 Mine is the story of a man without a plan. I was an academic and pursued an academic life. Then I became the dean of the university of where I worked. Then I went into government accidentally and I became the minister of development, it was called, which included industry and trade and development. From there, in Venezuela, I went to the board of directors of the World Bank in Washington where it was quite an experience. Then I became a member of a think tank, the Carnegie Endowment, many years ago, and I was doing what people in think tanks do, which is write and comment. Then I became the editor of a magazine called Foreign Policy, and I did that for 14 years. After that, I became a columnist, and now I do all of that. I write columns that are published around the world, I write books, and I do a lot of television programs. Since the career that I described created many opportunities for me to observe power upfront, closely, and sometimes experience it when I was in government. I always was fascinated by the gap between what people thought was the power of someone in a cabinet position, the minister, and the actual power that I had at the time. I thought that that was because of my inexperience, I was very young, or because my country, Venezuela, was very dysfunctional and very weak in terms of the state structures. Then I started talking first to my colleagues, and they all felt the same way. Then I had the opportunity, when I was at the World Bank, to talk with a lot of leaders from a wide variety of countries in Eurasia and Africa and Asia and the rest of Latin America. I would probe that, and I would discover that many felt the same way as I did. Power was becoming very hard to obtain, to use, and very easy to lose. I then started looking at it more carefully. Then I was the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine for more than a decade. As the editor of that magazine, that also put me in touch with a lot of people with power, also with a lot of people studying and understanding and viewing what was happening. I started writing about it, and so I wrote The End of Power, that in many ways that title is a misnomer. I'm not saying that power has ended and the world doesn't have pockets of power highly concentrated. The Pentagon and the Vatican, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin and Google and Facebook and Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil, these are centers, institutions and individuals that have a lot of power. So my point is different. My point is that in the 21st century, power has become easier to acquire, harder to use, and easier to lose. So it's happening everywhere. It's happening in Italy with Cinque Stelle and Pegrillo. It's happening in Spain with Podemos. It's happening in Europe where you have all kinds of new parties coming out of nowhere. You can see it in Poland and you could see it in Hungary and elsewhere, in Asia, in Latin America, of course. What do they have in common? Well, these are what I call the micro powers. They come out of nowhere. They have improbable origins. They have people at the beginning disdain them and give them no chance of winning. And then they are able to displace what I call the mega players, the traditional power structures that have dominated the political scene for a long time. So these newcomers displace them. But my point is wider than that because I say and I think I can prove that this is happening not just in the realm of politics. It's also happening in the area of war, of business, of media, of communications, of art and culture and science. Wherever there is human activity, organized human activity and therefore power matters, you will see that power is becoming far more feeble and more constrained, but also easier to acquire. So from that perspective, people that have now power, if I'm right, are very constrained in the way they can use it. And we are already seeing it in the case of Trump. He came with a wide agenda of things that he was going to do immediately. And well, we are seeing how he's not been able to do much and how he's facing already a lot of upheaval around his presidency. What will happen? There is going to differ from place to place. In some places, anarchy will be common and it will have a very frequent turnover of who is in power. But in other places, we're going to see the innovations of the good kind. If you think about it, we live surrounded by innovations in all aspects of our lives, except in the way we govern ourselves. So innovation is everywhere, but we still pick our leaders and govern ourselves and monitor the government and accountability and participation and how to organize different interests and how to work in a democracy are still done in the same way that they were done a hundred years ago. So I predict that we are at the verge of a wave of political innovation that is going to be very positive in some places. In other places, there will be political innovation of a horrible kind. Would there be new revolutions given the culture of mistrust? It's easy to predict that because it's already happening. Give me the name of a country where people are not in the streets. People are in the streets everywhere. People are protesting for a variety of things, either because they belong to the middle class of countries like the United States and Europe that feels embattled and threatened and under siege, or because they belong to the new middle class in India, in Mexico, in Indonesia, in Turkey, in China. The new middle class now has expectations that has been empowered, that is better educated, that is more connected. They are also taking to the streets for different reasons. But around the world, people are protesting because political parties are no longer providing them the channels to articulate, to organize, to express the grievances and their aspirations.