurist, he said this evidently many years ago, at least it's attributed to him. And that is that the new literacy today, the new literacy today is not reading, writing, and arithmetic. The new literacy today is the ability to learn and re-learn. That is the new literacy. That if you haven't gone to college and come away with the ability to learn how to learn, then you haven't really gotten the degree you need. Because I worked for the New York Times for 32 years, the chances of my girls working at any company for 32 years is probably zero. Not in a hyper-connected world. But my main advice and the advice we give in the book here, Michael and I, to people who ask us what do you tell your kids in this hyper-connected world? It's really four things. First, think like an immigrant. How does the immigrant think? How does the new immigrant think? The new immigrant thinks I just arrived here in Washington D.C. and there is no legacy spot waiting for me at Georgetown or Howard University. I better figure out what's going on here, what are the biggest and best opportunities, and I better pursue them with more focus and energy and vigor than anyone else. An Armenian friend of mine like to say that new immigrants are paranoid optimists. They are optimists because they picked up and went somewhere else, and they are paranoid because they know the opportunity can be taken away from them at every second. Think like a new immigrant friends because we are all new immigrants today, to the hyper-connected world. Second, think like an artisan. This is an idea from Larry Katz at Harvard. Who is the artisan? The artisan was that person in the middle ages who made every item individually, every item one off. They made every utensil, every spoon, every fork, every plate, every saddle, every pair of shoes, every piece of furniture individually. And what did the best artisans do? The best artisans carved their initials into their work at the end of the day because they took so much pride in it. Do your job everyday as if you brought so much extra to it, you'd want to carve your initials into it. Third -- what is third? I'm just like that guy that's governor of Texas. [laughter] I haven't done this in a while. What's my third, Michael? >> Michael Mandelbaum: Doesn't matter. >> Tom Freidman: Doesn't matter? [laughter] >> Michael Mandelbaum: You've given them enough. >> Tom Freidman: Third is think like a starter upper. This is an idea I got from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. Reid likes to say in Silicon Valley, there's only one four letter word. And that four letter word is "finished." Starts with an 'F' and it's not really four letters. If you ever think in Silicon Valley you are finished, you are truly finished. Think like a starter upper said Reed. Always think of yourself as being in beta. What is beta? Beta is that stage in the development of a piece of software or new technology where it's about four-fifths done or nine-tenths done. And the designers and developers throw it over the wall and they let the community work on it and find the holes, and find the imperfections. And they throw it back over the wall, then you work on it again. And you throw it over the wall again. Always be in beta. Always think of yourself as unfinished and wondering how you can redesign, reinvent, and reengineer yourself in a hyper-connected world. Lastly, think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis, my favorite restaurant. Many of you know I'm from Minneapolis. I was working on this book out in Minneapolis, one day, Sunday morning I was having breakfast with my best friend Ken Greer at my favorite restaurant, Perkins Pancake House. I ordered, 7:00 am in the morning, three buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs. Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit. And after 15 minutes the waitress came, she put our two plates down and all she said to Ken was, "I gave you extra fruit." She got a 50 percent tip. Okay? Why did she get a 50 percent tip? Because that waitress, God bless her, she did not control much. But she controlled the fruit ladle. Okay? And that was her extra. That was her extra. What was that waitress doing in her own little world in her own little way? She was thinking entrepreneurially. Always think entrepreneurially, whatever you do. So if Michael and I can leave you with any four thoughts today friends, any take away from this book, it's think like a new immigrant, always be hungry in the hyper connected world; think like an artisan, take pride in what you do; think like a starter upper in Silicon Valley and always be in beta; and think like a waitress at Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis and always be entrepreneurial. Because friends, in this hyper connected world, we are all residents of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the children need to be above average. Thank you very much. ^M00:44:32 [ Applause ] ^M00:44:35 Thank you. ^M00:44:38 >> Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.