The Post Pandemic Designs Understanding the Great Remobilization with Mark Esposito, PhD

Hello everyone and welcome to Day 2 of our Virtual Alumni Weekend 2021. My name is Jill Felicio and I'm the Director of Advancement here at DCE, and I am delighted to welcome you to our faculty keynote presentation, The Post-Pandemic Designs: Understanding the Great Remobilization with Dr. Mark Esposito, PhD. Now, as we get underway, I have just a couple of housekeeping notes. Please feel free to use the chat box throughout the presentation to say hello or to react or chime in, and use the Q&A box for any questions that you wish to pose during today's recorded presentation. Now, it is my honor, an absolute thrill, to introduce Dr. Mark Esposito, PhD. Mark is an internationally acclaimed thought leader in matters relating to the fourth revolution and many changes and opportunities that technology will bring to a variety of industries. He is the co-founder and chief learning officer at Nexus Frontier Tech, an AI scale-up firm dedicated to help businesses become more efficient and competitive by introducing the latest data management science. In 2016, he was named one of the 30 most prominent business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. He is a global expert of the World Economic Forum and an advisor to national governments. You may have had the good fortune to take his Harvard Extension School courses, Economic Strategy and Competitiveness, or The Management of Technology: The Global AI Economy, or one of his Harvard professional development programs, the newest of which premieres in just days, Understanding the FinTech Markets and the Power of Blockchain. Now, in addition to his Harvard teaching, Mark has appointments at the University of Cambridge, Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management, Hult International Business School, and AIE— excuse me— IE Business School. He holds fellowships with the Social Progress Imperative and with the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils in Washington, DC. He is a nonresident fellow at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai, as well as a research associate for the University College London Blockchain Technology Now, Mark is the author or co-author of several bestsellers, including Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using Drive to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends, which he presented about 4 years ago here at Alumni Weekend, and his most recent book, The AI Republic: Building the Nexus Between Humans and Intelligent Automation. He will give you a sneak peek on a really exciting upcoming book as well. So without further ado, Please join me in warmly welcoming Dr. Mark Esposito.

Thank you so much, Jill. I hope you can hear me fine. And quite the honor after 4 years to be back in the setting. This time is a slightly different setting than when we were doing this in Cambridge, but to some extent is a setting that equally honors the ingenuity of making sure that life could continue during this quite exceptional period of our history. I'm quite happy to spend some time with you today to, first of all, engage with the Harvard community. That's most likely the main driving force for me to be able to spend some time today on a Sunday with a community of thinkers and doers, many of which I've been honored to see in my classrooms. And I follow their endeavors on social media, and wonderful to see how much difference we're really bringing to this world. The second main conversation is to bring you up to speed with some of the work and research that I've been running the last few months. The pandemic was naturally a shock, but every shock is, is providing opportunity for, I think, a deeper reflection on whether we are operating on assumption that we are comfortable with, or whether this assumption have to change. And, and likely we all feel right now that something has profoundly shifted somewhere. And I'll try to give you a journey of where that thinking from my perspective has gone in terms of trying to define and equally decipher the signals that take us towards the future. And thirdly, is to bring a more concrete example of work that is now shaping up, as I was sharing with the Harvard team prior to this, My next work together with two phenomenal colleagues, Olaf Groth from University of Berkeley, Haas, and Terence See, ESCP Europe and Hult, is now in its baking stage. We're currently collecting the primary data. And it will be published next year by MIT University Press. So I will spend a significant part of my conversation in sharing with you the skeleton and the outline of where we currently are with the work. And it was like try to go within the reach of the topic of today is trying to understand the post-pandemic designs. As you will understand, the engagement and the questions coming from you is the part that I look forward the most. This is one because it's you that really brought me here, the opportunity for me to have a chance to to engage again with a wonderful community. And second, it is the kind of conversation we're going to have today that will equally shape the dialogue following forward. Not only the dialogue that happens in so like privileged circle, like the one we are right now, but it's also inspiring the public debate we'll need to have on some of the most pressing challenges that we will face ahead of us. I always say to all of my students when I'm teaching at Harvard that we are often entangled in the assumption that we have already seen some of the events that are currently happening in some form of a comparable format back in the past. And we tend to resort to historical information or hindsight to determine how do we solve those challenges. Truth to be told, every single day we're going through our life, it sets to some extent a record, a first timer of some kind of. It's either the day with most people on Earth, and every day of our life for the foreseeable 30 to 40 years likely will be that. It's either the first time where we've seen a degree of technology exponentiality that is growing at even faster pace. Or it is the number of data we're really capable of generating in this hyper-connecting world. So no matter where you're really looking at this, different from before, we truly are experiencing a record-hitting period of history. And always remind myself, this is a wonderful time to be alive. Let me take you a little bit more into a structured conversation. My plan, if you want, if you agree with me, is to take you through a bit of a journey that is combined both by the research side and a bit of the storytelling. And then at one point in time where I feel the bulk has been shared with you, I will ask Jill to come back and help me moderate some of the questions that I'm looking forward to receiving from your side. So in the good style like I've been doing throughout the semesters, let me share the screen with you. And take you through a little bit through a journey that I would like to share with you today. So the Great Remobilization is where we're going to today, is our first major answer to the running title about the post-pandemic designs. And the subtitle that we have in our book is called Designing a Smarter World. This is because we believe that we can institutionally, on a global level, rethink about the foundations and the tenets upon which we're really building our global economy. The last 2 years, they have no— wholly definitely generated a significant scar in our memory in terms of understanding what the global pandemic is capable of doing when we have an interconnected system that are They're nonlinear by design and multiplicative. The other things that we have equally acquired is a clear understanding that some of the foundations upon which we were standing, they were quite fragile, and they have really not been able to undergo the pressure of the last few months. But where are we moving forward is equally a quite difficult answer to provide. It's always like if you were crossing two different kind of landscapes. And right now, we were on a suspended bridge. We tend to be impacted by wind coming, change of weather, maybe a storm. And when you're moving from one landscape to the other on a suspended bridge, the ground underneath your feet doesn't really feel very safe. This is pretty much a number of different analogies or metaphors to tell you that this increasing unsettling feeling that our ground is shifting is not just perceptive. It's truly the fact that we are changing tenets. Now, history does not repeat itself. It does rhyme. But the reason why I tell you that is that this is not the first time that society has found itself dealing with this degree of disruption, or more than disruption, we should call it discontinuity. It happened prior to World War II, following the Great Depression, 1929. It was a period of history where we have profoundly impacted the way that The middle class was rising up. And the level of inequality that we were having led to exasperation of systems to a point in which World War II actually imploded later at the end of the '30s. At the end of World War II, we redefined the role of the North Atlantic Alliance by having free market and democracy as the two main tenets that were really thriving and driving the growth models. This is the time where the United States became the hegemon. In many ways of that world order. We had a similar unsettling period at the end of the '70s when we having the energy crisis, the crisis with Iran, when for the first time we started to understand that from a finance perspective, we could borrow money we didn't have. We started to unpeg resources from gold, and we started to define money out of money. By doing this, we kind of borrow from the future. And we open up to a series of debt finance that was bypassing equity financing. That revolutionized the financial industry and opened up to a global society that culminated with the drop of the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89, and openly opened up to a world that was, to some extent, waiting to be impacted by a global story. We're now facing, again, a quite historical moment where the intersection is kind of shaping towards new structure and new foundations. This time we have a much more global experience of the challenge, and we should remember or remind ourselves we are just the very beginning of that. In some instances, we kind of have the feeling that we're going back to a sense of normalcy because maybe we can remove masks, or maybe because we get vaccinated, or maybe because we can travel. But we should equally remember that some countries will see the first dose of the vaccine administered only early 2023. Especially the country within the COVAX alliance. So it'll take us some years before we can start feeling that this period of history is behind us, and we can really build or focus on the reconstruction. So that's the kind of the story and the philosophy around the Great Remobilization. I'm not doing this effort by myself. This is a poster. It's not yet the COVID We're using this soon for social media, but you will see now, so like a preview, Teren See and all of Growth and myself, we're like getting our hearts and minds towards this topic. And I hope if you follow the work we're doing on our social channels, that you'll be informed when more and more of these events will actually be unfolding. We plan on having a number of different events running in the next few months, up to a point where we'll be able to announce the, the launch day of the book. Sometime next year. I hope that next summer we'll be able to celebrate the launch of the work. So let's start. Let's get our conversation going. Let's get our thinking going. Help me. I will help you. So I see you see that the structure, what we're currently doing, and you'll help me understand at a deeper level where this conversation should go as soon as we start in the Q&As. Here is the first part of the conversation. We're dealing with tectonic shifts. We really are, in the analogy of tectonic shift, looking at shifted our plaque of the Earth. They're creating entirely different landscapes. So we're really interested in understanding from the collision what is really coming out. There's multiple different hypotheses. You might have heard a lot about the new normal story. There's nothing really too sexy about the new normal. I think, conventional thinking that once you're disrupting a system, a new one is emerging. What we probably should start feeling a bit more comfortable is, number one, introducing the plural to that, so we can talk about new normals. But as one of my friends, who is the editor of HBR Italy, Enrico, calls it, he calls it never normals. And I guess that's probably more where I would put my thinking this moment, is imagining that it'll take us some time before this entire new form of value that will be redefined by the new structure will eventually shape up to become normalized. So for a simple period of time, thinking about never normal, I think, is a quite safe assumption. In the book, so you can see a little bit about where we are, we'll spend the first part of our work on the technology shift, and really looking at how do we get where we are. Then we start having some of the discontinuities that we'll take you through. We're looking at scientific scrambles. We're looking at the technocracies. We'll see how governments are changing. We'll see Asia accelerated and the West becoming anemic right now for a number of different reasons. But it's quite inevitable to see that the needle has been moving historically since several years towards the East. And the success of the Asian economy to put this pandemic under control has provided them with a level of triumphism that is something we should really accept. The race to reconstruction, unique opportunity we really have to start thinking again about the institution of government, the institution of public health, the institution of education. How do we teach kids in school? How do we define, for example, the role of government via fiscal? How do we think about immigration? These are some of the conversations that we'll actually have an opportunity to rethink. Most of the story and the narrative that we have these days, they were shaped in the wake of the '50s and the '60s, and some of the story even earlier. All of my economics students know that when we talk about GDP, we're referring to Simon Kuznets, which was a Harvard economist, who introduced GDP for the first time in 1934. But the work was mainly measuring the growth in the United States from 1929 to 1932. When you see or read about GDP today, remember GDP is roughly 87 years old. That's pretty much a number, right? Now, we'll start looking more and more about the role of technology and how virtual versus physical will have to reconcile and strike a balance. We'll start feeling the ethical boundary that the data deluge is generating. What is our life today? Nothing else than a series of data sets that somebody has, and that somebody can share. And how do we think about replicability and replication of information to the point in which, in theoretical terms, data could be shared infinately. It's not like a physical commodity or a physical good that if I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. So conversation about what does protection, identity, sovereignty means in digital times is another part of the conversation we're having. And then the idea about technology pervading our life to a point in which today no company is not a technology company, regardless if you are mainly a bakery, or you're actually even a street vendor, because in the moment in which you're using WhatsApp to get your order, or you're having your payment through Square, or Visa, or Mastercard, or in the moment in which you're having an online program to run your inventory, the moment you're having just an app, you're shifting a lot of your value creation, or at least value proposition, to technology solution. You might not call yourself a data company, but you are de facto a technology company. And how do we deal with the fact that we became a technology-driven society? That's another story that will have to redefine rules of engagement, as I mentioned before, the ethical boundaries. And finally, in the last part of our book, we'll try to understand more and more, how do we remaster the world? And do we have a roadmap? At the end of the day, we, the three of us, Olaf, Terence, and I, we teach in business schools. So we tend to be constantly tempted by the idea of having frameworks and maybe conceptual models, something that we can teach, we can do executive programs, we can do keynotes, and something that we can hope our students or attendees replicate. It might be a bias because it might not necessarily have the level of intellectual depth required in such a long-term project, which is rethinking the world ahead of us. But definitely, emphasis on actionability, and how do we make it very heuristic-based, is necessary for us to get a sense about the world we're really going to build. So briefly, ladies and gentlemen, this is where the project of the Great Remobilization goes. It is a work in progress, as I was sharing with the team who organized the event before. We're interviewing several people that are helping us to get to a level of depth, or a level of, of interdisciplinarity that we can't reach by ourselves. And what I want to share with you today is some of our very initial reflection. We're just scratching the surface of a conversation that likely will continue to happen, not wholly within the time we have to write the book, but very likely, It will happen the moment the book is published. We'll engage with the public about this, and we'll learn more things than what we can actually imagine right now. So it kind of starts also for me today. It's the first official time where I'm presenting to such an esteemed audience the work we're currently running on. So let me try to get you a bit into the story. So how do we get there? We started to really see that the globalism, or globalization, the way we have been celebrating, at least in some parts of the world, has not necessarily taken us where we want it to. I think there is a story to be told that is twofold. The first side of the story is, wow, globalization has lifted millions of people out of poverty. It's been the greatest form of capitalism we have ever seen in history. On the other hand, globalization has created more inequality than ever in history. In other words, the level of lifting people up from poverty does not necessarily generate automatic distribution that can be even enough for people to feel that lifting up is enough. It's not enough. We lift them up in extreme poverty, and we give them access to things like health care and basic needs. But it looks like the moment that they enter the workforce, we have been flattening social mobility to the point in which the aspiration of many people to improve their life tends to be almost sandboxed, if not trapped. Let me give you some estimates. Roughly 80% of people in the United States will not see a change of their social status throughout their entire life. No matter how hard they work, a job, two jobs, three jobs, their social position will not change. Why? Because mobility is quite— is quite flat these days. So for the majority of their lifetime, no matter how hard they work, they'll hardly move themselves to the next level. Very different from the golden time in 1950s, '60s, '70s, where we even coined the concept of the American dream. In the American dream, if you remember, working hard will rehabilitate anybody to the upper sense of fulfillment, whatever that meant. It could be individual, spiritual, collective. It was a feeling that we are, to some extent, defining the opportunity in our life. And remember the conversation on our offspring, thinking that our children would, to some extent, be able to take us to the next level. Well, unfortunately today, the generation that we currently see rising, starting from the millennials to Generation Z, or Z, their best chance is in their parents' networks. And this is so sad because it shows that for the first time in modern history, we are having diminishing opportunity for a generation that don't have the same chances that their parents. So this is not necessarily written in stone. We can change this. But what we want to see up front is to understanding that the system as it's been designed does not necessarily contemplate the opportunity for people to be lift up to a point in which they can actually really see even distribution of opportunity. So from soaring inequality to, of course, the challenges that a growth model that has been heavily factoring in environmental externalities, and growing anxiety, slash, the rise of significant worries about mental health, is really showing that system, as we have seen it before, starts to be not wholly limping, but is generating significant hiccups. I have a slide to show you this. This is to show you a little bit more about the challenge that we currently see. You know this, in terms of the globalization, lifting people out of poverty has been a phenomenal journey. Nothing has ever done the same. On the other hand, you start noticing that in parts of the world where we had a significant setup from social welfare, or where we had enough prosperity, to expect most of the population being well taken care, we start to see rising chances for population to be trapped into a level of economic distribution that doesn't have any mobility, as I mentioned before. So globalization, many benefits, but equally has been not necessarily working the same way as we expected. And to, to sort of like attach it to another conversation, he has created a sense of disenfranchisement. In the United States, we felt it a lot in the last few years, and the sense that we were mainly divisive and divided. We were connected to some extent, but we were not necessarily converging. And I think this sense of connected but non-converging is a quite important part of the journey that I would like you to keep in mind. That said, the feeling that our social experiment in the United States was coming to a shortcoming has been reflected in other parts of the world in which much more, I would say, parochial and localized events have been given space to nationalistic movements and some form of populistic movement that have exacerbated the radical opinions, the public opinion may have had. Let me rephrase this slightly different. When we disenfranchise millions of people by capping or curtailing the opportunity they have to acquire social mobility, when people start feeling that there is nothing more they can look forward to, because no matter how hard they work, nothing really changes, they start to radicalize more and more. This is an interesting story. It's captured by a sociologist called Overton that was able to introduce the Overton window. Which was a quite interesting idea where public opinion, regardless of what we think, swings towards the left or towards the right depending on circumstances. When it swings towards extreme left or extreme right, that's kind of regardless, it radicalizes. When anybody running for office is capable of tapping on the pulse of the overtone window, it's very likely to build nationalistic movement that try to see national interest as being determinant for a political spectrum. We have seen this in the United States with the previous administration. We've seen this in Mexico, in Brazil. We've been seeing this in some parts of Italy. We saw this with the National Front in France. We saw this with the Brexit vote. It was to some extent a form of self-determination. We saw this— we see this right now in Hungary. We have been seeing this with— candidate running in Austria. So many parts of the world where we're not expecting necessarily the overturn window to swing significantly, we have been noticing radicalization. And one way for you to see this in perspective is that it's partially determined by the fact that as the global structure is no longer fulfilling the different ramification of societal fabric, it's actually alienating it. And this is an area where— we'll have to work hard to make sure that we're not necessarily incurring into the creation of new monsters. We already had enough. Now where do we go from here? From the conversation about how the global structure is now suffering, we move into a part 2 that, if you remember, is one of the longest ones in our work. It's the idea of the discontinuities. Where are the discontinuities coming from? Well, there's a few things I need to tell you first. It's kind of easy to come to the conclusion that we have been discontinued by COVID in many ways. But when you go a little bit deeper into that, you realize that— and you might have heard this several times— COVID does not really discontinue on its own. It has accelerated it because it was an echo chamber. It has magnified And it has amplified, but it hasn't on its own discontinued. And where this becomes particularly relevant is to start looking at some of the trends that we find naturally attributed to COVID. But when you're looking at the trend itself, you realize that the trend happened as a byproduct of a degree of fragmentation that was already happening pre-COVID. And if you want to understand more about it, these slides will do the job for you. These are some of the pre-COVID fracture globalization. This is extracted from a friend of mine, Sanjeev Khagram, who is the dean in Arizona State, who has presented this. And I found this so fascinating that I love to represent it to you as well. Here is an interesting story about trends that started pre-COVID and likely will continue through 2035. This is a degree of discontinuity not that was triggered by COVID. It was simply catalyzed through COVID. But these were trends that would have happened nonetheless. What we don't know is how long it would have taken for that trajectory to fulfill itself. But very likely, these are some of the trends that we have started to see already with inklings, prior to 2020. I have already touched upon the waves of exclusion. I mentioned it before as soaring inequality. We equally mentioned the fact that we went into a connected world, but a divergent one. That lack of convergence was reflected in, I would say, shambles within the international community, more doubts that were mainly cast upon the multilateral institutions, such as the UN, the WHO, the WHO, for example, a feeling that the global order was under some form of attack or siege. And it wasn't really finding its own narrative back, right? Still to this day, I don't find, even if clearly the Western countries are now again in a dialogue that is much more convergent and collaborative than one year before, I still find that The setup seems to suggest that some degree of localization and regionalization is prevailing. I think it's induced partially by the lack of mobility that we have comparably to the past, but is also, I think, rapidly determined by production and supply chains. Most of our supply chain got heavily impacted by the first few months of the pandemic, and many organizations and countries, they started to rebalance their their portfolio. So now we have much more local-produced products that are getting into our market, reducing slightly the dependency we have from the global trade, let's say, routes. And that is reinforcing the regionalization at any level. We have a conversation on the climate that is not leaving us alone. It's actually going to continue in the next few years. We're just at the very beginning of what we can call a climate instability. How do we address this can only happen prior with two, so like, three, so like, let me count them right, three, so like, way forwards. The first one is finally giving up on this idea that climate change doesn't exist, because that didn't really generate other than ideology that have fractured the debate even more. I think we should— we should graduate this idea to the higher level, which is becoming an overarching concept that we're not necessarily defeating, just because of narrative and dialectics. Once we get there and we understand that climate change is a universal challenge and it's not politicizable, we're moving into the idea that if we're operating in terms of climate adaptation and climate mitigation, we're really going not solely to change too much of the course of action, But we're going to change the course of action, our economic geography. The challenge with the environment change— and it's not the environment itself, because in natural systems, entropy rules— is more about the fact that our economic geography is being designed with the expectation of the climate being normalized. So how do we rethink about adapting the economic geography? How do we start understanding that degree of volatility and larger spread of performance are becoming a part of a normal distribution? How do we start reacting in— reacting is not necessarily the right way, but responding to climate instability in a way in which we are rethinking the infrastructure we actually have. Now, it seems to be more wannabe than anything else. The good news is that in the last couple of years, when we started to invest heavily into climate adaptation and climate restoration, we are generating roughly $7 trillion of global GDP that is coming from this. So finally, we have found, I think, a nice pocket where we have created an economic and social environmental synergy that is not necessarily looking at the climate as a trade-off, but is looking at the climate as an opportunity to renew the economic infrastructure. And so when you hear in things about alternative energy or the New Deal, as they call it, right, the Green New Deal, Don't look at the politics around that. Look at the fact that renewing the infrastructure in light of what it will likely be, a refurbishing of the way we are running value tree infrastructure, it is a form of climate restoration and climate mitigation, because it means that we are redesigning processes around a much more adaptive/volatile climate. And the restoration and mitigation might eventually slow down some of the most I would say dangerous trends, which could lead to a scale of magnitudes of challenges that we're not prepared to. Last thing I want to say on this, I don't want to extend it more than necessary. I've been telling this in every single class, and I'll do the same now as we have in this gathering. I always tell myself that COVID-19, it is climate change 1.0. Thinking that there is no correlation between the climate instability and infectious disease it is really living in la-la land, right? And as I don't want to live in la-la land in this period of my life, because I think the opportunities are larger in living in a much more construed format than in an illusional part, I really want to make sure that I say that also to you, that if we are capable of seeing the relationship between COVID and the climate instability, we are going to understand what climate change is really all about, rather than just the a more tip of the iceberg idea about rising temperatures that for many people did not convert into any sense of urgency. Moving very fast on the rest, technology innovation— we'll talk more about it today— is how quickly do we see technology rapidly changing the way we are, and how technology is equally becoming a proxy to the antidote that we want to develop. And things like the global economy moving into low growth, This was a problem that we had since 2007, '08, when the financial crisis hit us so hard that some industries simply never recovered. They were simply becoming insolvent. And this sense of low growth has been going on for quite some time. Working population that's becoming older, big gap between aging country and young countries. This is something that's been starting already before. Back in the 2017 books with Terence on, on Drive and the Megatrends, we were already noticing that the, the gap between old country and young country was becoming so ridiculously large that likely immigration would be inevitable, and also drop of productivity and challenges to the social welfare systems inevitable as well. Bear in mind, just for you to have a point of reference, Social Security in the United States was introduced when average age was 63. And so we went a long way from when average age was 63 to average age now that is close to 79, 80. So interesting that as our life expectancy has improved, the social system did not necessarily improve with the same speed, neither with the same degree of proportionality. So likely in the years to come, we'll see some of this either under significant impact or under the opportunity to be deeply reformed because it's necessary. And then finally, and since we are within an educational setting, and you all went through your Harvard degrees, skill sets, right? What kind of skills are we going to really build for the future, considering that degrees are important, but they are insufficient to deal with some of this required skills gap that we really want to achieve? So this is to give you a bit of a sense of where in this continuity We're trying to move our conversation. Then we go a little bit deeper into some more specific— I will really just go briefly on that, making sure that I'll start thinking about moving my conversation to where eventually I'll stop and then get some of your questions running. That's really, as I told before, what I've been looking forward the most. So here is, again, some of the possible scientific scramble that we see as a level of discontinuity On one side, we really see more and more the contrast between entertainment and enlightenment. We have to really understand in which way we're simply looking at the tail of the distribution of scientific discoveries, and much of this is mainly the very beginning instead of an era that is unprecedented. I have to say it's quite miraculous to see what we were able to achieve with the vaccines. And not everybody knows that the same technology used for vaccine has been the same one deployed for research on cancer prediction, right? So definitely funding the research in the right amount makes things happen. But is this the end of a tale? Is this the very beginning of an entirely different sense of how science is? We don't know yet. We definitely think that scientific communities these days, they feel as well on the suspended bridge It looks like COVID has been not only an echo chamber in their case, but truly, so like an incubator. And we see this defined in two different scenarios. And depending also where we are, likely we'll see different kinds of outputs. From here, we'll move into despots versus democrats. I think we already have seen this rising. I mentioned it before when I was talking about radicalized public opinion. This gives space to a certain kind of political figures to be to be on the spotlight and eventually elected. We do suffer. Our democracies today are under significant attack. For once, because in many countries, the agency of democracy is no longer directly from citizens to public figures, but parties and lobby have become an intermediary that is likely generating the principal-agent relationship that was once upon a time determined by constituents and politicians. In many parts of the world, in democratic systems, politicians are becoming elites. There's a number of different cases where political figures, they tend to be affluent. Now, it's a very different, so like, profile of what we used to have back in time, where we had much more of a calibrated public servant. We also have, though, the problem that Is the solution to this despots or more, more authoritative countries? We don't have the answer. We do see now a variety of options in which the fact of being a democratic composition doesn't guarantee anymore what we thought it was within, I would say, the norms or the normative discourse of a society. So rethinking election, rethinking who do we select, rethinking in the United States the two-party system, where we are to some extent lacking competition in that sense, and thinking about whether we can give space to new ideas to eventually be represented and elected for. Whether it's about understanding technocracy versus political figures, in which you want to have a government that is equally building on competence, —like it happens in many Asian economies, where government attendants or government public servants, they tend to be very competitive in what they do, because they are heavily invested from an educational perspective, but equally on how much becoming a public servant becomes a form of pride. So I think there is a space for this, in which rethinking about the act of democracy is something that is particularly important. On this, just because it's within the Harvard community, those of you who know me, you know that I've been working also with Professor Michael Porter in Harvard Business School. Actually, that's how I started. And the interesting part of that, Porter wrote this wonderful book with Katherine Gail on the industry of politics. And we interviewed Katherine for our book. And so interesting how much she was vocal about the fact that Today, Washington doesn't necessarily serve the needs of the country in the same way we would expect from a country like the United States. And the challenge is not necessarily the politician in Washington. It's how Washington was able to estrange itself from the fabric of the country. You can argue exactly the same for Silicon Valley, which represents probably the opposite of the spectrum in terms of the private sector. It's so estranged from the rest of the country as well. So clearly, this conversation needs to find a way to strike a balance where we want to imagine a democratic exercise that is not necessarily going to build increasing gaps, but is going to generate the degree of diversity required for public debate to see the society when it has something in common. It's a much better society rather than a society in which only very few individuals, they have benefits that they can access in comparison to the rest of the population. To this extent, Professor Michael Sandel from the Kennedy School has done wonderful work around the commodification of the economy and determining should everything be up for a price. Because he argues that in a democracy, regardless of rich or poor people, if we have a sense of common life, that's what defines it. When we go and vote, regardless of our economic position, we do have a sense of what our society is all about. But if we make everything up for a commodity, or commodification. What happened is that we are so alienating the perception of reality. And we're going to really have people living in different bubbles. And this is where I think democracy suffered the most. I'll try to move a little bit faster. This is where in the discontinuity we're going into Asia accelerated. We kind of feel America is becoming anemic, but so is the West. We see that our ideas are not necessarily becoming anymore the driving force But from the ecosystem to the innovation hubs, more and more is happening through the rise of the Asian economy. And we cannot deny the conversation around China, and what will China be? Will China become the new hegemon? Will they become a new financial hegemon? Will they start to create an alternative system of reference? Will they engage? Will they simply become a form of polarization that will be only regionally relevant? Will they be integrated? These are questions we don't really know. As a matter of fact, though, if the conversation on China has always been relevant, it will be even more relevant in the future as this part of the world is rapidly becoming the most significant part of the world from any possible indication. And it's not GDP that it will be just an easy win for them to eventually overcome or outperform is how much of the value of the economies through infrastructure investment and trade is shifting by the day in this side of the world. So this is something that, again, it's animating the conversation we're having on in which way we think that geopolitics will actually emerge. We have this impression that we are about to see an entirely different rise of geopolitical spectrum, where we're going to have a lot of really different players, regardless their physical size, where we're going to have less dependency on a central system that was nicely encapsulated by what the Western heritage was capable of bringing forward. We see this more and more, I would say, as partially sclerotic, scattering out on the territory, multiple small players really playing a significant role. These are still part of our conversation that we are trying to to shape in our work, but we really think that in the post-pandemic designs, rethinking the role of Asia will be critical for us to really honor how this part of the world is now, by any form of macro indicator, leading the way forward. Now, this is just to give you a little bit more of a sense of where this is going. I have a few more slides before it's like getting to a point where I feel comfortable in wrapping this up and getting the question flowing. Again, conversation about race and reconstruction. Do we see engorging pockets of wealth, or do we actually start understanding investment in a very different way? We believe that the financial system will be heavily impacted by the reflection we're going to have right now on not only inequality, but on currencies, on how cryptos have impacted the thinking around what is an alternative form of money. I was sharing with the Harvard team that with the Harvard Professional Program, we're launching together with Terence our next executive course, actually in 2 weeks' time. And it's on fintech and blockchain, and understanding that these two set of technologies, which are to some extent intimately interwoven, they are going to reframe the conversation on financial value, is quite a fascinating story to be told. Because once we're understanding this from financial players to fintech versus techfin versus banks, all the way down to players that are going to refine trade, the storage of value, these are conversations that will very likely change our understanding of money. I'm going to share something with you that I think is quite interesting in terms of rethinking about the original purpose Money was created as the highest form of trust, because if I could not necessarily be happy with a barter, I would simply trust that the nominal value of your money, regardless who you are, would be the same, that I would accept as such, and the nominal value of my money would be equally accepted by you in the same way. So suddenly money became in society a form of exchange of trust. And this is really why it's a really noble idea in the first place. What money became in the last few years was truly a sense of disenfranchisement that was alienating so many different players in the world. Crypto has rethought the concept of trust in a way that, regardless of the volatility, which is by design because of the limited supply of, of cryptos, and the fact that in some cases, for example Bitcoin, uh, there is a clear tension that is defined by the fact that you having a proof of work that is competitive, different from other kinds of cryptocurrency. But the idea that this is a system that has an implicit tension doesn't necessarily make it a moral system, but it makes it, from a social perspective, one of the most significant social experiments ever had in history. Because I could actually say immaterial currency with no intrinsic value and no backing up by any government, if you trust that, We have a market. And we did trust it. So it shows you that the lack of trust that they find in the centralized structure was redirected towards structuring the decentralized ones. And so I think from a perspective of trust, we are going to see ahead of us a rethinking of money 5.0, to call it with a number that is becoming popular in the everyday conversation. From the race to reconstruction, or the conversation about virtual versus locally, I think this is something that we'll have to understand. How do we think of convergence in a way in which we're not thinking about it as either/or, but we start really looking at the opportunity of using online infrastructure to really empower the nature businesses that might simply reach and scale out globally? It's not about saying, because it's online, it cannot be face-to-face. I think that conversation is now, because we are in early stages of a moment in which the online became a proxy for presence. In the absence of physical world. Over time, I think we'll normalize this better. But balancing the virtual with the physical, it will be critical for redefining the rule of engagement in any part of society, especially the productive ones. And moving into the data deluge, this is an area where I'm personally writing probably most of my, let's call it, public pieces, or pieces that are designed to go into really high visibility outlets. We have to rethink about the governance framework. How do we rethink privacy and personal privacy models? What is the value of information, and how does my life become nothing more than part of an algorithm, right? That's a story that I think we'll have to redefine. Where does my liberty get, to some extent, defined, but equally violated in many ways? How do we make sure that the technology companies or the data companies are generating value, not solely extracting value? Because when you are having a ratio of extracted value versus generative value in favor of the technology companies, you kind of start shifting more and more into a significant amount of information power that later on is becoming political and economic power. And we have already seen this a lot. Especially in the last few, a couple of years, when the stock exchange was skyrocketing and it was celebrated, it wasn't reflecting that on the ground people were getting any better. We have seen today with the platformization of the economy one of the most significant market inefficiencies that we can think of. So how do we normalize the fact that markets should reflect the essence of the global economy, not necessarily the interest of a niche of organizations that, regardless of the condition on the ground, will continue to grow because their economic model is designed to grow exponentially, since they're quite light in assets. Some of these are conversations that we'll have to rethink as cybersecurity is becoming quite big. The idea of surveillance, where is the border between— or the demarcation line between a contact tracing app that is keeping us safe versus those information being used for commercial terms? Again, these are questions that many times they pop up in my classes. They tend to be part of conversation that are required. And in this post-pandemic design idea, which is sort of like an overrunning and overarching story, we'll have to start answering those questions. These are questions that we will need to have because we cannot surrender determinism from a human perspective by simply automating the process to algorithm and artificial intelligence. So these are areas of the conversation that I think is important to preserve. Moving into the next couple of slides, and this is also where I like to eventually take a bit of a break from me presenting so that I can get to have your conversation with you, is more about flexibility or feudalism. It's more about where do we really create a clear set of ecosystem in which we are redefining roles according to what we think generates value. And this is, again, something we don't know yet. We think that building ecosystem is like a positive mechanism of creating communities of people. They are sharing interests, and they're not necessarily confined by their own limitations, but they can use technology to reach out Think about the role of digital nomads, which means that we can now have access to a wonderful digital workforce that doesn't necessarily have to mean that people physically move. In the same way as we're running right now, I hope, a compelling encounter together without necessarily being in the same place, but by tapping on a global outreach that I would imagine is really touching on different corners of the world. So we have to be extremely careful in redefining ecosystemic rules. And how do we want this to be part of the kind of society we really want to have? That brings me to where I see the opportunities going. So there are two things that define the opportunity moving ahead of us. The first one is recognizing the fact that technology will be an overrunning and underpinnings running at the same time. Technology is not only going to continue to accelerate, but it will create economic value that currently we don't really have. From jumping in productivity, to more trillions of dollars to the GDP, to jobs that currently do not exist but will exist by 2035, to skill set that will change roughly by 35% in the next 4 years. Technology is only the very beginning of a journey that is still unknown to us. And it's very difficult for us to even find any formal linear representation towards the prediction. Because if you have an exponential system, no matter how much you try to imagine what it would look like, you have no way to ever define that trajectory. So we're pretty much into the unknown. But knowing for a fact that things that we actually can control, because much more organically distributed or diffused, like jobs and the skill sets, we really are at the very beginning of a transformation that we have never seen, at least in the last 100 years. In fact, I say 100 years, if you're looking at the jobs in the United States today, and you try to go back 100 years, and you ask yourself the question, how many of these jobs exist in some form in 1921? The answer would be roughly, guys, 50%. It means that for a long period of time, we kept jobs the way they were. It is just right now that the level of convergence and interoperability of technology makes it possible for the transformation of tasks, and later on jobs, to be so much more rapid that we'll see entire professions being displaced by technology. It means that the displacement will continue. It won't continue the same way. We have asymmetric distribution of income, therefore a country where people are still cheaper to hire They'll preserve people rather than machines. But sooner or later, some job will naturally be optimized, and technology does this better than anything else. That said, that optimization should not be considered to be just about the fear of becoming unemployable. It's more about the fact that that degree of optimization will naturally change the nature of the jobs. If we imagine that we all be alive—touching wood—by 2035, and 60% of the jobs that we'll have back then do not exist today, it shows you that we are in a creative tension right now in building jobs we never had before, where the integration of technology will hopefully create what we call symbio-intelligence, and a level of intelligence where the cognitive job will be integrated by technology and skills. And in more physical, in the more physical factory floor jobs, what we call cobotics, where the integration of robotics will integrate tasks and jobs and the factory production. So again, I hope you see this as an opportunity rather than something that scares us, because it's really where I think the majority of us will see a significant, I would say, renewal of the jobs market the way we know it so far. My presentation could continue for longer, And I could do that, but I would equally love, first of all, to give you a break from me talking and presenting and get the opportunity to actually get to know you as well. Questions could really take us busy for the remainder of the time, and then if we're running out of questions, I can always provide you with the final reflection on the nature of the work. But my point is not to show you everything that I have prepared for you. My point is to get the conversation started so that we can then make it much more of a custom-based discussion on the things that matters to me as somebody who is currently working on this project, but more importantly, that matter to you as not only friends of the Harvard community, but the stakeholders and folks that some— in some cases, equally were part of my classes. So Jill, if that's OK, that's also a good excuse for me to take a sip of water I stop my share. I go back to you. I haven't been able to follow anything on the Q&A, but I'll let you help me with that.

Yes. Well, we have a very active Q&A, Mark, and that was just such an exceptional overview of some of the challenges that we're facing right now. And there are so many questions anchored in several different topics. So a number of them are relative to China and Asia, and I was wondering if you could say just a little a little bit more about China's Belt and Road Initiative, and perhaps some of the partnerships that COVID has forged for China, say, with the rest of Southeast Asia, and how you predict AI factors in, and just say some more about Asia in general and your prediction on that hegemony.

Sure, Jill. Thanks so much for this. So a few things that I think is important. In 2013, President Xi started for the first time to say, We should reanimate the Silk Road. Now, guys, in just 8 years, the government has been able to prioritize the Belt and Road Initiative at the pace we've never seen before. Now, there are two versions of this. The first one is actually very factual. When you're building infrastructure, you're kind of building the condition for distribution and logistics to actually happen as well. So China is trying to play in the same way as we used to play back in the '50s, in the United States by expanding our interests across the global sphere. They do this with infrastructure, because we have to remember that infrastructure is also critical to trade. So I think it's quite clear that if you're building that level of project, Jill, you're kind of going to really looking in some degree of dominance, at least commercially. When you can move stuff so easily from A to B around the world, That's something. Now, here's the interesting story about your question on AI. When you're building logistics, you kind of want to automate that as much as you can, because suddenly it makes it more efficient if I can use technology to make what I currently do. And when we use technology that is integrated, because you can now be, as I mentioned before, interoperable, you're collecting data. And that data over time becomes material for algorithm and machine learning. By the way, this is not even secretive, because the government openly says that China will be the leader in AI by 2030. So I think, just to provide you my own sense— this is what I think is in the facts— my own feeling on that, I think China is rising up to a level of advocacy that is unequivocal. They want to become a dominating force. Of course. I think where this is in a very stark contrast is I don't hear that sense of advocacy coming from the West. If I have to ask myself, what is the vision of the United States or Europe in 2025 or '30, I don't have an answer. I think our silence has been heavily overcompensated by a loud voice, and is followed by a number of different acts that I think is likely going to the role that the country had, that China has on a global sphere. Where China, though, still lacks is internally. Their level of inequality and the increasing discontent around the party is dangerous. We should remember that empire was always defeated from inside, never from outside, right? And so that level of soaring discontent is quite preoccupying. It's actually worrisome. The second thing, China hasn't yet decided whether they want to step up in a global role, because that would imply opening up. I think we still have in the West the possibility of reshaping the debate of what a society in the 21st century should be all about, and what are the intellectual conditions required for us to build in terms of what are our tenets. So I don't think that the story is only following China as the only exclusive winner. But thinking this is not happening, it would be very naive of ours.

Absolutely. Now, do you think that the Western countries in particular are more considerate of data privacy and user data rights? And that is where some of their complications around, say, adapting the technology that China has China's mining data, right, without much respect for, for privacy. Do you feel that, uh, that that is something holding back those Western countries?

I think it's, it's holding back, and it's, uh, so like preventing and sometimes preempting the possibility for ecosystem to be established. I think what we should remember is that regardless how protected we are the data deluge will continue to happen. So rather than thinking about— and I'm going to use an analogy I'm using in my classes— breaking Google down in small Google will not change the problem. It's how do you engage Google in a different economic model where there's a different sense of service to society, right? I think rethinking the role of technology and data being a byproduct of that will be much more important than trying to decrease the exposure to data. 'Cause if we're using this incremental or decremental mindset, eventually one day we'll be outnumbered by, by the evidence. So I love for the conversation to be more about the purpose. And if you remember, Jill, when companies like Facebook came to life, their idea was to connect people. I remember in 2004, the founder of Google said, if more people around the world can search online, there will be more opportunity for small vendors, businesses, and all of that. There was a social nature in technology company when they started. The social nature, I think, got diluted into a model that is now much more commercial. Even, I think, their technology companies, they realized they became too large to not be accountable for so many different things. But will that level of engagement be reframed in the right way. I think this is where the conversation might really go. I'm hoping it will be successful, because we need the technology companies and the ecosystems, but we clearly need to understand that protecting privacy should never come at the expense of economic opportunity.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that's a big nut to crack. It is pretty big. My goodness. We have a question that is very specific here, where talking about the breakdown, or at least a legislative breakup of big tech companies, and what would that mean as far as impacts on microeconomies, if you have any thoughts on the impact— On this coming. —down the road, yeah.

So I think the breaking down of the large organization is so like a very intuitive way to say, hey, Google is too big. Facebook is too big, right? And I think when we see these guys going to Washington, and we realize, that the guys in Washington, the guys in the Valley, they simply don't understand each other, of course we get worried. I think the challenge is much more about what defines the economic incentives of the technology company. And I'll try to tell you where I think the problem is, Jill. If I say something which is true, and I'm creating engagement through the public, that generates economic opportunity through advertisement. And that's clear. But if I say something which is not true, I can equally create engagement, and I can equally generate economic opportunity. So truth or untruth in the social media sphere has the same economic value. So we are so prone to multiplying multiple alternative truth just because we can. I think technology companies, they don't have to fear the idea that in some cases, truth doesn't have two truths. Only one. And how do we make sure that this is becoming part of their social engagement? In the same way as I think food companies now, they are much more engaged in keeping us healthier, or healthier than before. There was a time where we were so like feeling the food company were taking the best out of us. Today consumers are demanding food company to be transparent about what they put on our tables. I think the same happened for pharmaceutical companies, The level of scrutiny that they go through before a drug gets approved, or a person even gets a food license to sell food, is a level of scrutiny that is required to create standards that protect both sides. But the technology company today doesn't have the same standards. So I think the impact on the small community might exist, but I think it is much more about making sure that we are creating standards where technology doesn't become exclusive only to few, but is becoming portable within, I think, a level of trust that is coming from within the standard we're generating. So it's more about, I think, building up that level of standards so that they can create economic opportunity also for the microplayers before we're even thinking about breaking them down or not.

Absolutely. Accessible, right? Accessible technology. Shifting a little bit to the Global South. Yes. Now, do you see any sort of discourse happening relative to the international human rights framework? Is it still something that is in the forefront?

Yeah, so that's an interesting question. It's interesting that in 2020, '21, we are more exclusive and intolerant than ever before. And I think this tells a lot about the fact that when we grew our economies and we were becoming modern societies or civilizations, we did not necessarily grow at the same time the social cohesion. So I would say there's a lot of work for us to be done in closing the gap where we are able to accept minority diversities, but equally understanding that the integration of people in different side of life is really important because it's the kind of renewal of economic infrastructure we want to have. So I find the conversation to be not where it should be. I actually personally find that the engagement right now is quite underwhelming. But I think we should pay attention to the fact that indicators show that at least in the last few years, we've been moving backwards in terms of inclusion. And we should try to close that gap. Because when you're closing that gap, you're not only closing what I think is a normal evolution of any society that want to converge, but you equally creating economic opportunities that currently are not happening because of the level of exclusion. And I think, Julie, should go into rethinking about infrastructure, rethinking about public school and funding for public schools. We have so much work to be done. That should break down the caste system no matter where we are. So I think it's a relevant question, because I think we haven't been doing too well in the last few years.

Do you feel like COVID exacerbated that?

Yeah, unfortunately, I think if you take an example of homeschooling, right? And then suddenly, you find yourself that your kids has to homeschool. And if you have the access to the internet, and your home is big enough for that, it's a pain because you're rethinking about spaces and dynamics, but you don't necessarily suffer from, let's say, basics. I remember, and I'll tell you this, Jill, there was one of my co-authors, Olaf, who was teaching during the semester for his MBA student at Husky, and he was telling me a story that at one point in time was noticing a kid that was taking classes over in coffee shops. But then eventually, coffee shop got shut down, right? Because he didn't have internet at home, and he was trying to take online classes wherever he could. Now, I think the pandemic has made the most vulnerable fringes of our society even more vulnerable. And I think this is something that has exacerbated even more the level of inequality, especially for one reason. Again, I can say I research and I teach for a living. So if I don't do it in the physical world, I do it on Zoom. Now, it's not the same, and I'm missing those chit-chat conversations that happen on coffee breaks, or people coming to me and ask me a question. But you can say that the bulk of the conversation can still happen. We did not— we found ourselves through a shock that was much more on a personal level. But from a professional perspective, we could migrate. But imagine you are in the physical world, and all you have is the relationship with a physical space that suddenly gets shut down. You have no way to bounce back. And I think this is a reflection that we should really have. And you can see this in hospitalities, venue, people working as waiters or waitresses, people working in hotels. If your hotel is shut down, where do you go? Not everybody will have augmented reality set up, right? And you're not necessarily qualified for that. So yeah, I think so. It did create, I think, a bigger crack to eventually reconcile.

Yeah, while we're here kind of thinking about the future of work and your notion of digital nomads and skills of the future, do you have any predictions on where those set of key skills are most needed?

Yeah, so that's quite interesting. I think it'll likely be in those areas where the task will be impacted by technologies. And the task will redefine the job itself. So I think greatly depends on whether we're going to have jobs where, or whose repetition was high, and therefore we will see likely technology taking over, and job where repetition was not too high, and so technology would just become, I would say, ancillary at the very beginning. So I don't have a specific way to define where. The only tips I can give, if you have a job where repetition is by design within the job, that job likely will be impacted by a higher degree of automation. If you're answering the phone 100 times a day, like people used to do, it's likely that an automated service will take your job. We don't have call centers anymore, Jill, because they're now chatbots. Remember, there was a time where people answered the phone, and you could have people working as secretary, or people working in job that was about switchboards, all of that. Those jobs are gone. But if your job doesn't have enough repetition, likely technology will just become, I think, a support structure. So just keep an eye on the level of repetition. That is already an indication where, from an economic perspective, somebody could start saying, is this cheaper to replace that job? So I always divide them. And Kai-Fu Lee, this guy who wrote this interesting book on AI, divides into two— optimization-based and strategy and creativity-based. So the answer to that question, if you have a strategy and creativity-based job, then it's going to be OK. But if you have an optimization-based job where you're being measured by efficiency, and you can improve the efficiency by replacing odds that are coming from human labor force, likely the job will be impacted by that.

Right. Do you see any countries kind of making more significant progress on adapting to the change in the future of work, adapting robotics or automation solutions that think of the people that are in these roles and reskill and upskill? Do you see any of that happening now?

Yeah, I have a way to, so like, determine from a geographical perspective where that will happen. And I can tell you roughly to what rate. So I'll start from the rate. Between 23% to 27% of jobs that could be replaced, so it means 1 job out of 4, in countries where the GDP per capita is really higher than $15,000, $20,000. So most of European countries, North America, some countries in Asia, 1 person out of 4 likely will be impacted by technology displacing that job, because labor cost is so high that having chatbots or technology that's doing the job— and we don't even need AI. We need the pre-programmed chatbot to replace, for example, sales agents in some parts, right, or people working in parking places where you used to actually get— people exchanging tickets or giving you a ticket at the entrance. Today, it's entirely automated. So roughly 1 person out of 4 will lose or be impacted by that in country with GDP higher than $15,000 to $20,000. In country with GDP lower than that, the odds go down to roughly 13%. So let's say 1.3 out of 10. And that's because, as I was mentioning during my presentation, so hiring people will still be cheaper. So here is where it gets even more interesting. The majority of the world is still in that part of the story. So we're looking at roughly 4 to 5 billion people out of the 7.5 that will not necessarily see anything happening for a foreseeable future, because hiring a person that will still give you a ticket in a parking lot, it will be still cheaper than replacing that with an automated machine. So where you are as a— as a geography will determine how likely the conversations sometimes we have will be self-fulfilling prophecies or just story you hear on the news.

Right. That is fascinating. Now, related, where do you see the future of edutech? Where do you see education going? I think COVID has accelerated what we here at Harvard Extension School in DCE have always known, that you can leverage technology in just infinite ways to learn and design pedagogy. And I wonder, where do you see where we are today?

This coin? Yeah. A good way to see what is happening is to go back to the banks 10 years ago when the first fintechs were popping up. And the bank was saying, who are these guys? And the answer was, these are technology companies who are doing finance. So today, the whole edtech is noneducational players playing education. And that's possible because— First of all, to some extent, their ability to acquire competitive content is much more within their reach than if you're going into more traditional institution, where also really more conservative faculty might take longer before they can get to the point. It's not a critique of my own industry, but it's not a mystery that traditional university, they are still quite slow of adapting. Because the incentive model has never been there in many ways. I think second, we start having— so who has really done a great leap forward during the pandemic was the consulting companies that, because they had to come up with solutions to clients saying, what shall I do now, they have developed really cutting-edge content. So today, I feel quite intrigued by what some of the large consulting companies are able in creating their own their own academies. We already have the PwC Academy. Boston Consulting Group actually has significant content that is dished out sometimes on the Harvard Business Review. And they have their own knowledge village. We all heard about McKinsey Global Institute and the level of insight they're producing. These companies, the day they decide to offer educational stuff, they can do it overnight. I think the challenge will be for those players that have not been able to really integrate change fast enough, and they will not necessarily be able to be relevant as before. On top of it, which is the final point to your question, there's a lot of technology companies that today can simply come up with ready-to-go content. They don't necessarily need to fill the gap of the education degrees, the degrees itself, but they can do a lot of certificate and short courses courses. I think at the Extension School, we've been pioneering this from even before, right? And so we've always been ahead of the curve, also within Harvard. But we're really quite an exception in the arena, I would say, Jill.

I agree with that. We are the exception. But I hope that we will see more of the recognition of lifelong learning, just in general. When you talked about the economy and the job changes over the last several decades, That's something I think that our division really embraces as providing lifelong education and knowing that we know we're trying to change mindsets from that, you know, single career that you are going to devote your life to, to a lifetime of careers, and that everything is rapidly changing and being adaptable and amenable and resilient is key, right? Absolutely. Now, getting back toward your notion, and my goodness, the division, the extremism. Can you talk a little bit about any relation to media or the media's role in exacerbating this polarization? Or is there a solution? Any prediction? What do we do about this problem?

I think, Jill, what I was mentioning before about the number of truths that we have, you know, that's really where we should heavily regulate. And when I say heavily regulated, I mean, I remind to all of those who are attending, I call myself a free market economist. That's how I went to school. And that's how I think it shaped my view of the world. But still, regulation sometimes is in the best interest of everybody. Imagine if you're taking drugs over the counter that's not being regulated. You have no idea what it will do to you, right? So the least thing you expect is that there has been scrutiny on some of the things you actually ingest, right? I think it's the same. And I remember having a conversation with the head of the relationship with the European Union from Facebook, who happened to be a former friend— is a former colleague of mine, friend of mine, who was working in the European Parliament and then ended up working for Facebook. Now, I brought her to my Harvard class before Christmas, and I told my Harvard class, let's be nice. Let us not have grilling questions. Let's have questions that make us understand. I mean, and this friend of mine from Facebook, she was fine. She knew how to answer the question. One of the questions was right before— it was right at a time where the election had already run, but the whole circus around the election was being played, right? And then people said, why don't you do something more about misinformation. And she said, that level of information requires so many human eyes that we don't have enough people for that. So to that point, I think we need to help the technology company to fill up or to aspire to the role they have in knowing that when they're producing content, when the content gets amplified by the followership, we have to remind ourselves that a company like Facebook when you're putting it together with Instagram, they have a population of roughly 3 billion people. They have a huge power. So how do we make sure that we are simply protecting information from becoming, as we heard in more sarcastic terms, alternative facts? I think we have to be extremely careful that in the same way as I'm expecting regulation in the drug industry, I'm expecting regulation on content. Which also goes back to a fundamental point. I guess we all remember when we heard that my individual freedom ends when it violates someone else's freedom. I think the same should count for social media. We shouldn't use freedom of expression as the only reason why we justify everything. I think we should calibrate things because in society, the calibration of information needs to refer the value that —society. And our real society is not a society in which everything can be said, because that's not where you're expressing freedom, is when you're saying something that is factually true. But of course, that's, again, as before, that's a pretty big one to crack moving ahead.

Yeah, yet another big one to crack, absolutely. Sort of along this notion, there is a question that, should we focus on rethinking our political models? Like existing political parties, are they becoming irrelevant? Are they exacerbating the societal difficulties that we have?

You know, Jill, back to the work, I think, that Porter and Katherine Gehl have done, having only in the US Democrats and Republicans running for office is insufficient to represent the spectrum of ideas in a country with so much talent. Plus, In theory, we are a democracy, but isn't it funny that the same families produce more than one president, or allegedly so? As much as I enjoy who is currently in the White House, I have to say he was already vice president before. If you remember when President Trump was elected, he was running against, you know, First Lady Clinton. She was already in the White House, right? And if you go back to the fact that do we have dynasties in the US, we do. So how do we break that? It shows us that we don't have the right representation in terms of representing the right quality of ideas that can be floated to the public. So that predetermination, I think, is really where we have to break the system. It would be better if we were making the system— I think the question is more in the primaries than anything else— in making sure that more candidates are really presenting their ideas. Because I think there is such a spectrum of opportunity in a country like the US, and not only. But why do I talk about the US so much? I remember asking this question with Katherine Gehl. And I said, so what do you think? Do you think we should follow the example like Denmark, or Sweden, or all of that? And she said, you know, I have— she said, I have no doubt the country like Denmark, Sweden are better democracy than what we have in the US. But they equally don't have the same complexity as we have. So we have to think about that complexity in the US system is enough. For us to consider that we'll face challenges that other countries won't face. So putting them on the same scale would not be fair. But point will be then, Jill, how do we make sure that we have a wider representation of candidates that are better representative of the idea that are expressed in this country? So yes, breaking the two-party rule, I think it would be important because I think over time, it has been, I would say, suffocating the aspiration of serving in public office. And now it's much more of an inside game than anything else.

OK, thank you. I know this is a controversial one. It is. But it's really interesting hearing your perspective on it. Someone had mentioned that MIT Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland has been working on rebuilding after COVID in the context of several global economic and development organizations and partnering with them. Have you ever worked with that initiative? Or can you say more about the work that's done in partnership with development organizations and helping that?

Yeah, so yeah, I know a bit of the work he does. So I haven't been working with him. I think the difference from his work is that we are much more thinking about the business community and less of the regulators, because I think the kind of transformation we'd like to see in the post-pandemic designs It starts on a much more grassroots level, where we like people to organically think about the new economic models. We do have access to regulators, and some of our interviews are with people working at the high level of the government. So we feel comfortable that we can equally target multilateral institutions. There's another quite interesting scholar. Her name is Mariana Mazzucato, who is running her institute at UCL in London. And Mariana, she's been working on redefining the value of states. So her work back in 2013, The Entrepreneurial State, became so like milestone work. And then now she's rethinking about the purpose of public value. So I think there are a lot of different scholars who are targeted at the multilateral organizations, similar to what Sandy is doing. We are at the much more micro level because we like to have a conversation that is inspired by the business community, community in a very opportunistic way, too, Jill. That's the guys we have the most access to, because we're teaching in business environments. And we like them to feel inspired that the level of great remobilization starts by thinking of the paradigm shift yourself, rather than hearing it from somebody else. Absolutely.

And getting back to the beginning of your presentation, there was quite a bit of interest around climate change. And the notion of COVID sort of being— rethinking the way that we talk about climate change as COVID being a primary driver. Do you think that there is the opportunity to use that for people to see those interests, those business leaders to coalesce and try to address climate change through the lens of COVID Yeah, that's a great point.

I think— And I tell you where my first exposure to the idea was coming from. So I remember back in January 2020, I was looking at the Global Risk Report that is produced by the World Economic Forum every January. And in that report, climate instability was right at the center. And then by 2 degrees of separation, you would have infectious diseases. It was related to water crisis, infectious diseases, And if we remember, COVID is a zoonotic disease, so it's mainly transferred from animals to humans. You tend to transgress habitat when, because of economic precarity or scarcity, you're trying to hunt on species that we usually don't hunt because you're trying to diversify how you get into the market. Remember the anecdote that some bats were sold into a live animal market in China, That's how the idea all started. That behavior, which is about transgressing natural environments, is driven on a combination of the habitat being destroyed, the animal moving elsewhere, and economic conditions that are pushing people in that direction. So somehow infectious diseases are determined also by instability at the climate level. So this is where I want to create a relationship between COVID and climate change. But I think the interesting part about that is that it has given to climate change a different facade. In everyday conversation, when we hear about climate change, by even the way we call it climate change, we're hearing about maybe water levels rising, cities getting flooded, or extreme weather events. We hardly imagine that when you're disrupting the chemistry of the planet, you're disrupting so many different parts of the gears that are changing the way the climate behaves and operates because of the normal sense of evolution. One of this is the relationship with habitats and biodiversity. The same— and I'm going to make this example just to make sure that we are expanding on the same concept but with a different example. So sometimes back, I was starting to get more interested in the circular economy, integrating value And you start getting conversation about plastic and recollecting plastic from the ocean. And then maybe I bought a pair of Adidas shoes that were entirely made by plastic recovered from the ocean. So I got into that. And one of the first things you discover is that most of the plastic in the ocean is ingested by fishes. And when you're mainly fishing and you're dissecting, you know, what is inside of a fish, roughly 50% of what the fish has in its body is plastic and plastic particles. Now, there is a relationship between increasing tendency on certain kinds of cancers and the fact that if you're eating certain kinds of fishes, you're exposed to more plastic ingestion. So you could argue that public health or diseases are equally related to climate change or to climate, in this case, to, to human-driven behavior that is dumping, because of consumption, plastic that is not biodegradable, back into the ocean. That's another example where we start noticing that our behavior within the environment does have an impact that is not just about the rise of temperature, but it's much deeper than that.

Absolutely. Now, getting back to the notion of currency, There was a lot of interest in the idea of truth in currency, and trust rather, trust in currency. Now, do you feel, are you predicting that crypto and nanoscale technology and other innovations will impact this next industrial revolution or be part of the foundation there?

I think it will, and I don't think it will happen at the money level. Which I think is to some extent good news. You know, the problem with the crypto at the currency level is that the level of speculation needs to be there for crypto to be cryptos. Because if you buy your crypto at $35,000, you want that to become $60,000 to sell it. It's in, it's in your mindset that you're not expecting crypto to perform like a normal US account where interest rates are 0.2% every year. So you're expecting the level of volatility to be part of the game. So I think in terms of currency, when you're moving into financial market, you get to see what you get to see right now, which is this major spread. Where I think the whole idea about crypto very interesting is redefining through blockchain storage of information in a way that now we start having interesting model. Example, one of the large fashion company lately started to say, we're going to use what they call not fungible tokens, and NFT. They are mainly a way to say, if I am an artist and I am going to design something for a major fashion company, my design will be protected and they will be valued a certain amount of whatever, let's say a token. Now the purpose of that is not for the token to become speculated into the market, but for me to have a way to recognize an artist that might have a design that becomes a global success. Like, I could imagine the same applied to musicians, or to educators, or to writers. So I remember this, Jill, which was an interesting story. In Eastern Europe, there was a city that was— there are sometimes people that are retired, and they volunteer in the morning to help kids cross the street when they go to school and stop cars. Now, they are volunteering job, but this city had created a cryptocurrency called Tolar, that was rewarding them with crypto. So somehow, you were using a service to community as a way of rewarding outside of the traditional budget the city had. Now, the value of that is a value that might increase over time, but will never increase in the same way as you having on the more famous cryptocurrencies. So I think by rethinking retribution, or compensation, or recognition through crypto, And by attaching this to a social reasoning, we're going to go far in understanding that the value of crypto is not just in thinking whether or not we should have our Federal Reserve backed up by Bitcoin. It's much deeper than that. And I think this is the direction where I would hope this to— I would imagine this to go.

Right. That is such an interesting connection between that cryptocurrency and social mobility and overcoming those it was, you know, the society's downfall of creating opportunity. And would you mind, which community was that?

So it's, uh, it's, it's a tiny community in Croatia, but I can tell you the currency that was, uh, uh, was managing this, you find it, I think it's Tolar, T-O-L-A-R dot IO, and it's still running. And it's a community, it's a cryptocurrency that is is primarily designed to support social work.

Wow, that's fascinating, really. I mean, that, that requires further reading. I just love that. Uh, now you presented, you know, so many complex issues. Are you feeling optimistic about the future? You mentioned that technology is going to create value, but that the trajectory is so difficult to define. Do you feel good, or how do you feel? Give me a temperature reading.

I, I think I am a techno-optimist, I would say, Jill, because I, I, I see how much technology can really help us achieve goals we have never been able to achieve before. And I think the technology today can really start revealing inefficiency or inequalities or, or structural gaps because it comes with so much more, I think, value proposition that could really close or converge us more, from new idea for financial inclusion, to transparency in payment by reducing salary gaps. I think the opportunity ahead of us are huge. I do worry that it will be society that might mismanage the opportunity of technology. But on the other hand, and I think I am biased because I, as an educator, I get to work with smart our people. I see them rise into the opportunity like never before. This is a much better generation than when I went to school, because when I went to school, we had to be part of a game that was already determined for us. So it was more about compliance than anything else, right? You needed to go to school, graduate, and find a job and settle down, and that was pretty much expected of you. And I can see in many of my students that is no longer something I could sell easily. Because there's so many nuances to that. So I see this— many of my students rising to the opportunity of rethinking value and bringing ideas to the market that are phenomenal. So I have no reason, even if I wanted to, not to be optimistic.

Well, that's awesome. Can you say a little bit more about your teaching at Harvard Extension? You've been here for a number of years. And you mentioned your work with Michael Porter in the early days. How did that evolution transpire? Say a little bit more about your work with Michael Porter. It's fabulous.

So I started with Porter in 2011. I was part of the Microeconomic Competitiveness Network. I still am. But then I became co-leader of one of the institute councils with another gentleman called Amit Kapoor. We ran it for 4 years. So we were in charge of roughly 40 institutes around the world attached to Michael Porter Institute on work on competence, and clusters, and economic growth. And seeing Porter in action for at least 9 years of my career, you kind of really understand the sentence about learning from the shoulders of giants, right? And then through Porter, I met Clayton Christensen, who has now unfortunately passed away, and many other great people at HBS. So that work, got reframed at the Extension School in a course that I'm teaching called Economics, Strategy, and Competitiveness. It's pretty much the same stuff, but it's not called the same way. But it's offering the same sort of conversation around economic growth in times, I think, of significant discontinuity, as we have right now. So that is a course I'm running, I think, in the fall. And last year, I launched a new course course called Managing Technology in the Global AI Economy. And that is based on my work on the AI with the previous book. And that is a course that I'm running by looking at how technology is profoundly changing the way we are. So these are the two courses that I run the most. And then in the professional degree and the professional program for the PDPs, right? I'm running 3 short courses. One is called Identifying Growth Opportunity, which is based on the 2017 book On Drive. One is called Creating Value Through Machine Learning, which is based on the 2019 book on AI Republic. And we're launching in a few days FinTech and Blockchain.

That's it. That's it? That's so great. Yeah. Thank you. There are so many more opportunities to learn and kind of extrapolate here, but, you know, the, the notion of like the politicization, politicization of truth and elite versus the anti-expert, how do we overcome that? As, you know, as higher ed, how do we bridge that divide and lead into the future to create positive change?

You know, Jill, I personally find that most of my students, when I ask them where you would like to go after your degree, degree, most of them, they of course go and serve the private sector, because that's where we feel that the incentives will be the right ones. I'd love for the brightest people on Earth, which are the students I teach— how lucky am I— that they can start thinking about public service as a way of thinking that that level of competence must be infused in governments. I remember— and this is a story I'll never forget— I was teaching a class at the University of Cambridge, and I had 24 students. Students, I still remember, and 7 of them were Asians. But when I asked, where are you from, they all told me Singapore. Now, it's kind of an awkward statistics that out of 7, out of 7 from Asia, they're all from Singapore. So I asked them, why are you guys here? They said, well, we all work for government. The government pays for us to get our degree in Cambridge. And when we come back, we got to work for, I think, 4 or 5 years before we either move up or eventually change job. And I was thinking, this is a government that is investing in sending their kids to— well, kids— to Cambridge. And I guess the same will happen to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, because they believe that high talented people should serve in government. I would imagine that if that can happen to us as well, where we can inspire the generation of our students that serving in public office office should become one side of your life, it doesn't have to become a career, I think we'll start seeing more and more of the right level of conversation in government, rather than hoping government will change by itself. It won't.

It will be us, actually. That's so interesting. And I think Singapore is a great historical example of a rise, such an accelerated rise. And from what I've read and learned, I don't know the names of the— the founders that really brought into this revolution of Singapore, but education was at the core. And that notion of 70, 80 years ago, some of the leaders of Singapore were educated at Oxford and came back and rebuilt this economy. And my goodness, the acceleration is really phenomenal seeing Singapore up today. Absolutely. That's amazing. Okay. Well, it looks like we've gotten through most of the questions. If anyone else would like to submit a last-minute one, you are welcome to. We have such an engaged alumni body, and many of them do work in social justice. So there is a great number of your fans on the line that are giving you constant shoutouts in chat, by the way, which we can send you a transcript of after we are done. But, uh, and lots of thanks, lots and lots of thank yous in the chat. It's just such a fascinating conversation, and I feel like each segment of your upcoming book could be its own. I mean, there's just so much to say and such a wealth of content. And yeah, I appreciate the sneak peek.

It is the community of students like the one that are now here that put me in a position where I can ask myself those questions. And I'm not saying this just because it might sound good. It's a privilege for me that working with so many talented people, I get to spend my time on important questions. And I think this is probably a luxury that I am happy to have, is that the time that we don't have— because we don't have enough time, pretty much. We would love to spend more time on other things. In my case, I am lucky that because I'm constantly nudged by this smart brains, I'm always finding myself landing on critical question. And I think when you're landing on a critical question, if you recognize how critical it is, you really have to engage with that. So if content becomes important or relevant, it's because of the number of people that help me find it. And I say this because what a privilege to be an educator.

That's wonderful. And Harvard is so very lucky to have you. And we are absolutely just blown away by your presentation and so grateful to you for leading and taking on this responsibility, because it is no, no easy nut to crack, as we have talked about. So we need, we need to clone you. You just need more. So your students are extensions of you and of your work, so we only hope that they are going into communities and making the difference there.

Well, thanks, Jill, for having me. Thanks for reaching out. I mean, I, uh, when I received your, your message, you know, it's— I was thinking if we could make this work and happen, what a way for me to spend some time with the Harvard community. We spend busy lives, so once they graduate, they play a role in the world, as they should. But having moments like this where I can— I haven't seen them, but I can feel them, right? It's so nice, and I'm really honored that this could happen. Once the book is out, I think we should talk about it again, right?

Absolutely. And we can't wait to share it. You know, we enjoyed so much your other books, and we've had you here in person, and we want to get back together in person, like, as soon as humanly possible. So absolutely, we will look forward to that and wish you nothing but the best. And, you know, if anyone is interested, if you just look up, uh, Mark Esposito, courses at Harvard. He is teaching at Harvard Extension School and at Harvard Professional Development. And coincidentally, if you're a degree holder of Harvard Extension, you receive a pretty hefty discount to Harvard Professional Development, 30%. So feel free to check out any of those courses. And best of luck, Mark, with the fintech. Thanks so much.

Thanks again for having me. Thanks, Jill. Thanks, Veronica. You guys have been wonderful in getting me up to here and making sure I could do my service to the Harvard community. And we should say godspeed, right? Absolutely.

Godspeed. And hope to see you soon. Thank you so, so much, Mark.

Thank you, Jill. Big hugs to everybody. Bye, everybody. Cheers. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.