Tom Friedman on saving lives and livelihoods & honoring the heroes of the crisis | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Welcome to the daily homeroom live stream. I'm Sal from Khan Academy, and I'm super excited about our guest today. So I'm actually just gonna go through my announcements pretty fast so that we have as much time with Tom Friedman as possible.

But before we start, I do like to make my standard announcement that remember, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. And I do want to give a special shout out to several corporations that stepped up when they found out that we needed to step up more during this whole crisis. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis, and the many other corporations and foundations that have been supporting us even pre-COVID. We were running at a deficit before this, and this has definitely helped.

But we continue to run into deficit because of the traffic on our servers and all the programs that we're trying to accelerate because of COVID. So if you are in a position to do so, please think about donating.

So with that, I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Tom Friedman. I think someone who doesn't need much of an introduction, a famous columnist, an author from The New York Times. Tom, great to see you!

It's a pleasure to be with you. It's great! I’m glad you joined. I don’t think there’s a lot to talk about—not much interesting going on in the world—but I figure we’re good at killing time. Where do we start?

I am curious about your vantage point on all of the things that are now kind of thrown up in the air—from the healthcare crisis to the economic crisis. Obviously, there's even an education crisis and maybe some political stuff going on. Obviously, Khan Academy, we're a non-political organization, so we try to stay a little bit clear about some of those conversations. But I’m curious, from your point of view as a columnist and an author, you’ve written books about globalization, "The World Is Flat," all of these things. What do you think is the biggest aha of this moment?

I think there are two cells that really are shaping how I cover this story. The first is that my youngest daughter, Natalie, actually is the executive producer of All Things Considered weekend edition on NPR, so I never miss it. On Easter Sunday, they did a roundup of pastors' sermons from around the country, and I was particularly struck by Michael Curry's sermon from the national cathedral because he ended it with a song. He started singing, "He's got the whole world in his hands. He's got the whole wide world in his hands. He's got the whole world in his hands."

Now, I think, for me, I’m a pretty good singer! I don’t think so, but that was definitely in any way. But yeah, please continue.

What is the uber story for me, Sal? What has really shaped my thinking more than anything about this story is that—just substitute "He" for "She." For the first time, Mother Nature has us all in her hands. For the first time, our generation of human species—because I don’t think any of us, or virtually any of us, were here in 1918, the last time she had us all in her hands. The last time there was a global pandemic.

For the first time, we all are facing one of nature's challenges together as a species. Mother Nature throws fastballs at us—droughts, floods, wildfires, germs, viruses, pandemics—and these are the way, ultimately, natural selection happens for plants and animals. This is how she starts out the fittest.

And this is the first time all of us together have faced this kind of challenge, this kind of fastball. So, Mother Nature—one of the things you always have to keep in mind is that she doesn’t reward the smartest; she also doesn’t reward the strongest. She actually rewards the most adaptive. When she throws her fastballs, who can actually adapt best?

In the face of a pandemic, she really is saying to us: I reward three kinds of adaptation. First, I reward humility. Do you respect my virus? Because if you don’t respect my virus, it will hurt you or someone you love. Second, are you coordinated in facing my virus? Because I evolved my viruses over millennia to find any crack in your immune system. So unless you are really coordinated in your response, my virus will find that crack.

Lastly, because Mother Nature herself is just chemistry, biology, and physics, she says, I only reward adaptation strategies that are based on chemistry, biology, and physics. If your adaptation strategy is based on politics, ideology, or an election schedule, it won’t be effective.

And so for me, Sal, that’s kind of the uber framework at which I look at everything. I judge the responses, and that is the lens through which I’m doing my analysis.

Actually, there are a ton of questions already coming in. I do want to remind everyone watching, if you have any questions for especially Tom, but including me, feel free to put them on the message boards on YouTube and Facebook. We have team members who are going to surface that to us.

But, given what you just said—which I think is a really good way of thinking about it, because so many times we’re kind of caught up in our human bubble—but we are on this planet, and there are forces that can humble us very, very quickly. How do you think—let me ask a question—how do you think this is going to play out? How do you think it’s going to play out in the short term, and what do you think are going to be the maybe the medium and long-term implications of all of this?

Well, what I would say is that what you see are three broad responses of adaptation playing out in the world today. So one, let’s call it the super-efficient lockdown, and then trace, test, track, trace, track, and quarantine model. The probably the most super-efficient form of that is China’s, because it uses basically a surveillance system that it uses for controlling a society to now track and trace the coronavirus.

So that’s one model, and then there are democratic versions of that—Germany, South Korea, etc.—and they’ve also been quite effective—Taiwan, New Zealand to name a few.

At the other extreme, you have the model being—and by the way, China is doing that—they hope to actually completely quash COVID-19 in their society, and the spread of transmission until there is a vaccine. Because you only can overcome a virus like this when there is herd immunity, and there’s only two ways to get herd immunity. One is through a vaccine, and the other is by 60 to 70 percent of your population actually getting the infection and overcoming it naturally by developing the antibodies. Excuse me.

So that’s the China model. The second model is the Swedish model, and Sweden, while they don’t like to say it directly, basically has gone for natural herd immunity. Their model was actually to keep their economy sort of open, close colleges and high schools, but let K-12 schools operate—let malls and restaurants open—but encourage social distancing, mask-wearing, and protect the most vulnerable in theory, which they didn’t do very well in practice.

Actually, let the young and the least vulnerable—those who will experience this just as a mild flu likely—get it, develop herd immunity, and bet that the number of people who will get the disease and not require ICU units or ventilators will be less than the number of ICU units and ventilators you have. That’s the Swedish model.

And the case is still out there. I mean, we just don’t know. They’ve had a lot more deaths than their neighbors. Obviously, they’re arguing that the real tests will be in three months—whether they have herd immunity and they’re done with this or not. But you know, there’s a lot of controversy around that, and there’s simply no way to judge at this stage.

The third model is America, and we’re a mess, Sal. We basically talk like we’re going to be China; we kind of act like we’re going to be Sweden by default. We are really not preparing to do either, and our president’s arguing we’re superior to both, so it’s kind of a mess, basically.

You have some states where it’s working well, others where it’s working not well—people who are wearing masks, people who aren’t. I go back to Mother Nature, because she actually doesn’t know, Sal, where the border between Georgia and Florida is. And she really is not interested in your lockdown, or if you are tired of being locked down. She really is only going to respect your adaptation strategy.

So, what do you think the implications are? I mean, just for the U.S. and the world? I mean, even for a China or even a Sweden?

Well, I guess the herd immunity could be very effective, but a place like China, obviously, at some point they’re going to want to open up their borders. So even if they are able to squash it in the short term, if to your point, Mother Nature also does not know the borders of countries. You know, if you just take a realist point of view, you know, there’s a world where you advocate for one policy or another. But if you just say like the world is kind of already on a trajectory and you know there’s going to be political forces and economic forces at play, what do you see as the next 6 to 12 months looking like?

You know, when you look at the stock market, it looks like, you know, at least the U.S. stock market looks like we’re all clear. The things are on. I mean, what’s your best guess as a prognosticator?

Yeah, I read an analyst the other day who said the stock market’s priced in everything except a recession related to the virus. It’s quite remarkable, but that’s in its own universe, basically.

What do I think is going to happen? Let me start with what I’m praying will happen. I’m praying that Moore's Law will defeat COVID's Law—that basically you’ve got a race right now between Moore's Law and COVID's Law. That, you know, COVID's Law is about the speed with which one single person can impact three others, and three others, three others, and how quickly this virus can spread.

Moore's Law says the speed and power of microchips will double every 24 months, and so basically it’s a proxy for technological advance. Since 1918, Lord knows we have technology tools now that we’re applying to biology that just didn’t exist before.

I’m hoping that they will give us a vaccine or therapies, at a minimum, that will take death off the table. But a vaccine that, by the end of this year, early next year, will allow us to get through a high degree of herd immunity around the world. That’s my hope.

Beyond that, it’s really outside my skill set. I listen to what the biologists say, the virologists, and they expect that this will—we will get a second wave. We’ll get a second wave in part because people just aren’t practicing smart habits of social distancing and masking and not collecting in groups.

And we may get a second wave because the thing about this disease which makes it so beguiling is that, you know, first of all, it comes in decaf, regular, and double macchiato. And so, first of all, many people get it and are completely asymptomatic, and the next person next to you gets it and needs a respirator.

You know, and so it clearly interacts with different bodies, different DNA, different co-morbidities, different latitudes, different populations, and different temperatures differently. And so I think you just really have to respect it and be humble.

And so I listen to what the biologists say, and they’re all basically telling us there’s going to be a second wave. And you listen to people like the epidemiologist Mike Osterholm from the University of Minnesota and Tom Frieden, the former head of the CDC, who would just say that this thing will keep infecting us until it runs out of people. So, unless we develop either natural or immunological herd immunity—so a vaccine or immunity.

I’m quite humble about it, Sal. I don’t want to—I try not to get over my skis.

And what’s your sense, you know, given even that somewhat hopeful picture of hopefully we can get a vaccine near the end of the year, early next year? I’ve talked about—there’s talk about people being able to have some type of antiviral therapies maybe sooner that to your point takes at least death off the table.

But that still might be a November timeframe type thing. What do you think is going to happen from kind of an economic and societal point of view? Because even in—you know we’ve seen what’s happened to unemployment just over the last six or eight weeks. What do you think is going to change about people’s behavior, the economy? You know, I don’t want to get too much into kind of the politics and who’s doing right or wrong, but you know, what might that broadly affect politics?

Well, it's a really important question you’re asking. And let me just talk a little bit about my own life. You know, I’m talking to you from our home in Bethesda, Maryland. My wife, Ann, has been building a museum to promote reading and literacy in Washington, D.C. It’s called Planet Word—planetwordmuseum.org. And we were about 90% done; we were actually supposed to open next week, so that’s been put on hold.

But here’s what I’ve noticed. You know, you and I are having a conversation now via this technology—this Google technology platform—and I’d say, Sal, it’s about 85% as good as when I used to come to your office and you and I would sit there, you know, across from your desk. But it’s 100% less stress on you and me, and we’re reaching a wide audience.

I have been having the most rich, deep Zoom conversations now around the world. I started this morning with a friend in Mumbai. I’m doing this now with you. It's just a treat. And then this evening I'm doing one with a friend from a consulting firm. I had a day a couple weeks ago where I did the India Today platform in New Delhi. I then spoke to 82 U.N. ambassadors for the Small Ambassadors Coalition at the U.N., and I ended the day with the Bawa Forum in Beijing, and I never left my seat here at home.

And these were not facile interactions; they felt deep. And so I—this change will change my world. This will enable me to act globally. You know, when I wrote "The World Is Flat," what the book was basically arguing was that what made the world flat—the reason I was making that argument was that what we were seeing was not globalization. In the old days, to be global, you had to be a country. In the old days, to be global, you had to be a company.

What was new—that’s what I was writing about when I wrote that book in 2005. What was new was the ability of individuals to act globally. Sal and Tom are now acting globally, okay? And as individuals, I think that is only going to accelerate more and more.

I want to hear from you what this means for education. And I’ve been talking to my daughter early about that, too. Obviously, this is really not going away because this technology is just going to get better and better.

You know, I can only imagine. But I do believe we’re going to see more automation, because machines don’t infect each other. And we're going to see a lot of companies realize, you know, The New York Times has been closed from pretty much the first week in March. We’re closed. They announced we’re not coming back to the office till the end of summer until Labor Day at the earliest. That includes the Washington Bureau I work and the New York office.

And, you know, I’m proud to say we are putting out the most amazing newspaper every single day, and none of us are in the office. Now, I don’t know exactly what the implications of that are going to be, but they’re going to be implications, and I’m just trying to get my mind around that now.

No, I mean, you’re touching on a lot of things. I have to say a lot of people, they start calls these days and say, “How are you doing?” And, you know, I say relatively speaking, I’m fine. And you know, a lot of people are suffering much more. I almost feel guilt that, to your point, I have—there are aspects of this that I think have been a huge boon. I don’t enjoy planes for a whole bunch of reasons—I get claustrophobic on them and all of that—but just the time, the energy, and then being able to have fairly good interactions with folks, you know, all over the world like this.

I think it is a new world. And to your point, you know, like The New York Times, Khan Academy—we are already reasonably distributed, but even more so, the team is as functional as ever. I mean, the main issues kids have—team members have childcare issues while they're working from home. But if that wasn’t an issue, I think a lot of folks are appreciating not having the commute, not having to get on planes.

And so it is a bit of a brave new world for everyone that maybe will have some positive—Clap for the NHS! We are privileged. I have a job; I work for a healthy organization that’s not laying me off. I understand what a minority this is.

But in terms of just how these technologies are not going to go away, I think they will—they’re going to infuse throughout our society. And the longer this goes on, because the technologies will get better, the more remote learning, remote work, remote lectures I think will become part of the norm.

And I am curious about that last point, because I think both you and I, we are very fortunate—we have jobs we can do remotely. We’re— you know, which I think is maybe one of the most important things right now, you know, given how many people, especially in the service sector and restaurants, airlines, tourism, and now other things—you know, people losing their jobs, record-high unemployment in our lifetimes, maybe ever.

We don’t know when this is going to end. And to your point, it might accelerate if factories lean even more on automation because you can’t transmit the virus and all that. What’s going to happen to all of these folks? How are we going to be able to make sure that people stay engaged in society and they feel productive? And you know, will it be temporary, or will it be somewhat structural even if we get the vaccine?

You know, one of the points that—I did a dialogue one day with my friend Michael Sandel who teaches the Justice course at Harvard, and we did a column together earlier on what is the common good in a pandemic. Michael made this point; it really struck me. You know, you look around, Sal, and look at all the people and all the jobs we are now depending on—people who go in and stock grocery shelves, people who go in and butcher meat at meatpacking factories, people who drive the truck from the meatpacking factory to the grocery store—the processing plant.

All the people who—you know, every crisis throws up different heroes. In 911 it was first responders, and this one is first responders too. But now it’s all these people who, traditionally, you know, it wouldn’t be wrong to say were looked down upon. You know, do your homework, study Khan Academy, so you don’t have to be a truck driver. You know, it would have been a cliché you would have heard out there.

These people are heroes now. They’re actually the ones saving us, and by going to work, they’re actually risking their lives. Think of someone who sits in a grocery store all day stocking shelves, and we need to find a way to honor these people after this is over.

My friend Dev Seidman says, you know, right now we’re busy saving people, but after this, leaders need to figure out how to serve people. We need to make a pivot after this to make sure that these people have the kind of healthcare, have the kind of family care, childcare, and access to education that they deserve—that everyone in our society deserves.

And it’s really got me thinking a lot more about that. I’ve never been a big fan of universal basic income only because I think dignity is so much derived from work and working. But, you know, the way we’ve been dividing the pie is not sustainable. Out of this, I think needs to come a real different division of the pie—more for labor than for capital—and safety nets that reward and honor these people who we now find out are so important for the functioning of our society.

And what’s your sense? There’s a question—there are a bunch of questions here from Facebook and YouTube. Tim Kearney asks, you know, he’s referring to your kind of Darwinian frame that you started with. You know, if COVID-19 is survival of the fittest, what responsibility does the federal government have to support the least fit? And I’ll add a little bit to it because you know this kind of takes, I would say, maybe a health angle—the least fit—but also we, as we just talked about, the economically vulnerable as well.

And there is this really hard tension that you might save people with the shutdowns on the COVID side, but it might lead to more poverty, more unemployment, hunger, and all sorts of forms of death that are correlated with not having a job and not having income. So, how does someone weigh that? How do you thread that needle?

It’s a really important question, and I would say, you know, from the very beginning—and in the beginning, it was controversial—I was one of the very first people writing that the strategy we need is one of what Dr. David Katz called total harm minimization—how do we maximize saving lives and saving livelihoods? Because there’s a lot of ways to die. You can die immediately by COVID-19, and you can die long-term by a death of despair, of unemployment, of loss of hope and income.

And both are thrown up by these fires. You know, sometimes people do say, wow, that sounds really Darwinian. Guess what—it is! When we’re all in the grip of Mother Nature, it is. There are no easy solutions.

And the point is to respect to me both sides of that equation—how do we maximize saving lives, maximize saving livelihoods? And it seemed to me the way to do that, and this was what people like Katz were talking about, Amnon Joshua in Israel, was basically you lock down, you break the chains of transmission, you protect the most vulnerable—you literally don’t let them go out, and you quarantine and sequester them.

Then, on a risk stratified basis, you feed back into the workforce the people who are most likely to experience the virus either asymptomatically or as a mild or tough flu—not require hospitalization—and let them keep the economy running or get it running again.

It had to be that kind of a strategy. One of the big problems we have selling—I’m not going to get into politics here any more than I need to—but we haven’t had a national navigator. You know, and so basically the public here has been caught between what I call breaking news and President Breaking Bad.

So you’re watching the news, and suddenly it breaks in and tells you that 24 kids in the New York area experience COVID-19 as dramatic and dangerous inflammations. But what you’re not told is that 24 out of 2400—24 to 240,000.

If there’s one lesson I hope you’re teaching, it’s the difference between denominator and numerator. When you don’t know what the denominator is, and breaking news is constantly hitting you with “breaking news” that a 24-year-old died of a stroke or whatever, and if you don’t know what is the denominator, what is the numerator, how do I put this in perspective?

So you have that on one side, and then you have a president who’s not wearing a mask, using hydroxychloroquine that his own FDA rejects, and putting out crazy ideas about Lysol and ultraviolet light. And so we have not had, like New Zealand has had, a calm voice at the top educating you, uniting us, making clear that we’re all in this together.

So don’t go to a restaurant without a mask or crowded in there. That’s not a sign of macho; that’s a sign of disrespect to your neighbor, to your family, to your grandparents. This is not us against each other; this is us against all of us against Mother Nature’s fastball.

And we really need to think of it that way now. And a lot more questions coming in from Facebook. These are two related. Roger Stevens asks, what are the biggest societal changes you think we’ll see coming out of the pandemic? And Tim Kearney, I teach first grade—what type of long-term changes do you foresee for my colleagues and students? How are they better or just are they just necessary? How will they be temporary versus the new normal?

So it’s really, you know, two questions of what’s going to be the new normal. We talked a little bit—maybe the nature of work changes, maybe a lot fewer people, you know, kind of schlep into the office with that long commute, sitting in traffic. Maybe we travel less, which frankly I would love.

What are other things that you think might happen?

You know, one of the things I’ve been a journalist now, Sal, since 1979, so it’s my 40th year—and actually 1978 I started. And so if I look back at my career, the stories I’d most like to take back are the stories and columns that began with this sentence: The world will never be the same again. That’s a dangerous sentence, you know?

So I’m humble about that too; I want to be very careful. But what is clear to me is pandemics accelerate existing trends, and they often exacerbate existing fractures. Clearly, this one is going to accelerate distance learning, distance work, and replacing travel with this kind of teleporting, telecommuting, telemedicine that I think is just going to become more and more effective and efficient.

And so— I mean, I’ve seen Zoom presentations, and I know you can do it on this Google platform too now with graphics and what—it’s just gonna get so good that clearly that’s going to be an uber trend.

Beyond that, you know, it seems to me another broad trend, and this is a phrase that my friend Dov Seidman uses: You know, first we work with our hands for generations, millennia. Then we work with our heads, computing the information economy. Going forward, more we’re going to work with our hearts—we’re going to work with things that connect people to people and that require people-to-people connections and enhance people-to-people connections.

So I have a motto: If you’re not in the community business, you’re not in business today. You know, that is in the retail sense. If you’re not creating a community experience, you are just the next company that’s going to be devoured by Amazon. Because if all you have is kind of a price arbitrage, there’s going to be somebody bigger and more efficient at that.

So things that connect people to people—like I really love what we’re doing, but I will love going out of this and sitting around in my backyard with friends who can come over six feet apart even more after I’ve spent a day doing this.

So I just think there’s going to be more and more work of connecting hearts to hearts, and the machines will be doing the head stuff.

My friend Ravi Kumar, who runs education for Infosys, actually the Indian high-tech firm, you know, Ravi basically says in the future, you know, machines will do the problem-solving, and people will do the problem-finding, and that we—and that’s why Infosys, for instance, is hiring fewer STEM people and more anthropologists and psych majors and people who can find problems.

You know, that was Steve Jobs' genius. He knew you wanted an iPhone before you knew it, you know? And he’s the great example of that—problem finders I think are going to be in great demand. And then we’ll let the AI and the machine and the bot be the problem solvers. I think that shift is going to happen more.

It’s something you might want to be thinking about at Khan, you know? I mean, are we—surely look, you can’t be a good problem finder if you don’t know math and you aren’t literate and you don’t know history and whatnot. But ultimately, you know, is that a vein for Khan to be mining? You know, the idea of problem-finding—it’d be interesting to have a course in problem-finding?

Yeah, I’ve never thought about it, by the way, but it makes a lot of sense—the problem definition and recognizing there’s a need. Now that makes—and maybe on that last point, because it does kind of touch on careers of the future and all of that, you know, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with young people.

It’s graduation time, you can imagine there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s always anxiety at that age, but especially in this, you know, we have a couple of questions from folks. Ashley Pascal, it sounds like she’s a young journalist, you know? How should she navigate her career during COVID-19? But I’ll broaden the question. You know, what advice do you have for young people kind of entering the world into a very, very tough job market—a world where things are in incredible flux? What advice would you have for them?

You know, I guess one of the things that I said earlier, this exacerbates current trends. So like if you are, for instance, look at established journalists. So I can just call some up and say, “Let’s Zoom.” And you can call me up and say, “Tell them let’s just Zoom in, bam, we do it.” It’s like that. But I pity someone who can’t do that. Zoom is only good if I can call you up, and you will be the counterparty, you know?

But this is such a challenging time to start out in. At the same time, because these things always go both ways, it’s like a whole new world. And you know, there’s such virgin territory there to be reported on—so many motherlodes of emotion and psychology now playing out. And if you can find a platform to publish on—an online platform or somehow create your own—you don’t have to be at The New York Times. You can break in now like never before.

So my advice always for young journalists is that write, write, write, and write some more. That is the only way you learn how to be a journalist is to write and develop a mountain of clips that show how you can write, the issues you can take on, the stories you can frame and find, and that’s how you build a reputation.

But there’s kind of no other way. I mean, going to journalism school now through Zoom doesn’t strike me as very productive. So I have a lot of sympathy for people starting out now. I haven’t—my mind’s been elsewhere, frankly, for the last couple of months, but I need to think more about that. It’s a very good question.

But the most important thing you can do—the thing that always works—is write and get published. And by the way, it doesn’t matter whether it’s for your neighborhood shopper, your local community newspaper, your blog, your online—just something that can show your talent that you can show to someone else for them to say, “Hey, that was pretty good, I’m gonna give you a chance.”

And I’ll add to that, you know, I’m not a journalist, you very much are a journalist, but some of the stuff that you pointed out is stuff that I felt too. Is that, you know, there’s all this reporting in the media, but sometimes people are, like, losing the meat of it. You know, they’re reporting this state has this many cases, that state has many. Well, what’s the per capita?

Like, how at risk will I be? They’re losing that. You know, yes, there is a young person who had this symptom, and it’s really scary, but you know, give the context of, guess what—there’s always been, you know, one in a million cases of really horrible things happening.

So that might not be as different as the media implies. So, you know, whether someone’s getting started in journalism or any other field, because everything is thrown up in the air right now, there are opportunities to maybe find niches. To speak kind of in evolutionary terms, that might not have been there before. Our ancestors wouldn’t have come out of their holes if the dinosaurs weren’t hit by a meteorite!

So, Tom, thank you so much for this. Whenever we have a good conversation, the time goes unusually fast. We’re already over time, but I really appreciate this, and I hope we can do this again and we can have more of these highly stimulating Zoom conversations.

Absolutely, Sal! Thank you very much. Thanks to all the people who tuned in. I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much!

So everyone, thanks again. You know, as you can tell, these conversations are always super fun for myself. Hopefully, you all have enjoyed it as well! I’m—I’ve actually—the reason why I’m in the office, all the socially distanced, I’m the only one in the office. I don’t think they’ve turned the air conditioner on today, so that’s why I might be looking a little bit more shiny than normal.

But it’s always incredibly stimulating for myself, and I look forward to seeing y’all in the future—I guess we could call them episodes. Tomorrow, it’ll just be just me, and I’m happy to take any questions you have about anything.

So with that, I will see everyone tomorrow!