$500 MILLION DOLLARS - Smarter Every Day 179

Five hundred million dollars— that's a lot of money! If someone just handed you five hundred million dollars and said, "Here, go do something good for society," what would you do? I don't know if you know it, but society is kind of divided right now. It's like we're on different teams, and when we're on teams, we tend to play games.

Right? I don't like to even touch politics because of this division, this polarization. But just as a thought experiment, look at this graph—there are two teams: there's the blue team and the red team. Where would you put yourself on this graph? You might find yourself over here on the left, or maybe over here on the right, or somewhere in between. Whatever you're into, that's cool, but I kind of look at it a little bit differently.

I'm not really on the graph. I don't really care what team gets the credit, and I don't even really want to play the game. I want to be a part of those things that are just unarguably good. When I was at university for mechanical engineering, it was pretty much understood that if you were to graduate, you would have a job because there was a deficit of engineers to fill engineering jobs. Eight years later, my sister went through university, and she read the market forces differently. She chose computer science.

I thought it would be interesting to get her perspective on what it's like to be a female computer scientist.

"Hey guys, Destin asked me to make a quick clip about women in computer science, but the thing is I'm actually really busy—computer science thing, as we speak. I really need to format this aggregation right now; I can't make a video clip," so that's all she gave me. She kind of messed my script up.

So here's how this works: she's too busy working. She is a senior software engineer. Her opening salary was a hundred and fifty percent of what mine was when I graduated, adjusted for inflation and everything. If you want a job when you graduate, computer science is the ticket.

Google invited me via email to this event. Industry leaders from all different types of companies and government leaders were coming together to ball up 500 million stinking dollars and allocate it to get coding into schools. This is a big deal because in the current loaded political tribalism environment, this email invite I got looked like a breath of fresh air. It looked like people working together.

So yeah, I'll put on a suit and go to Detroit and listen to people working together for something I agree with.

So this is what that looks like: "Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! I'm in Detroit today; I have been asked to come to an event about computer science for children. It's put on by code.org, the Internet Association— a lot of groups have come together. It's a big deal!

So, there's 500 million dollars that's being given specifically to focus on computer science literacy for minorities, young girls, and rural students. So, I'm in Detroit. Ivanka Trump's gonna be here in a second; we're gonna talk about what all is going on, and I'm gonna watch this event first, and then we'll all talk about it."

This guy is Michael Beckerman; he's the president and CEO of something called the Internet Association. The Internet Association is responsible for getting all these industry partners together to donate all this money. This is how we kick things off: a new initiative creating a large funding for computer science and STEM programming, and that would have not been possible without the leadership and vision of Ivanka Trump, who is with us today.

So, I just wanted to thank Ivanka as well. Thank you for what you've done! After this, the panelists came up, and I'll summarize exactly what went down: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Salesforce.org each gave 50 million bucks. Lockheed Martin gave 25 million, Accenture gave over 10 million, and General Motors and Pluralsight are giving 10 million.

There were a lot of things said on this stage, but the one thing that was very clear is everyone was unified on this one particular topic: pathways for a job for all Americans, even those who walked out of a four-year college model. For my money, Hadi Partovi from code.org seemed to sum it up the best.

This guy's been beating this drum for years, and you could tell this was a really big moment for him. Listen: "The way he had to say Americans expect the tech industry to address some of these things, and today they're putting their money where their mouth is to do that. And on top of that, the administration is coming together in a really unique public-private partnership that we don't really see in our country very often. You know, our country lives—we're living in divided times; everybody knows that. But everybody agrees on the idea that every American should have the opportunity, as a student, to have a great career in front of them, and the school they go to should prepare them for that place, no matter where they want to get into.

So I wanted to thank Ivanka personally for championing this and being such a champion, particularly of diversity for girls, for African Americans, for Hispanic Americans, who have the least access to this opportunity.

Today, I want to point out something right now—somehow, I don't know how this happened, but in society right now, we have come to believe that if you agree with a person on a topic, somehow you're signaling to the rest of the world that you agree with everything that person thinks on every topic. That's simply not true! It's okay to say that something that's good is good.

I'll give you an example. This makes me look bad, so maybe you'll believe it more. On this channel in particular, I've done a video in the past saying that one particular practice that Facebook was doing was inequitable, and I disagreed with it. It was a very strong video, but here, Facebook has given 50 million dollars for computer science education—that is a good thing, and people might say, "Whatever, it's a PR stunt." I don't care what people think; you've given 50 million dollars to computer science education, and that is a good thing no matter what anybody says.

By the way, all these companies that don't traditionally agree with some of the policies of the current administration are sitting down with Ivanka Trump. Everybody's on stage doing a good thing! This is exactly what I want the future to look like. They're all listening to each other. Speaking of that, I actually got to go meet some of these people one-on-one and listen to them. This is really fun!

I like this. I came to this country as an immigrant from Iran, and my family is leaving during a time of war. I came here as a 12-year-old with my twin brother, and we had nothing to our name other than my ability to code. Thirty years later, I've made more money than I need, and I've started companies that employ thousands of Americans, all because I learned coding in computer science.

The person who taught me was my dad, and the reason I started code.org is most Americans aren't going to learn coding and computer science from their dad. If computer science is taught in schools, not only will every American have the opportunity, we can also address the diversity issues about who goes into the field.

Okay, I'm here with Mary from Microsoft, and you had some good one-liners there during the panel. One of them you said is, "A goal without a plan is just a wish," right?

"Right! And I will say it now that I took that from Melinda French Gates, who also has been just such a strong leader for women and driving diversity in the workplace too. But nonetheless, it's really true: once we set a goal, we need to really have indicators to ensure that we're going to meet those goals. My goal is that in five years there’s computer science in every single high school, and that we have teachers who are also representative—that we have women teachers and that we have young people of color teaching computer science."

Okay, regardless of political background, we can all agree that smart kids is something that we all want. So, I'm here with Michael from the Internet Association and Ivanka Trump, but you guys—government and industry just came together!

We're talking 500 million dollars to teach young girls and minorities and rural areas how to code, right?

"Yeah, absolutely! Well, we announced a memorandum of a minimum of two hundred million dollars annually, and the private sector also announced an enormous contribution today towards computer science education. We're super passionate about coding; we think that the jobs of the future will require this technical skill set. I'm also really excited that the presidential memorandum requires that the Department of Education considers inclusion in the design of these programs because we need to encourage gender and racial diversity in a scale of which, unfortunately, women's participation has been moving in the wrong direction in recent years—we only represent a little over 22% of the computer science field.

So hopefully this will take a big step in changing that dynamic. These are jobs for everybody, as Ivanka pointed out, and her leadership has been absolutely incredible. There are 500,000 open computer science jobs across the country, and that's in agriculture and banking sectors outside of technology. Yet, we're only graduating 50,000 students a year. Less than half of the schools are teaching computer science, but all the parents—90 percent of parents want their kids to learn this.

So this is important for kids—every kid across the country, here in Detroit and in every community, regardless of whether you want to go into tech or not. The leadership that the Ivanka administration has shown has been absolutely incredible, and it's just great to be here representing the private sector matching this commitment as well and working together."

That's awesome! That's what I'm really excited about—everybody working together, regardless of political differences, to do the right thing, which is educate the future. It's really good, and I'm a father as well; we've got four kids, and so I can relate to all the stuff you guys have going on. It's a big deal! My sister's a computer scientist, and I'm really excited about it. So, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much!

"Thank you very much! Appreciate it."

One final thought here: do you remember that political graph? I feel like I have a really unique perspective right now because recently I've done something interesting on both sides of that graph. Last year, for example, I met with President Barack Obama, and like anyone in life, I had things that I agreed with him on and things that I disagreed with him on. But I chose to focus on the good things, and we made progress together.

I had the exact same experience with Ivanka Trump. She is a sharp, competent woman who just used her position of leadership to accomplish some great things on a topic I care about—computer science. My point is this: if we focus on our disagreements, there will be no progress. But if we actually take the time and listen to each other, then we can work together with the things that we do agree on.

Only then are we really gonna make the future smarter every day, and I think we can all agree that that is unarguably good. You’re probably thinking, “What’s the deal, Destin? Did you just make this video to virtue signal and feel better about yourself?”

No, no! But did not—were you not listening? There’s 500 freakin' million dollars that you didn't know existed a few minutes ago, and we can funnel that into your local school. They kind of like spend it, right?

So they're trying to figure out how they're gonna allocate this money. So I'm gonna leave links in the video description—students, be smart about this! Mom, Dad, teacher, administrator, don't wait on anybody else to do this. Go to the link, enter your school, tell them everything they need to know.

Let's figure out how to get a coding curriculum in your local school. You don't even have to have kids or even be connected to the school—put the stuff in there! Let's figure out how to get coding into schools. When we go to Mars, there's gonna be millions of lines of code on that vehicle, and it's gonna be done by this generation.

So use the links, get the money, and learn to code. The future is yours—you can do it! I promise. Anyway, I’m Destin; you’re getting smarter every day. Have a good one, and everybody just be nice to each other. Look at what we're doing when we're nice to each other; it's awesome!

Anyway.