The World Is In Crisis, So... Where Should You Live? | Parag Khanna | Tank Talks Asia

Parag: We tell our daughter that the best title to have on her business card is Queen of AI Prompt Engineering because you always want to be that person at the very top of the funnel who prompts, who teaches the prompts and encodes the prompts. So Queen of AI Prompt Engineering, should be the highest paid job.

Manisha: I love that one.

Imagine stepping into a time machine and fast forwarding 50 years into the future, what would you see? Floating cities above rising seas? AI companions that know you better than you know yourself? Or a desolate landscape where all are competing to survive? Maybe those visions feel too far away and too pessimistic.

Maybe you're just focusing on the coming 10 years, wondering where to live as sea levels rise, or whether your kids will have jobs in the AI age. Whatever you are planning or fearing, maybe today's guest can help? Governments and multi-billion dollar companies certainly think he can.

It’s Tank Talks Asia. I'm Manisha Tank, from me and the rest of the AsiaWorks team, a very warm welcome to you. In this episode, we're joined by Parag Khanna. He's a bestselling author, advisor, CEO, and founder of AlphaGeo.

Parag, it is so lovely to see you across the table. How are you doing?

Parag: Great, thank you. Nice to see you again.

Manisha: Have you just come back from another global trip?

Parag: This was quite global and circuitous, Davos, Geneva, London, Stockholm, Melbourne for the Australian Open Tennis final.

Manisha: Well, of course I know that you're a big fan.

Parag: That was so key. It was epic. Epic.

Manisha: Excellent. How would you describe yourself?

Parag: That's a tricky one. I mean, I'm a cosmopolitan, I'm a globalist, I'm a technocrat, I'm a traveler above all else. I, you know, had the good fortune to be raised all over the world. Born in India, Middle East, Europe, America. Being a traveler has been just the most fundamental thing to my identity. You know, at first it was almost just good fortune and luck, my parents raising me in lots of places, but then it became almost like and end in itself, and then it became a professional justification.

Sort of literally my objective was to get other people to pay for my travel. And so the best way to do that was to write books. And so that's how that began. I'm an academic, so, you know, once you jump through certain hoops and, you know, pass certain tests, you're an academic which qualifies you for certain roles and functions. So that's why I say I'm a technocrat too. I advise lots of governments and companies and have, you know, been a public servant.

Manisha: When you were 10 years old, let's say, is this what you saw yourself doing, or what ideas did you have about the world back then?

Parag: Well, you know, it's interesting you ask the question almost facetiously, but it was literally when I was 12 years old that I knew my future because when I was 12, the Berlin Wall fell.

Manisha: Right, that had a big impact

Parag: And I happened to be, I was living in New York at the time, but because my father had lived in Germany very briefly when he was a young professional, he literally pulled my brother and me out of school and we booked plane tickets and within a couple of weeks of the Berlin Wall falling, we had an early Christmas holiday.

na family, you know, December: 1989

Manisha: Goodness.

Parag: So we flew to Frankfurt, we drove all night, got to Berlin, I was 12 years old and we literally rented a hammer and a chisel and I hacked away at what was left of the Berlin wall.

Manisha: Which was allowed in those days.

Parag: And I brought little Ziploc bags of Berlin wall pieces for the entire eighth grade of the Robert E. Bell School in upstate New York.

Manisha: And did they appreciate your contribution?

k about that moment, that was: 1989

Manisha: Does your work feel like a hobby? Because it's clearly something you're so passionate about.

Parag: Completely. And you know, again, whether I was studying geopolitics, international relations, global history, political science, all of those associated disciplines or whether I was writing a book, or whether I was doing memos for governments or you know, just traveling, researching, whatever. It has all felt like one giant stream of consciousness.

Manisha: I wanna know what's consuming your head space right now? What have you been thinking about?

Parag: I mean, this is one of those times where you really do have to juggle very seemingly unrelated things in your head at the same time, and try to stitch them all together. You know, you could be thinking about de dollarization and the, you know, sort of debasement of the US currency, or you could be thinking about the Russia, Ukraine War and Gaza and the kind of future map of the Middle East. And about climate change and volatility and mass migrations. And there really are either thin or thick threads connecting all of these. It's getting more and more complex. I feel like, 24 hours a day, my mind is wrestling.

Manisha: Coming up. The big issue that no one's talking about.

Let's talk about AlphaGeo then, because effectively this is what Alpha Geo is doing. It's taking, it's looking at all all the data, it's making sense of it. And then you are able to use what you are learning from all of this data and share it with governments, with corporations, with individuals, with people who are asking, where do I invest? Where should I live in the future? I am really concerned about all of this disruption.

Parag: Right. It started out with exactly that kind of query.

The first clients asked, where should we buy land and build homes in light of climate change and volatility? And you know, you don't want to build a home in a floodplain.

Manisha: Absolutely.

Parag: You don't want to build a home in places that people are leaving and moving somewhere else, but can you anticipate where they're going?

Where should you build sea walls and flood control measures or relocate populations? And you know, what crops should you change the location of what you're planting where? For companies, it's where should you be buying real estate? Where do you build data centers? You know, what about your infrastructure? What's the risk to that infrastructure? Pipelines, internet cables, you name it, railways. What's the future cost of insurance gonna be like? These are questions that are very, very hard to answer.

Manisha: Let me jump in there, 'cause I know you've written about this actually quite extensively. So after the California wildfires last year, there were a lot of people who saw the cost of their insurance go up by 11%.

Parag: Oh, a lot more than that.

Manisha: Okay, more than that. So that was in one piece that I read.

Parag: Yeah.

Manisha: I've spoken to reinsurers in this part of the world who have said their massive concern is that this is a region that's very underinsured, I'm sure there are others. It's not a sexy subject, but talk to me a little bit about insurance.

Parag: It should be very sexy, quite frankly. Actually, one of the things we tell clients of ours is, you may not believe in climate change, but your insurer does. Insurance companies literally set the premiums and they determine whether or not you can afford to live where you live.

One or two percentage points increase annually above the expectation of flood insurance or fire insurance sends a signal to the market and it sends shivers down people's spines. And when mom and pop are sitting around the table looking at their bills and they see that we've never paid more than the rate of inflation each year on year for our insurance and suddenly it's jumped by 8%. And we predict for some geographies 25% next year, 55%, or you are literally uninsurable, which is a word we put in big red letters, you know, for certain locations based on scenarios and simulations.

Manisha: Can you share any of those locations?

Parag: Sure. In fact, it's actually one of our kind of founding stories. There's a little town in Florida on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, slash Gulf of America, you decide what you want to call it.

Manisha: Yes.

Parag: It's called Cape Coral. And when we started the company, Cape Coral was the red hot post COVID sunshine housing market. Everyone's going to Cape Coral in the same way that wealthy Americans are going to Florida. Low tax, what's not to love?

And we would show this location in our software and say we're really worried about a place like this. The insurance premiums are gonna go through the roof. The hurricane frequency and damage is amplifying. And people would laugh at us. They said, ha, everyone's moving to Florida.

Manisha: How long ago was that that they were laughing at you?

Parag: Like, our company's three years old. So this is like two and a half, three years ago. So the great validation, tragic as it is, is that last summer, so just six months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece, titled America's Worst Performing Housing Market. And which one was it? Dot, dot, dot.

Manisha: Yeah.

Parag: Cape Coral. Because again, insurance premiums went up and people just said, I don't want to pass this down to my children because what is it gonna be worth if there's no buyer?

And so one of the reasons I started AlphaGeo is literally because my parents were gonna retire to Florida, and my brother and I were like, no, you don't. And instead we just started crunching a lot of data and we said, what's the best place to retire? Where is it affordable? Where is the climate good? Where are you near good hospitals? Where is the good infrastructure?

All these obvious, basic, humane, sensible things that any child wants for their parent. And I said to myself, where is the app for this? Right? And there isn't one. And so I said, you know, why don't we just build it?

Manisha: The best solutions come about because you're solving a problem, like a real time human problem.

In a moment why we need to find a better way with water.

Let's get into some other really interesting things that AlphaGeo has done. Something I spotted was the periodic table of states. That really fascinated me. States kind of put on this matrix as a periodic table and I think it was on the left side, it's less stable. And as you move sort of downwards and to your right, you're getting to more stable.

To make it very easy for us to spot trends straight away. So one of them I spotted was most of the stable countries were actually in Europe.

Parag: There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but there is a high concentration of stable states in Europe.

But first to be clear, without going into the whole methodology, but for those who remember their chemistry, you have your periods and your groups, and you have atomic number, atomic mass, and so on. Each of those concepts maps onto one of the scores in our periodic table of states.

And the three key terms are military strength, demographic size, territory, whatever, of a state. Then there's what we call the stateness, which is the state capacity, the cohesiveness, its internal governance capacity. Right. So strength, stateness, and you add up those two scores and you get stability.

Because the one thing that all states can agree on is that they would like to be stable, rather than say unstable. Right no leader wakes up and says, gee, I wish my country were less stable. So we said, what is a neutral kind of indicator? So stable countries, yes, European countries are quite stable. Asian countries don't rank particularly high except for say, Japan.

So we wanted to be as neutral as possible, to cater to kind of any government saying how can my country be a better version of itself tomorrow? Because part of the approach that I take in my writing is to view every country from the inside out, to tell its story. That's kind of what my first book was about, sort of like the inside out psycho-analysis of a whole set of, you know, 40, 50 countries.

The data sets that comprise the strength and the stateness are 26 variables that we found to be sufficiently neutral, desirable, virtuous, you might even say, for a regime to want to pursue, for a state to want to be, and that's how that project emerged so I'm very pleased with how it turned out

Manisha: It's really good stuff. For our audience, we’re going to put a link to it in our show notes so they can go and check it out and have a look and understand a little bit more about it.

Couple of other big issues that I just wanted to pick up with you. Water. We are not talking enough about water.

Parag: So true.

Manisha: And I think it's definitely something that, you know, probably you guys at AlphaGeo or you have looked at as a geographer. Water is crucial, it's everything.

Parag: So water is a huge theme in our work, obviously, and what we try to do constructively is to say you can forecast the next 75 years of drought risk, water tables, everything. So if you just highlight on a map those places and then also score their adaptation capacity. So let's say it's high drought risk, but A, it's got 10 desalination plants and great irrigation and reservoirs and water storage facilities. Well that's not high risk.

But let's take the places that are super high risk of drought and that have no adaptation capacity, no good infrastructure. And then the third data set we'll overlay is demographics, how many people are there? So now if you take all the places in the world that have super high drought risk, that have very poor infrastructure and lots of people, those are your crisis zones.

Manisha: Do we have a worryingly high number of crisis zones?

Parag: Yes.

Manisha: Do you have a number?

Parag: See, it's not the number, it's the where. It comes back to the geography.

Manisha: Okay so where are they? Are they clustered in particular parts of the world?

Parag: Oh, I mean, you find them on every continent. And it's very important to remember that climate change in that sense is indiscriminate. It's not about rich or poor, right. The farmers who have five Mercedes in the garage are getting wiped out by the desertification effect on agriculture in Australia.

The same thing goes for the United States. Rich, poor, north, south, every single continent has drought prone areas, and most places, almost every place has been way behind in adapting. Because unlike oil, where you have a global market and it's literally a fungible commodity, you can drill it, extract it in one place and put it on a ship. We don't do that with water. Right. I mean, only in an absolute crisis. You've seen these zero day water events. They've had them in, you know, Cape Town, South Africa, Chennai, India.

Manisha: And now parts of Delhi as well?

Parag: Sure inland, right? I mean, at least if it's a coastal place, you can literally bring in a tanker, like a retrofitted tanker and fill it with water from somewhere else. And they've actually done that in Barcelona.

Delhi is a good example of how it's almost too little, too late. You're seeing this in Tehran, is another obvious example where, you know, there's talk of needing to move the capital. Now if you don't have the political wherewithal and the competence and the bureaucratic capability and the engineering capability to deliver water to the people of Tehran, do you really think you have the competence to move 14 million people somewhere else?

I don't want a prize for identifying the hotspots of 10 years from now. I wanna make sure there are no hotspots 10 years from now.

Manisha: Absolutely. There's a lot of debate over who is responsible, but then there's a point that you come to and say, well, it's sort of, we're all in this together. Is that true? Are we all in this together? Because we don't all have the same resources to do something about it.

Parag: Sadly, we're not all in this together. So if Chinese reduce coal-fired power plants, it does eventually benefit people in Africa right, so that's a global public good.

Adaptation to climate risk, meaning Singapore builds a sea wall, raises its roads, connects its reservoirs, does all of that stuff, has lots of desalination. That is a local, private good. So we're not all in this together. Singapore is doing things for Singapore, right? And Europe is doing things for Europe.

Can we all invest in the technologies and democratize those technologies so that everyone benefits, you know, from each other's know-how. Yes, we can do that, but we're not doing that nearly enough. So I don't feel that there's enough action being taken in climate adaptation that I would say, oh yes we truly have global solidarity on climate adaptation. We really don't. What we really have is, you know, everyone searching for their own life raft.

Manisha: Yes. So if we're not in all of this together, it's really important that the biggest economies make strides towards adaptation. How damaging has it been that the United States has been less supportive of the green agenda?

Parag: I think it depends on the issue, because you could make the argument that, from a technological perspective, the train has very much left the station, you know, progress in renewable energy, whether it is solar, wind, deployment of nuclear and so many other aspects of environmental sustainability and efficiency.

Many United States institutions, whether they're academic and most certainly the tech community and companies are world leaders in that, and they're not slowing down either. So it's more than obviously just optics and rhetoric and the Trump administration withdrawing from treaties and cutting off funding for certain agencies. That obviously is damaging

But I think that actually if we put all the resources that we were committing to just signing treaties and declarations and instead devoted to technology transfer, we would actually still be on the winning side of the equation.

Manisha: Okay. Well that at least is positive.

Just up ahead, a 50 year forecast.

You travel the world, you speak to a lot of people, but I'm sure you spend time thinking about what this world is going to look like 50 years from now. What sort of a world are we gonna live in?

Parag: Well, I would first issue the disclaimer that, especially given the moment we're in and in scenario planning, you kind of think in intervals like five years, 10 years, you know, and there's decision trees along the way and forks in the model. So to just jump 50 years ahead is quite a sci-fi kind of undertaking.

Let's start with things that we know pretty much for sure, unless you have divine intervention, so we're gonna be fewer people on the planet in 50 years than we are right now.

Manisha: Is that an aging population thing, or is this also the impact of climate change?

Parag: It's all of the above. So you have, you know, one and a half to 2 billion elderly today will not be around 50 years from now, but you've also had a collapse in fertility. So generation alpha, today's toddlers, are smaller in number than Gen Z.

Our generation and millennials below us, they're not having kids anymore. So once our children stop having children, it goes off a cliff from both sides. So, 50 years from now, you know, based on current trends, there might be, you know, 6 billion people in the world rather than the 8.2, 8.3 we are now. That's a massive decline in the number of people alive on the planet.

Manisha: So I wonder, will there be areas that everyone's gonna move to that perhaps we don't live in today?

Parag: So remember that 8 million people and certainly 6 billion people could actually all fit in Singapore, standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

Manisha: A little bit uncomfortable.

Parag: A little bit uncomfortable. But, you know, the terrestrial surface of the earth, all the continents combined, all represent 150 million square kilometers.

There's plenty of space and there's plenty of livable, habitable, green verdant space, and were it all to be devastated by climate change we have had, for a long time, enough engineering capability to build ourselves livable, comfortable habitats. Right. We have air conditioning, we have heating, we have hydroponic, aquaponic food production, we have domes, climate control, all of that stuff.

Countries that face elderly populations and very high debt and need young people to be tenants and homeowners and entrepreneurs and taxpayers, right, and caregivers, they should be actively trying to recruit young people. And they are actually, no matter what you hear, again from politicians.

brium that resembles the year: 1850

The world map, the political map is always in flux. So one of the things I am working on right now, and sort of as a side project, is to kind of look at what would be the optimal political geography of the world if you needed to overlay or realign resources, borders, people, infrastructure and so on, what would it look like? It wouldn't be this current jigsaw puzzle that we have. It would look quite different.

Manisha: Will AI know us better than we know ourselves? It seems to be heading in a direction where those who are enthusiastic about the technology, want to develop it further and further. But I've heard people say, when you don't know what's happening in the black box, that's a little dangerous.

Parag: Of course it is dangerous. And the thing is, it's not only responding to you based on what it knows about you. It is making inferences as well based upon metadata about the rest of humanity, whose data it also has. One of the not errors or habits, bad habits that I find with LLM is that, as you go through a conversation, you may switch gears to ask about something unrelated, but it's going to refer you back to the unrelated thread and say, do you want to hear about this in the context of that? And it doesn't understand that you've now changed direction. You don't care about the history topic and the context of the technology topic. Right? And it's just bad at that. So it thinks that you're having one continuous thread of a conversation. So you have to actually go up to that top button and the drop down and like, you know, reset the conversation.

Manisha: Coming up.

Parag: Highest paid jobs 50 years from now? Only for you did I reveal that.

Manisha: Now we're gonna do a quick fire round. I'm going to ask you a question. You can either answer yes or no, or you have to give me a quick answer to the question. Are you ready?

Parag: Ready.

Manisha: Excellent. 50 years from now, will the US dollar still be the world's reserve currency?

Parag: Only partially, if at all.

Manisha: Okay.

Parag: That was short.

Manisha: Gotcha. Okay, I doubt there'll be any cash in anyone's pocket. Alright. Will the internet be facilitated by cables on the land and in the sea, or by satellites above our heads?

Parag: Both.

Manisha: Both? Okay so in sort of an interweb of capability.

Parag: Interwebs a great term. You should coin that.

Manisha: I'm sure I've made it up and it's probably completely grammatically inaccurate.

Will someone be on their way to Mars?

Parag: Yeah.

Manisha: 50 years from now?

Parag: Maybe already there?

Manisha: Potentially. Okay. I wonder who will be behind that when it comes.

Parag: My son is a very enthusiastic candidate.

Manisha: Will robots replace all humans in manufacturing and service positions?

Parag: Manufacturing, 99%.

Manisha: Alright. Which jobs will be the highest paid?

Parag: Oh, that's a great question. That's not a yes or no question at all.

Manisha: It’s not.

Parag: Highest paid jobs 50 years from now. Let me answer with a humorous line. We tell our daughter that the best title to have on her business card is Queen of AI Prompt Engineering, because you always want to be that person at the very top of the funnel who prompts, who teaches the prompts and encodes the prompts. So Queen of AI Prompt Engineering should be the highest paid job.

Manisha: I love that one. Which capital cities will no longer exist, if you could choose one or two?

Parag: I have my doubts about Cairo, given the desiccation of the Nile River and so forth. So I think, you know, Egypt’s headed for disaster. We were talking about Tehran earlier, hard to imagine them surviving.

There are places starting to thrive and grow, right before our eyes, that we're not appreciating, are literally gonna be the civilizational centers of tomorrow. They're just getting started and like Toronto is one and Almaty, Kazakhstan is another.

Manisha: Oh, that's so interesting. Likelihood that our phone calls will be conducted in VR spaces?

Parag: A hundred percent. Yeah. Why not?

Manisha: When I was a kid, whoever thought that you would see a video of who you were talking to?

Parag: That's so true.

Manisha: The chance of replicators, like in Star Trek?

Parag: I would say that's a bit of a stretch.

Manisha: Nanobots curing disease?

Parag: A hundred percent.

Manisha: Is it already happening?

Parag: Yeah.

Manisha: It's already happening, so we're well on the way. And will average lifespans increase or decrease?

Parag: Increase. Well, it's everything from the things that we do socially and nutritionally and politically in terms of creating stable environments, clean air and so forth.

And then there's medical interventions that may seem more, could be supplements that you take and, you know, optimal balancing. But then there's cellular regeneration obviously as well. And so I'm for that aspect of things, not eternal life for the sake of it, but who would argue against elongating your health span.

Manisha: Yeah. I'm learning many things from you today, Parag. But the one thing, overarching everything that you've talked about, is you're teaching me that things are the way that you look at them and what you focus on, because there are just so many different nodes in our thinking.

Parag: Absolutely.

Manisha: Around which we, and towards which we may gravitate. Okay. Let's come out on flipping the table a little bit. What are the questions you wish you were asked more about the future?

Parag: Which societies will win and lose and why? Because I think there was a good answer to that question. You know, if I could reduce it all to one thing, I would say the countries that are gonna win in the future are the places that are attracting young people. Because that is like a biomarker for a country. It's sort of, you must be doing a lot of things right if young people want to go to your country. You must be stable. You probably have liberal culture, you have affordable housing, you have good education, you're friendly towards migrants. You know, you've done all the things. That's why young people want to go to your country, or city for that matter.

So to me, I wish that more people would ask that, and I could get them to think in those terms because that, rather than everyone cherry picking their own metric, I say this is actually the net result, right? This is the composite of all of those things. And when I do explain that to governments, I think it is a real wake up call. They can't lie. They can't fudge that. And if I say that's the single most important thing you can do when you wake up tomorrow, is how do I make my country a place that is attractive to young people?

First of all out of a matter of pride or to avoid shame, they realize that it's the right thing to do. Then they start to ask, well, okay, what are the 10 things I need to do to be that place? I want everyone asking themselves that question. And that will automatically lead to better societies.

Manisha: That's great and very succinct. My absolute final question to you today is, earlier you told us a wonderful story about your parents when they were moving and you and your brother staged an Oprah style intervention. Where did they end up eventually?

Parag: Ah, you know, it actually all comes full circle because a lot of people who use AlphaGeo say, just tell me the best place. Like, tell me where to go. Just tell me where to retire. Tell me where to buy a home.

Manisha: But what I've learned from you, it changes for every person.

Parag: It changes for everyone. You know based on what we wanted for our parents and what they wanted for themselves, we identified a town that I had never heard of. There was no bias, you know, involved. And it was, it's called Roseville, California.

So Roseville, California is 10 miles sort of west of Sacramento, California. And it kind of is perfect.

Manisha: Yeah.

Parag: And we didn't know that it was kind of perfect, but my parents have lived there long enough to see their property value massively appreciate because this is a really desirable place on the ground.

I was like, you know what? I'm gonna build that app and that became AlphaGeo because I must have done something right. So that's where they wound up.

Manisha: What a wonderful place.

Parag: And by the way, only for you, did I reveal that. Because very often in public I actually get asked, so you know, where are they and where should I retire? I say, look, I don't want to disclose the secret, but for your listeners, if you wanna make a property investment, go there.

Manisha: Oh, exclusive. I love that. Parag, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Parag: It has been a joy. Thank you.

Manisha: Thank you for coming.

Well, if there's one thing Parag has made abundantly clear today, it's that thinking about the future isn't about predicting the end, it's about preparing for a pivot and perhaps just a different way of life.

That's it for this episode. We really appreciate you listening all the way through to the end. If today's conversation shifted your perspective, perhaps share it with someone else who might be interested. We've shared references in our show notes in case there's anything you'd like to follow up on and please do subscribe and follow Tank Talks Asia. That way you'll never miss an episode. I'm Mnisha Tank, from me and the team, thanks again for your time.

Tank Talks Asia is an AsiaWorks production and the views and opinions shared by our guests are their own.