More and more people, Freston says, are becoming masters of their own destinies.

Question: What are we doing right?

Tom Freston: Well I think we’re doing a lot of things right. If you look around the world, you see more and more countries have adopted . . . Africa . . . Many parts of the world democracies exist for the first time. People have an ability to chose their rules. People have an ability to increasingly hold their rulers to some form of transparency, and you know have some ability to control their lives. I think that that trend is a good trend. It isn’t equal in every country. It isn’t perfect in every country. But overall you’d have to stand back and look at . . . The age of self-determination is, you know, sort of where we are. And I think overall that’s a good thing. I think a lot of what’s going on with international law, international trade, ways to link countries together in ways that sort of subliminate or eliminate their militaristic tendencies is a good thing. A lot of work needs to be done obviously with global warming, extreme poverty, so on and so forth. But the building blocks to do that seem to be in sharper focus. People seem to be more connected or have the ability to be more connected than ever before. Certainly a lot of groups are not seeing eye to eye on things. But again as an optimist I think that, you know, everything we need to sort of achieve and to do what we . . . What has to happen is within our grasp if we can have some reasonable moments with ourselves.

Recorded On: 7/6/07