YouSaid · the spoken record

Parag Khanna

lines on the record: 33
first: 2016-04-22
most recent: 2016-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's actually really a great point to bring up because one of the things that I had argued with Mark about, well, not argued, but when I was probing him about the idea on Twitter before I actually came here to work here, was that I didn't want it to become this model for where poorer countries would have to essentially suffer in order to get ahead. But what you're arguing is the exact opposite, which is quite refreshing and hopeful. Well, Prague, this is really interesting. I think people should read your book, Connectography, and see the immense amount of research and analysis and thinking that you've done at scales, both grand and in micro levels as well. Thank you for being on the A6NC podcast.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I totally agree with Mark's argument, and that's exactly what's happening is regulatory arbitrage. With one caveat, we used to call it the race to the bottom. We used to believe that countries would relax all sorts of regulations in order to attract investment of any kind. And that was the kind of 1970s and 1980s of Asia. But in fact, I argue that it's actually a race to the top because this is how countries ascend the value chain. This is not how they make soccer balls with their hands for the next 50 years. This is how they get jobs, they get investment, they get technology, and they gradually move up the value chain. Sometimes they move up very, very quickly. We used to think of this as a derisive kind of trend, but it's actually a very positive trend. And I'll tell you why, and this was one of the hardest areas of data gathering for me to do for this book, but it's all embodied in one map that I have in the very early part of the book about these special economic zones. And what it shows is the share of exports of each major country in the world.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think of it as being dominated by Bangalore and in India, right? But now because outside of Manila and the Philippines, there's a whole city that's basically BPO city. The Philippines now has more workers and more revenues from call centers than India does because they made a plan. Let's physically get connected. Let's leverage our English speaking population and let's capture this industry from India. We've got 4,000 such special economic zones around the world that are getting into this global economic competition to leverage connectivity and attract industries and investment and technologies that help build their workers and raise wages and obviously build a better life. And that's why the Philippines and India and Vietnam, these countries that have the most special economic zones are among the fastest growing countries in the world. I've been traveling to them one by one over the last five, ten years and a lot of the stories are included in this book.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah, so Shenzhen, or what started out as a Shenzhen, Dominican Republic, Mauritius phenomenon has now become these pockets and enclaves, whether they're port cities or the Dubai International Financial Center or the Bangladesh Textile Export Processing Zone or the Malaysia Multimedia Supercard. Either it's the transformation of an existing place or it's literally breaking ground, building entire new cities from scratch like Songdo, new economic city in South Korea, which a lot of people look at Mastar City and Abu Dhabi. These places are not on our maps. And what I've been doing is traveling to them and trying to understand what are the technologies that they're investing in the most in order to leapfrog, basically, to the 21st century. What are the industries that they want to capture and compete in, so LED lighting, right? For example, or digital animation, clean tech software and programming. I'll give you one example, business process outside.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I have this line in the book where I say I've spent much of the last 10 years in places that don't exist because there's lots of cities that are not on the map yet and yet there are places where governments are investing in developing new kinds of modern infrastructure, especially economic zones, supply chain hubs, if you will. Instead of just cities, which are our oldest political unit of organization, we've had cities for 5,000 years. We've had modern nations for a couple of hundred years. The city is the organizing unit of humanity and the sort of top 300 cities in the world represent most of the world economy. And so countries around the world are saying, what can we do to get in on this global network of connected cities that are driving the world economy forward that dominates supply chains and so forth? They're building these special economic zones and hubs for supply chains. And I noticed that, you know, in 50 years ago, there were only a couple of special economic zones in the world. Today we have 4,000 of them.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“hasn't quite settled into this place we're in the middle of this friction. So, do you have any thoughts on what's changing, what needs to change there? Because we can't also dismiss the real concerns of people who are moving in these systems and trying to live their lives and make their way.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to go back to one of the points you brought up earlier in the echo chamber bit. So, one of the things that I think is interesting is you talked about how we have this nostalgia for this time that never really was the way it was before and that you're arguing never really was. And I think many people agree that it's just sometimes a hindsight view of the world. I think one of the things that's happening is that those systems that evolved became containers for practices that are associated with taking care. So for the example that you cited, like, you know, you work at one company for 60 years. That's no longer happening anymore. But because that was a system, that was where healthcare was located. That was where people's financial security was located. And now we're in this place where we haven't quite built out this other ecosystem of third party services that can support like, you know, we have in the US, we have now Obamacare. So that helps take care of healthcare. But then, you know, other third party services to help the employees who are no longer captive to a single company. So we're kind of in this in-between place.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In global economic transactions, in getting your goods from the village and country X to the big city in country Y. And so what I'm seeing in my research is that through all of these cloud-based digital technologies for, you know, just call them for lack of a better term, global trade, enterprise apps, whether they use blockchain or otherwise, now just about anyone can participate in global supply chains. You can make parts for the global supply chain for manufacturing or be part of a digital kind of coding ecosystem on like Nitris or GitHub, whatever the case may be, you can participate in the financial transactions, in the digital transactions, in the economic transactions through all of these increasingly lower cost platforms. So to me, scale is still the real big issue. And this is where all of the inventiveness and innovation of Silicon Valley meets the frictions to go back to the earlier term of the real world. And we have to continue to fight and push to”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, not at all. The global economic pie is still expanding. There's plenty of growth in the world. And I think the answer might sound mundane, but it's scale. I mean, a lot of the things that we're talking about right now are happening but aren't happening fast enough. We do have the next 3 billion, the next 5 billion that need to be connected. So that's kind of a long way to go, right? And I think, again, the answer is in scaling supply chains, getting people more access to markets, whether it's technology, capital, mobility, whatever the case may be. And I think tech companies have a lot of a big role to play in that. Let me give you a very concrete example. It's very expensive to access global shipping and transportation networks to move cargo and goods around the world. That is something that big companies can do. And the cost of access are very often bureaucratic, paperwork and bribes. So of course, Ethereum, you know, and blockchain technologies really reduce the transaction cost and the transparency and the security of participating.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where does this world that you describe? And I'm sort of thinking about the stateless superpower and then the rest of us. I mean, is there only room for the very giant that gets bigger and bigger before it comes super? Like where is the room for innovation? And for what Silicon Valley does best, right? You know, birth these things and put them out into the world? Or is the network effect of these stateless superpowers so powerful that there isn't room for anything else?”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that if you look at the number of, for example, international friends that people have on Facebook. It used to be only four or five percent of an average person's friends were from another country, and now it's risen to like 15 or 16%. Now, of course, we can debate the meaning of the word friend. I think the fact is that we have global connections. Most people in the world will still never leave the country in which they were born. So I'm very sympathetic to the idea that you can be a prisoner of the kind of the values, the identity that are imposed on you by the place, by the government, by the religion of the country that you're in. And without digital connectivity, how would you ever have those options as to who you identify yourself with, what you believe in and so on? The fact is that more connectivity is better for everyone.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a lot of mythology around this idea that, oh, we used to huddle around the NBC evening news and what we were exposed to lots of diverse ideas, watching our monochrome television, everyone going to the same old office every day, like a Japanese worker, let's say, and working 60 years for the same company. That world is not coming back. And nor did that world ever really exist. Let's embrace the reality of the fact that, first of all, we're exposed to a zillion times more ideas than we were before from every corner of the world. I can't possibly imagine the feedback and the diversity in the geographic diversity of feedback that I get on every syllable that I write coming from everywhere, were it not for this connectivity. Just because you can choose to switch on a filter bubble and isolate yourself with totally nationalist ideas or ideological ideas, political ideas, that doesn't mean that you do, in fact.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is their primary identity? And as someone who's migrated a lot in my life, I'm very sympathetic to this. I've met young Russians and Brazilians and Indians and Saudis who say, you know, my passport is such a drag. But also obviously just on a day to day level, what are the Facebook groups you're in and who are you dialoguing with online, that gives you a sense of identity too. Big shift from 500 years ago, right? Your primary identity was religion or state. And now it's anything you want it to be. And so I think, again, connectivity, total connectivity enables this.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financially. So connectivity and mastering connectivity on an individual level actually matters profoundly for each and every American. That's one angle. Then there's identity. When looking at stateless superpowers, I looked at the hundreds of thousands of employees used to be less than the 1%, the elite global travelers who are bankers and consultants. Now it's so many people who are always moving from one place to the other. I look at, for example, the number of expatriates in the world. There used to be about 100 in the 60s. There are only a hundred million people living outside their country of origin. Now it's over 300 million people who are expats. And they might be permanent expats. They belong to what I call in the book, the independent republic of the supply chain.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're at the point now where there are more people surviving on the sharing economy. So as part-time workers, digital workforce, gigonomists, whatever term you want to use, freelancers as a whole, some estimate 30 to 40 million of them. More people employed or self-employed in that way than there are manufacturing workers in America, which is less than 10% of the labor force and only about 10 or 12 million people and obviously dwindling very fast. Let's fast forward to where Americans are self-employed and are living off of various tasks that they get through connected work, through large companies to each other and so forth. And that is, of course, changing the nature of how the individual relates to the economy. There's no more stable employment for generations on end. Instead, you have to be much more self-reliant. And your degree of connectivity is going to shape your prosperity, your ability to be mobile sort of digitally so that you can continue to work in different ways over the course of your career.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I know I get called a futurist sort of all the time, but I wouldn't be writing about any of this stuff if it weren't sort of deeply grounded in everything that I observe today as I'm just traveling around the world and talking to people and seeing things. There is nothing particularly futuristic about all of this. And I think there's two answers to your question. One is on the level of the workers and workplace practices. And the other is the level of identity”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sort of pervades Silicon Valley, that ultra high oxygen content air that gets people thinking a step ahead of the rest of the world. But in the present, these same companies are saying, whoa, we can grow faster in India. There's great technology workers and programmers and coders in emerging markets who cost less. And of course, we can't get enough talent into the borders. For all of these reasons, a lot of large companies, Cisco, to say nothing of obviously companies that are leveraging just coding talent in the cloud want to locate and be just about everywhere. And so they are, in a way, deterritorializing themselves.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, it is a giant global footprint. And so all telecom companies are angling. If you're a Spanish telecom company, you are aiming to boost your market in Latin America. Tata, again, Tata Reliance, all of these Indian telecommunications companies, where's their biggest growing footprint besides their home market? It's Africa. And this applies now to all sectors. I mentioned consulting. I mentioned energy. I mentioned now technology. Most Fortune 500 companies now earn more revenue abroad than at home. So to become a stateless superpower, you want to have your globally distributed revenue. You want to have your management distributed in different jurisdictions. You want to be a bit decentralized. You want to have diverse kind of management structures. All of these kinds of tools in a way that companies are using. And people always think that these are American companies. They're created by American talent or immigrant talent. They thrive on the air of entrepreneurship that”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things, you only had a few companies that were really leveraging this globally connected system. Now people, companies are everywhere. Vodafone is a British company, but what per share of its revenue do you think really comes from the United Kingdom? Very, very small.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is what I call a stateless superpower. So you think of like a commodities trader like Glencore, a company that can buy mining assets, copper, zinc mines, whatever the case may be, get it anywhere in the world through its shipping networks. That's a stateless superpower. It operates everywhere and is nominally registered as a Swiss company. Switzerland has a large share of these stateless superpowers, as does Singapore and some of the offshore British jurisdictions. Think of McKinsey as another example. Where is McKinsey? Where is Accenture? They have hundreds of thousands of employees, but no one knows where their headquarters is. Sometimes their own staff don't know. So, you know, I recently wrote a long essay that was just analyzing how 20, 25 years ago, in a pre-connectivity sort of world, in a world where there was not all of these connected nodes that had all of the full services of legal sort of domicile, of quality regulation, of technological connectivity, of good airports, even all of”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sort of telecoms real estate stations, mobile infrastructure, all of those things all over the world. The point I want to emphasize is this is a physical thing. It's a physical investment. It has this transformative impact on the nature of the organization of the world because you can actually touch and feel these things. Of course, we think of sort of internet as something so ethereal, but it is such a physical thing and all of this infrastructure becomes more tangible and more relevant to our lives than invisible borders.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, earlier I mentioned a company that most people have never heard of, and yet it's the most powerful builder of energy infrastructure in the world, TransNet. Now, the technology companies, the technology infrastructure companies that lay all of these fiber cables, many people haven't heard of Tata Communications and the others that build, own, and operate these millions of kilometers of undersea internet cables. And they are the silent agents of digital connectivity around the world. Now, of course, many people have heard of Vodafone. Vodafone is the largest telecom operator in the world, nominally British company, but really a global telecom superpower. These telecom and technology and kind of, you know, data industry companies invest about, you know, it's estimated that between now and 2020, let alone all the trillions that have been spent so far, we'll spend another $4 trillion just on the physical infrastructure of digital connectivity around the world. That's the internet cables, that's the data center.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's also just a really good engineering practice. The design of any good system, the philosophy is that you want to have as many redundancies as possible so you can reroute if something breaks, whether it's a printer or a circuit or any mass autonomous system. You want to be able to have multiple pathways and ability to reroute on demand. It's super fascinating. You just talked about with that example. How does that play out with like, say, technology companies and applications?”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through Poland to Ukraine. So even if Russia wanted to cut off Ukraine, Russian gas is still going to through Ukraine through Western Europe. It's one of the kind of arcs that I try and argue is that the more connectivity you build, even if it seems redundant, even if it seems superfluous, even if you think, why do we need 10”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead, TransNet wants to make money, and TransNep can't make money if it's not selling oil and gas. So it is a Kremlin-backed owned company that is actually doing the most to undermine Putin's foreign policy because it doesn't want to lose money by cutting off the flow. I have a whole map of this in the book where I point out that the more pipelines you build between Russia and Europe and the more natural gas that Europe can import through Turkey, from North Africa, from the United States, the United States now ships and liquid natural gas to the Baltic countries. So the more resilience you have in the system, because even if Russia were to turn off one tap, it's got all these other taps that are still flowing. So here's the crazy part. This is the punchline. The target country for Russia is, of course, Ukraine. But now that Russia has built so many new pipelines to Europe that circumvent Ukraine, Europe is building what are called reverse pipelines that take the gas that goes from Russia to Germany and feeding it back.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm so glad you brought up this example. It's a perfect one. Because interestingly enough, once Russia, that is one of the largest builders of gas and oil pipeline infrastructure through a company called TransNeft. It's a state-owned, like a Kremlin-backed company that builds most of the pipelines that flow between or that connect Russia and Europe. So even though it's a Kremlin-run company, you would think that when Russia wants to cut off supplies to Ukraine and Europe, it would just flick a switch and do that and punish them, right? Right.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's literally everything because the world becomes not a world of the Westphalian political borders, but it becomes a supply chain world in which the supply chain connects everything, every supply in the world, every resource, every commodity, every idea can reach any other place or person in the world through these infrastructures. So the world becomes completely organized according to connectivity. That which is connected and that which is not connected. And everything becomes fungible, right? Any resource can be moved and transferred from one place to the other. And so that is a supply chain world. And that is totally unprecedented in human history, not to mention that it is global.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which infrastructure and supply chains fundamentally matter more than nations and borders? Because again, there's so much more infrastructure than there is borders. So instead of thinking about things stopping at borders, we should think of the only ways in which we slow down the movement of goods, of people, of resources, of knowledge, of ideas, of technology, is through various kinds of frictions, the great firewall of China.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think we live in a world in which the most fundamental layer of human organization is the political state. It's my nation and your nation and the borders between us, states and borders. What happens when you have the volume of infrastructural connectivity between cities and communities so drastically exceed the utility and the length of global borders is that you change the entire nature of the system. And of course we're not old enough to remember only those who are steeped in kind of geopolitical history would think back to the last period of what's called like major systems change from the Middle Ages to the modern state system. That was 500 years ago. And once every 500 years we have this kind of systemic transformation in how human society is organized. And so, you know, we're moving from the world of nations and borders to what I call the world of flow and friction.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to pause on that idea for a minute. It was eye-opening for me to think about the internet as the one in this continuum versus like this discrete theme that just randomly layered on top. Why does that distinction matter so much? Why that's important, what the implications of that is.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data supply chain. We have a supply chain for moving cargo, a supply chain for moving energy, for moving ourselves. Now we have a full-on global layering of a digital supply chain, which we call the internet. So as I say, the internet is only the newest kind of supply chain. It's the third and freshest and newest and obviously among the most powerful.”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across the Middle East. And of course, the Russians did too. That's just transportation. Then came energy. We didn't have international oil and gas pipelines 100 years ago. Today we have about 2 million kilometers of them, right? Not to mention the 4 million kilometers of railways. And so on top of transportation, on top of energy, you have communications. And communications is the third and most recent layer of global infrastructural connectivity. You've got the telegraph. And along some of the same maritime routes where the British laid telegraph cables a century ago, we now have fiber optic submarine cables across the continent. And there's about one million kilometers of fiber optic cables on the ocean floor. We're building more and more all the time. And then, of course, we've got the satellites and the data centers and the ISPs and all of the ways in which digital connectivity takes place. So it is a”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And there's no reason not to be grandiose. I write books with neologisms and terms like global civilization. So I'm hardly one to shy away. I aim at the hundred year perspective, but also there is lots of granularity in the argument. I think, you know, it is true that, though, when you're in the valley and you're talking about connectivity, of course, your first instinct is to think about digital connectivity and the internet and your mobile phone. And all of that is true, but the internet is actually only the newest layer of global infrastructural connectivity. The fundamental argument is there is the most powerful force of this century is connectivity. But that connectivity falls into three categories. There's transportation, energy, and communications. And that evolution that you asked about begins in the late 19th century with intercontinental and cross-border highways. And then, of course, railways built by empires such as the British, even the Ottomans had railways that spent”
2016-04-22 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source