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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,
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had just stopped exporting them
as it finally recovered from World War II.
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The other problem was
that Canada's long cold war
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between its French
and its English communities
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had just become a hot one.
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Quebec was threatening to secede,
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and Canadians were actually
killing other Canadians over politics.
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Now, countries face
crises all the time. Right?
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That's nothing special.
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But Trudeau's genius
was to realize that Canada's crisis
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had swept away all the hurdles
that usually block reform.
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Canada had to open up. It had no choice.
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And it had to rethink its identity.
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Again, it had no choice.
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And that gave Trudeau
a once-in-a-generation opportunity
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to break the old rules and write new ones.
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And like all our other heroes,
he was smart enough to seize it.
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Number two, there's power
in promiscuous thinking.
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Another striking similarity
among good problem-solvers
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is that they're all pragmatists.
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They'll steal the best answers
from wherever they find them,
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and they don't let details
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like party or ideology
or sentimentality get in their way.
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As I mentioned earlier,
Indonesia's democrats were clever enough
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to steal many of the Islamists'
best campaign promises for themselves.
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They even invited some of the radicals
into their governing coalition.
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Now, that horrified
a lot of secular Indonesians.
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But by forcing the radicals
to actually help govern,
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it quickly exposed the fact
that they weren't any good at the job,
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and it got them mixed up
in all of the grubby compromises
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and petty humiliations
that are part of everyday politics.
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And that hurt their image so badly
that they've never recovered.
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Number three,
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please all of the people some of the time.
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I know I just mentioned how crises
can grant leaders extraordinary freedoms.
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And that's true, but problem-solving
often requires more than just boldness.
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It takes showing restraint, too,
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just when that's
the last thing you want to do.
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Take Trudeau: when he took office,
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he could easily have put
his core constituency,
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that is Canada's French community, first.
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He could have pleased
some of the people all of the time.
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And Peña could have used his power
to keep attacking the opposition,
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as was traditional in Mexico.
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Yet he chose to embrace
his enemies instead,
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while forcing his own party to compromise.
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And Trudeau pushed everyone
to stop thinking in tribal terms
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and to see multiculturalism,
not language and not skin color,
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as what made them
quintessentially Canadian.
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Nobody got everything they wanted,
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but everyone got just enough
that the bargains held.
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So at this point you may be thinking,
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"OK, Tepperman,
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if the fixes really are out there
like you keep insisting,
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then why aren't more countries
already using them?"
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It's not like they require
special powers to pull off.
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I mean, none of the leaders
we've just looked at were superheroes.
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They didn't accomplish
anything on their own,
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and they all had plenty of flaws.
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Take Indonesia's
first democratic president,
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Abdurrahman Wahid.
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This man was so powerfully uncharismatic
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that he once fell asleep
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in the middle of his own speech.
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(Laughter)
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True story.
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So what this tells us
is that the real obstacle is not ability,
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and it's not circumstances.
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It's something much simpler.
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Making big changes
involves taking big risks,
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and taking big risks is scary.
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Overcoming that fear requires guts,
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and as you all know,
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gutsy politicians are painfully rare.
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But that doesn't mean we voters
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can't demand courage
from our political leaders.
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I mean, that's why we put them
in office in the first place.
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And given the state of the world today,
there's really no other option.
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The answers are out there,
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but now it's up to us
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to elect more women and men
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brave enough to find them,
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to steal them
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and to make them work.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)