All-In Summit: In conversation with Larry Summers

00:00:00.000 | [applause]

00:00:01.000 | Next up, Larry Summers.

00:00:04.000 | [music]

00:00:07.000 | [music]

00:00:32.000 | Larry is an absolutely incredible human being.

00:00:37.000 | He was the president of Harvard.

00:00:40.000 | He was Treasury Secretary under Clinton.

00:00:44.000 | He was Obama's head of the NEC.

00:00:48.000 | He's been on the board of some very well-known tech startups like Square, now Block.

00:00:53.000 | He's been a great friend of mine for 12 or 13 years.

00:00:58.000 | He taught my son calculus.

00:01:01.000 | But I want to start with one very quick story.

00:01:03.000 | Larry was staying at my house, and he runs into the kitchen, and he says,

00:01:10.000 | "Jamal, the internet is not working. I have an extremely important Zoom."

00:01:15.000 | And I said, "Oh, yeah, no problem. You can just use this thing over here."

00:01:18.000 | And he goes, "Oh, I need you to help me get on the Zoom."

00:01:20.000 | So I'm like this IT guy helping him get on the Zoom.

00:01:24.000 | And up pops a picture of the governor of the DOJ, the Bank of Japan.

00:01:28.000 | And I was like, "What's going on?"

00:01:30.000 | And he says, "Jamal, if I'm a little peckish, could I just get anything you have over here to eat?"

00:01:34.000 | So I go outside, and my mom's like, "What is going on?"

00:01:37.000 | And I said, "Oh, Larry Summers has a meeting with the head of the BOJ."

00:01:41.000 | She goes, "The head of the BOJ?"

00:01:43.000 | And she stops me on the head and she goes, "We must make him something to eat."

00:01:46.000 | And so we made scrambled eggs and orange juice.

00:01:52.000 | And then at the end of it, she's like, "Who is he, this person talking to the head of the BOJ?"

00:01:56.000 | And I said, "It's Larry Summers, blah, blah, blah."

00:01:58.000 | And then once she heard that it was Clinton, she hit me on the top of the head again, and she worked for Clinton.

00:02:02.000 | And she said, "We should have given him fresh-squeezed orange juice."

00:02:05.000 | [Laughter]

00:02:09.000 | Okay.

00:02:11.000 | He is literally one of the most stimulating intellectual people that I know.

00:02:14.000 | So let's start with the most pressing question.

00:02:18.000 | CPI is going to come out tomorrow, Larry.

00:02:20.000 | You have basically become the shadow secretary of the Treasury and the shadow Fed governor.

00:02:27.000 | Where are we going?

00:02:28.000 | Where are we in the cycle?

00:02:29.000 | What is happening to the consumer?

00:02:31.000 | Give us just the five-minute redux on the economy.

00:02:34.000 | We have a thing in politics, Shamath, it's called the management of expectations.

00:02:40.000 | And you have just failed me completely in that regard.

00:02:47.000 | Look, there are two kinds of economists.

00:02:49.000 | There's those who know they don't know and those who don't know they don't know.

00:02:54.000 | I'm in the first category, so I'll give you my best guesses, but that's what they are.

00:03:02.000 | What Samuel Johnson said about second marriage is true of soft landings.

00:03:08.000 | They represent the triumph of hope over experience.

00:03:12.000 | [Laughter]

00:03:15.000 | [Applause]

00:03:21.000 | There's never been a time when inflation was above 4 and unemployment was below 4

00:03:27.000 | and the U.S. economy didn't go into recession before that situation was resolved.

00:03:33.000 | That's why I've been kind of a Cassandra on inflation and the cyclical outlook for the last couple of years.

00:03:45.000 | Here's the way I think about soft landing.

00:03:50.000 | You've got this plane.

00:03:52.000 | It's ultimately aspiring to fly very fast and then land on an aircraft carrier.

00:04:00.000 | It was way off course and seemingly out of control.

00:04:07.000 | The pilot figured out that it was all screwed up,

00:04:12.000 | and now the pilot's got the plane on a reasonable course, and that's good.

00:04:21.000 | But it's still 300 yards above the deck of the aircraft carrier,

00:04:28.000 | and it's still going very fast,

00:04:32.000 | and it's still an open question whether it's going to hit the aircraft carrier

00:04:40.000 | rather than land on the aircraft carrier

00:04:43.000 | or whether it's going to overfly the aircraft carrier

00:04:47.000 | and have to turn around and achieve a soft landing.

00:04:51.000 | And I think all of that is still very much at risk.

00:04:59.000 | The people who say it's all okay, we never need to worry about inflation,

00:05:04.000 | inflation was 9, inflation's now 3.5,

00:05:08.000 | it's all under control, we're all done,

00:05:13.000 | don't know what they're talking about.

00:05:16.000 | It could turn out to be right,

00:05:18.000 | but inflation was never on an underlying basis anything like 8 or 9.

00:05:26.000 | It was like 5, artificially pushed up by used cars and airline fares

00:05:32.000 | and a bunch of stuff like that, gasoline.

00:05:37.000 | And the thing about stuff that mean reverts is that it mean reverts.

00:05:42.000 | And so when that stuff was going up real fast,

00:05:45.000 | we had 8% inflation with an underlying inflation rate of 5%.

00:05:50.000 | When that stuff collapses,

00:05:53.000 | we have an underlying rate of inflation of 4 or 5%,

00:05:57.000 | and we see inflation below that.

00:06:00.000 | And so that's what happened.

00:06:02.000 | So if you try to measure what's happened

00:06:04.000 | to the actual underlying rate of inflation,

00:06:08.000 | it's down a little, maybe it's down half a percent,

00:06:11.000 | maybe it's down a percent.

00:06:13.000 | That's more than I would have expected,

00:06:15.000 | and that is genuinely good news.

00:06:20.000 | But it's a long way from where we are now to a soft landing.

00:06:29.000 | And I think you've got risks on both sides.

00:06:31.000 | I think you've got risks that the consumer is going to slow down hard,

00:06:39.000 | that monetary policy operated with a lag,

00:06:43.000 | that credit is going to be crunched,

00:06:46.000 | and that you're going to see the economy have a bit the Wiley-Coyote aspect,

00:06:53.000 | a bit the ball rolling off a table aspect.

00:06:57.000 | I think that risk is there.

00:06:59.000 | I think there's a larger probably risk

00:07:02.000 | that we don't really have inflation on a secure path down below 3.5%

00:07:10.000 | and that the Fed thinks it's got it under control and it doesn't,

00:07:15.000 | and that it's going to have to go back to raising rates.

00:07:22.000 | So Larry, if you were--

00:07:23.000 | I'm nervous.

00:07:24.000 | Okay, you're nervous.

00:07:25.000 | So if you're Jay Powell, if you had Jay Powell's job right now,

00:07:28.000 | what is the delta from what he's doing,

00:07:30.000 | what would you do differently do you think?

00:07:33.000 | I thought Jay Powell was a million miles off course two years ago.

00:07:40.000 | I thought he was talking about zero interest rates until 2024.

00:07:44.000 | He was talking about inflation being transitory.

00:07:47.000 | It was all on a different planet than the one that I thought I was seeing.

00:07:53.000 | Starting about a year ago,

00:07:56.000 | he has recognized that the principal problem is inflation,

00:08:02.000 | that the Fed was way behind the curve,

00:08:07.000 | that he needed to focus on getting inflation back to target,

00:08:13.000 | and so my differences would be small and on tactics

00:08:18.000 | rather than large and fundamental.

00:08:22.000 | I think the Fed probably needs to be investing a bit more in its credibility

00:08:30.000 | by emphasizing that it's prepared to raise rates again

00:08:37.000 | if it doesn't see inflation decline.

00:08:42.000 | I think the Fed should be recognizing that the extraordinary size

00:08:49.000 | of the U.S. budget deficit and where it is in prospect

00:08:53.000 | is going to complicate the macro policy task

00:08:57.000 | and should be more willing to call that out than it is.

00:09:04.000 | I think the Fed on matters relating to financial regulation

00:09:11.000 | should be giving more attention to market prices

00:09:16.000 | and the market values of assets

00:09:19.000 | and less to a variety of book value regulatory concepts

00:09:25.000 | than it tends to emphasize.

00:09:27.000 | But again, I think that what we did in 2021

00:09:33.000 | when the government basically infused $2.9 trillion

00:09:42.000 | into a rapidly recovering economy

00:09:46.000 | and when the Fed promised it was going to keep interest rates at zero

00:09:50.000 | till 2024 and when the Fed bought bonds on a massive scale,

00:09:58.000 | that put us way off course.

00:10:02.000 | Since then, we've been working our way on the monetary policy side

00:10:07.000 | back to course in basically reasonable ways.

00:10:14.000 | But that doesn't mean if you get all the wrong answers

00:10:19.000 | on the first third of the exam,

00:10:21.000 | you can do great on the second two parts,

00:10:23.000 | the second two thirds of the exam,

00:10:25.000 | and you still won't get a very good grade for the overall experience.

00:10:29.000 | So it's a hard problem.

00:10:31.000 | My interpretation of what happened in 2021 is in Q1,

00:10:34.000 | they passed that $2 trillion American Rescue Plan,

00:10:38.000 | that last COVID relief bill.

00:10:40.000 | You absolutely nailed it by warning that this could set off inflation.

00:10:44.000 | And the politics of that was that the administration,

00:10:47.000 | everyone who wanted the bill basically said,

00:10:49.000 | "Oh, no, Larry doesn't know what he's talking about."

00:10:51.000 | They sort of poo-pooed your warnings.

00:10:53.000 | And then sure enough, the inflation came that summer.

00:10:56.000 | And that's when they almost, I think for political reasons,

00:10:59.000 | had to say it was transitory because they didn't want to admit

00:11:02.000 | that you had been right and they had been wrong three months before.

00:11:05.000 | And as a result of that,

00:11:07.000 | the Fed waited another nine months to start raising interest rates.

00:11:10.000 | And so everything got delayed.

00:11:12.000 | They should have reacted back in the summer of 2021.

00:11:15.000 | I don't know. That's my interpretation of the politics.

00:11:17.000 | - Is the Fed political like that?

00:11:19.000 | In terms of how they behave, to Sax's point,

00:11:21.000 | are they thinking about the politics in the current administration?

00:11:26.000 | Or are they acting independently like they're supposed to?

00:11:31.000 | - First of all, I think I'm a spectator and commentator,

00:11:36.000 | not the dominant actor by any stretch.

00:11:43.000 | I'll leave it to others to speculate about everybody's motives.

00:11:47.000 | It's not only people in political situations

00:11:52.000 | who, when they develop a strong view,

00:11:55.000 | change it only slowly in response to evidence.

00:12:00.000 | I'm basically someone who mostly goes to Washington

00:12:05.000 | and explains when I'm in Washington

00:12:08.000 | that there are limits to our knowledge and limits to our competence.

00:12:12.000 | And so it's often true that the best thing we can do is get out of the way.

00:12:17.000 | So I believe that.

00:12:19.000 | But I also think that it's a mistake to think

00:12:25.000 | that whenever anybody makes a judgment that doesn't turn out right in Washington,

00:12:30.000 | that it's because they had some bad political motive

00:12:33.000 | and were playing politics,

00:12:35.000 | rather than they were using their best judgment

00:12:38.000 | and they turned out to be wrong.

00:12:40.000 | And like human beings in public environments,

00:12:44.000 | they change their mind slowly in the face of evidence.

00:12:52.000 | There's a very broad thing.

00:12:55.000 | You all who work in companies experience it.

00:12:59.000 | You experience it in your personal lives.

00:13:01.000 | We experience it in our relationships.

00:13:05.000 | When something isn't going great,

00:13:08.000 | you always have to decide,

00:13:11.000 | is it that we need to give it time,

00:13:13.000 | persevere with what we think is right,

00:13:16.000 | double down and keep going,

00:13:19.000 | or do we need to say we got this all screwed up,

00:13:22.000 | you need to suddenly change course.

00:13:25.000 | And that's a decision we all are always making.

00:13:29.000 | And it's not that it's always the right thing to change course

00:13:34.000 | at the first hint of failure.

00:13:37.000 | And so I think people obviously made bad decisions

00:13:41.000 | and they kept making them and they made them too long

00:13:43.000 | and I was on the other side.

00:13:45.000 | But I think that it's a mistake, really a serious mistake,

00:13:49.000 | to go quite so quickly to motive.

00:13:58.000 | And I want to say one other thing,

00:14:00.000 | just because I was struck by what came before.

00:14:03.000 | Look, I really do worry a lot about regulation.

00:14:08.000 | But it's important to understand

00:14:10.000 | that the largest part of the good that cops do

00:14:14.000 | is not that they catch people breaking into houses

00:14:19.000 | or that they pull people away

00:14:22.000 | when they're trying to murder somebody.

00:14:25.000 | The large reason why cops are good

00:14:28.000 | is because everybody knows that there are cops around

00:14:32.000 | and they commit far fewer crimes than they otherwise would.

00:14:37.000 | And therefore, evaluating the police

00:14:40.000 | only by the incidents where the police are actively involved

00:14:45.000 | gets a judgment about crime wrong.

00:14:49.000 | And the same thing is true with respect to regulation.

00:14:56.000 | And we do need to recognize

00:14:58.000 | that all the things that we take for granted

00:15:01.000 | that make this place a very different place to do business

00:15:06.000 | than Argentina and a much greater place to do business

00:15:11.000 | than it was 100 years ago

00:15:14.000 | have to do with institutions and regulations.

00:15:19.000 | And so I think that's a perspective

00:15:22.000 | you all need to keep in mind.

00:15:24.000 | If there had not been major regulation

00:15:28.000 | that was regarded as oppressive, totalitarian,

00:15:33.000 | wrong, and anti-market beginning in the late 1940s,

00:15:39.000 | it would be impossible for this gathering to exist

00:15:44.000 | because the smog in Los Angeles would be so profoundly serious.

00:15:49.000 | Were there excesses? Was there craziness?

00:15:52.000 | Of course there was.

00:15:53.000 | But let's also keep in mind

00:15:57.000 | that you need frameworks in which freedom can flourish.

00:16:03.000 | Let me ask you a basic question.

00:16:05.000 | [applause]

00:16:06.000 | We had Ray Dalio yesterday,

00:16:09.000 | and he was going over the arcs of history

00:16:12.000 | and maybe America being past its peak in decline.

00:16:17.000 | And I'm curious what you think

00:16:20.000 | about the perhaps existential crisis for America

00:16:24.000 | in terms of our spending.

00:16:25.000 | Trump added a trillion to the deficit.

00:16:27.000 | Biden already four trillion.

00:16:29.000 | We've had this debate on the pod.

00:16:31.000 | Are we in an existential crisis

00:16:33.000 | in terms of how much we're spending, debt-to-GDP ratio?

00:16:36.000 | Is that the most acute issue for America?

00:16:39.000 | And then what are your thoughts about America

00:16:41.000 | on the global stage versus other emerging powers,

00:16:45.000 | China and India?

00:16:47.000 | There are a lot of parts to that question.

00:16:50.000 | I think the most important theme in American history

00:16:56.000 | is resilience.

00:17:00.000 | I'm old enough--I'm not that old--

00:17:02.000 | but I'm old enough--I'm old compared to the people

00:17:05.000 | in this room, I guess--

00:17:07.000 | but I'm old enough to remember

00:17:10.000 | when Jimmy Carter declared a crisis of the national spirit

00:17:15.000 | and a pervasive malaise.

00:17:19.000 | I'm old enough to remember when the country

00:17:22.000 | was being torn apart by the Vietnam War

00:17:26.000 | and the President of the United States

00:17:28.000 | couldn't go speak anywhere in the country, pretty much,

00:17:31.000 | except on a military base

00:17:34.000 | and where there was gunfire on college campuses.

00:17:41.000 | I'm old enough to remember when--

00:17:44.000 | I'm not old enough to remember, but I've read about--

00:17:47.000 | when Joe McCarthy had the country in his thrall

00:17:54.000 | and people on university campuses

00:17:57.000 | were afraid to express progressive beliefs.

00:18:02.000 | If you read the history,

00:18:04.000 | almost everyone advised FDR in 1932

00:18:09.000 | that he needed to use his inaugural address

00:18:12.000 | to declare dictatorial powers to take the country over,

00:18:18.000 | to deal with the Depression

00:18:21.000 | because democracy wasn't up to it.

00:18:24.000 | Patrick Henry said in 1792--1792--

00:18:29.000 | that the spirit of the Revolution had already been lost.

00:18:35.000 | And so I think the theme in American history

00:18:39.000 | is the capacity for self-denying prophecy.

00:18:43.000 | It is the capacity for the Jeremiahs

00:18:47.000 | that generate all this alarm,

00:18:50.000 | that set in motion the processes

00:18:55.000 | which lead to renewal.

00:19:01.000 | And it won't be that way always.

00:19:03.000 | There'll come the end,

00:19:05.000 | there comes--there's come the end for everything

00:19:10.000 | great historically.

00:19:13.000 | But I'd rather be playing the hand of the United States

00:19:19.000 | than the hand that Xi Jinping is playing,

00:19:23.000 | than the hand that India is playing,

00:19:26.000 | certainly than the hand that societies in Asia,

00:19:31.000 | where there are only going to be half as many people

00:19:33.000 | a century from now, are playing,

00:19:36.000 | certainly than the societies of Western Europe.

00:19:42.000 | That doesn't mean that those of us

00:19:46.000 | who are financially minded

00:19:49.000 | don't need to be terribly, terribly concerned

00:19:54.000 | that the government's finances

00:19:58.000 | are not on a sustainable path

00:20:01.000 | and won't be on a sustainable path

00:20:04.000 | until we figure out how to raise the revenue

00:20:08.000 | that a society facing grave national security threats,

00:20:14.000 | an aging population,

00:20:16.000 | and a rising price of medical care and education

00:20:20.000 | relative to flat screen TVs and houses

00:20:24.000 | needs to finance its government.

00:20:28.000 | That doesn't mean that there aren't huge challenges

00:20:34.000 | as well as opportunities

00:20:37.000 | associated with everything that's coming out of

00:20:41.000 | information technology.

00:20:46.000 | That doesn't mean that I'm not fearful

00:20:51.000 | of so much that's happening

00:20:55.000 | in our educational system.

00:21:01.000 | I think that we have in our educational system,

00:21:06.000 | and this is true of our great universities

00:21:09.000 | and it's true of our unionized elementary schools,

00:21:12.000 | we have gone from thinking

00:21:15.000 | that self-esteem comes from achievement

00:21:21.000 | to thinking that achievement comes from self-esteem.

00:21:27.000 | And that is a...

00:21:30.000 | [applause]

00:21:35.000 | embarrassment that the grade point average

00:21:40.000 | of the average student at Harvard University

00:21:43.000 | is above 3.7.

00:21:47.000 | That by far the most common grade is A.

00:21:52.000 | And that the big education reform idea of the moment

00:21:57.000 | is to eliminate standardized tests

00:22:01.000 | that actually measure what people know.

00:22:09.000 | And so this kind of moves away

00:22:14.000 | from traditional values of excellence,

00:22:21.000 | achievement, the importance of learning,

00:22:29.000 | is something that I think is very much a problem.

00:22:38.000 | So yeah, I'm worried about the national sociology problem,

00:22:43.000 | represented by the fact that we used to be a country

00:22:48.000 | 60 years ago where 4% of men between 25 and 54 were not working,

00:22:53.000 | and now we're a country where 14% are not working

00:22:58.000 | at any point in time, and a quarter of them

00:23:01.000 | don't work for more than three months within a two-year period.

00:23:05.000 | Am I worried about that? Yeah, I absolutely am.

00:23:08.000 | Am I worried about the finances? Yes.

00:23:10.000 | Am I worried about our inadequate investment

00:23:16.000 | in technology leadership?

00:23:19.000 | Am I worried about a kind of broad constipation?

00:23:27.000 | Many of you have probably been to Harvard Square.

00:23:31.000 | There's a bridge. The bridge goes over the Charles River.

00:23:35.000 | It's 362 feet long.

00:23:39.000 | It had been around for 100 years.

00:23:42.000 | It needed to be fixed. It did need to be fixed.

00:23:47.000 | 62 months, five years and two months,

00:23:53.000 | with one lane of traffic closed,

00:23:56.000 | in order to renovate a 362-foot bridge.

00:24:01.000 | To put that in perspective,

00:24:03.000 | Patton built a bridge over the Rhine 3,000 feet in one day.

00:24:10.000 | [laughter and applause]

00:24:12.000 | But there are better things about spending your life

00:24:17.000 | hanging around in a university.

00:24:19.000 | And so I wandered over to the classics department one day,

00:24:23.000 | and I learned that Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar,

00:24:28.000 | built his bridge over the Rhine 3,000 feet,

00:24:32.000 | not 300 feet, in nine days.

00:24:36.000 | And this is what it took us.

00:24:38.000 | So do we have huge problems? Yes.

00:24:42.000 | Is this the first time we've had huge problems?

00:24:45.000 | Hell no.

00:24:46.000 | Is there the prospect that we can solve those problems?

00:24:49.000 | Yes, I think there is.

00:24:52.000 | Do I think we, all things considered,

00:24:56.000 | have a more solvable set of problems

00:24:59.000 | and a more dynamic society for solving them?

00:25:04.000 | Yeah, I do, than the other places.

00:25:08.000 | [applause]

00:25:09.000 | And never forget this,

00:25:13.000 | even though we always forget it

00:25:15.000 | when we make policy in the relevant area.

00:25:17.000 | -Larry, but before-- -The best--

00:25:19.000 | -Let it come. -The best test is,

00:25:23.000 | we are the place that people

00:25:26.000 | from every part of the world want to come to.

00:25:29.000 | [applause]

00:25:30.000 | That is 100% true.

00:25:34.000 | I want to ask you a question.

00:25:36.000 | Let's just actually go to that quickly,

00:25:38.000 | which is, you were the president of Harvard.

00:25:40.000 | There was a very, let's call it,

00:25:43.000 | important, divisive, foundational case

00:25:46.000 | that just went through the Supreme Court

00:25:48.000 | on affirmative action.

00:25:49.000 | You wrote, actually, a pretty interesting op-ed

00:25:52.000 | about all of this.

00:25:53.000 | Give us your thoughts about what is working

00:25:56.000 | inside of higher education,

00:25:58.000 | what you think about that ruling,

00:25:59.000 | just society in general as a reflection of that.

00:26:04.000 | I wish that ruling hadn't happened.

00:26:07.000 | I wish that great universities were in a position

00:26:11.000 | to set their course and to compete with each other

00:26:15.000 | and to admit students as they saw fit.

00:26:22.000 | But I think after that ruling,

00:26:25.000 | it is clear what the right theme should be.

00:26:29.000 | And that theme is opportunity.

00:26:33.000 | The great strength of our universities

00:26:39.000 | should be that they make it certain

00:26:43.000 | that everyone has an opportunity

00:26:47.000 | to succeed and get to the top,

00:26:50.000 | no matter where and in what circumstances

00:26:53.000 | that they were born.

00:26:56.000 | And I think there's much more

00:26:58.000 | that our great universities can do,

00:27:02.000 | and there are things that are much more important

00:27:06.000 | than arguing about diversity policies

00:27:09.000 | that could get us there.

00:27:11.000 | Here are some of them.

00:27:15.000 | Whatever the right way to think about this was

00:27:18.000 | 40 years ago,

00:27:20.000 | the time for legacy admissions is over.

00:27:24.000 | [applause]

00:27:28.000 | Problem solved.

00:27:29.000 | If there are scarce spots in our great universities,

00:27:35.000 | having your father hire a fantastic coach

00:27:41.000 | to teach you to play a country club sport

00:27:45.000 | at an extraordinary level

00:27:48.000 | should not be a path to admission

00:27:51.000 | to our leading intellectual institutions.

00:27:55.000 | Let's end athletic recruiting for aristocratic sports.

00:28:04.000 | It's really a nice thing.

00:28:06.000 | It's a nice thing.

00:28:08.000 | It's a good thing.

00:28:09.000 | It has a lot of good things

00:28:11.000 | for most of the people in this room

00:28:14.000 | that there exists early decision and early action.

00:28:20.000 | But it basically works to help the privileged,

00:28:25.000 | and it basically prevents the underprivileged,

00:28:28.000 | less privileged,

00:28:30.000 | from shopping their financial aid offers

00:28:33.000 | and getting the deals they should.

00:28:35.000 | We would not permit Goldman Sachs

00:28:38.000 | to make exploding offers to our MBA students.

00:28:42.000 | Why should great colleges make exploding offers

00:28:47.000 | to admitted students?

00:28:51.000 | You guys, it's like the word.

00:28:53.000 | Like, I didn't really know

00:28:56.000 | until I got involved with Silicon Valley

00:28:59.000 | that scale was a verb as distinct from a noun.

00:29:03.000 | I thought it was something you kind of stepped on

00:29:05.000 | in the bathroom.

00:29:09.000 | If you think about it,

00:29:12.000 | any institution,

00:29:15.000 | almost any other institution in the society,

00:29:19.000 | nearly a tenth as successful as Stanford or Harvard,

00:29:24.000 | would have far more customers today

00:29:27.000 | than it did 50 years ago.

00:29:30.000 | And yet, our universities have not grown

00:29:34.000 | their size of their students on campus,

00:29:38.000 | and they have moved only glacially

00:29:43.000 | to use the incredible opportunities

00:29:47.000 | that technology presents to provide education,

00:29:52.000 | which--and this is what's remarkable

00:29:54.000 | about educational technology, if you think about it.

00:29:58.000 | It can be much vaster scale

00:30:03.000 | and at the same time be much more personalized.

00:30:08.000 | You can go at your own pace.

00:30:09.000 | You can hit, you can hyperlink,

00:30:11.000 | you can go deeper in the things that you're interested in.

00:30:14.000 | And so scale plus personalization

00:30:18.000 | creates incredible possibility.

00:30:22.000 | And our great universities have only scratched

00:30:26.000 | the surface of what's possible.

00:30:30.000 | So there's an immense amount they can do.

00:30:32.000 | - Last question, because we're running out of time.

00:30:33.000 | I just want to make sure you touch free speech on campuses

00:30:36.000 | and how it's actually affecting the rest of society as well.

00:30:42.000 | - Look, vigorous argument

00:30:47.000 | in which all ideas can be put forward

00:30:53.000 | and in which no idea

00:30:57.000 | gains its authority

00:31:00.000 | from who said it

00:31:03.000 | or some fashion

00:31:07.000 | rather than its merit in open debate.

00:31:11.000 | That is the essence of liberal society.

00:31:15.000 | That is the essence of great universities at their best.

00:31:19.000 | It is the essence of a great university at its best

00:31:23.000 | that when I was president of Harvard

00:31:25.000 | and I was teaching a freshman seminar,

00:31:27.000 | some freshman could come in and read my paper

00:31:31.000 | and explain how it was kind of an interesting paper

00:31:33.000 | by President Summers,

00:31:34.000 | but it was really pretty completely confused.

00:31:37.000 | That was a fantastic thing.

00:31:41.000 | He wasn't right, but it was a fantastic thing.

00:31:44.000 | It was a fantastic thing.

00:31:48.000 | And yet so much of what we should be able to argue about

00:31:54.000 | and discuss is off limits.

00:31:59.000 | Some of that is the speakers who get disinvited,

00:32:03.000 | and that's terrible,

00:32:05.000 | but much more of it is a culture

00:32:08.000 | that there are only certain views you're allowed to have

00:32:13.000 | on questions about identity,

00:32:17.000 | that there are only certain views you're allowed to have

00:32:21.000 | on questions about markets and redistribution,

00:32:25.000 | that there are only certain views you're allowed to have

00:32:28.000 | about how children should be raised.

00:32:31.000 | There shouldn't be any views you're not allowed to have.

00:32:35.000 | [applause]

00:32:38.000 | Let that happen.

00:32:39.000 | Academic freedom should be an absolute,

00:32:44.000 | but academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism,

00:32:51.000 | freedom from debate, freedom from challenge.

00:32:54.000 | That is the essence of the most successful human institutions,

00:33:00.000 | and our universities should be modeling and demonstrating that

00:33:05.000 | rather than leading a charge, as it too often seems they are,

00:33:11.000 | towards an orgy of mutual self-regard, respect, and care,

00:33:18.000 | rather than getting closer to the truth in the most excellent way.

00:33:23.000 | Ladies and gentlemen, Larry Summers.

00:33:26.000 | [applause]

00:33:28.000 | Wow, another standing ovation well deserved.

00:33:32.000 | Thank you, Mr. Summers. That was extraordinary.

00:33:36.000 | The besties are back.

00:33:38.000 | [music]

00:33:42.000 | Rain Man David Sacks.

00:33:44.000 | And it said we open sourced it to the fans,

00:33:49.000 | and they've just gone crazy with it.

00:33:51.000 | Love you, West Coast.

00:33:52.000 | The Queen of Kinwam.

00:33:53.000 | Besties are back.

00:34:01.000 | Go 13th.

00:34:02.000 | That's my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

00:34:05.000 | [laughter]

00:34:08.000 | Oh, man.

00:34:09.000 | [music]

00:34:12.000 | One big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

00:34:14.000 | It's like this sexual tension, but they just need to release it now.

00:34:18.000 | Let your bee--

00:34:20.000 | Let your bee--

00:34:21.000 | Let your bee--

00:34:22.000 | Bee.

00:34:23.000 | We need to get merch.

00:34:24.000 | Besties are back.

00:34:25.000 | [music]

00:34:28.000 | I'm going all in.

00:34:32.000 | I'm going all in.

00:34:35.000 | (upbeat music)

All-In Summit: In conversation with Larry Summers

Chapters