 what we really are is one global civilization connected through infrastructure and supply chains and just because you didn't make your t-shirt that you're wearing right now, you know, you are part of the supply chain by which that cotton was farmed somewhere, water was used to treat it, it was the electricity was used in the factory, human labor went into it and then it was shipped on some cargo vessel across the oceans to come back to you. So you are part of that footprint of that t-shirt and the same goes for the manufacturing of any kind of mobile phone product. Dr. Parag Kanan is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Parag is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler and best-selling author. He is founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm. Parag's newest book, The Future is Asian Commerce Conflict and Culture in the 21st century came out in 2019. He is the author of a trilogy of books on the future of the world order beginning with the second world empires and influence in new global order which came out in 2008 followed by How to Run the World charting a course to the next renaissance in 2011 and concluding with connectography mapping the future of global civilizations which came out in 2016. He is also the author of Technocracy in America, Rise of the Info State in 2017 and co-author of Hybrid Reality, Riding in the Emergent Human Technology Civilization in 2012. Parag was named one of Esquire's 75 most influential people of the 21st century and featured in Wired Magazine's smart list. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and a bachelor's of master's degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has traveled to nearly 150 different countries and is a young global leader of the world economic form. Parag has been honored as a young global leader but also has served on the West Global Future Council on Mobility, Global Agenda Council on Geoeconomics and advisory board of its Future of Urban Development Initiative. He also serves on the board of trustees of the New Cities Foundation, Council of the American Geographical Society Advisory Board of Independent as an advisory board, Independent Diplomat. He is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, International Institute for Strategic Studies and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2002, he was awarded the OECD Future Leaders Prize. He speaks German, Hindi, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Parang spoke as a head in 2016, Ted Global 2009 was a guest host of the Ted Global 2012 and lead speaker at TEDx Gateway in 2018. His TED talks have been viewed more than three million times. The maps customized by Dr. Khan's books have been displayed in numerous prestigious international arts exhibitions and if I'm correct, he lives in Singapore with his wonderful wife and partner and they're running around the world conquering it and doing wonderful things for humanity and society. Welcome, Parang. So good to have you on the show. Pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show. It's such an honor to have you on the show and I'm an avid stalker of yours on and offline and following your talks and all your books. I've read your books and really love your work, the way you think and the way you've been active around the world. I want to jump right into and things kind of let my listeners know how we got to kind of our past crossed and how I asked you to the show. We have a mutual friend, Claudia Rinka and I want to thank her for introducing us who is a writer and produces films and documentaries and we got together on a documentary called Now by Jim Raketa that we were in together although we weren't in the same set or part of the documentary never got to meet but that was a wonderful work that is just now releasing. I kind of teased Claudia and Jim and the producers of the film or of the documentary that they should have maybe called the movie not the documentary not now but yesterday because of the pandemic it's kind of was in this old business model that it wasn't set up for streaming and online and still traditional movie theater things and so it's just now in November getting going and maybe January out in the theaters in different places around the world. My first question for you is how have you weathered this pandemic? We heard your biography in this long list of what you've done over the years and how you've worked with globalization and maps and been around the world has any of that helped you to get through this crazy time? It's a great question Mark and I'm glad to see that you've actually pivoted well you've been digital you've been doing your show virtually you've been talking to people from all over the world so you know fortunately you were prepared and I fortunately was as well in terms of just digital connectivity you know carrying on with work you know with the the governments that I work with the companies I work with the various organizations just moving to virtual you know and other than geographically staying put I would say our day-to-day life here hasn't really changed much at all you know obviously I'm accustomed to traveling every single week but it's physically a lot healthier not to you know it's certainly better for the environment so you know I've pivoted to this new normal pretty seamlessly I think you and I both have a lot of sympathy for people around the world who are not not nearly as fortunate a lot of the governments that that I speak with or work with in the past have been talking about their digital plans broadband 5G you know Wi-Fi for everyone and they never they didn't do it in time that's for sure and they regret it and their populations are are suffering a little bit more as a result so it's one of the many lessons obviously from this pandemic. That's kind of like a business and governmental infrastructural problem that it wasn't up to speed prepared for such a pandemic but there's also a way to get a certain amount of resilience in your own life that you're already used to working very remotely very used to working digitally and online and and so I believe for us that was probably an easier transition. You have you been contacted or reached out to during this time say man we should have listened to you more and applied some of the things that you've discussed and prepared better so that we would also have that resilience or maybe advise companies to get back to some kind of a structure. Well so seizing the digital opportunity now is something that everyone is doing so whether or not they are early movers or late starters either way one can always do better so even in a place like Singapore where Wi-Fi is pretty much ubiquitous, fiber is as well there's still a couple of gaps you know it can come down to the quote unquote last mile so do enough kids have laptops that they can borrow from school or get subsidized you know it's become a big problem in Germany. Germany is a huge country the US as well but they have a very egalitarian system in Germany they want all kids to have you know equal access so you know that's a lot of laptops in a country of 80 million people and x number of school children so you know that's the obvious stuff at this point and I have to say you know that the private sector has stepped up in many ways and found ways to lower barriers to access and provide you know connectivity to people and again it's a team effort we're in a pretty unprecedented situation but of course that's just one aspect of the response you know I mean the world has learned a lot in the last eight to 10 months about what is an essential service and a non-essential service right and we've learned things in social policy we should be paying our healthcare workers and and other professionals who you know deliver food or medicine and all of these kinds of things a lot more than we do sanitation as well as much as anything else so that's also important so I think there's many of us who are taking stock of what the lessons for policy are and kind of you know what is the playbook and the playbook obviously can't just be fighting the last war right it's also what comes next the next crisis is again it's a climate one or a political one or an economic one or all at the same time so you know resilience preparedness is a very long checklist in a way and and I hope that you know the governments that have been negligent are going to wake up and you know again for all the the tragedy mark in all of this at least I see again over in Asia I observe you know the four plus billion people of this region 30 or 40 countries a little bit more closely than I do many other places but there are very poor countries here and what I see is pragmatism and alertness and you know a sobriety this has been a gut punch a wake up call there is no time for corruption right now there you know everyone is watching what governments are doing you can't be asleep at the switch and so this is you know a time for real leadership and I and what what is nice to see is that even in some of the poorest countries in the world they're working as hard as they possibly can you know they they know how serious this dilemma is and I hope that they maintain that focus on good governance coming out of this so there there's really this overarching theme of you know obviously at first it's the COVID and then it could be the recession and then there's this climate change wave and then actually beyond that is the biodiversity and there's just a lot of issues going on a lot of issues during the pandemic as well with Black Lives Matters and with issues around Brexit and issues around obviously the election and other things are you feeling in your work or in your life or in what you're researching and studying that there's this dooming civilization collapse or this unease with humanity around the world where we're feeling this civilization framework structures around the world is just not working for us all anymore there's a lot more unease and unrest going on there at times like this it becomes you know a meme to talk about civilizational collapse and there's a whole literature on specific civilizations whether it is ancient Mesopotamian civilizations the Egyptians or the Mayans and so forth and what brought them down and so we're not talking about global civilization just yet right I mean if suddenly you have a cataclysmic atmospheric event that leads to the destruction of the old human species fine but what we're what we're talking about at the moment is which societies of the many societies different you know differentiated and geographically detached societies there are in the world which ones are really not going to make it you know based upon where things are going right now and what happens to them can they do anything can we do anything for them or where do they have to go so there could be specific countries a country like Yemen and you know the catastrophe in Yemen has nothing to do with the pandemic the pandemic has just made the existing catastrophe worse there are places like India where you have groundwater depletion and terrible air pollution and that was all before the pandemic as well so the question is not are we having a global civilizational collapse imminently it's which places are already you know potentially past the point of no return and what if anything can be done to help them and and that's you know much more nuts and bolts but but you know realistic assessment and you know we have a lot of you know quantitative metrics and indicators and studies and rankings around this stuff but you and I also travel and see the the human suffering and hardship and toll and you don't need an index to tell you when some of the fundamentals environmentally are irrevocable irredeemable you know in certain places and I fear that we're not having a serious enough conversation about that and and there you know there's parts of obviously the Middle East North Africa parts of Central and South America certainly parts of South Asia where you know these these dire forecasts apply there's really in your book Connectography not only beautiful maps and and and things depicted in there but a lot of the maps were used to even the one behind me are really um they're outdated they're very naturalistic or they tell a different view or picture of of our world and the reason I really like your books but also what you're discussing and the maps you present is kind of when we look at them based on data there's just a whole different story that tends to emerge or something that comes out that we're like oh well maybe maybe it's not that this is not what we've been led to believe or what the way we view the world is actually occurring differently and um with that I want to kind of move into do you feel like you're a global citizen and how would you feel about a world without nations borders and divisions I mean that's the kind of central question that is you know animated a lot of my research and work and thinking and dreaming for more than a decade but you know in that same book uh Connectography I talk about how we actually have more borders and more nations and more sovereign units than we've ever had in human history so we're really a far far way we're a long way away from a borderless world but what I want people to understand is that the way you get to a borderless world is very very paradoxical the way you get to a borderless world is by having the maximum number of borders and I'm not sure that people understand that so let me just flesh it out in 30 seconds when you make political units smaller and smaller and smaller imagine an independent you know Massachusetts and an independent republic of the Altai and Russia and you know independent states of India you wind up with a world imagine a world of you know 600 countries right absolutely zero of them can survive alone right zero the idea of autarchy of self-sufficiency disappears then we realize oh my god we actually cannot survive without each other we now have to open up to our neighbors we have to connect to our neighbors and and build these larger federations so it's kind of like the European Union where you went from the hereditary empires of the medieval world to the sovereign nation states which were obviously very fragment to the now since World War two you have the European Union which is this umbrella Federation and they share roads and highways and railways and a currency and electricity grids right and laws right so it's because Europe is so small and yet has so many smaller units within it that more or less none of them are really survivable based upon the way in which they built their collective economy and legal structure and so forth so that's how you get to a borderless world Europe is borderless but remember it has dozens and dozens of borders right so I want the whole world to go through that evolutionary process and that's how you get to borderlessness is there is there some even a little bit more bottom up or is there a little bit on an individual basis how do you make that shift or that paradigm as there are certain things that you should be looking at or doing or researching to kind of start to to move your thinking in that way or how have you seen that transition for people to make that shift well to be honest it's it's a historical and I used the word evolutionary before a natural it's a human and psychological process let me give you a couple of examples if you look at the world map the political map of the year 1945 there were 51 countries and today there are about 200 so the vast majority of three quarters of the countries on the planet were born since 1945 mostly out of colonial out of european empires right and the remnants of those empires through decolonization so now if you look at the postponial regions of the world particularly southeast asia east africa and the middle east in a couple of these regions you see that now you are three and soon to be the fourth generation on from that independence at the time of independence these were highly fragile insecure unstable countries they were fighting with their neighbors seeking to figure out what's my land what's your land the europeans drew these crazy straight lines and we don't even know you know where our porters are this makes no sense and then you start to stabilize but you've got the cold war manipulating your politics and it's still divide and conquer in some way now you have this post-cold war period and you have the global economy and capital markets and supply chains and you start to say oh i'm a landlocked country i need to have a pipeline in the railway and electricity grid with my neighbors i need to maybe have some kind of a you know figure out how to stabilize our exchange rates so it's not so crazy when removing fruit and you know coal across our borders or whatever the case may be and so if you look at east africa you know one of the poorest regions of the world you look at southeast asia where i know live still a very poor region over the last four generations they have come an incredibly long way in that kind of european style process now they're never going to have an east african union you're never going to have an asian union it doesn't have to be the same thing it's the process it's the people who are the great great grandchildren of the founding leaders saying you know what i wasn't alive then you weren't alive then i'm sure our grandparents hated each other but we've got better things to do right now let's build this railway across our borders let's have a joint investment promotion board let's do that deal together let's have a visa free access to each other's countries that kind of thing and that is happening it's happening in so many places and it's incredible africa has plans for a continent-wide free trade area continent-wide free mobility zone that's amazing are they going to get there tomorrow no but were african leaders did they have the confidence you know 20 years ago 10 years ago to have that summit and make those plans and write that declaration they didn't and they do now and that's just part of the evolution and and i literally think it's beautiful this is cartographic beauty this is why i make maps this is why i have maps made if i should say to match my writing and why they get animated because it is a constantly evolving thing the human political the global political body is an organism right of our design i um belong to this group there may be of an interest you may already somehow be involved as well that's a that's through the united nations a development program an environmental program and they're kind of merging together uh through a good friend of mine uh who who is working with the un and digital areas name is david jensen we work on a project together i work on five different projects with the un but this one's called the digital ecosystem for the earth and what it is it's an open source transparent um compilation of about 1200 plus geospatial data points from you know d l r in germany from the european space agency from nasa from google earth and many many other planet and uh that is kind of bringing them all in one spot kind of making an open source and transparent but secure through digital ledger technology in that so that that not only people in the un world economic form but we can have access to that in one place and youth though that cartography that map those 3d visualizations of you know whether it's precipitation and some moisture soil moisture or whatever else is is going on in our world real time kind of up to date um it's a it's a super project but i can i think you would fit in there so beautifully in that in that project i'll have to make sure to connect you if you're not already um because i really believe that that that knowledge is you know we talk sometimes about this moonshot or this earth shot you know what what is that it's innovation had we not gone to the moon had we not sense uh satellites out into space had we not used that emerging technology we probably would have discovered the earth a lot later and we wouldn't have that innovation that data to kind of give us the true picture of what's going on and how we live and and having said that i was wondering if i could kind of not play the devil's advocate but get into some more recent examples in our world one of them will kind of touch on your book that future is asian but the other one is the brexit is probably a recent um um uh recent racial political job uh uh type of a situation that happens that that went to lock down borders and move away from the EU would that be okay if we kind of touch on that and i set that example and maybe you could tell me how close we are so uh a lot of that vote it was uh uh was for a lot of people very shocking very they didn't understand why it happened and and i'm i'm not sure one person could say well this is this is the reason but there was some tendency there was a lot of distrust or unease uh in the united kingdom about the loss of jobs to migrant workers or you know and they're saying between 200 000 and and chlorine up in some season 600 000 immigrant workers mainly coming to the united kingdom to work on farms to be food producers to sell in grocery stores to sell at restaurants and food chains um and um a lot of the vote was to bring those jobs back to the united kingdom but also to stop having immigrant people you know take their resources and their their jobs away and so after the the brexit occurred we had the lockdown you know uh not too not too long afterwards and what happened was really crazy because it was harvest time in the united kingdom and there were no immigrant workers there to harvest the food to produce the food to be workers in some respects it was good because a lot of those shops were closed a lot of the restaurants were closed but in other respects it was pretty bad and what they were doing was digging mats graved for food they would harvest it and just till it right back into the ground and so not only was it a resource waste it was a big cause of of methane because once you rebury that food at rots at ferment it turns into methane which created huge problems through a political decision that had wide-reaching ripple effects but even more so if you look at the map if you look at the cartography of the united kingdom where they produce their food around the world it's four times the size of the united kingdom so one they were um not only not allowing people to help them but also when that vote occurred not a lot of people jumped into those jobs to help harvest that food and produce that food and so I just kind of want to put that into light but that is really a cartography it's really a big thing and I was wondering what your standpoints what your ideas what your understanding of that because I think that's a recent border and division and closing us off and how how maybe you could dissect how you feel that worked for us as a world or what your understanding is of it I mean a couple of things that stand out about brexit you know not in no particular order the first is that it's simply not representative of the global pattern you know if it weren't for the headline brexit and the fact that it happened you know in the uk and you know we're all exposed to english language media globally you know the fact is it just wouldn't be as big a deal it made a big deal of itself because that's what british culture does but to speak of it as representative is just flatly false you know you and I were just talking about these swaths of the world that are integrating more together now the population of this east african set of countries that we're talking about is 300 million people the population of southeast asia 700 million people so that's a billion people right there the population of the united kingdom is about 55 or 60 million people right now i'm not saying that it's irrelevant to the world i'm saying that we have to put it in context right it's not representative what's happening in western civilization it's not representative what's happening in europe brexit is what's happened to the uk that's point number one the second point is they're the biggest losers you know i remember in 2016 people said that this is going to bring down the european union there's going to be a cascade of nationalist movements and so forth well that was all wrong right when you do something dumb you're usually the biggest loser from what you did right and what the world has learned to do and this is all part of that same evolution is to isolate uh these kinds of uh bad situations as as much as we can right so a pandemic is maybe the opposite example or a financial crisis the question is how quickly can you contain the locus of the or from which the uh the sort of pain has emanated right china managed to shut down its own virus right now it's the rest of the world struggling to do it when it comes to brexit it's the british economy that suffers the most not the european as a whole greece their financial crisis same thing if there's a war in libya civil war in libya and their oil no longer can be exported well the rest of the world has plenty of oil as much as we don't want the world to be using oil the fact is that oil prices are not going to quintuple overnight because of libya so libyans become the biggest losers from their own war and that's very different from the world of just 30 or 40 years ago where if you do have a disturbance in one place again especially economically it ripples around the world instantly right and in oil markets and so forth so we're actually learning a lot and i think that what pretty much any sane country learned from brexit is never to do anything as dumb as brexit and and i think it's important to be incredibly blunt about it in equal and opposite measure to the extent to which people cried out that this is representative of the whole world right for every time a british person or someone who champions brexit or thinks it's a big deal makes it out to be a harbinger of things to come remind them just what a stupid and counterproductive and self-destructive sort of move it was and i think that's how we set the conversation straight and not only because we want to and we believe in progress but because that's actually the correct actually accurate assessment of the situation i think that's so beautifully said and i totally agree with you because a lot of things that happen especially the election has taken like at this microscopic view we've been able to see things a lot clearer now say boy that was a big mistake or boy we don't want that to happen again and through that process there's quite an evolution that occurs that say boy we're not going to make that mistake again or you know what what uh that bad decision of that uh you know compocalypse bolson arrows putin shades or whoever it is around the world is making crazy decisions for the rest of us how that has a you know ripple effect and and there's been a lot of those um to zoom in zoom out moments this last year especially i think so i don't know how it was for you but this year actually began out as a bang you know the decade of action really wonderful a lot of positive busier than ever was on this uh tour to road to davos tour and a lot of speaking engagements then spoken in davos and things were just a lot of big corporations were taking a lot of sustainability movements and transitions um and and then this pandemic occurred and for me it's it's been real positive out as we discussed before but i wanted to um touch upon the fact now there's they're gonna move uh the the form to the turn um next year and open it up to a little bit bigger city a little bit more accessible probably price points to attend but one one thing that i really like that ties to your cartography is the transformational maps that came out in 2018 on the world economic form page they're um basically systems dynamic modeling systems thinking about a uh clout swap wrote about it in his book the fourth industrial revolution but he also touched upon it on the website in 2018 releasing these transformational maps which are is another form of mapping you know uh some of our global problems and in our industries and how they tie to so many other things around the world well just last week a week and a half ago the world economic form came out with a new function for that that that each corporation or individual can actually go in and for a certain fee or certain requirements to a personalization of their focus area of their their business of what they're trying to you know discuss and make that map personal how do you have you've done any research or or work at all with the transformational maps and how do you feel this new tool do you feel it is a new tool that can really help us and do some great things for us well i do a lot of scenario planning actually with uh with governments and companies so you know scenarios are never really done the same way twice it really depends on what uh you know the the organization wants to figure out what's the time horizon what are the variables that they think are intersecting to shape their uh you know their the landscape of their business or their or their strategic planning so uh we do a lot of that and i think transformation maps is a good tool it sort of contributes in some ways to that what i like about it most is it's interdisciplinary and we know we we are very very careful to be as interdisciplinary as possible to figure out how you know scientific and technological factors weigh upon the economic or the or the political societal and how those affect each other so this is the kind of approach that you know way more actors need to start using there's no question about it so the the future is asian i'd like you to kind of give us a bigger teaser of it but i i i want to caveat it or with a question uh so i have a good friend is also a ted speaker gino you from hong kong and um he throws out a big question in his ted talks in the beginning and says what has what innovations has asia brought out in the last 300 years and then he goes in specifically and talks about emotional intelligence iq and just some other things that they do bring out that are that are much better for our world and so i'd like you to kind of put on both of those if you would sure i mean this is kind of an age old debate in the sense of um you know what are the relative merits of eastern and western systems right or in this case you know asian systems and particularly confucian systems and how their mentality or psychology anthropology is different i wouldn't necessarily call that innovation right though that's ways of life and ways of thinking and we all have you know different societies have different approaches to that and i think that that's fine innovation you know strictly so that so that the term innovation doesn't mean everything and nothing at the same time let's stick to using it the way we conventionally do which is kind of looking at processes uh technologies and how we apply them to create value or enhance kind of you know well-being or productivity or whatever the case may be and there i think it's pretty open and shut right so you know 5g internet speed emerged through an international process of developing standards and technologies and equipment but asian countries applied it to their countries a lot faster look at china south korea and japan right um the apps on your phone right you know amazon is one innovative app google is another facebook is another whether it's social media or web search or e-commerce but it was the chinese who put them all together into this we chat ecosystem and added a whole bunch of other things that those don't have you know right around telephony and and other kinds of services such that you have one integrated lifestyle app no western country today right now in november 2020 has an app even remotely as good as what they have right that's innovation so it's a silly conversation at this point right you know in the bottom line is that invention is one thing and innovation is another thing and an invention there's many areas where western societies have an unquestionable advantage right the the educational systems the curiosity the uh the dynamism the risk taking is all there in abundance right at mit at stanford at cambridge at oxford in life sciences in computer science it's it's a wondrous thing it's not a competitive thing they're doing things that become the foundations for all global societies to take advantage of but innovation is did i put it to work right did i did i use it for the betterment of my people right and the fact is that it's really not fair that so many people in the united states of america don't have good internet access when the internet was invented in america right that's that's literally unfair it's not a good translation of invention to innovation in the public interest right it's a market failure and and i think it's incumbent upon those countries that are inventors to make sure they're also innovators for the public otherwise you lose some of the support for the invention and hence you have you know a anti technology backlash and things like this and i think that's obviously unnecessary unfortunate and could certainly be avoided does it do you think that has something to do with this the us being strong competition strong capitalism strong monopolies like they don't realize that the market's actually big enough for everybody they could roll out an infrastructure of you know a thousand facebook's a thousand amazon's a thousand and really make the the infrastructure or the entire country better and give that access to everybody and it's actually win win for all or do you think some of that plays in because what i'm hearing is you're you kind of nailed the you hit the nail on the head is that asia is really good at scale and innovation and quality and and getting those things out and and completed and instead of talking and saying oh let's compete against this and and you know doing these this other form is that what i'm hearing is correct or well you know i mean look asia is not perfect you know that if asia were a country it would be the most unequal country on the face of the earth by a very very wide margin because you have the richest people in the world and the poorest people in the world crammed into this space but i do think that you can't get elected in an asian country or even in a in an asian non-democratic country unless you are talking about talking to talk and walking the walk of inclusive societies right uh you know that's a genuine effort here even the leaders in asia that we think of from the outside as being thugs are doing a lot for children's education and nutrition right and roads and electricity and hospitals it actually is their number one priority i mean i literally mean the thugs in asia have some conscience when it comes to this and then i mean that literally i mean i guess except for north korea right but i've been to north korea and you know that would be the exception but i've also been to every other country in asia the richest in the forest and and i know i'm not i don't have wool over my eyes right i'm a fierce critic of many systems and societies but there you can't in you you have to have some kind of a conscience really you really do you have to have some look i mean look at the king of thailand just to take a live example from the news the impunity of his office and the way in which he's dealt with it has led to mass protests in a country that we think of as being very deferential to authority because the people say absolutely not we will not have this right you know we we are we have a certain solidarity as a society and that cannot be trampled upon and that that too is a beautiful thing especially in a set of countries where you know people could be very afraid of their leaders right people you know we're talking about military dictatorships we're talking about countries that have been authoritarian but the people say absolutely not at the bottom at the end of the day you know we have to be treated with respect and and even that's happening so there is that but i don't want to go too far into that against sociology of asia but you're talking about the us and you you said a couple minutes ago the market is big enough for good not only is that true if you don't have an inclusive market your market's going to collapse where is your market if only five percent of the public has any money in their pocket to spend right so you know this is an area that's been widely misunderstood we've caricaturized you know caricatured economic debates as being kind of you know Milton Friedman extremism you know versus socialism but the truth is that even Milton Friedman knowledge that if you have severe inequality and you have a plutocratic economic system you're really not going to have an active consumer base your firms will fail so you know this is a false debate an entirely false debate and you know you can get to that realization the easy way or the hard way right you know right now let's face it we're taking the hard way in america and and that's unfortunate you know and in in continental europe things look a little bit different in that regard and that's probably uh it's a point in the europeans favor so i i'm going to be interviewing uh john nasbet who wrote megatrends his wife doris john retired and doesn't do anything in the public eye but wrote they both together been writing books for over 40 years and kind of this trends and and futurist type of movement and really they also have a book that's you know says the future's asian and that you know is very forward thinking on the asian markets and i'm in full alignment and agreement i love asia spend a lot of time there and also feel it's more this um games theory it's more win-win it's more society it's more long-term multi-generational type of thinking but as far as your book the future is asian can you kind of give us a what what your key takeaways are um of why you focused on on that and what you're what what you're hoping to reach the rest of the world with it and by letting them know that well you know it was uh i feel like it was a book whose time had come you know i i really had to correct some of the misunderstandings about asia first and foremost that asia is just china and kind of whatever china wants and uh that's not exactly true uh you know the geography of asia is much larger than east asia what most of what we call the middle east is in asia geographically historically even the arab societies have more connectivity and trade and so forth along the silk roads with china and india then they have obviously that's been that was replaced during the colonial era with kind of leaning west but now they're all leaning east again so i wanted to take the full geography of asia point out that's much larger than china 3.5 billion asians are not chinese only 1.45 billion are chinese um and so kind of give that full picture of what i call the asian system so it's not really that the future is asian the present is asian you know asia is the majority of the human population it's 50 percent of the world economy in uh in deep purchasing power of charity terms um so for a whole long list of just you know bullet point statistical you know reasons the present and the future are asian no matter what happens anywhere china or otherwise so it it you know obviously we should spend time and and have a better again sort of systems and holistic understanding of how asia works it has its own historical dynamics that explain how asian countries behave better than analogies to world war one or 19th century europe and so forth so you know there's a huge gap in our understanding of asian history our eyes glaze over you know we're like kind of deer in the headlights when we look at uh you know episodes of asian history that are obviously as significant for the world's future as anything in our own past and uh so you know i thought it was time to really put it all together um and to kind of one one uh you know big fat statement that's beautiful and i and that's really what i got out of it and it uh was so beautiful to me to to see that i i'm always traveled to to asia china and lot to thailand and spent a lot of time in and uh philippines as well and and i really uh have seen this thing emerge over the year so during the pandemic really not only from pocalypse and many others are trying to blame china on the pandemic and there's always fingers pointed to to china or asia for problems or how they're ruin the world but i see it in a much different light and that's one that i really would like humanity and especially the united states to see that they're really good when it comes to um calling them out on the carbon saying you know when are you going to do something towards climate action towards sustainability towards biodiversity when are you going to start producing your own products and doing your own things instead of putting blame on others and try to divide us as humanity here on earth um for example during during the pandemic well because a lot of americans were too damn cheap to stock up on masks and respirators and the essential personal protection equipment took the low bid from china had china produced those masks and uh they didn't have enough in stock they didn't have enough on hand and uh most of them came from china came from asia anyway and um put them in a precarious position because of being cheap because of getting the low bid because of uh let's do it cheap and quick and fast and and whatever let's not plan ahead let's not be preventative and there was this one one thing last year that was really uh well it was actually yeah it was last year that was really interesting the gretta tomb bird sailed across and she was part of our documentary now and she sailed across the uh the ocean and went to the us to the climate conference and um or to the to the un conference there and it was really interesting while she was in uh new york and washington she went and sat in front of a congressional panel and the guy in the panel there there was democrats and republicans as a republican representative there shows the panel and they're all grilling them because it was uh this johanna versus the united states in this other group of uh youth that were suing the american government because of climate change and they so they were kind of welking them but also kind of interviewing them finding out about the problems and as you watch this uh a teapack uh television thing about this you see this representative that's republican with this iphone it's an iphone what you know one of the newer newer ones can 11 whatever they call him and he's got it in his hand and and then it comes the time and he asks he says he goes to the great and he says really we're we're not going to do anything until china does something until asia does something because they're the ones polluting they're the ones creating these new cold power plants and doing all this negative stuff um and what do you have to say about uh we're doing just fine we're doing great what do you have to say about that and it really put her on the spot and she really couldn't answer it was a little little flustered and she says you know i'm just a kid and and i really don't have to answer the big political answer but the united states have been in the position for many many years where they're shipping their garbage to asia to china to dispose of the garbage and plastic waste in asia let it leaving them with an environmental impacts and the problems there uh that were actually produced in the u.s secondly those iphones the one that he was on on the panel that was produced in china was put together in china and um a super product most chinese don't even have probably have an iphone but yet they can produce and have the environmental or the total environmental impact of that production but yet but it's okay for others to produce the united states hit and have the environmental impacts but then at the back end of it to say no no it's their fault they're polluting they're the ones who're doing it and and that's something that's not always clear in people's mind until recently when we had the microscope again shown in where china says we're not going to take your garbage anymore we're not going to produce for the cheapest product we're going to start harging you the total environmental costs because what we do is efficient we don't want to harm our people and we want to have a better future and and so i really think the same when we talked about the brexit that a lot of countries are are allowing other countries or other people to shit on their lands to to use their country as an open sewer and then reap the benefits of their food products of their technology products or whatever they produce and then when it comes around to doing some action towards sustainability or towards improving or applying those technologies then it's always someone else's fault or they need more money and so i don't know if you've ever seen it that way before but for me there really have never been these borders or these nations i believe that we've been trading all over the world but we need to put it into a better perspective you know what you're saying really resonates with an argument that i've been making for a long time which is about supply chains right what we really are is one global civilization connected through infrastructure and supply chains and just because you didn't make your t-shirt that you're wearing right now you know you are part of the supply chain by which that cotton was farmed somewhere water was used to treat it it was the electricity was used in the factory human labor went into it and then it was shipped you know on a some you know cargo vessel across the oceans to come back to you so you are part of that footprint of that t-shirt and the same goes for the manufacturing of you know any kind of you know mobile phone product by the way just so that everyone knows samsung has doubled the global market share of apple right apple is more than twice as valuable but if you want to just think about you know made in where and whose logo is on the largest number of mobile phones in the world samsung is twice as many as apple so that's as twice as much samsung garbage on the planet as apple garbage just in terms of mobile phones just so that everyone knows um so the koreans also dump their garbage on other countries uh you know so do american manufacturers like apple but these asian countries have now started to say we don't want that anymore right we don't you've been paying us for this waste that is burying us so even if you pay us five times more we just don't want it so you're having these ships turned around and sent back to america now america technically has a couple of choices here right it can it can bury it in the desert uh it can burn it it can find other ways to dispose it could actually recycle it you know start to design products with different materials so that they either biodegrade or can be be reused upcycled and so on and there you see different companies doing different things right you certainly don't see anything good happening at anything like the scale that it needs to happen but hopefully that process of you know rejecting waste in advance you know convinces countries to change the way they they make things in the first place that's the conversation that needs to happen in corporate america but that hasn't been a big focus yet right because investors and corporate boards and asset managers and pension funds haven't yet forced uh companies to do that you know on a large scale in europe they certainly are a lot more stringent about those things and you're tracing the supply chain way more carefully in all these kinds of things but is are there some efforts towards doing that in you know most developed countries yes you know there are and i think you know i wish all of these things went a lot faster right can't we just see three or four steps ahead see the writing on the wall realize it's going to cost us a lot realize the regulations are coming see the environmental damage it's doing um you know define cheaper and better at the same time i mean really win win ways of doing the things that we're doing you know we could just hit the pause button now and do that and it's just the pity that we don't because as you know you know better than i do there's a lot of damage that's being done on the way to that fairly obvious enlightenment here's the very first big hardest question i have for you today and it's really the burning question wtf and it's not the swear word it's actually what's the future and i i know you can tell us the political and the global future but i'd like to know more your your vision of the future what's the future tron the future economy you were saying yeah what what's the future well you know i'm i'm actually working on a book about that right now so maybe this is a little sneak preview so uh probably probably leave it on this note so i don't reveal any any more but it is about the future of human geography and what i've basically done is to kind of take connectography what connectography was for infrastructure and supply chains i'm trying to do for people i'm trying to anticipate five ten 20 years ahead thinking about climate change pandemics economic crises political upheaval demographic imbalances and how they all affect each other and play it forward to try to understand where what are the what are the optimal geographies for humankind to to to reside and to settle do we need to literally resettle the world population based on all of these trends and if so where and how so it's a book of kind of demographic and geographic foresight and to me that's the most important question of the future because you know are we going to have AI that's very intelligent yes i think we already know that you know are we going to have space based weapons yes unfortunately we are you know is there going to be are there going to be robots doing human labor everywhere yes we know that you know so the question is where are we going to live in a way that that that that preserves our you know human population in a sustainable way as best as we can is i think a big question that hasn't been answered so that's what i've decided to to tackle and that'll come out next year so we can let's let's get together and talk about it then i definitely i definitely want to do that i'll devour it and then we'll have another podcast another meeting about that um what what are your feelings on neo Darwinism neo liberalism you know this fierce competition only the strong survive natural selection uh you like me believe that's bullshit and is that also tie a little bit to the future well you know there there is a long tradition of geographical determinism as well that feeds into this Darwinism so the idea that geography is destiny demography is destiny and looking at those questions at a country level rather than us as a society and having the agency and the capability to make choices and change those kinds of fatalistic predictions so i'm obviously on your side of the camp in that debate is that if you were to uh if i were to nail you down and make you pick one of your favorite maps or the famous cartography that you've ever put together you've ever seen what one would it be well you know i mean i work with the the most incredible uh you know gis data scientists and digital cartographers uh in the world really for for the maps that they've made both for print and online and some of those are again they're on my website every we make sure everything is free freely accessible to public anyone can download a high res map and use it for whatever they want or go onto one of the platforms and manipulate variables and things like that because you know to me if you're not learning geography you're not you're missing out on the uh on the most essential discipline so um you know the maps i would say have had perhaps some of the biggest impact in terms of visibility and getting people thinking i found over the last five years um one is the map that shows what happens to global agriculture if temperatures rise four degrees celsius which is you know an astronomical temperature rise it's unconscionable it's way past the point of no return and i know that all of your viewers know this but just to underscore what cataclysmic scorching impact that has on ecosystems everywhere um but it does show the arctic being green and everything else being brown and then as is what people may not know is the total population of the arctic circle of the planet earth is about five million people right out of you know eight something billion people so that's a scary mismatch and whenever i present that basically it's you know people are pretty aghast and you kind of have to stop and think about the implications of that and another one is the pixelated map of the current human demographic distribution which shows where we are and again there are no borders on that map it's just every human being is a pixel there's eight billion of them and this is how this is where we have evolved to settle this is where we feel is our natural you know where everyone is not everyone but most of us are in a livable habitat and so it's the map that kind of shows most organically how nature has shaped our human geography and that's incredible because it really shows just how again demographically asian the world is bright huge pink over china and india and the other demographic concentrations europe and the east coast of the us and so on it's it's beautiful and it just gets people thinking about you know if even if the world were borderless this could be where we were would be if it were not for a climate change right or how would things be different um and there's one more that that that really you know it's the one about this new silk roads where i kind of did a lot of homework on every single big infrastructure project going on in eurasia and we layered them into one map and you just see that it's meant to be a spaghetti bowl it's meant to just be like what like look at all these lines you know and the point was to overwhelm the borders right to say like sure you've got big powerful states and heavily armed borders but you've also got a zillion pipelines and railways and electricity grids and fiber optic internet cables and hydro uh canals and all this stuff crisscrossing and this is really how we overcome again that political geography and even the obstacles of nature to provide for each other right that's why we we don't build this infrastructure just so we can roll tanks across and conquer each other right 364 plus days of the year we use this to actually do things for each other and we can reshape you know our geography in a constructive way so you know some of these maps are really meant to have a moral message and that's actually one of them that's beautiful Cup 24 in Katowice Poland I sat on on a board for the global energy interconnection which is was really spearheaded by a Chinese organization called GuideCo I don't know if you'd ever heard of them but they've basically taken another form of cartography and mapped out the new renewable energy grid for the world and how they could roll out and scale that so that everybody can transfer I mean with renewable energy is that the transportation is just not there to get up to everybody and there's no no infrastructure and so I I'm also very aligned with you on on the type of maps that you like and the the movement of the future is Asian I also want to make sure I connect you to the island management association they have these top talks were famous doctors and professors have spoken at I'm sure they would love to hear from you and and about your wonderful work in Thailand as we mentioned them as well I have three last questions before we wrap it up and it's really sustainable takeaways for my listeners I'd like maybe if you could depart some of your wisdoms and to them what would be one message that you could depart to them that that is a sustainable takeaway that would have the power to change our life kind of your message what would that be well you know it does relate to COVID in the sense that you know one of the lessons from this has been around food supply and actually in your opening comments you mentioned this you know rotting of food and waste of food and reburying food and that just generating more method and yet imagine if we had used connectivity better to move food around to those in need even though it was a surplus at home because of you know ruptures and global trade supply chains so what's so such a tragedy but one of the lessons has been we can grow a lot more food locally right a lot of countries are earning not to just keep on building cities on farmland right give back to the farmland and grow your own food and you will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and you will build local resilience and and have a healthier diet all at the same time so I'd love for more people to think about how in this urban world where we tend to not appreciate nature and where things come from where food comes from that can change tomorrow I totally believe that I often say you know food cities are a place that food goes to die and I would really love for us to break that cycle you know to get the the linkages back and even other waste of the human waste and the waste of compost or the composting that comes out of food waste that that somehow gets kept back in the cycle to get back to the farms to get back to our soils and things uh the next question is what should young innovators or cartographers or those interested in geospatial data or in your field be thinking about if they are looking for ways to make real impact on our world? Well actually you know uh if only it were my field that you know I feel like when I was in college uh not nearly enough courses were offered in in this area of GIS and now fortunately it is a much more prominent popular college major and a very useful one and you know if you study geospatial systems or you know earth observation as sometimes known GIS um you'll get a job guaranteed and you'll hopefully you'll be doing something quite meaningful so I definitely encourage people you know very vigorously uh actively to study exactly those areas. What is something that you've experienced over your years that uh and your professional journey that you would have loved to know from the start? Boy if I only knew that what is there something there? Um you know that most of the governments of the world including our multilateral organizations are kind of flying blind you know and in the same way that you kind of are a young student apprentice you know to um you know more accomplished uh academics and then only after a long time of reflecting on their work do you see all the flaws and mistakes in those people you admired? I would say that I for too long kind of you know was just deferential intellectually to authority thinking that they knew what they were doing and uh and they don't you know uh they really don't and now we're in a world where and I'm not sure I really like this uh very commonly used metaphor but the tide has gone out and we can see who's wearing you know sorts or not and there's probably just a very very small handful you could count them on one hand governments in the world that are gonna that can navigate on behalf of all their people in an inclusive way um you know crises like what we're in right now you know it's no secret who they are when you're when you watch the news every day and that's uh let's face it it's a terrifyingly small number of governments and and they didn't take the COVID pandemic for us to realize this uh or brexit or the last financial crisis I think that you know if we take a hard look at who's just coasting along versus who is actively you know preparing for a complex world is very very few and and uh you know I would would go back in time and be way more harsh you know in my my warnings and observations and and critique and constructive critique right of our systems of our political systems and I mean now I think I'm pretty full throttle harsh but um I could have should have started that in my in my teens or twenties rather than rather than you know in in in your book uh in one of your books you you really talk about um how the united nations the world economic form that those are foundations private organizations that really everyone in the world has the ability to start something big start something international that can be far-reaching that it's not some kind of a political or or democratic process to to get to that point to to change in our influence our world and correct me if I'm wrong I believe you also said we need more diplomat than we need we need more people that are diplomatic and know how to to have a discussion in exchange without uh you know dividing us um can you maybe tell us just a tad bit more about that yeah you know that that's definitely um one of the points in time you know when I started to think hard about who's actually doing something versus regurgitating resolutions you know and that that was um that was a book how to run the world that was a book about diplomacy basically because diplomacy is the process that we use to run the world so it was a kind of like a provocative title but it was actually completely literal um it was it wasn't meant to be like ironic or or arrogant diplomacy it was my it was written out of my deepest respect for the profession of diplomacy as you mentioned at the beginning you know I study the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown which is effectively America's diplomatic academy and I went there for that reason because you know I have that deepest of respect for the profession so that that that book was actually grew out of my my phd and in the phd I looked at some of these organizations that are saying hey look we're not a government but we're trying to improve global governance let us make a contribution and it was the world economic forum and the gates foundation and other such bodies and I looked at a whole suite of them and how they compete to be viewed as legitimate and the way you can be legitimate is by doing something good right and and I found that when we really measure global governance by that account the answer to the world's problems is not it must always be ratified at the united nations by the general assembly or if washington doesn't agree with it it's not going to have legitimacy no legitimacy comes from doing that good thing and then you will inspire others and you will build that movement and then you will have all the legitimacy and recognition that is needed so it was a much more it was an attempted a bottom up kind of reconstruction of diplomacy in which yes as you said everyone is a diplomat and that that absolutely was one of the punchlines I really liked it and that's what I wanted to end on thank you so much for your time and unless you have a question for me or anything else that you didn't get to say I think we're done I really hope we can do this again when your next book comes out I'd love to this is a great conversation and I'm so glad we covered you know such a wide range of topics you know the the future of the world seems like such a vague notion but but you made it incredibly concrete so I'm so glad that we got a chance to talk about all of this stuff thank you so much for all get so wonderful you have a wonderful day or night now and say hi to your wife likewise thanks so much really appreciate it take care bye bye you