 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I think this is the most oversubscribed session in Davos. There are 135 people on the waiting list. So thank you for joining us, and glad you got some seats. We are here to talk about something that Ray Dalio subscribes to, which is that globalization is dead with somebody who, I think, can probably challenge that opinion in a pretty convincing fashion. It's a huge pleasure to have on the platform Tom Friedman, journalist, author, columnist, and probably one of the most, you know, the touchstone for commentary in the 21st century. So great pleasure to have you with us, Tom. Thanks for joining. And you know, we've heard this from Ray. We've heard it from a number of business leaders. You know, globalization has been crumpled up and thrown into the bin. Is it a little early to be dancing on the grave of globalization? Well, first of all, great to be with you, Adrian. Thanks for having me. I'm sorry, Ron, I couldn't be here. I suspect ever since the first tree fell in a pathway used by paleolithic homosapiens, somebody wrote on a tablet globalization is over. Here's a newsflash. People want to connect. It's wired into us. And the technology every month makes it easier to connect. Girls just want to have fun. Globalization is wired into us as human beings. It is not linear. It's curvilinear. It goes up and down. But I have to tell you, just since I've been writing about it, Google after 9-11, globalization's over. What can we have globalization when people are flying planes into buildings? Google after 2008, globalization's over. The whole financial global economy melted down, globalization's over. Now we hear it again. There's a library of books telling me the world is not flat. It's spiky, it's lumpy, it's curvy, it's humpy. Get over it, OK? If World War I didn't stop globalization, if World War II didn't stop globalization, what makes you think the war between Ukraine and Russia is going to stop globalization when, in fact, it's actually the first world war? Not World War I, not World War II. This is the first world war, two-thirds of the world's falling on any smartphone. So I just find the whole notion preposterous. But let me drill down a little deeper and explain why. And it's not like I have to remind people, I didn't do this. I promise you, OK? I just wrote a book about it, all right? And I wrote a book about it because I couldn't understand the world as a foreign affairs columnist without it, you know what I mean? Now what I find is that in the nature of journalism is such that if you say anything positive about anything, if you have any optimism bias about anything, you're treated as a utopian. I'm described as a techno-utopian, OK? I was just describing the conditions that were allowing globalization to take a different stage. And my view is always it had upsides, it had downsides. And our job as the job of politics and geopolitics was to get the upside, more of the upside than the downside. But I do confess that when I see 800 million people grow out of poverty faster than any time in the history of the world, my heart does go a little pitter-patter, OK? That does kind of float my boat a little bit. But for that, you get called a techno-utopian. Now if you're a pessimist and you've written umpteen times that globalization is over, nobody remembers that, OK? So it's very dangerous to make any positive claim about the world. And that you're immediately turned into some dreamy utopian. Let me explain, though, what I think my contribution to the discussion was. Because we say globalization is over. First of all, I have to say, what do you mean by globalization? Do you mean global trade as a percent of global GDP? Do you mean telecommunications? Do you mean cargo travel in containers? Do you mean internet? And so to just say globalization is over, all of these are different aspects of globalization. Now what the world is flat was about was the claim of the world is flat, I'm not an economist at all. I've taken exactly one course in economics, introductory economics at Brandeis University in 1973. That's the only economics I know. And so when people accuse me of being a neoliberal, I don't even know what that word means. It never even figured into my book. I wasn't making an economic argument. I'm not smart enough to do that. What the world is flat was about was a very simple proposition. If you look at the sweep of history, to act globally, historically, you needed to be a country. Spain discovering the new world, Vasco de Gama. Then beginning with the Dutch East India Company, you actually to act globally, you had to be a company, at least, or a country. What the world is flat was about is that we had created a platform, a global economic platform of technology and a set of rules that, for the first time in history, enabled individuals to act globally. That was the core claim of the book. So when I said the world is flat, I wasn't saying we're all equal. I wasn't saying, oh, borders are going to disappear. That was somebody else's book, not mine. What I was saying is something really big happened. For the first time in history, you can now act globally. You can reach farther, faster, deeper, cheaper in more ways and more days around more themes and subjects for less money than ever before as an individual. And that's what's new here. And just to finish one last point while I get this rant all off my chest, there are many things Vladimir Putin did not understand about the world. But the thing he understood least was globalization. Because in a previous book to the world is flat on Lexus and the Olive Tree, I actually created a new category. It was based on this platform, but I hadn't sort of defined it yet in the world is flat, of what I called the super-empowered individual. What I was saying was that this global platform was creating a world where we didn't just have super powers. We were actually spawning super-empowered individuals where individuals could actually act with the power of states. So I wrote Lexus and Olive Tree in 1999 and my example of a super-empowered person, I called him a super-empowered angry man was a guy named Osama bin Laden. So I wrote that in 1999. And the reason I wrote it was because the Clinton administration, when Al-Qaeda blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, Bill Clinton fired 72 cruise missiles at bin Laden in a base in Afghanistan. And I wrote it about at the time and I just said, wow, we just fired 72 cruise missiles at a million dollars a copy at a person. We've never done that before. We fired 72 cruise missiles at a person. And I said that was the first war in history between a superpower and a super-empowered angry man. So when 9-11 happened, I said, oh, I know what this is. This is the retaliation of the super-empowered angry man against the superpower. Now let's flash forward to Ukraine. So, because we'll tie back to the core question. So Putin thought he was at war with a superpower. The United States acting through NATO and buttressing Ukraine. So he fell into what I call my Prince's Diana rule. So Prince's Diana once observed that the problem with my marriage is that there were three people in my marriage. Putin didn't understand that there were now three people in his marriage. There was the superpower and the super-empowered people. And so the superpower imposed all kinds of formal sanctions on Russia. And then the super-empowered people went to war. And this is how they did it. So they went into Tik-Tok and they saw videos of Massacre in Bukha. They posted it on their Facebook page. Then they went into Slack and discussed it with their fellow employees at, say, McDonald's. And then they did not ask the CEO of McDonald's. They told the CEO of McDonald's, we are getting out of Russia. And that happened in a thousand companies in a space of two weeks. That was the super-empowered people. That was individuals acting globally as individuals. And Putin didn't see that coming at all. And so is globalization over? Not my globalization, that's for sure. Trade may be down. It may be up. I have no idea. I follow those statistics. I'm not an economist guy. I'm actually right about power. Foreign affairs, that's where I come from. And for me, globalization is not over, in the least. One of my takeaways from your book, The World is Flat, was actually what you were saying was that the world as a consumer society is becoming more homogeneous. The United States doesn't have a better iPhone than you have. Someone in Cape Town doesn't have a different Android phone. Well, that's very leveling. It's leveling. And also, there's a homogeneity to it. You go into a Luckins Coffee in Beijing or Shanghai. It's going to look pretty much like a Starbucks looks in Boston. So actually, that was not my view. It's half-righted in the sense that my view of globalization, and again, it gets to this idea that I'm some techno utopian, but it's very clear in the book. Globalization, it's flat. It goes both ways. It can be incredibly democratizing. We saw it in the Arab Spring, for instance. It can be incredibly authoritarian, where China uses a globalization system to impose its order on its society. It can be incredibly particularizing. I wrote in that book about women artisans in Peru. We used the internet. Suddenly, it had a global market for their artwork that they never had before. And it could be incredibly homogenizing, for the reasons you discuss. There's Starbucks now at every beautiful tourist site in the world. And so it's all about how you get the best and cushion the worst, but it goes both ways. And if you think it's all one or all the other, that's when you get in trouble. You said right at the beginning, we talked about the kind of rhetoric of globalization. It's dead, but you said the upsides and the downsides. Is what's dead or dying some of that optimism about globalization? And is there a way you put some of that optimism back into it when you wrote the word? It's flat. But is there a way to restore some of that optimism now in what looks like a really dark world where we're facing food shortage, we're facing fuel shortage, we're facing a conflict in Europe the like of which hasn't been seen in decades? Well, again, it's basically against the rules of modern journalism to be optimistic. So if you stick your head out there, it's going to get chopped off. But I'm an old fart, so who cares? You know what I mean? Well, when did you see this before? Through PayPal. PayPal has set up a system. They identified, I think, 200 different and vetted, 200 different Ukrainian charities, empowerment groups, rescue organizations. And they set up a system. Not only were individuals of 800 million PayPal users could, as individuals, act like USAID and send any amount of money to any of one or all of these groups, but they worked with American Express so you could cash in your rewards miles and send a donation to an NGO in Ukraine. Was your grandmother doing that in World War I? I don't think so. So again, that kind of floats my boat, you know? I'm really sorry for being optimistic about that. But that's amazing. You can cash in your rewards miles as an individual to make a donation to strengthen the Ukrainian NGO against Russia as an individual. Or, as we saw in the first week of the war, someone in Airbnb said, you know what? I'm going to rent a room in Lviv from someone in Airbnb. I'm not going to go. I'm just going to transfer money to that person. And within two weeks, $20 million, before AID had laced up their shoes, individuals around the world had transferred $20 million through a what global platform in a flat world to Ukraine. I guarantee you, that was not in Putin's pre-war planning. Now, does it trump everything Putin is doing? No, but these are enormously exciting things. And to even mention it, you become a techno utopian. Last night, we heard from some of the Ukrainian MPs who are here, and they were talking about how they'd used booking.com to solve refugee issues. Absolutely. They're fine space. So quite incredible. We don't have long with you, I know, and we have a great room. So I wanted to see if we could get some questions from our audience. So if you can show a hand, then we can get a microphone to you. And just if you could introduce yourself briefly. Gentleman just in the middle there. And excuse me if I'm not seeing you, I'm faced with a bank of light. So give it a good old palm up. Thomas, my name is Peter Holmes, I'm from the Australian Financial Review, friend-shoring or ally-shoring. So trading with only those that we like. Can you talk about that in the context of what you've been talking about? Spend a little more, what do you mean by that? The idea that nations choose who they will trade with based on whether those countries meet... Share their values. Share their values. And whether that's a good thing or whether trade actually helps bring good values to countries. So that's a much debated subject. It's a very interesting question and it's much debated. In Lexus Nealoptery, I coined a term that I called globalution. So I defined it as revolution from beyond. That is when you can't get reform and political change from below and you can't get it from above, sometimes you get it from beyond. And what I pointed to was China importing global accounting standards that they couldn't generate from below or above. But because they wanted to do business with Australian companies or have Australian companies work in China, you get the revolution from beyond. And it's interesting. We are just doing a roundup the New York Times. They ask every columnist to write about something. They got wrong or they've reconsidered. And I did actually China because I wrote in Lexus Nealoptery that I wrote two things. One, that China is going to have a free press. The leaders just don't know it. And my argument was that without free and accurate information, it would always be a limit on its growth. And the other thing I said was that my grandmother, because China was claiming it was going to take the 21st century. And I said, my grandma used to say, never see the century to a country that censors Google. It was a little thing grandma used to say. And so my belief is that censoring Google is a proxy for restricting people's imagination so that it would always be a limit. And so I confess, I got these wrong. But I said, so I plead guilty, your honor, but I'm asking for a 10-year suspended sentence. Because who declared 2022 the end of history? I think we're in a really interesting moment right now with China on this. And so I think it's really dangerous to make any of these statements. Globalization is dead. It's the end of history. I mean, you know, people don't realize, I actually wrote The World is Flat in 2004. Do you realize when I wrote that book, Facebook didn't exist. Twitter was still a sound. The cloud was still in the sky. 4G was a parking place. LinkedIn was a prison. Applications were what you sent to college. Big Data was a rap star. And Skype was a typographical error. All of that happened after I wrote The World is Flat. And people are telling me globalization is over. And I've been at all these Ukraine means. The amount of innovation the Ukrainians overnight have generated to help their people internally to, I mean, people's globalization is over. There's a Ukrainian parliamentarian to it. The Russian's first goal was to take down the terrestrial internet in Ukraine. That was, there was job one. And the Ukrainian MP tweets that Elon Musk, God, we could use some Starlink here. And three weeks later, there's 130 Starlink pods in Ukraine and they're up and running and Russia can't do anything. And globalization is over because somebody's trade is off this year or their foreign investments and their fund is down. I mean, I'm sorry, you know, who gave them ownership of this phenomenon? If it isn't a human phenomenon, what is it? Just stare out and just see if I can get a question from the gentleman just there. Hi, Neil Vamer, Tuane Hub, Global Shaper. I love the idea of writing about something that you were wrong about before. What do you think is the biggest... I guess it's all a whole book, so it's going to... I'm going to ask you to make a prediction. If you are wrong about your view now, what do you think is the most likely thing that would have caused that? What are you most concerned about? It's a very good question. So, I'll go back to a previous book that I wrote and that was Lexus Nality, which, if you permit me a moment of narcissism, I think was my most important book. Now, it was written in 1999, so it was written right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And at that time, there were four big claims kind of made of what will be the international system that replaces the Cold War system. That's what we're all asking of itself. Frank Fukuyama said it would be the end of history, the triumph of free markets and liberal political system. By the way, I'm a huge fan of Frank's. And I take my view of Frank as sort of my view on something. He may be early, but not entirely wrong. And so I'm not ready to, but at the time, it certainly hasn't come about. The second was Sam Huntington. He said it'll be a clash of civilizations. Or really, like Ukrainians fighting Russians? That's a clash. If there's ever been a clash within civilization that's tipped over the world, it's that. This is not a clash of civilizations. It's slob versus slob. Or how about Iraq versus Iran? I mean, Sunnis versus Shiites. That really didn't work. That didn't hold up at all. The third was Robert Kaplan wrote a book called The Coming Anarchy. The world's just going to get anarchy. He may be right. I mean, I think he's early, but who knows? That may be right, but hasn't been. So the book I wrote was Alexis in the Olive Tree. My argument is that actually what will be the defining feature of international relations is going to be the interaction between these really wired old urges. I called our olive tree urges. Our quest to build solidarity around sect, tribe, family, region, state, religion, nationalism, but the things that anchor us are olive trees. Interacting with the world, increasingly defined and tied together by this globalization system. And international policy would be this constant rubbing of these two things together. Occasionally, our olive tree urges would burst right through. Putin would take Crimea. And then he would make this move toward Kiev and then get beaten back, you know, in part by the globalization system. But to me, that's the system now. It's the interaction between what's really old and this new thing. And it takes different forms all the time. And that was the argument I was making. And the title of the book actually came, I was in Tokyo. I had gone to the Lexus factory in 1994 in Toyota City. And it was the first fully roboticized car factory. And I was just blown away. I'd never seen a roboticized car factory before, it was 1994. And it was a little thing where I would put the hot molten glue around the front windshield. And at the end, the little finger would come over and there would be a drop of glue on it. And a wire would come along and stand it off. It was just amazing, you know. I was wowed. I got back on the bullet train to drive back to Tokyo from Toyota City. And I was reading the Herald Tribune and they had a story in there about how Margaret Tupwiler had mis-stated some UN resolution on Palestine in 1948. And I just thought, you know, these people who I'm riding on their bullet train are building the greatest luxury car in the world with robots. And these people in page three of the Herald Tribune who I love so dearly, who I know so well, are still fighting over who owns which olive tree. And that's the post-Cold War world. That's where it came from. Great reflection. I'm just going to look out and see if I can wisdom of crowds for a final question before we, Alec? Alec Hogg from Brisbane News in South Africa. I need help from you on this because I can't understand it. The Ukrainians tell us that the Europeans are by buying gas or funding Russia to have a war with Ukraine, they're getting, Russia gets more money from buying, from selling its gas than Ukraine, sorry, than its costing Putin to wage the war. It seems like- It seems better than that. Putin starts a war and prices go up, you know. And so he actually sells, has to sell half the oil to make the same income in a war. Look, we specialize in America since 1973 of funding both sides in every war. That's what we do, you know. We fund the US military through our tax dollars and we fund the other side through our energy purchases. And you know, I wrote about this for the umpteenth time, you know, a few days ago because, you know, that's, you know, it's, I'm told I don't know this by experience, but I'm told that if you, if you jump off the top of a hundred story building, you can think you're flying for 99 floors, okay. It's the sudden stop at the end that tells you you're not, okay. And so you can launch a war with Ukraine and think you're flying, but you know, if you don't, it's all the underlying plumbing, you know. In that sense, I mean, it's a real Marxist, I believe it's the underlying, if you don't understand the underlying substructure of globalization, telecommunications, energy or whatnot. And so you get in these situations where you're funding both sides in war and that's where we are. Now, the interesting question here, and I would argue we're in the sumo stage of this war now. So it's like, now it's like two giant sumo wrestlers and each trying to get leverage on the other, you know. And with Russia, it's the pure weight of manpower and just dumb bombs, you know, against a pretty defenseless urban population spread out around Ukraine. For the West, Ukraine and NATO, it's this massive sanctioning of the Russian economy by both superpowers and super empowered people. And we're just sort of seeing, you know, now who will be able to generate the most leverage? And oil will be part of that. The problem with oil is that, you know, oil and energy is a scale problem. So if you don't, I mean, if you don't have scale, you have a hobby, you know. I like hobbies. I used to build model airplanes as a kid. I wouldn't try to change the world energy system as a hobby, which is basically what we do, you know, what we've been doing. And so there's only one word that matters when you're talking about energy and climate. It's transition. It's transition. If you don't have a strategy for transition to get from small scale renewables to base load renewables to get from oil and gas companies to energy companies. And if you think the transition, the critique from me of the Greens is they think the transition is flipping a switch. I tweeted on it. I got the board of my school to disinvest from Exxon. You got to get out of Facebook and into somebody's face if you're going to really make change, you know. So they have no plan for a transition. The energy companies, they've been selling as the same hogwash since 1973. Oh, Tom, you're right, you're right. We need to do the transition, but right now, we need to pump more oil. So that's what they say, every crisis, and yeah, you're sure, but we need to pump more oil. So actually, we never make the transition at the speed, scope, and scale that we need. Now, hopefully this will help and we're getting there. It's moving down the road. I mean, Germany, you know, gets 52% of its energy, electricity from renewables. Had they not a close shutdown, almost all 17 of their nuclear plants, they'd be 80% there. That's jumping off the top of 100-story building and thinking you're flying. So if you don't have a scale plan, you don't have a plan. And the only way to get scale, there's only one thing as big as Mother Nature, and that's Father Profit. That's the market. And if you aren't leveraging the market by reshaping it to give it the incentives you want for the outcome you want, you just have a hobby. Tom, what can I say? Thanks for coming in, challenging the consensus for us. It's great to have you framing things. Great to have you week by week, kind of challenging us to rethink. Sorry, Rana. And yeah, it's our bad. Rana was double-booked by us. So our apologies, but I think we're hoping to bring her back this afternoon for a one-on-one. But I think we've all gained a lot from listening to you and we gained a lot from reading you. So thank you so much. Thank you.