WEBVTT

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The conventional wisdom
about our world today

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is that this is a time
of terrible decline.

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And that's not surprising,
given the bad news all around us,

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from ISIS to inequality,

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political dysfunction, climate change,

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Brexit, and on and on.

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But here's the thing,
and this may sound a little weird.

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I actually don't buy
this gloomy narrative,

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and I don't think you should either.

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Look, it's not that
I don't see the problems.

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I read the same headlines that you do.

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What I dispute is the conclusion
that so many people draw from them,

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namely that we're all screwed

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because the problems are unsolvable

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and our governments are useless.

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Now, why do I say this?

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It's not like I'm particularly
optimistic by nature.

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But something about the media's
constant doom-mongering

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with its fixation on problems
and not on answers

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has always really bugged me.

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So a few years ago I decided,

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well, I'm a journalist,

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I should see if I can do any better

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by going around the world
and actually asking folks

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if and how they've tackled

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their big economic
and political challenges.

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And what I found astonished me.

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It turns out that there are remarkable
signs of progress out there,

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often in the most unexpected places,

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and they've convinced me
that our great global challenges

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may not be so unsolvable after all.

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Not only are there theoretical fixes;

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those fixes have been tried.

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They've worked.

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And they offer hope for the rest of us.

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I'm going to show you what I mean

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by telling you about
how three of the countries I visited --

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Canada, Indonesia and Mexico --

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overcame three supposedly
impossible problems.

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Their stories matter because they contain
tools the rest of us can use,

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and not just for those
particular problems,

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but for many others, too.

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When most people think
about my homeland, Canada, today,

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if they think about Canada at all,

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they think cold, they think boring,
they think polite.

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They think we say "sorry" too much
in our funny accents.

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And that's all true.

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(Laughter)

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Sorry.

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(Laughter)

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But Canada's also important

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because of its triumph over a problem

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currently tearing
many other countries apart:

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immigration.

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Consider, Canada today is among
the world's most welcoming nations,

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even compared to other
immigration-friendly countries.

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Its per capita immigration rate
is four times higher than France's,

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and its percentage
of foreign-born residents

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is double that of Sweden.

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Meanwhile, Canada admitted

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10 times more Syrian refugees
in the last year

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than did the United States.

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(Applause)

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And now Canada is taking even more.

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And yet, if you ask Canadians

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what makes them proudest of their country,

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they rank "multiculturalism,"

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a dirty word in most places,

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second,

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ahead of hockey.

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Hockey.

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(Laughter)

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In other words,
at a time when other countries

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are now frantically building
new barriers to keep foreigners out,

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Canadians want even more of them in.

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Now, here's the really interesting part.

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Canada wasn't always like this.

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Until the mid-1960s, Canada followed
an explicitly racist immigration policy.

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They called it "White Canada,"

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and as you can see, they were not
just talking about the snow.

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So how did that Canada
become today's Canada?

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Well, despite what my mom
in Ontario will tell you,

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the answer had nothing to do with virtue.

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Canadians are not inherently
better than anyone else.

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The real explanation involves the man
who became Canada's leader in 1968,

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Pierre Trudeau, who is also
the father of the current prime minister.

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(Applause)

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The thing to know about that first Trudeau

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is that he was very different
from Canada's previous leaders.

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He was a French speaker in a country
long-dominated by its English elite.

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He was an intellectual.

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He was even kind of groovy.

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I mean, seriously, the guy did yoga.

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He hung out with the Beatles.

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(Laughter)

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And like all hipsters,
he could be infuriating at times.

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But he nevertheless pulled off

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one of the most progressive
transformations any country has ever seen.

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His formula, I've learned,
involved two parts.

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First, Canada threw out
its old race-based immigration rules,

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and it replaced them
with new color-blind ones

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that emphasized education,
experience and language skills instead.

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And what that did
was greatly increase the odds

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that newcomers would
contribute to the economy.

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Then part two, Trudeau
created the world's first policy

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of official multiculturalism
to promote integration

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and the idea that diversity
was the key to Canada's identity.

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Now, in the years that followed,
Ottawa kept pushing this message,

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but at the same time, ordinary Canadians

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soon started to see the economic,
the material benefits of multiculturalism

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all around them.

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And these two influences soon combined

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to create the passionately
open-minded Canada of today.

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Let's now turn to another country
and an even tougher problem,

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Islamic extremism.

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In 1998, the people of Indonesia
took to the streets

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and overthrew
their longtime dictator, Suharto.

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It was an amazing moment,

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but it was also a scary one.

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With 250 million people,

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Indonesia is the largest
Muslim-majority country on Earth.

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It's also hot, huge and unruly,

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made up of 17,000 islands,

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where people speak
close to a thousand languages.

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Now, Suharto had been a dictator,

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and a nasty one.

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But he'd also been
a pretty effective tyrant,

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and he'd always been careful
to keep religion out of politics.

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So experts feared that without
him keeping a lid on things,

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the country would explode,

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or religious extremists would take over

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and turn Indonesia
into a tropical version of Iran.

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And that's just what seemed
to happen at first.

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In the country's
first free elections, in 1999,

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Islamist parties scored
36 percent of the vote,

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and the islands burned

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as riots and terror attacks
killed thousands.

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Since then, however,
Indonesia has taken a surprising turn.

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While ordinary folks have grown
more pious on a personal level --

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I saw a lot more headscarves
on a recent visit

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than I would have a decade ago --

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the country's politics
have moved in the opposite direction.

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Indonesia is now
a pretty decent democracy.

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And yet, its Islamist parties
have steadily lost support,

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from a high of about 38 percent in 2004

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down to 25 percent in 2014.

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As for terrorism, it's now extremely rare.

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And while a few Indonesians
have recently joined ISIS,

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their number is tiny,

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far fewer in per capita terms

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than the number of Belgians.

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Try to think of one other
Muslim-majority country

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that can say all those same things.

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In 2014, I went to Indonesia
to ask its current president,

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a soft-spoken technocrat
named Joko Widodo,

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"Why is Indonesia thriving when
so many other Muslim states are dying?"

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"Well, what we realized," he told me,

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"is that to deal with extremism,
we needed to deal with inequality first."

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See, Indonesia's religious parties,
like similar parties elsewhere,

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had tended to focus on things like
reducing poverty and cutting corruption.

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So that's what Joko
and his predecessors did too,

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thereby stealing the Islamists' thunder.

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They also cracked down hard on terrorism,

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but Indonesia's democrats
have learned a key lesson

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from the dark years of dictatorship,

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namely that repression
only creates more extremism.

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So they waged their war
with extraordinary delicacy.

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They used the police instead of the army.

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They only detained suspects
if they had enough evidence.

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They held public trials.

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They even sent
liberal imams into the jails

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to persuade the jihadists
that terror is un-Islamic.

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And all of this paid off
in spectacular fashion,

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creating the kind of country
that was unimaginable 20 years ago.

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So at this point,
my optimism should, I hope,

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be starting to make a bit more sense.

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Neither immigration nor Islamic extremism
are impossible to deal with.

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Join me now on one last trip,

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this time to Mexico.

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Now, of our three stories,
this one probably surprised me the most,

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since as you all know,

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the country is still struggling
with so many problems.

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And yet, a few years ago,
Mexico did something

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that many other countries
from France to India to the United States

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can still only dream of.

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It shattered the political paralysis
that had gripped it for years.

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To understand how,
we need to rewind to the year 2000,

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when Mexico finally became a democracy.

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Rather than use their new freedoms
to fight for reform,

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Mexico's politicians used them
to fight one another.

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Congress deadlocked,
and the country's problems --

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drugs, poverty, crime, corruption --

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spun out of control.

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Things got so bad that in 2008,

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the Pentagon warned
that Mexico risked collapse.

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Then in 2012, this guy
named Enrique Peña Nieto

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somehow got himself elected president.

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Now, this Peña hardly inspired
much confidence at first.

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Sure, he was handsome,

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but he came from Mexico's
corrupt old ruling party, the PRI,

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and he was a notorious womanizer.

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In fact, he seemed
like such a pretty boy lightweight

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that women called him "bombón," sweetie,

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at campaign rallies.

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And yet this same bombón
soon surprised everyone

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by hammering out a truce

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between the country's
three warring political parties.

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And over the next 18 months,
they together passed

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an incredibly comprehensive
set of reforms.

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They busted open Mexico's
smothering monopolies.

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They liberalized
its rusting energy sector.

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They restructured
its failing schools, and much more.

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To appreciate the scale
of this accomplishment,

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try to imagine the US Congress
passing immigration reform,

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campaign finance reform
and banking reform.

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Now, try to imagine Congress
doing it all at the same time.

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That's what Mexico did.

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Not long ago, I met with Peña
and asked how he managed it all.

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The President flashed me
his famous twinkly smile --

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(Laughter)

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and told me that the short answer
was "compromiso," compromise.

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Of course, I pushed him for details,

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and the long answer
that came out was essentially

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"compromise, compromise
and more compromise."

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See, Peña knew that he needed
to build trust early,

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so he started talking to the opposition
just days after his election.

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To ward off pressure
from special interests,

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he kept their meetings small and secret,

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and many of the participants
later told me that it was this intimacy,

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plus a lot of shared tequila,

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that helped build confidence.

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So did the fact that all decisions
had to be unanimous,

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and that Peña even agreed to pass
some of the other party's priorities

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before his own.

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As Santiago Creel,
an opposition senator, put it to me,

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"Look, I'm not saying that I'm special
or that anyone is special,

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but that group, that was special."

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The proof?

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When Peña was sworn in, the pact held,

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and Mexico moved forward
for the first time in years.

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Bueno.

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So now we've seen
how these three countries

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overcame three of their great challenges.

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And that's very nice for them, right?

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But what good does it do the rest of us?

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Well, in the course of studying these
and a bunch of other success stories,

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like the way Rwanda pulled itself
back together after civil war

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or Brazil has reduced inequality,

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or South Korea has kept its economy
growing faster and for longer

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than any other country on Earth,

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I've noticed a few common threads.

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Now, before describing them,
I need to add a caveat.

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I realize, of course,
that all countries are unique.

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So you can't simply
take what worked in one,

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port it to another
and expect it to work there too.

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Nor do specific solutions work forever.

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You've got to adapt them
as circumstances change.

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That said, by stripping
these stories to their essence,

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you absolutely can distill
a few common tools for problem-solving

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that will work in other countries

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and in boardrooms

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and in all sorts of other contexts, too.

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Number one, embrace the extreme.

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In all the stories we've just looked at,

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salvation came at a moment
of existential peril.

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And that was no coincidence.

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Take Canada: when Trudeau took office,
he faced two looming dangers.

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First, though his vast,
underpopulated country

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badly needed more bodies,

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its preferred source
for white workers, Europe,

00:13:41.600 --> 00:13:45.656
had just stopped exporting them
as it finally recovered from World War II.

00:13:45.680 --> 00:13:48.176
The other problem was
that Canada's long cold war

00:13:48.200 --> 00:13:51.016
between its French
and its English communities

00:13:51.040 --> 00:13:52.680
had just become a hot one.

00:13:53.280 --> 00:13:55.456
Quebec was threatening to secede,

00:13:55.480 --> 00:13:59.256
and Canadians were actually
killing other Canadians over politics.

00:13:59.280 --> 00:14:02.736
Now, countries face
crises all the time. Right?

00:14:02.760 --> 00:14:04.000
That's nothing special.

00:14:04.960 --> 00:14:08.736
But Trudeau's genius
was to realize that Canada's crisis

00:14:08.760 --> 00:14:12.320
had swept away all the hurdles
that usually block reform.

00:14:12.880 --> 00:14:16.240
Canada had to open up. It had no choice.

00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:18.816
And it had to rethink its identity.

00:14:18.840 --> 00:14:20.536
Again, it had no choice.

00:14:20.560 --> 00:14:24.096
And that gave Trudeau
a once-in-a-generation opportunity

00:14:24.120 --> 00:14:26.720
to break the old rules and write new ones.

00:14:27.360 --> 00:14:30.840
And like all our other heroes,
he was smart enough to seize it.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:32.360 --> 00:14:35.120
Number two, there's power
in promiscuous thinking.

00:14:36.200 --> 00:14:39.136
Another striking similarity
among good problem-solvers

00:14:39.160 --> 00:14:41.176
is that they're all pragmatists.

00:14:41.200 --> 00:14:44.376
They'll steal the best answers
from wherever they find them,

00:14:44.400 --> 00:14:45.776
and they don't let details

00:14:45.800 --> 00:14:51.136
like party or ideology
or sentimentality get in their way.

00:14:51.160 --> 00:14:54.456
As I mentioned earlier,
Indonesia's democrats were clever enough

00:14:54.480 --> 00:14:59.256
to steal many of the Islamists'
best campaign promises for themselves.

00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:03.176
They even invited some of the radicals
into their governing coalition.

00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:06.720
Now, that horrified
a lot of secular Indonesians.

00:15:07.840 --> 00:15:12.696
But by forcing the radicals
to actually help govern,

00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:16.576
it quickly exposed the fact
that they weren't any good at the job,

00:15:16.600 --> 00:15:19.616
and it got them mixed up
in all of the grubby compromises

00:15:19.640 --> 00:15:22.696
and petty humiliations
that are part of everyday politics.

00:15:22.720 --> 00:15:26.120
And that hurt their image so badly
that they've never recovered.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:27.240 --> 00:15:28.616
Number three,

00:15:28.640 --> 00:15:31.480
please all of the people some of the time.

00:15:32.200 --> 00:15:37.296
I know I just mentioned how crises
can grant leaders extraordinary freedoms.

00:15:37.320 --> 00:15:41.296
And that's true, but problem-solving
often requires more than just boldness.

00:15:41.320 --> 00:15:43.896
It takes showing restraint, too,

00:15:43.920 --> 00:15:46.576
just when that's
the last thing you want to do.

00:15:46.600 --> 00:15:48.536
Take Trudeau: when he took office,

00:15:48.560 --> 00:15:51.136
he could easily have put
his core constituency,

00:15:51.160 --> 00:15:53.816
that is Canada's French community, first.

00:15:53.840 --> 00:15:57.280
He could have pleased
some of the people all of the time.

00:15:57.920 --> 00:16:01.456
And Peña could have used his power
to keep attacking the opposition,

00:16:01.480 --> 00:16:03.256
as was traditional in Mexico.

00:16:03.280 --> 00:16:06.416
Yet he chose to embrace
his enemies instead,

00:16:06.440 --> 00:16:08.936
while forcing his own party to compromise.

00:16:08.960 --> 00:16:13.136
And Trudeau pushed everyone
to stop thinking in tribal terms

00:16:13.160 --> 00:16:17.656
and to see multiculturalism,
not language and not skin color,

00:16:17.680 --> 00:16:20.160
as what made them
quintessentially Canadian.

00:16:20.960 --> 00:16:23.456
Nobody got everything they wanted,

00:16:23.480 --> 00:16:26.800
but everyone got just enough
that the bargains held.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:28.560 --> 00:16:30.976
So at this point you may be thinking,

00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:32.216
"OK, Tepperman,

00:16:32.240 --> 00:16:34.976
if the fixes really are out there
like you keep insisting,

00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:37.520
then why aren't more countries
already using them?"

00:16:38.640 --> 00:16:41.216
It's not like they require
special powers to pull off.

00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:44.816
I mean, none of the leaders
we've just looked at were superheroes.

00:16:44.840 --> 00:16:46.976
They didn't accomplish
anything on their own,

00:16:47.000 --> 00:16:49.176
and they all had plenty of flaws.

00:16:49.200 --> 00:16:51.616
Take Indonesia's
first democratic president,

00:16:51.640 --> 00:16:53.296
Abdurrahman Wahid.

00:16:53.320 --> 00:16:56.536
This man was so powerfully uncharismatic

00:16:56.560 --> 00:16:58.656
that he once fell asleep

00:16:58.680 --> 00:17:00.456
in the middle of his own speech.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:00.480 --> 00:17:02.096
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:02.120 --> 00:17:03.320
True story.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:07.960 --> 00:17:11.656
So what this tells us
is that the real obstacle is not ability,

00:17:11.680 --> 00:17:13.496
and it's not circumstances.

00:17:13.520 --> 00:17:15.576
It's something much simpler.

00:17:15.599 --> 00:17:19.576
Making big changes
involves taking big risks,

00:17:19.599 --> 00:17:21.640
and taking big risks is scary.

00:17:22.480 --> 00:17:25.816
Overcoming that fear requires guts,

00:17:25.839 --> 00:17:27.175
and as you all know,

00:17:27.200 --> 00:17:29.640
gutsy politicians are painfully rare.

00:17:31.120 --> 00:17:33.216
But that doesn't mean we voters

00:17:33.240 --> 00:17:35.976
can't demand courage
from our political leaders.

00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:38.810
I mean, that's why we put them
in office in the first place.

00:17:39.520 --> 00:17:42.960
And given the state of the world today,
there's really no other option.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:43.880 --> 00:17:46.696
The answers are out there,

00:17:46.720 --> 00:17:49.056
but now it's up to us

00:17:49.080 --> 00:17:51.616
to elect more women and men

00:17:51.640 --> 00:17:54.016
brave enough to find them,

00:17:54.040 --> 00:17:55.416
to steal them

00:17:55.440 --> 00:17:57.056
and to make them work.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:57.080 --> 00:17:58.456
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:58.480 --> 00:18:03.791
(Applause)