Parag Khanna; Separatists, migrations & the future of cities. Author of 'Move" & 'Connectography'

Parag Khanna [00:00:00] Right. If you could say that there is just two things, just two things that human beings have done for, you know, 10,000 years. It is that we move and we build things, and we build things that connect. So like three things. We move to new places, we congregate in cities and we connect those cities. We can't say that all human beings are tribal because there's many human beings that are not inherently tribal or don't even belong to a tribe in the first place.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] This is Michael Ring. I'm a cattle and crop farmer from Northern Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with a geo strategist and a wonderful thinker named Para Kana. This is one of those people that is out in the world producing books and making, giving talks about a concept that is somewhat difficult to put into words. It's looking at how the maps of human beings have come together based on how they trade, how they share ideas, how they come together, what he calls Connectography is something that we kind of intuitively know here on the podcast. And I can tell you we had 55 minutes and we crammed as much into this conversation as I ever have in any interview I've ever done. I absolutely loved this conversation. You are in for a wild ride that will really touch on everything from agriculture to cryptocurrencies to the death and rebirth of cities, and really is one of the most optimistic conversations I've had in a long time. And in this day and age, that's a really great thing. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but I am prepared to head out onto the road and go give a whole bunch of talks over the month of November and then the Christmas season will be upon us. So one of the things that I did last year that turned out to be a wild success was Legacy Interviews. This is where somebody comes and hires me to spend an hour or an hour and a half with a loved one to record your family stories, your values, some of the history that you've heard your parents or your grandparents talk about, but you've never actually taken the time to get them to put it down on paper.

Vance Crowe [00:02:14] Well, you can have me interview these people and talk with them and get them to open up in a way that isn't always common when they're talking to their kids or grandkids. And this has turned out to be something that people that have used this service have absolutely loved. The only limiting factor is time. I only can do so many. There's only so much, so many interviews I can do in a single day. So if you are interested in doing this and you'd like to have it be a Christmas gift, go to store dot Articulate Ventures and sign up. I believe that if you can get signed up, we can do them before December 15th and make sure that they're available for a Christmas gift. And just know this has been something that listeners and people that subscribe to the newsletter have absolutely loved. People have said, if they, if my house were burning down and I could only go get one thing, I would go get this recording. So we'll send you a digital copy so you don't have to worry about fires. But we'd love it if you did this. So go to store dot Articulate Ventures. Also, the network has seen some pretty dramatic growth in the last few days, is based on a percentage of our overall population. People are realizing, hey, as we're heading into winter, as I'm doing less social activities, I wanna be connected with a group of people that love the podcast. They wanna talk about the things that they hear, hear, and also build on their own skills. Right now we are just wrapping up so sober October, where everybody decided they're gonna give up alcohol or THC or caffeine. And this shared experience that we have as a group where people are talking about what they're realizing, they're talking about how much more productive they've become, or things that they learned that they would never have seen had they been involved with this substance.

Vance Crowe [00:03:57] It's a great thing. But we also have a place where we do Circular Firing Squad, which is a debate program where we take controversial subjects and let people come at it from all different angles and a whole bunch of other things. One of the biggest things that's been popular lately is because I'm doing these talks out in public, I have practiced some of the talks inside of the network to get feedback. So if you'd like to see some early talks, if you'd like to be connected with a group of really amazing people from all over the United States and even into Canada, we would love to have you. You can learn more by going to network dot Articulate Ventures. Alright, without further ado, let's go to this fascinating interview with Prag Kana Prague. Kana, welcome to the podcast.

Parag Khanna [00:04:39] So good to meet you, Vince.

Vance Crowe [00:04:41] You are a prolific writer. You've been on Ted stages several times, and your concepts are actually pretty novel and new. So when you're just introducing your ideas to a world of people that have maybe never heard of you, how do you quickly get to the, the core fundamental ideas that you like to talk about

Parag Khanna [00:05:00] In one sentence? I travel, therefore I am, you know, traveling is my methodology. Travel is what I've been doing since birth. I mean, I haven't, I'm an academic, I've been a professor, I have a PhD, but at the same time, I test everything I read and every interview I conduct with a so-called expert by going out on the ground and seeing it, and my books have been the result of the contrast between what I and everyone else reads and talks about versus what I actually physically go and see around the world. I would say what I'm most, you know, proud of is having traveled to more than 150 countries pretty much everywhere in the world I've ever wanted to go. And, you know, I, but nothing's gonna stop me. Keep on traveling.

Vance Crowe [00:05:37] Well, it's interesting, one of your core ideas back in 2012 was about how borders are completely manmade and things that we think are immutable are, you know, just something that we've created. And one of the points that you made that really struck me was 50 years ago there were a lot less countries to visit, and as Balkanization has happened, there's more and more countries. So explain why you think that has happened and kind of what implications that has for how people view themselves.

Parag Khanna [00:06:05] Well, I mean, borders are of course completely manmade. So it's, it's hardly my idea founded in 2012. It's just kind of a fact. And of course, borders are not immutable, nor are states. You know, as you just pointed out, in 1945 when the UN was founded, there were only 51 members. Today there's nearly 200. So obviously no state is sacred. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I'm sure it thought it was sacred, but obviously it proved not to be. I'm sure that's been true of many states in the past. And you know, one of the things I pointed out in my connectography book is that we have infrastructure, manmade infrastructure pipelines, electricity grids that pass through and under sovereign states that predate those states. And that will still be around after those states collapse. Just look at Iraq. Right. So, you know, the fact is that there's nothing permanent about states. And, and, and, and when we look at a map, and we, you know, this is I think one of the tragedies of, of modern life is that we, in our, in our kids' classrooms, in our offices, we hang these maps on the wall that just show the world is divided, and it's the one map, the one map that every classroom has. And hanging in the whole world is the map that teaches you that the, that that we are separated from each other by these completely arbitrary lines as if they're somehow sacred and immutable, whereas no such thing as true.

Vance Crowe [00:07:20] Yeah, and it's really fascinating because in the past, the way that people, before you had the ability to create maps and engineers and surveys, people could only say, let's use this physical border, this mountain range, this river to decide where you should be or where you shouldn't be. But then once you have this digital age and, and maps in it of themselves, people start viewing themselves differently. It's, it's a, you know, it's something is akin to water, right? People view themselves as Americans or Canadians, and, and yet that's entirely constructed. But because it's so much a part of our everyday lives, it's difficult to separate ourselves from those ideas.

Parag Khanna [00:07:56] It's such a great point. I think you phrased it in an extremely nuanced way, which is that we are basically a visual species, right? Or we've come to be one. So it it, and by the way, many borders in the world today still are of course natural features such as a river or a mountain range. And whereas it might be demarcated by GIS in a formal way, basically between Chile and Argentina, you know, it's one of these more or less kinds of things like the Andes Mountains, right? And therefore, when Chileans Argentinians look at each other, it's sort of like, you know, it's the Chileans over there on the other side of the Andes. It's not, they are precisely at, you know, this, to west of this meridian. And if one of them steps one foot across the line, we shoot them, you know? And, and I, and I feel like of course, in most of history, that's generally the way things have been. And, and again, the important thing is to remember that that's still fortunately still persists to some degree, and that we could go back to that world and have a bit more fluidity around our movements, across natural features rather than viewing, you know, again, artificial militarized walls and borders as being the, you know, sort of permanent divisions between ourselves. Because those are inevitably going to change.

Vance Crowe [00:09:05] You know, one of the challenges of being an author in the way that you are is you're talking both about the present moment, how things are, and then how things will be. And your most recent book move came about after the, the pandemic, or you must have been writing it during the pandemic, but then it was, oh,

Parag Khanna [00:09:20] I finished it before the pandemic, actually.

Vance Crowe [00:09:22] Oh my goodness. Okay. Yeah. So this is fascinating. So why don't you talk a little bit about this concept of move and then how the pandemic impacted the, the core philosophy of your book.

Parag Khanna [00:09:33] Great, great question. So Move was meant to be a sequel to Connectography. Connectography is at the functional geography of infrastructure. It's how we build the world, and move is about human geography. So how we move about the world, basically, and human geography is something that I had not yet deeply tackled in a book unto itself, which is to say, what is the distribution of 8 billion people on the planet? And what will that distribution be? Where will you Vance live in 20, 30, 20 40, 20 50? You, your children, your family, your loved ones, your friends, fellow Americans, fellow North Americans, fellow members of the human species, where will we be and why? And to answer that question, you know, you have to go back about a hundred thousand years and look at the fact that we've always been, nomadic, always been migratory, humans have always been moving to move is human. And so the fact that there was a pandemic, the fact that there was a lockdown, and there have been pandemics and you know, there have been pandemics before, there've never been lockdowns as extreme as what we did this past year. And I think it's important for people to remember that the, this lockdown of 2020 was the single most coordinated act in human history, right? Never has human society coordinated one single thing within a short period of time. And of course, we didn't coordinate a great opening, right? We instead we coordinated a great closure. And that's not an accident because sovereign states control their borders and they want to prevent the movement and the flow of people and pathogens across those borders. So the fact is, it's something quite remarkable that happened, but it does not mark the end of history. And where we were in history up until that moment of the lockdown was that migration was expanding.

Parag Khanna [00:11:08] You know, openness was accelerating, more people crossed borders in 2019, in one single year than it ever crossed borders in history. 1.5 billion people. So obviously the notion that we, or you know, we're we're heading in a direction that was fragmented, tribalized, tribal balkanized splintering was in some respects, nonsense, right? The volume of data flows, internet traffic to some degree, portfolio, capital investment, all of these things were reached enormous, enormous volumes. And the fact is, we're gonna go back to that, and we're gonna go back to that probably with a vengeance in many ways, because you can't stop some of these forces that drive people to move. It's people seeking economic opportunity in jobs. It's fleeing civil war, genocide, terror, you know, conflict. It is technological automation being driven away from your factory or you know, enjoying remote work and moving to someplace where you can just, you know, live in a cheaper place and have a better quality of life. And of course it is climate change, right? And climate has always been present, of course, in shaping where we live. And climate change is now accelerating, therefore it too will drive us to move. So the notion that this one pandemic as awful, tragic, and severe as it has been, is somehow gonna overturn all of these forces that drive human beings to seek stability, ecological stability, economic stability, social stability, political stability, and a good climate, a good latitude and altitude and attitude. As I say in the book, you know, the pandemic is not gonna stop that the pandemic in many as will just accelerate it.

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] It's an interesting thing about people moving into cities. So maybe, I don't know, five or 10 years ago we tipped over past 50% where people are living in cities, and if you go look at the Santa Fe Institute, they, they discovered the rule of 15 where you have the super linear growth. So for every time your population doubles, then people's income goes up by 15%, their number of patents. So trying, trying to factor how many ideas they're sharing, number of new businesses, the speed with which they walk, and even things that are negative things like crime also goes up by 15%. But one thing that would've been impossible for people like Joffrey West to have predicted would've been what happens when you don't have to physically be in the same place when you can share ideas like this, you and I talking, me being able to watch your body language, being able to feel like, I know you 'cause I can see you. What do you think the impact of like the digitization of the human being does to the growth of cities going forward?

Parag Khanna [00:13:44] I mean, neither rule is actually universal. So the rule of 15 and super linear scaling and so forth obviously doesn't apply to Sao Paulo, Brazil or Jakarta, Indonesia, right? In terms of things like productivity and patent output, because there are no patents being produced in Jakarta, Indonesia, right? And all you have is just more congestion, more traffic, highly unlivable and totally unproductive places. So it certainly applies if you're comparing New York and Tokyo and you can obviously see certain patterns. So I don't refute the work. It's highly important and super interesting work, but it isn't universal in that way. But I I, but again, obviously, so you know, what it does prove, and as this is the important point, is that when we can congregate in cities, certain magical things happen, basically, you know, we become more productive and we get that, that hive mind effect, if you will, kicking in. So it's mostly a positive phenomenon. It has been, if it weren't a positive thing, Vince, we wouldn't be doing it because we have a choice as to whether we decide to move to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or to simply all go live on farms. So that's useful. Now, in terms of digitization, we're not all digital, so that's not universal either. And we don't, can't all be remote workers. Actually the, you know, I think it's a really a remarkable feat that 30 to 40% of the global workforce is location independent and can do their work remotely. That's a staggeringly high percentage of the global workforce, you, me, and many other people. But let's not forget, the majority of human beings still need to physically be in a physical place where they physically work. So let's, you know, take a pause, shed a tear, whatever the case may be.

Parag Khanna [00:15:16] But most people are, that doesn't mean you're a manual worker, right? But it does mean that you're required to be there. Let's say you're a government worker and going to a government office, right? Or you're a doctor, you know, most doctors aren't doing telemedicine, right? You're physically treating patients every single day. So I, I do celebrate the remote worker, obviously, it's a big theme in the book is, is, you know, young people being digital nomads and getting to choose where they live and build a better life for themselves is a very important part of how the next generation is gonna sort of, you know, expand their horizons, if you will, and contribute to building our future civilization. So I'm pro that, but the operative law, I guess, becomes Metcalf's law, right? The value of the network increases in proportion to the density of the nodes and the connectivity between nodes and the network. So more of a, another sort of mathematical approach to understanding things. And that is actually how, not looking at cities in and of themselves, but how cities relate to each other. And it's a principle that I discussed in Connectography because I was saying, look at this world that's not just three or four major cities that run the whole planet. There's about 50 major mega city hubs. And even if it's not one of the mega city hubs, there's, you know, a hundred, 150 really important cities in the world and what every single one of those cities wants. To the extent it has a psychology, you know, more than anything else, it's to connect to other cities. It doesn't want walls, borders, moats, and barriers between itself and other cities. That's the last thing any city leader wants. Every city leader, and almost every resident of a city wants more airline connections, more internet cables, more stock exchange trading, and more talent mobility and more di digital interaction with other cities.

Parag Khanna [00:16:51] Because you prove your importance in the world as a function of your connectivity. You're not important based on your size. You're not important based on your number of people. You're based, your, your important based on your degree of connectivity. And that's something that, that cities embody is that principle. And therefore all cities, in a way, are contributing to this Metcalf's law on a planetary scale, even if they're not coordinating in doing it.

Vance Crowe [00:17:14] Man, this just got really exciting for me, like the, because the concept of Metcalf's law, when you start to draw it out, right? So you take a little dot, and then you make another dot, and how many connections can there be between those? Well, just one. But as soon as you start adding in another dot and another dot, and you start interconnecting, you start seeing, wow, you have exponential growth, you, you actually can see how every, for every time you add a new person into a community, the interconnections between them just skyrocket. And so for me, this was like a, a mathematical concept that was akin to like staring off into the universe where you're like, look at how powerful this is. But then when you start to have that collide with the, the tribal brain that you kind of mentioned before, you know, Dunbar realized that you can only keep track of 150 different relationships in your mind. There's a reason that all church congregations around 130 families, right? There's a reason that you have the county breakdowns and the parish breakdowns are somewhat similar because the human mind can only handle so many connections. Is there a limiting factor to cities, or is it because they're emergent? There's something else going on there that, that, that supersedes individuals and even the communities of people that they can know.

Parag Khanna [00:18:28] Well, there's so many, you, you said limiting factors, but it's also maybe just, you know, boundary constraints or just part of the evolution or the stage that we're at in our evolution, which is to say that, you know, not all continents are deeply connected to each other. You know, if they were, then there would be even more connectivity and we wouldn't be limited. And if you look right now, believe it or not, across the Atlantic Ocean, across the South Atlantic, African and South American cities are striving to trade more with each other, opening more ports and shipping routes. There's some inner fiber optic internet cables now. And, you know, you would say, well, these are relatively underdeveloped regions of the world. They're quite poor. And nonetheless, they're striving and yearning to connect and to be part of that overall, again, intercity global network. So the fact that any one person's individual mind is limited in how many connections it feels they can embrace and understand and, and hold dear, is not necessarily a limitation on a global scale in terms of how much connectivity we can build. And this is the difference between, one of the things I always explain the difference between connectivity and globalization. Globalization is a measure of how intense and voluminous our interactions are at any given point in time. But you can't have any of them without connectivity. Connectivity is the capacity, and we are building ludicrous volumes of connective capacity in the world. Every pipeline, every railway, every highway, every internet cable, every electricity grid is part of the capacity for global connectivity and exchange of goods, services, ideas, capital, and so on. So whether or not we use it any given time or that you or I feel that we need it or can handle it without our brain exploding, you know, is that's, that's a, that's just a kind of, that's meteorology, right?

Parag Khanna [00:20:06] Just a day-to-day variation. But fundamentally, there is no limit to our collective ability to continuously build this connectivity in the capacity for that connectivity. So that means basically, fine, you may be comfortable with 150 people today, but you can just go somewhere else and connect to a hundred, another 150 people tomorrow and redefine what your tribe is and embrace a new tribe, a new identity, a new place. And that's also possible in a totally connected world.

Vance Crowe [00:20:33] So you've like traveled all over the world and you've seen the way that people live in these large, you know, super mega regions, these, these cities that are so vast that their numbers larger than the human mind can actually, you know, understand what did the, the pandemic show you about cities that you didn't expect, right? Bringing everybody all together and Yeah, I don't, I don't really have a great question there other than something seemed to be revealed about cities during the pandemic that wasn't there before. Right?

Parag Khanna [00:21:04] I know what you mean. And I think there are a few things there. So for one thing, and I want to immediately begin with this sort of cautionary note, A lot of people announce that the pandemic means the death of the city, right? You heard it all, you know, heard it so many times. And when people said that they basically have this image in their head that when, when, when someone says thus city, they mean New York and they mean Los Angeles, right? And, and therefore, if people left those cities, it's the death of the city. So it's wrong in so many ways. You know, let me, let me begin to enumerate, first of all, you know, New York and Los Angeles don't represent all cities around the world, and people weren't leaving all cities around the world during the pandemic. Most of the human population lives in Asia. I devoted my previous book, the Future is Asian to exactly this issue. And it, you'll never meet an Asian, literally of the 5 billion Asians on the planet earth. You know, I'm literally speaking about most of humanity. They're not gonna leave the city, right? The Asians will flock to cities always, because the quality of life differential between the city and the countryside in Asia is still vast. You're not gonna have your 5G fiber broadband outside of the capital city of a major, you know, of an Asian country, right? And you're not gonna have good schools, good hospitals, none of those perks, right? Restaurants, you name it. Even just stability and you know, access to connectivity. You know, even in the airport, you're not gonna have that in a lot of Asia except for in the big cities. So fear not for global urbanization, global urbanization is gonna continue. Now, even if we believe that the entire world is just the west or just America and everyone operates like America, let's just take America as a microcosm.

Parag Khanna [00:22:42] The fact that New York may quote unquote lose, it doesn't mean the city has lost because the city actually always wins. We have 7,000 years of urbanization, as you pointed out, 10 years ago, we reached a real milestone, which is that the majority of the human population lives in cities, and that percentage is still gonna continue to accelerate. So the fact is that the city always wins. And New York's loss is still another city's gain. It's Austin, it's Miami, it's Denver, it's Seattle, right? LA is loss is a, is a gain for, for Phoenix or for Calgary, for Toronto, right? For what, whatever the case may be. So some city is always winning. The only question is which one, but the city always wins. Now the next point is within the city, right? What has changed during the pandemic and what attracts people to certain cities over other cities? Here we also have some pretty universal rules. You need affordability, right? People will leave overpriced places for affordable places, pretty straightforward. Now there's the kind of, let's say the more qualitative issue around livability. Now, given the pandemic, people say, well, I'm gonna spend more time at home. I'm gonna be be traveling less. I don't wanna live in a shoebox. I want to be, I wanna be near a park. So one phenomenon that I do think is durable is this idea of a 15 minute city, right? And a lot of places were going this direction anyway. New York was eliminating, you know, car lanes and replacing with bicycle lanes and public street parks and cafes before the pandemic, right? They've been doing it for 15 years. And other cities have been doing it too, saying, let's have maximized green space, public amenities, public wifi, you know, eliminate parking lots and, and, and, you know, add more bike lanes, all that kind of stuff.

Parag Khanna [00:24:16] The 15 minute city, make sure that everything you could possibly want, food, movies, schools, medical clinics, everything is within a 15 minute walk from where you are. And I think that is probably a very, very kind of, that that's an idea that's now become quite rooted all around the world in, in those cities that can afford to do it. Paris is a real leader in this area, you know, Berlin, Barcelona, and so forth.

Vance Crowe [00:24:41] Yeah. I'm struck by your examples of New York and la My experience in both of those cities is that the, the biggest value that you get out of being in a city is the ability to, you know, collide serendipitously with other people. But in New York and LA it's not actually that easy. Whereas you have these new cities that were much younger, they were able to make infrastructure changes, or at least as they were building out infrastructure, saying, how can we adapt and, and not have the same problems that the BART system in San Francisco has, or the, the subway system in New York. And, and therefore they're much more able to adapt and, and grow. And so it may just be that the old cities that started first just have some amount of decay or wearing down and the other cities are able to to grow much faster.

Parag Khanna [00:25:28] It's so true. So, you know, inertia, on the one hand, it's sort of, you know, we built great infrastructure and used it well and thoroughly. If you think about the east coast kind of Amtrak corridor, right? Boston, New York, Washington obviously serves millions of passengers every single day and has for decades. But now you can't build a more modern high-speed rail because of nimbyism. So you already have the rail, so you can't stop the rail and you can't rip out the rail because everyone needs the rail and therefore you don't get, don't get to build a better rail. And no one wants to build a new rail next to the old rail, right? So in a nutshell, that's why, you know, you get places that get kind of bypassed. Meanwhile, look at the Middle East. Let's look at Dubai and Abu Dhabi, right? The two main centers, the two main Emirates of the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. Now there, they of course don't have any railways, so they're able to just say, and they've got a lot of oil money, so they can just call up Virgin Hyperloop, call up Elon Musk and say, Hey, you know, build us hyperloop, let's do it right? And of course, because it's a hereditary monarchy, even authoritarian state, they can pretty much do whatever they want. And of course this is something that's in the public interest, but they can pretty much snap their fingers and, and get it done because there's nothing standing in their way. So there's a, there's definitely that kind of phenomenon that's part and parcel of history. And that's why places that have these legacy institutions need to constantly modernize. London is a good example of this because London obviously has, is a gigantic city, has many boroughs, 20 different boroughs. It's like 20 cities, you know, sort of accumulated together, conglomerated together, and they're always improving the tube network, right?

Parag Khanna [00:27:02] Which is their subway above ground or, you know, and underground and modifying it, expanding it, adding new lines, you know, speeding it up and so forth. And that, that's how you stay relevant is these incremental improvements in your infrastructure to suit the times.

Vance Crowe [00:27:17] Yeah. I could not believe when I spent time in London that how far you could ride their public system outside of the main corridors of the city after having been in DC and New York. Like you get on that and you can go kind of far, but eventually it ends with, with London, you realize like, holy geez, this is so far away and it will take you all the way, literally out to the countryside, all the way to the coast, and Oh,

Parag Khanna [00:27:41] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:27:41] And it's very, very rare in the US

Parag Khanna [00:27:43] You spend, you spend your whole day, your whole life riding the tube in London. It is true. It, it's, it's amazing. People don't necessarily appreciate how extensive it is the way you just described. And it's also also relatively cheap.

Vance Crowe [00:27:58] You know, the thing that strikes me about people that study international relations, right? You have a view, almost like an architect does of a house where you're looking down at the blueprint and you're always seeing things from the big picture. When you think about these large global phenomena, like the connectivity of cities and how people are moving, where does the individual fit into this? Because it seems to me that there is, we are having to go through some sort of philosophical revolution in order to be able to adapt to this. Why, you know, we're in the age of acceleration, things keep moving faster and faster and faster. And the philosophical or religious traditions that used to answer questions don't seem to apply now. And that really comes down to the individual. How do they view themselves within these larger groups? How do, how does this strike you?

Parag Khanna [00:28:49] Well, I think you're raising two things in parallel. One is just the role of the individual somehow as, I guess you would say in economics, a price taker, right? I mean, you know, we don't get to shape the system as individuals. We're victims of it. We have to respect, we have to respond to it in parallel. You're also talking about Phil philosophy or religion or worldview, you know, and not everyone sort of has that per se, but obviously it, it shapes how we respond or how we feel about what's happening kind of in, in, in the world. So the first one is more material, right? And the second one is more kind of ideational. So on the material, I think it's, it's really interesting. We are technically on a, you know, at the, the median human being or the, the mean or average human being, you know, has more agency than ever before, right? You know, even people from relatively underdeveloped countries, their passports are now more accepted around the world. You know, that's getting digitized and machine readable passport. There are, are countries that are looking for people with all different kinds of SPI skills. There's an embassy somewhere near you, you can apply and you can get a visa and you can go, you know, travel and experience the world, ideally, right? Not everyone, most people will still die in the country that they were born. But more people have opportunity than ever before. So I, I would reject the notion that some people say, which is that, you know, we're, we're completely hopeless in this world of ever growing and spiraling complexity and we can't do anything about it. You can, you can, for example, move, right? And that's exactly what my book is about, saying, you know, we are 8 billion individual agents, 8 billion people, you know, a a smaller number of families if you want to take the family unit, which is still of course, very, very important.

Parag Khanna [00:30:24] You know, and we actually have more capacity than, than before. Even if you're stuck where you are, you have digital access to cryptocurrencies, to information markets, whatever the case may be. And so there really is a deep change going on in the role of the individual and the individual matters in many ways, more than than ever before. You know? And even the fact that your data may be being, you know, sort of surveilled or stolen or spied on, you know, again, your, the fact that you have useful data at all is something relatively novel, right? If you think about it in history, it's someone who even wants your data, right? That you even have that monetary value, that you are even a data point rather than just a body, you know, is actually something quite novel. And, and again, it's a sign of what is happening globally. We are all part of this global, you know, sort of network civilization, as I described. We're not equal members of this civilization. It's not a utopian or necessarily a positive thing. There many dystopian and negative elements to it, but it is a material fact. So I want to be as objective, you know, in a way as possible about this. You and a person in India or Pakistan or Cambodia have certain things in common. You own a mobile phone. There's a, there's a phone, there's a number attached to it. You can reach out and call someone, you know, the kind of six degrees of separation has pretty much collapsed at this point. It's probably down to like three degrees. I think we could probably test that. It might be really interesting. There's that. Then there's the i ideological or ideational and intellectual questions you're asking, which are super fascinating. But obviously there isn't one kind of right answer.

Parag Khanna [00:31:55] You know, do I believe that there's a certain intellectual teleology to the world? Yes, I do actually. And which is not to say we're all gonna take on one view, but I do believe that there's a narrative arc, right? The narrative arc is about connectivity, right? If you could say that there is just two things, just two things that human beings have done for, you know, 10,000 years. It is that we move and we build things and we build things that connect. So like three things, we move to new places, we congregate in cities, and we connect those cities. We can't say that all human beings are tribal because there's many human beings that are not inherently tribal or don't even belong to a tribe in the first place, right? So that's a myth. It's not, it's not a useless myth. It's, it's a, it's a factual statement in some places, but it's not universal. The universal truths. If you were an alien that were, that could not understand any human language, and you were observing human behavior, and you were just floating in the orbit above the planet and watching the world population that started out very small and grew to a billion and stayed at a billion and then saw suddenly became 8 billion people, and you had to fly back to your other galaxy and write a report about these strange, you know, ants and, you know, humans moving about the earth like an ant colony over a 10,000 year period, your report would say the following, you know, these creatures move, they build things and they connect those things to each other because you wouldn't be able to see the borders, you wouldn't be able to see the tribes, you wouldn't be able to understand or decipher the different religions. You would simply see what we do. So I, I make those statements as again, you know, factual observations, devoid of ideology, but in a certain vision, a certain view, worldview emerges from that because it is the sum total of our human behavior, therefore it constitutes an idea.

Parag Khanna [00:33:39] And that idea happens to be one more powerful than any, any religion per se.

Vance Crowe [00:33:45] So there's a, you know, you're talking about things that are em emergent, right? They, they occur whether or not any one individual is there. If you or I go away, they will exist. And we have so much, so little agency to change the overarching picture. There's some amount of randomness or, or things that happen in the world. So I'm struck that just this last weekend, Jack Dorsey came to Twitter and said, hyperinflation is here. You know, it's already happening as it goes in the us So it goes to the rest of the world. How much do you think, well, one, you're, you, you studied at the London School of Economics, do you agree with him? Is hyperinflation coming? And then two is, when you look at that and how it impacts the future, when do you start seeing those things? How much does it impact the long-term future? Is it like, eh, it'll just be a bump and it'll get smoothed out over time?

Parag Khanna [00:34:38] Well, I mean, almost by definition, when you have a hyperinflationary moment, it doesn't last forever because it has to collapse. So, and that, that's exactly what happens in any historical or present, you know, case of hyperinflation. It's not sustainable. Whether or not it's here, no, of course not. Because hyperinflation, again, by definition, is a significantly higher rate of inflation than we have right now. Right? If, if you're saying you're in a hyperinflationary moment right now, you obviously don't know a whole lot about history because, or or even about Venezuela today or other countries, because hyperinflation is like, you know, 1000, 10000% inflation. So are we in the early stages of inflation? Potentially. I mean, I think that there's a very interesting conversation going on right now about the composition or of drivers of today's temporary, I think inflation, because there's equally powerful deflationary forces out there. So we have to bear those in mind. You know, the inflationary or the inflation, you know, you might say, would look at the supply constraints today. Look at the trade war, look at the, obviously the, the, the fiscal stimulus and the dubbish monetary policy and all of these things. But I think each of those can be still be unwound in a way, right? Some of them are temporary, some of them are, are, again, policy driven and that can be changed. Some of them are supply chain driven that can be changed and so forth. Overall, if you take the abundance view, you know, this would be deflationary if you combine the abundance view of raw material production, digitization, automation, as well as the deflation in the world population, right?

Parag Khanna [00:36:12] This is one of the significant points of departure of my, my move book, is that the world population is hitting a plateau and a, a stagnant and declining world population is obviously deflationary in terms of at least, you know, sort of upward pressure on prices, so long as you still have productive capacity. So if you're automating everything and of a smaller world population, that's not the kind of environment that you would describe as inflationary, right? And the cost of, of, of some of the critical aspects of our economic basket, like housing, you know, or could, could be set to collapse. If you think about the oversupply, America has the second largest vacant housing stock on the planet next to Japan. And there's, there's a reason why both of us have such a high vacant, high housing stock. It's because we actually are, have completely plateaued in our populations. Without immigration, America's population would already begun to decline. And the higher birth rate that immigrants have in Japan, it is an, an absolute decline. Hundreds of thousands of people every single year. You know, there, there are more deaths than births in Japan. So they have empty homes everywhere. We have empty homes everywhere. So, you know, housing has to be thought of as well as part of this situation. But is there, right now, this is like a housing costs, it's because of like higher lumber prices. But you can't look at higher lumber prices and say, oh, yes, that's a permanent condition. Of course, it's not a permanent condition.

Vance Crowe [00:37:41] The, I mean, so the, I don't, I I couldn't possibly debate your, your fact on the vacant houses. It's just shocking. So I'm trying to put this into context to say, well, is that because it's in the, you know, parts of cities that people no longer wanna live in and that are decayed that eventually will come back? Is it because, you know, like how, how is one to even wrap their mind around that as we watch so much money get poured into the building of new houses,

Parag Khanna [00:38:07] Right? So the, it's a, it's a location question, right? So if people are moving to Boise, Idaho, and, you know, or to Denver, Colorado, and they haven't zoned in advance for enough, you know, sort of, sort of housing stock to be built as people pour, of course the price is gonna go up. That's just simple supply and demand. But again, will it eventually stable? The stabilize is the key question. And the answer historically is yes, certainly in America it's going to stabilize.

Vance Crowe [00:38:36] Man, that's fascinating. I, I'm, I'm so thrown off, I don't even know where to go. I like, tell me more about what happens in a place like Japan if they, you know, they, they historically have been very limited in how many people they let into their country. They have a, a really old population. What happens to a country when they just stop letting people in and their birth rate doesn't keep up with their death rate?

Parag Khanna [00:39:06] It's a great question. We'll be watching this play out in real time over the next 10, 20 years in Japan. We've been watching it for the last 10. So you already have a, a, some signal of where things are going. So for one thing, it's irreversible, right? They, they and other countries have tried lots of policies to promote fertility and they've always failed, you know, no country that has tried to increase fertility through subsidies and, you know, gifts to women and, you know, generous childcare kind of subsidies and, and, and even paternal, you know, sort of, sort of, sort of benefits and all of these kinds of things. It never really works. It maybe work for like a year, but that is not exactly gonna increase the world population, right? And if Sweden, you know, has, has very generous paternity leave again, Sweden is a tiny country, right? Again, it's not gonna move the needle in the grand scheme of things, China is, is started saying, you know, please have more than one child, right? They of course, restricted for a long, long time they had a one child policy. Now they're saying, have two, have three children. Can I just tell you it's not gonna happen, right? Because young people today are highly economically insecure. They're motivated by other even, you know, sort of post materialist values, sustainability, climate change, and they don't want to have more kids and they can't afford it when they're living in cities and so forth. So you go back to Japan, Japan's always almost a harbinger of the future, right? They, they're, they're not gonna have any children. The population is literally dying off. But here's the, here's the kicker. There've never been as many foreigners in Japan as there are today.

Parag Khanna [00:40:39] They have let 3 million people onto the Japanese islands. Now remember, you don't swim to Japan, right? So there are 3 million people who have legally entered Japan. And Japan is fully aware that these people entered Japan, has let them in. Japan has even encouraged them to come. And that doesn't make headline news, but it's a fact, right? So there've never been three. Now is it's kind of a drop in the bucket in a population of more than a hundred million people. But as the number of Japanese people declines and the number of foreigners grows, right? It's some, at some point in the future, maybe the distant future, it's no longer just a drop in the bucket. And even if it's statistically still not a big deal, the fact is that it does bring about certain changes, changes in policies, changes in, in the idea of what Japanese culture is. Now, Japanese culture is as a, as a ethnographic phenomenon, is something that's obviously quite insular. But in terms of the cultures that thrive on the island known as the islands known as Japan, that becomes something new, something novel, something we've never seen before. And you have Chinese and Filipinos and Koreans and Indians and Bangladeshi and Americans and Europeans and all manner of people are literally gathering right now as we speak in Japan, because they find it to be a very livable place. And it is from a climate standpoint, it's one of the places that I call in the book a climate oasis, you know, on a relative basis, it's better off than being in say, Egypt, right? And it's obviously a rich, stable, safe, secure country kind of place where Americans can say, Hey, well you know what? I'm gonna go and live in Japan and buy a little house and fix it up and, you know, ride out the next couple of decades and just enjoy life.

Parag Khanna [00:42:16] And that's exactly what people are doing. They're doing the same thing in Italy as they are in Japan. So I think that, you know, it doesn't mean that what the meaning of Japanese ness may not change all that much in the next 20 years, but the day-to-day life for the human beings who live on Japan is gonna change quite a lot. And I observed this in a lot of places where in a way, like your unofficial language becomes English. There are districts of Tokyo that have more foreigners than Japanese people. And basically it's like you can pretty much get by in English in those neighborhoods. Now obviously you would go there and you would wanna learn some Japanese, but there you could pretty much live your day-to-day life and not speak any Japanese in certain parts of Tokyo. Would you or I have been having this conversation 15 years ago, Vance, that oh my goodness, there's so many foreigners hanging out in like this part of Tokyo that you don't even need to speak Japanese. That's crazy. You never would've thought that. Now, lemme just give you another example just quickly. It's Berlin, it's a place I know really well. I've lived there off and on for the last 30 years. And if you, there's a, there's a, I quote this very, very famous, one of the most famous lines in all of German or modern political campaign history. There was a, a politician who used this phrase kind and kind means, means have more children stop importing Indians. Right? And that was uttered 30 years ago, almost to the day. And I quote that guy in the book, and I say, what if you took that politician, Norbert Rutkin or something was his name? And you said, Hey Norbert, I got some news for you in 30 years time, your country, Germany, right? With its history of ethno-nationalism and everything else that we don't need to repeat right now, your country in 30 years is gonna have 1 million Africans, it's gonna have 6 million Turks, it's gonna have about 2 million Arabs, it's gonna have about four or 5 million people from the Balkans in the former Soviet Union.

Parag Khanna [00:44:03] You're gonna have about 400,000 Chinese people and about 50,000 Indians and a whole smattering of other people from all over the world. Dude, he'd have a heart attack on the spot, right? He would drop dead on the spot. Well, Vance, welcome to Germany 2021. I just summed up for you German demographics in the year 2021, right? And they just had an election, right? Just recently. And of course, a left wing coalition more or less won, and not the far right anti-immigrant parties, they lost, they got wiped out. So the fact is, whether it's Germany, Japan, other places, Canada obviously is the melting pot par excellence at this point. Canada takes in almost as many migrants as we do in America with one 10th of our population. So pound for pound, most generous country in the world in terms of immigration. And it's becoming a country that they call more brown than white. It's kind of where, where Canada is going. Again, is it a, is it an election issue? No. You know, do they have a Donald Trump of Canada? No. You know, they have Justin Trudeau who also just got reelected. And every Canadian more or less stands behind. Not every Canadian fine, but there's a political consensus that mass migration is good for the country.

Vance Crowe [00:45:14] I think that, so I spent a lot of time in the countryside of Canada, at least I did before COVID hit. And the very thing that you're describing to me sounds like the precursor to more balkanization. You know, I, one time was at a, a cattle ranching thing in Alberta, and a guy named Peter Zhan stood up in front of this crowd, and he, he talks about his geopolitical worldview, and then he says, and this is why I believe Alberta should break off and see and, and become a part of the United States, the 51st state. And I thought, oh my God, you're gonna get booed here, man. And no, it was wild, wild cheers. Like it was shocking to me. I was not expecting it because I think that

Parag Khanna [00:45:54] I'm sure they were entertained. Yeah, certainly. I've, I've been to Alberta. Was it the Calgary stampede?

Vance Crowe [00:45:59] No, no. This was the, the people that send their cattle to the stampede. This was the, these people.

Parag Khanna [00:46:04] Woohoo. I loved it. I had a great time there.

Vance Crowe [00:46:07] So I, it's

Parag Khanna [00:46:07] A beautiful place.

Vance Crowe [00:46:09] I I think that when you say things like this, where it's like the, the culture that exists right now is not going to be there and that it's going to be something very different, right? So you, you could frame it as a negativity that people should want this sort of cultural change, or it's, it's inevitable. But to the people that are facing that, it probably feels somewhat like an invasion. It feels like they had a cultural space where they fit, they understood, they, they thrived, they built. How do you think this will play out culturally as more and more people come in? Will it just be the Well,

Parag Khanna [00:46:42] Yeah, go ahead. I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't deny at all that there are people who feel that way. But let's be clear that we can measure these propositions. What you are saying and what I'm saying, and we're not necessarily saying different things, but let's remember that Canada is a liberal democratic society with a very high voter participation. So if everyone felt the way, you know, that you are describing some people as feeling then Justin Trudeau would not be prime minister and they wouldn't have 400,000 people coming in. It's their sovereign choice to do so. And they're doing it on the basis of what, what the, the electorate has voted. So obviously it's a significant minority of people who feel threatened by this in the way that you're describing. But do they matter? Yes, of course they do. Or do their opinions matter? Yes. Should they be compensated or should they in some way be in a way, you know, engaged, you know, in a, in a discourse that makes them feel, feel that this is not going to harm, you know, their values and their interests? Of course they should. Absolutely, they should. But also part of it hinges on this definition of, like Canada, you know, in my work, in political geography, I'm okay with the idea that you may have, you know, more enclaves. You don't have to necessarily call it balkanization. Balkanization obviously carries very negative connotations. It's, it's just about geographic and cultural drift in a very large country. And I'm okay with that. We have red state and blue state in America. Dallas, Texas is a, you know, blue city and a red state. And people are entitled to flock and move and congregate according to the places where they feel that their values are best represented. So cowboy country of Canada could remain cowboy country of Canada and be, be very sort of conservative.

Parag Khanna [00:48:15] It might be in a a, it might be a zone or a patch that spans multiple Canadian provinces. And those people may say, Hey, over here we're not gonna participate in the federal schemes to relocate Syrian refugees. We don't want any. And they're gonna be able potentially to say they're gonna win. They might win that battle politically and sort of, you know, no Syrian refugees here. Let all the Syrian refugees go to Toronto and you deal with them in your liberal big city. I am okay with that. We've gotta be clear here. There's not, I'm not some utopian cosmopolitan liberal who's coming in to impose mass migration upon you and to drown and dilute your culture, not by any stretch of the imagination. We will continue to have new formations and political groupings and even secessionist movements like the type that you are describing being kind of whipped up in a frenzy. We're gonna all, we're always gonna have that. Remember, it's my job to look at the map and to say that, Hey, wait a minute, we actually have 200 sovereign nations, and 75 years ago, we only had 50. I'm the last guy on the planet earth who's gonna pretend that the map is stuck and frozen the way it is now, I'm a Wilsonian. I'm a Wilsonian who believes that the project of self determinations of peoples is perhaps never complete. And I want, I want Palestinians to have their own country. I want the Kurds to have their own country and on and on it goes. So in a way, I'm not inter-tribal by any stretch of the imagination, right? You know, in a way, if you're a Wilsonian nationalist and you believe in self-determination, in a way you're sort of a tribalist. So put me on that side of the fence, not on the other side, right? What I'm for is a recognition, a mutual recognition that, you know, these different political groupings should find ways to peacefully coexist because they actually, despite their desire to be independently governed, according to their own preferences and values, still have a lot to benefit from relations with each other.

Parag Khanna [00:50:00] So even if you had Quebec go independent, right? Even if you have Texas go independent, Texas is not exactly gonna be an island, right? Texas is gonna have relations with America and with Mexico, right? And that's the way all of history has worked. So it's kind of hard to deny that that's what's going on. If you even look at the Balkan Balkans, like the real Balkans, lemme tell you a crazy story. 'cause I went to high school in, in Germany and when I was a kid in the 1990s and I was living near hum, we were watching this every day. We were watching the genocide unfold. I was writing letters to newspapers expressing my righteous indignation that we have not learned the lessons of the Holocaust and watching genocide. And I was, you know, you know, a a, a teenage activist kid. Here we are today, you know, 25, whatever years later. And in the Balkan countries, they have formed a customs union. The same people who are literally slitting each other's throats and, you know, you know, piercing each other's bellies and slit and killing each other, murdering each other by the hundreds of thousands. Those countries now have a customs union with each other kind. You might ask yourself, well why do, why do they go to all the trouble then of slitting each other's throats and having a genocidal war of dissolution? It's because they each wanted to govern their own unit and they have the right to do that. But guess what? The smaller and smaller and smaller our countries become in the world, the less au anarchic they can be, the less they can survive on their own. So more tribalism, more balkanization, more splintering, more states actually breeds inevitably the need for more connectivity, more infrastructure, more trade, more exchange.

Parag Khanna [00:51:30] And that's what I call the devolution and aggregation dynamic. We split apart, we come together, it's Humpty Dumpty, it's Humpty Dumpty, it's a Humpty Dumpty theory of the world. It's actually what I called it in, in a previous book. And that's literally, you can't deny. Well, I'm not spinning a theory in a way for you, I'm not spinning a hypothesis about the future. I'm describing the last like 10,000 years of human history here.

Vance Crowe [00:51:53] Oh man, I think this is fantastic. And one, one of the things that comes to mind is, you're describing this, is it appears to me that with the rise of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, these kinds of things, then the ability for city states to exist without the, without the, the ability for a fiat currency for a large government that's far away to determine what's going on because they control the monetary policy. Do you agree? Do you think cryptocurrencies empower the city state more than people are right now recognizing?

Parag Khanna [00:52:27] So a couple things. You would have the city state being more empowered even if you never had cryptocurrency, because you have the elimination of information asymmetry, which is a fancy way of saying the more people in cities or provinces know about what's happening to their money, the more they have wanted to assert control over their, over their, their policy, right? So you have this phenomenon. Again, this is devolution, this is the meaning of the word devolution, right? And you have this in America, you have this all over the world. You have this in Canada where British Columbia or the province of Western Australia or the city of Venice and Italy, they're all saying, or you know, Barcelona got the Catalans in Spain. They're saying, wait a minute, we pay in X amount of money to the capital city and we get back half of X. Why are we doing that? That's a bad deal. And we don't like the inefficient way in which the federal government is managing our money. So we are gonna assert more control. That's devolution. We've been, I've been tracking devolution for 20 years way before I ever heard of Bitcoin. Well, I guess that's before Bitcoin even existed. So can cryptocurrency accelerate this process that's already underway? Sure it can. Well, let's remember that it, it depends on the degree and the extent and the speed and the frictionlessness by which you can, can, can operate that cryptocurrency or transition towards a cryptocurrency. 'cause let's remember that having your fiat currency managed by a central bank somewhere else is also there providing a public good to you. 'cause it costs you money to operate your own currency. If the Scots become independent and decide that they're not only gonna become independent politically, but no longer use the British pound, they're gonna have to set up their own central bank and their own currency and figure out how that currency relates to and has, you know, an exchange rate with other currencies and build up large currency reserves in multiple currencies and do a hell of a lot of stuff that costs a lot of money and takes a ton of effort.

Parag Khanna [00:54:16] Whereas you're kind of, at least for a while, better off sticking with the British pound. Right? So, you know, if you just say, well, we're Scotland, we're gonna be independent and we're now gonna use Bitcoin, you know, it might work, but you can't guarantee it. It takes time. But overall, I'm bullish because I'm bullish on the, on, on this devolution. I'm bullish on individuals as agents and I'm bullish on connectivity. You put those three things together and you get the P two P civilization as people call it, a peer-to-peer civilization. And one of the things I just read about on Twitter the other day is the, the, the deployment of this thing called World Coin. You know, completely neutral global cryptocurrency that simply has its own as its foundation. The participation of everyone who can be part of it, and therefore your ID links you directly to this currency that you share with other people. And you can basically have a global bartering marketplace in a way, or a marketplace in which you transact in whatever value you assess a service or good to be worth in that world coin, you know, unit. So I, I totally, totally celebrate this, but I believe that it, it accelerates something that was already happening and that that, that's totally fine.

Vance Crowe [00:55:24] I absolutely hate that we have to go. But I know you have another thing to get to. So if people wanted to learn more, find your books, how could they go about doing that?

Parag Khanna [00:55:33] Para kana.com. I'll spell it. P-A-R-A-G-K-H-A-N-N-A. And pretty much everything you could ever want to know is there.

Vance Crowe [00:55:42] Yeah, that's right. And I would highly recommend going out and checking out your TED Talks. They are really strong distillations of a mountain of work that you've done. Prag, this has been a wonderful conversation. I hope you'll come back again sometime. Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Parag Khanna [00:55:57] I would love to Vince, it's great conversation. Thank you for having me on.