The Global Drive for Talent - Clip 4: Transcript
The Power of Numbers.
PAUL TAGLIABUE
I gave a high school commencement address, and I've been giving the same speech to a lot of young people. There are 300 million Americans. There are 6,000 million other people in the world.
Now, when I drafted that speech, I said there were 300 million of you - and these are kids going off to good colleges - and your contemporaries and the rest of us over here - and there are 6 billion other people in the world who have now been freed up to compete, to win, to succeed, to fail, to be entrepreneurs.
I heard a speech a few years ago in California at a seminar with a lot of Chinese-American entrepreneurs. And the question was asked, why are you all here in California? Why is your generation here in California, and will the next generation of Chinese be in California or in China?
The answer was, no, we'll probably be in China. Well, why are you in California? A, we had academic freedom. B, we had access to capital. And, C, we had access to markets. In China we now have access to markets, the biggest of all. We have access to capital. And we're getting, at least in some spaces - IT being one, for example, and some others - academic freedom. So why do you have to be in California. We can get all that in China.
But when I drafted my speech saying there are 300 million of us and 6 billion other people that are trying to make themselves better and working very hard, my wife said, no one understands numbers like that except people like you who worked in the Pentagon. Three hundred, whatever follows sounds bigger than six. People don't know the difference between millions, billions and trillions.
So she's the one who edited my speech and said 300 million of us and 6,000 million other people in the world, which is another way of saying 6 billion.
You know, the parents who came up to me after that commencement address, about 20 of them, to say it was important for our kids and for us to hear that, that's the one thing they commented on was the 6,000 million other people in the world.