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Filippino national hero Jose Rizal allegedly said that “Youth is the hope of our future.” When it comes to governance, is that a good thing in a world where there is a growing body of evidence that youth's satisfaction with democracy is declining in many countries? This decline—in absolute terms, as well as relative to how older generations felt at the same stages in their lives—may reflect understandable frustration with outcomes, rather than with the concept of representative democracy. But that makes it no less worrying. If not democracy, then what? Government by technocrats? By “strong” leaders? By the wisdom of crowds? This New Thinking for a New World podcast episode is part of Tällberg Foundation's exploration of the future of democracy. Is Churchill still right that democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else? Listen as Cristóbal Marín Rojas, who comes from Bogota, Colombia, and Julien Richard, who is French, American and Austrian discuss the challenges of making democracy work. Both are students at the Paris School for International Affairs at Sciences Po.

Today's world is short of a lot of things—sustainable environment, peace, prosperity, equality—but what we lack most is innovative, global, values-based leadership. If we can find and nurture that kind of leadership, the rest will follow.  The Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize named in honor of Jan Eliasson, one of the most accomplished global diplomats of our era. In this special episode, Jan and Alan Stoga, chairman of the Tällberg Foundation discuss how great leaders can change everything. What can you do? Take Jan’s call to action seriously and, then, nominate someone who deserves to win the leadership prize this year. Nominate your candidate here: https://tallberg-snf-eliasson-prize.org/nominate/ Music: "Without You" by Oxime © 2021. Permissions granted courtesy of Oxime Audio https://www.oxime-audio.com/

It wasn't that long ago that globalization was almost universally perceived as a good thing, when policymakers celebrated free trade agreements, and when countries competed to lower barriers to the free flow of goods, technology, and money. But something in the global zeitgeist seems to have shifted from free trade and open markets to decoupling, national champions, re-shoring, industrial policy.  We seem to be moving from a world where markets ruled to one where politics rules;  the politics of nationalism and confrontation, of East versus West instead of East and West. In this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast, Weijian Shan, economist, businessman, investor, and author based in Hong Kong, shares his unique perspective, not just on global markets, but on how the world really works. He is chairman and CEO of PAG, one of Asia's leading investment firms, and author of two books, Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Deal makers Saved Korea's Most Iconic Bank, and Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America.

A shape-shifting event like the global pandemic affects almost everyone on the planet—but it especially affects children. They have seen their education, social and mental health development, nutrition, and health badly—perhaps permanently—damaged.   And, what’s bad for kids is worse for girls, because in too many countries, especially in low and middle-income countries, girls don’t have anywhere near adequate access to schools, health care, even food. The Malala Fund, launched by Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousefazai, is dedicated to a simple proposition: all girls, everywhere should have free, safe, quality education. In this episode of the New Thinking for a New World Podcast, Maliha Khan, one of the leaders of the Malala Fund, talks about how the pandemic has made that goal even more difficult to achieve.

Today’s world is short of a lot of things—sustainable environment, peace, prosperity, equality—but what we lack most is innovative, global, values-based leadership. If we can find and nurture that kind of leadership, the rest will follow. In this special episode you will meet Nithya Ramanathan, one of the three 2020 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership prize winners. Nithya is an engineer and social entrepreneur, saving lives through the innovative application of technology, creating and applying data-driven solutions to global challenges. Listen, as she is interviewed by Cecilia Weckstrom, Sr Director, Diversity, Inclusion & People Innovation at Lego in the UK and a member of the 2020 prize jury. What can you do? Take Nithya’s call to action seriously and, then, nominate someone who deserves to win the leadership prize this year. Music: “Without You” by Oxime © 2021. Permissions granted courtesy of Oxime Audio https://www.oxime-audio.com/  

What does China—or, more particularly China’s leadership and the Chinese Communist Party— want from the rest of the world?  Domination or collaboration? Allies or subjects? War or peace? Jonathan Ward, an American who is rapidly becoming one of that country's leading China experts, thinks they want victory. Dr. Ward, who has lived and worked in China and has a deep affinity for the Chinese people, recently published a new provocative book, China's Vision of Victory. Listen as he shares his perspective on the issue that could literally change the course of history.

Early in 2020, when the global pandemic was still gathering force, UNICEF published a prophetic, deeply disturbing document "All children of all ages and in all countries are being effected in particular by the socioeconomic impacts and in some cases, by mitigation measures that may inadvertently do more harm than good. This is a universal crisis. And for some children, the impact will be lifelong.”  If anything, what actually has happened—and continues to happen—to children everywhere is, if anything, probably worse than UNICEF imagined.  Not just schooling, but human and social development interrupted.  Children cut off from the meals that come with school attendance.  Surging levels of abuse, trafficking and child labor.  Perhaps, a lost generation, but almost certainly a damaged one. Robert Jenkins sits at the epicenter of this crisis. He is leading UNICEF's global education response to the pandemic and brings decades of experience and a global perspective to what might easily be the most important and longest lasting impact of COVID.  How worried is he?  What needs to be done?  How can societies around the world, ameliorate the worst impacts of the pandemic on their children? Who do you think deserves to be recognized as a global leader? Nominate someone today at www.tallbergprize.org

Today’s world is short of a lot of things—sustainable environment, peace, prosperity, equality—but what we lack most is innovative, global, values-based leadership. If we can find and nurture that kind of leadership, the rest will follow. In this special episode you will meet Jared Genser, one of the three 2020 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership prize winners. Jared is an international human rights lawyer who has spent his career practicing law, engaging in serious scholarship, and teaching and mentoring the next generation of human rights lawyers. Listen, as he is interviewed by Shahidul Alam, photographer, writer, curator and activist and a member of the 2020 prize jury. What can you do? Take Jared’s call to action seriously and, then, nominate someone who deserves to win the leadership prize this year.   Music: “Without You” by Oxime © 2021. Permissions granted courtesy of Oxime Audio https://www.oxime-audio.com/

Even as the pandemic, like some giant glacier, slowly and unevenly recedes, the world seems frozen in place as it deals with the mess left behind.  Increased poverty and malnutrition; greater inequality; damaged and depleted health care systems; rising social and political tensions.  But is this crisis or opportunity?  Or, rather, are we smart enough and driven enough to turn what threatens to be a period of enormous strife—of the kind that often follows pandemics—into a new era of positive, life affirming change? This week’s guests on the New Thinking for a New World podcast are dedicated to the latter proposition. They both are trying to make the world the kind of place it could and should be. Vidhya Ramalingam is a recognized expert on the use of technology to disrupt violent extremism online. Sarah Durieux focuses on mobilizing citizens online, to help them achieve policies they care about. They both also recently completed the Obama Foundation’s inaugural Emerging Leaders in Europe Program

Europe is increasingly divided: between the frugal North and the Club Med South; between the illiberal East and the progressive West. In many ways, the latter is more profound at a time when democracy is under pressure almost everywhere. Leaders like President Orban of Hungary and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, who founded the ruling Law and Justice Party, are trying to change not only their own countries' laws and institutions, but to shift the center of European social and political gravity to the right. How likely are they to succeed? Will they change only their national realities or will they make changes on the larger European or even global stages? Do Hungary and Poland really belong to the Europe of the early 21st century? Our guests in this week's New Thinking for a New World podcast are engaged in this conflict. Both are lawyers; Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz serves at Poland's Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights and András Léderer is the senior advocacy officer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. They both also recently completed the Obama Foundation’s inaugural Emerging Leaders in Europe Program. Listen as they discuss the profound conflicts that will shape their countries—and perhaps Europe—for decades to come.

Today's world is short of a lot of things—sustainable environment, peace, prosperity, equality—but what we lack most is innovative, global, values-based leadership. If we can find and nurture that kind of leadership, the rest will follow.  In this special episode of the New thinking for a New World podcast, you will meet Sylvia Earle, one of the three 2020 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership prize winners. Sylvia is a world-class oceanographer and educator. Listen, as she is interviewed by Ashok Mirpuri, Singapore's ambassador to the United States and a member of the 2020 prize jury.  What can you do? Take Sylvia’s call to action seriously and, then, nominate someone who deserves to win the leadership prize this year. Nominate your candidate here: https://tallberg-snf-eliasson-prize.org/nominate/ Music: "Without You" by Oxime © 2021. Permissions granted courtesy of Oxime Audio https://www.oxime-audio.com/

Venezuela has been in a death spiral for years. The country have been devastated by political repression and economic depression; its people suffer from huger, malnutrition, shortages of food, medicine and, perhaps worst of all, opportunity. The numbers tell the story: 9 million malnourished, 90% of the country’s 28 million live in poverty, and more than 5 million have fled. David Smolansky, our guest for this episode of New Thinking for a New World, is one of those who have fled. He was chased from his elected post of mayor of El Hatillo municipality and avoided jail only by seeking political asylum in the United States. Listen as he imagines how his country can—he believes, will—go from a failed, kleptocratic state to a prosperous democracy.

Q.  What do Donald Trump and the Ayatollah Khamenei have in common with Rihanna?  A.   They have all been banned from social media.  Social media has become the lifeblood of modern culture. But it has evolved in ways which reward excessive outrage excessively and which encourage hyper attention to the immediate—untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values. One result is rising anger, increasing polarization, and easy manipulation of public opinion and of elections. Should online speech be regulated? If so, by whom? Is it good public policy to ask Silicon Valley executives to self-police?  Whose values should drive decisions about what is allowed and what is banned?   Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, is widely considered one of America's leading legal scholars on freedom of speech and has written extensively about the evolution of that fundamental freedom in the digital age. In this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast, he wrestles with the challenges of social media.

Europe has had a bad few years. The struggles between North and South mostly over economics, between East and West mostly over values. Brexit, which shifted the locus of power eastward and distracted European leaders from any possibility of a more positive agenda. The pandemic, which among all its other impacts led to interrupted borders in a Europe that prided itself on having no borders. Tensions with the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, and overall a sense that Europe is largely irrelevant to what happens elsewhere in the world.     Pierre Lellouche, former French parliamentarian and minister, worries that bad is likely to get worse. Listen as he discusses how Europe got stuck between the United States and China, the future of democracy, and the tragedy of social movements focused only on race and gender.

2020 was an awful year for Iran.  A year that started with the assassination of the country's widely popular, leading general ended with the assassination of its most important nuclear scientist. The three year old recession deepened while inflation soared. Widespread shortages, including medicines, made the fight against the pandemic all the more difficult. American “maximum pressure” combined with Iranian mismanagement took a huge toll on the country and on ordinary people. Yet, if anything, the regime seems more firmly in power today than a year or two ago. How can that be? Will it change? Is there any chance that the Green Movement of a decade ago will reappear during this election year?   Answers are difficult to find, but this week’s New Thinking for a New World podcast guests are in the business of looking for them. Sima Shine leads the Iran program at Israel's prestigious Institute for National Security Studies and spent most of her career in the Israeli Intelligence Community. Dr. Sanam Vakil is deputy director of Chatham House's Middle East Africa Program, where she leads the Iran Forum among other projects.     Listen as they discuss Iran, today and tomorrow.

Even amid optimism about vaccines and declining infection rates, there is mounting evidence that the pandemic is generating a global mental health crisis. Lockdowns and social distancing reduce transmission, but have the unintended consequence of intensifying stress and anxiety, stretching social bonds, and weakening personal relationships. How do we cope with the results? Could rising levels of child abuse, spousal abuse, drug abuse, homicide and suicide leave even deeper marks than COVID itself? Do we need to think differently about mental health interventions? Dr. Jonathan DePierro and Michael Niconchuk try to answer these questions in this week’s episode of New Thinking for a New World. DePierro is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and a practicing clinician; Niconchuk is a neuroscience researcher working in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan among other places.

The pandemic has forced most of us to move from real life to virtual life—and we are mostly unhappy about the results. It’s not just that we miss the real thing, but that it's virtual alternative—endless hours on Zoom or Teams or some other platform—is such a pale imitation.   Are there different ways to use the tools? Since we may be stuck in this second best world for a while, can we find ways to make it better? Is there a cure for Zoom fatigue? For answers, we turned to a magician. Magic used to be fundamentally physical, requiring a lot of interaction between the magician and his audience. Mark Mitton is a world class magician, whose performances produced Springsteen-like enthusiasm and engagement from those lucky enough to experience them. How did he move from three dimensions to two dimensions? What can he teach us about communicating during a pandemic? Listen as host Alan Stoga explores how magical thinking (or, at least, a magician’s thinking) can help us through this crisis. And watch here for the queen of clubs.

This week we want to lift an older episode we believe bears repeating. What are some of the challenges Africa faces in its future? We invite you to take a moment and rediscover this episode from August 6th, 2020.  At least so far, what plagues Africa is less Covid-19, than its consequences: collapsed economies, an industrial world that is closing to Africa, a deceleration (if not reversal) in globalization, a new “Cold War” (this time between China and the West), severe climate change, and the urgent need to grow and develop faster to serve its young, demanding population. How can Africa cope?  Are solutions—or, at least, possibilities—to be found at the local, national or regional level?  Where is the needed capital? Looking for answers, Alan Stoga talks to Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, and Carole Wainaina, a leader of Africa50, a public, pan-African infrastructure bank.

We live at a time of pandemic, recession, growing doubts about the future and form of capitalism, challenges to democracy, shifts in global power. The response of many if not most organizations, public as well as private, is to hunker down and try to survive. But some are embracing the challenges and opportunities of profound change. That certainly describes the Robert Bosch Stiftung, one of Europe’s most important private philanthropies which works in areas ranging from health care to climate to migration and well beyond.   Under the leadership of Sandra Breka and others, the Foundation recently rethought, rebooted and relaunched its operations—surfing, rather than fleeing from the forces released by shifting tectonic plates. Listen as she discusses how they fared and what kind of world she and her colleagues hope to help shape.

One of America’s most revered founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, allegedly used those words to describe what kind of political system the writers of the U.S. Constitution had created. The amazing events of recent weeks—Donald Trump’s concerted efforts to undo an electoral outcome that he didn’t like, the assault on the Capitol, and the impeachment of a President who is no longer in power—caused many Americans to remember Franklin’s concerns about the stability of their form of government. Congressman Dick Gephardt, former Majority and Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, shares those worries. In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, he told host Alan Stoga, "I think we're as divided and in danger of losing the democracy as we were in 1860,” when the United States fought its civil war.   Congressman Gephardt, a Democrat, firmly believes America needs bipartisanship to cope with the divisive spirits that are tearing at the country. Listen as he talks about some of the things that urgently need to be done, not just in the United States, but everywhere that democracy is under pressure. If your sound isn’t perfect as you listen today, blame us not your speakers.