Simon Anholt (What makes a good country)

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In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast Simon Anholt and I talk about:

• How Simon has helped dozens of government entities over the years and how it shaped his 'view of the world'?
• How governments and citizens define their 'country mission'? What is a country for exactly?
• What should be the right balance between competition and collaboration between nation states?
• Are humans now being perceived as pieces on a chessboard?
• How manipulated are we currently? And a surprising results of Simon's index building.
• How travel shapes the image of countries (in other people's eyes and yours).
• How Simon got to start a 'virtual nation'.
• Why it is so strange that 'Community Service' is a punishment.
• Where does progress actually come from?
• and much more!

You may watch the episode on Youtube - The Judgment Call Podcast Episode #41 - Simon Anholt (What makes a good country).

Over the last twenty years, Simon Anholt has advised the Presidents, Prime Ministers, monarchs and governments of nearly sixty countries, cities and regions. Simons's TED talks have amassed millions of views on ted.com and on Youtube. Simon Anholt is the (co)-creator of the Nation Brands Index and the Good Country Index.

Simon has written six books about countries, their images and their role in the world. His latest book, The Good Country Equation: How We Can Repair the World in One Generation is now available on Amazon.

Torsten Jacobi: So, I, I've been reading a chapter from your book, and I've been watching your TED Talks, and I find it really interesting the way you, you look at the world. And I think we're quite a bit kindred spirits in this. And I think what comes out in the book and also in your TED Talks is how you use your experience being out there in the world, traveling to a ton of countries, and observing what's going on in these countries. And then I have something very similar, and I talked to James Wilcox last week about that. When I go to a new country, even a country I haven't been in a while, my first thought is usually, how can I jumpstart economic growth, right? And it's obviously not necessarily something that necessarily wipes through the locals, but it's something where I immediately, my minds, my mind jumps to when I'm in a new country. And I think you use that experience brilliantly, and came up with a way of thinking, and I want to learn more about this, that's given you millions of views on YouTube and on the TED Talks. Tell us a little bit about it, and how did you get to the central tenets of these new ideas that you've got?

Simon Anholt: Well, I've been advising governments for 20 or more years, and I'm a generalist. I'm not a specialist. What I advise governments on is very broadly engagement, how their country can engage more productively with other countries, with the international community. So depending on circumstances, and depending on the country, and depending on who I'm talking to, that could be something fairly commercial. It could be tourism, or foreign direct investment promotion, or trade. It could be something a bit softer, it could be about cultural relations, or public diplomacy. It could be something quite hard, it can be about security and defence, but basically it's all about how countries can take better advantage of the opportunities that globalisation throws up, and the international system throws up, so that they can ultimately offer a better life to their own citizens, treat their own territory in a more responsible way, whilst at the same time providing benefits, or at least doing no harm to the world outside their borders. So for a long time, I've felt that the gold standard of good governance in this age of advance globalisation has to be the ability to harmonise your domestic and your international responsibilities. And that's something that most countries don't even think about, let alone do well. So in the first few years, when I was advising countries on this kind of stuff, the subject that I found coming up over and over and over and over again, and it was also something I'd written about, because I was interested in it too, was the whole question of national image. What was this country perceived in the community of nations? And this kept on coming back, and it kept on turning out to be not a superficial issue at all, but a really fundamental one. And the reason why it's so fundamental is basically because image is really all that countries have got. It's such a busy, crowded world, when we're looking at this age of advanced, complex, interdependent globalisation, the stuff that you buy, the people you deal with, the people you hire, they could come from almost literally anywhere on earth. And because nobody is an expert on 200 plus countries, we make our decision on the basis of prejudices that we've held probably for most of our lives. The kind of place we think Germany is, the kind of place we think America is. And on those simple childish prejudices, we base our decisions about where to go, where to invest, what to buy, who to hire, and so forth. So you end up with this really curious situation where the flows of billions, if not trillions of dollars, are actually governed by ill thought out, out of date, probably inaccurate prejudices. And that was why, ironically, I coined this term nation brand because I said that the images of countries are a little bit like the brand images of products. They're a sort of shorthand for what we believe about that product, and they guide our decisions. The trouble is that, obviously, the consequences for a country can be very serious. And if you've got a weak or a negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. It's a structural deficit.

Torsten Jacobi: I really like the idea that how you set up the good country index. So for me, it was a bit like the Skytrex, maybe that's the wrong comparison, but a bit of Skytrex of the country industry, so to speak. And from what I understood, you question individuals all over the world who had a certain idea about that country, that either are travelers, frequent travelers, or people who had business in a specific country, and then you compile that image, right?

Simon Anholt: No. What you've just described is something different. What you've just described is another survey, which I published, which is called the Nation Brands Index, which I do in partnership with Ipsil Samori, who are a big international research company. The Nation Brands Index is, in fact, as you describe, it's an opinion poll. So we speak to thousands of people around the world, and we use their perceptions to measure the images of countries. The Good Country Index will maybe come on too later. That's something completely different. It's not a measurement of perceptions or opinions, it's a measurement of real behaviour, a measurement of reality. So the Nation Brands Index, yeah, it's a poll, and we end up with this kind of ranking of which countries have the best, most powerful images, but in an enormous amount of detail. So I sometimes call it the Index of Ignorance, because perceptions not experience.

Torsten Jacobi: Well, one thing that is one of those things that always occurs to me when I go to a country a new or I haven't been in a while, is kind of this concept of a USP, you know, that's a marketing term. It's a unique selling proposition. So that is partially a marketing argument, and it's partially an argument where you say, what are the intrinsic advantages of this particular economy that could either be its culture, it could be its people or any combination of this. It could be sometimes luck, you know, we perceive the richness of many places in the Middle East with sheer luck, right, because there's so much oil, they literally, they only have to do is call BP and live up, they do more than this, but they can just literally, without any technology investment, they wouldn't be rich anyways, when you think of Qatar. So that's for me, that that's kind of what I'm immediately thinking, and I keep asking people in each individual country, kind of as my own informal doorway. And sometimes I feel some countries don't have enough identity, they're too random, they don't really know what is the USP, they don't know what is a comparative advantage, and they also don't know how to appear to others. Just some economic terms, but often, you know, politics play an even bigger role.

Simon Anholt: I think that's right. I think the majority of countries have very little sense of mission. They just adopt, the politicians tend to adopt just a kind of standard repertoire of things that politicians have to do, which is to keep their people reasonably happy, reasonably secure and reasonably well fed and reasonably prosperous. And it seems to me that in this age of advanced globalization, you really need to be a bit more strategic than that. And so the kinds of questions that I always ask of governments that I'm advising are rather different. I ask them questions like, what is your country for? You know, if the hand of God should slip on the celestial keyboard at 3 a.m. and accidentally hit delete and your country was no more, who would miss it and why would they miss it? Why should people feel glad that you exist if they're not your citizens? And I think those are the kinds of questions we should be asking in the 21st century. And this is my modern interpretation of the rather old fashioned idea of grand strategy. How do you fit in? What's your purpose?

Torsten Jacobi: I think this is this is marvelous and I just talked with Marcy Powell last week and we talked about education. And we both agreed that the question everyone should ask themselves, you know, how can I make the world a better place just by myself? You know, what are the things I can influence from my point of view where I think I have enough leverage and technology gives us a ton of leverage, one YouTube video is going to have 200 million views and can change the world literally.

Simon Anholt: Although if I may just jump in just for a second, there's a slight difference in emphasis here because one of the things I've started saying to countries is don't try and do this on your own. Because the kinds of challenges that we're talking about, why would somebody feel glad that Slovakia exists? Well Slovakia may well feel that it's got a particular expertise in tackling climate change, for example. But the thing that I spent a lot of time trying to argue the government out of is this idea that they then have to try and fix climate change on their own. Because that's stupid and wasteful and they'll overlap with other countries and the end benefit won't be as good. So I say to them, look, remember, this is not you against the world. The first thing you do is decide what you want to fix. Okay, you want to fix climate change. The second thing you do is say, who are you going to do it with? Who it's this kind of agile collaboration, I think is the way the world ought to work. I sometimes call it entrepreneurial multilateralism, but it's such a shit expression that I stopped using it. But you know what I mean.

Torsten Jacobi: I haven't heard that one yet. It's interesting. I think you're really onto something there and I think it's fascinating to see your thought process there. One thing that I immediately noticed, and I think you should get a little deeper into what your core mission is, but the good country index. But one thing I immediately noticed is there is this one side, and maybe we can call it a dualism, but I think there's more factors. But I feel on one side, we have this competition, we have the individual nation state who tries to do the best they could. It's kind of Adam Smith's idea. Everyone just does what they want in their own private interest, but eventually works out to something good. And on the other hand, we have this big idea of collaboration, which I think in economic terms is we take technology that someone else invented, or we have this now in software a lot, where we basically copy the best solution possible, work with as many people as we can align and then create something with way better leverage, but it needs way more coordination. So we have to think on these two layers at the same time. And I think this is where we are, when I understood your TED talks, I think this is what you wanted to encourage.

Simon Anholt: Absolutely. I mean, I think the progress of humanity, the story of humanity is basically one of three ages. The first age was the age of conflict, when we were basically nation states were fighting each other for blood and treasure, for territory. And then mercifully, after the experience of the first and second world wars, we moved into the modern age, which is the age of competition. So we're still fighting each other for advantage, we're still trying to have winners and losers. At least we don't kill each other in such large numbers as we used to. But that's progress. However, it's not sufficient for the age of the grand challenges, climate change and pandemics and all the rest of it. We now need to move into the third age, which is the age of collaboration, which doesn't mean we don't compete anymore. It just means that we're wise about how we mix collaboration and competition. As I often say, competition is only a problem when it becomes the only altar at which we worship. And that has been the problem for the last 60, 70 years. What we need to start doing now is to figure out how to make the fundamental culture of governance a culture of collaboration, collaborate first and then figure out how you compete on top of that. It works perfectly well. The industry has been doing that for decades.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I mean, it's quite a white topic and one thing that that is just my gut feeling and that's just that's a personal note. You know, I grew up in Eastern Germany, which was basically governed by the Politburo in the Soviet Union, far, far away. There were a couple of decisions that Eastern Germany was allowed to make, and there were a couple of decisions that citizens were still allowed to make, but generally, it was a very top down system. And the idea of the Soviet system, and we can talk about the execution, which was way less than perfect. It was generally thought of as an idea, and that's the Karl Marxan idea, that you take something that is something better for everyone involved, so you get rid of certain political divides that are clearly there. And then you institute a system that seems better, and was mostly carried by the intellectuals early in the times in 1920s, 1930s, irrespective of where you were in Russia or in the US. But then there was this white, I think it came out after the Second World War especially, that you felt like there is a lot of policies that were instituted to do something positive, but actually created the opposite. And somehow, there wasn't enough flexibility in any of the system involved that it could change. And I think the idea was still to work together, I think the execution was quite different. But I always felt it's one of those cases, and I lived through it just a few years in my life. So I'm certainly not an expert per se, but I always felt it had so many downsides, especially because it lost all this flexibility of competition, nobody had an incentive to do better than they already did, right, on paper. Everything was good on paper, but nothing was good in practice. And I felt like, and I think this is the experience of the last 100 years, it's not something I wouldn't prefer, let's put it this way, for all its faults, I think this idea of competition has given us so much flexibility, and we are able as citizens, but also as countries to kind of choose the model that we want. And I feel like now we're going the other way, right, so we're going, well, we need more of a League of Nations, we need more ideas that are seemingly more efficient from the, on a UN layer, right?

Simon Anholt: Yes, I don't see the culture of competition going away anytime soon. I mean, politically at the moment, there is undoubtedly a rising number of countries that are framing international relations as a game of winner takes all, as a sprint to the finish. I mean, you know, Donald Trump with his America first was by no means the only leader who was insisting on the idea that the national interest is the only significant interest. I don't know. It's very, very difficult to say broadly speaking which way things are going. But it seems to me that to try to measure the respective merits of competition versus collaboration is futile. They're both fundamental instincts of the human species. They both have their qualities. They both carry their risks and wisdom surely consists in us being able to mingle them in the most effective proportions. And as I say, industry, the automobile industry back in the 1970s pioneered this approach. They even had a name for it. They called it co repetition, where auto manufacturers would work together and share supply chains, but they would end up being fierce competitors in the showroom. And that works. I just think that that kind of experiment is long, long overdue for nation states. I think we should give it a try. And to some extent we do. But we are fighting against the fundamental culture of governance, which as I say is basically one of achieving ascendancy over each other. And it's been that way since the Treaty of Westphalia. I mean, the operating system that the planet works on hasn't had a major upgrade since about 1912. Actually since about 1684.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, that's definitely a very European idea. So the idea with the small little states, the little, I think it was originally born out of the feudalism, so it was even smaller and then it moved up to the nation states. Let's go back for a second. And I think you start with a slightly different thesis is that we have these massive issues that we feel like we grapple with and they seem to overwhelm us, climate change is one of them, migration, modern slavery, there's a bunch of things that either have been existing before as a threat or relatively new, at least as a major threat, terrorism. And what would you think would help? I mean, there is the idea that people work together more and that they think about other people, right, that they are looking outside the box. Where would you put the next level? Do you think we should abolish the nation state or should we transfer powers from the nation state? How does this go on? Like what is the political solution for some of those problems?

Simon Anholt: To be honest with you, I never had very much enthusiasm for those conversations about how to reshape the world system. Well, that's not quite true. I used to have a lot of enthusiasm for them and like many of us who are interested in these things, I spent in fact wasted many, many hours in intense discussions with people where we mapped out a new future for the world, we talked about different forms of governance, making the United Nations more democratic and more accountable, abolishing the Security Council doing this, doing that. And it took the longest time before it eventually dawned on me that all of this is just a waste of time. Because in the end, at this level, at the planetary level, there is no sufficient authority to impose a new system. We still operate on the basis of national sovereignty. And above the level of the individual state, there is no authority, apart from violence, which is luckily, as I said, going out of fashion. So you can come up with the most brilliant idea for replacing the United Nations, but if you haven't got the power to impose it, then what's the point in having a conversation?

Torsten Jacobi: Well, we convince people eventually to sign up to it, right? That's kind of voluntarily signed up to it. I like the European Union.

Simon Anholt: Yes, eventually. But experience shows that this takes centuries and we don't have centuries. So I pursue the real politic approach. I think we have to work with the system that we've got. And it's not so very wrong. It's the way that we consider the nation state that's really the fault. We still, as ordinary people, I don't mean as policymakers, but as ordinary people, we still regard the nation state as being the ultimate tribe to which we feel our ultimate loyalty. And that's the problem. Somehow humanity has to transfer its sense of belonging to the entire planet, otherwise we're screwed. And that's the challenge.

Torsten Jacobi: I like this analogy a lot, and I think you... I saw you speak about that. The way we have this idea of that we belong to one single nation state as a passport, right? And like I myself have a couple of different passwords, and I know some of my friends have four or five different citizenship. So they get really confused. And for one of my friends, he told me, you know, I grew up in eight different countries. I have four different citizenships. I have a bunch of different passwords. I really can't say it, but someone asked me, where do you belong? What nationality are you? You know, I can give them the list, but I can't pinpoint this to one point, which is a default answer, typically, right? So it's typically, you belong to one nation state, and that's... People want to put you in this box and say, okay, this is the typical experience of a German, someone from the Netherlands, a bread, and then they want to use this. And I think this is very helpful tool on average to use this as kind of the overlay, the typical experience that they know from this country, so they are more prepared for what you're going to say next, right? But this is a very outdated system.

Simon Anholt: It's a very lazy system. One of the things I say in the book is that most prejudice or racism is not so much the product of ignorance as people often claim. It's more the product of simple laziness, because it's so much easier to categorize, to generalize people than it is to particularize them. And I think most of us these days, and it seems to be getting worse, typically regard the human species, we reduce it to the level of a game of chess, where we've basically got six different pieces and two different colors. And the type of play, the type of piece that you are defines your role in the world and your attitudes and your behaviors. So if you're a castle, you move this way. If you're a queen, you move that way. If you're a pawn, you move this way. And it's so much easier to have to deal with six stereotypes than it is to deal with eight billion individuals. The reality of the matter is if you've been alive for more than five minutes, and you've observed humanity for more than five minutes, you will realize that there are as many types as there are people on the planet. It's much, much harder work getting to know people individually and understanding their individual character and their individual motivation. And it's so much quicker to say, hey, you're like that because you're black, you're like that because you're white, you're like that because you're male, you're like that because you're LBGTQ plus. And we resort to these stereotypes out of pure laziness.

I agree. This is, I think it's a default mechanism though, and it stems from the desire to reduce complexity. And I think our ancestors did relatively well with this because otherwise we wouldn't be around. So we probably wouldn't have made it until the 20th century because it does give you an advantage because you don't have to talk to anyone. You can just use your limbic system that's basically right there and doesn't cost you any processing power to figure this out. But I think the complexity of the world has gone up at least seemingly. And what's interesting to me, and I've been discussing this on prior episodes, what happened, I think since 2015, since Facebook mainly changed the algorithm to instead of a following algorithm, we have an engagement algorithm. And it seems that there's a very small number of, like you say, the chessboard types that actually are supported by the algorithm. And the algorithm looks at engagement. Engagement is either very positive or very negative reaction to whatever you see in front of you. And it seems like it has tremendously, it has accelerated how we put, but this is my observation, maybe overall, we see in a fraction of a second, we look at the headline, we react to it. And only these articles, a relatively small number of actual publishers, they create in our minds and they accentuate these stereotypes. And I think, I don't want to blame just social media for it, but I think social media has made it worse in the last five years. And it wasn't much of an issue 30 years before that. That's kind of my gut feeling. But part of the problem with humanity is that we're victims of our own curiosity. We have a very, very powerful inbuilt tendency to assume that every experience we undergo and every message we receive is learning. And we absorb things as if they were learning. And we all too often don't distinguish between sources of information that wish us well and wish us harm. And so everything that reaches us in the outside, from the outside world, and it's a lot of stuff these days, we absorb as if they were lessons. And we learn things even if we stop to think for five minutes, we'd realize these are things we shouldn't be learning. These are models we shouldn't be adopting. These are values we shouldn't be absorbing, but we adopt. We like sponges. We're walking sponges and we adopt and we absorb everything, which is why we're such easy victims for deliberate manipulators like some of the social media giants. We don't know how to resist information. Yeah. Well, they say this about entrepreneurs, and I think now what happened the last two years, I think it's just getting a little better now. Last two or three years, especially in the US, is that we're stuck in this echo chamber. So people were literally not interested in any other opinion, just the one that confirmed their own opinion, which they obviously only had of Twitter, right? It's not something they came up with their own and did some research, no, it was something they read and then they forgot about almost six months ago, and then they just seek confirmation for the same thing. But that's just the pleasure principle, isn't it? I mean, that's one of the main drivers. You go for the stuff that makes you feel good. I love the endorphins that come out of it. I mean, even knowing that this is manipulation, I still love the endorphins when I go to Twitter. I had trouble getting withdrawing from Twitter much better now, but I must say that that is a tough process. These endorphins really, they're like coffee, if not better. I mean, when I read the views of people who have very different opinions from mine, different value sets, it causes me a great deal of discomfort. It makes me feel unwell. I have to force myself to do it. It's not really surprising if the vast majority of people just stay away from it. They do the stuff that reinforces their prejudices and therefore makes them feel good. Yeah. Well, we have on the other hand, as you say, this huge sense of curiosity, right? And it seems in times of when we have enough to eat, when we feel our children will be better off than we are, in times of where we feel like things are improving in the world, when they're people very optimistic and I felt that was a strong period like 2009, 2015. We go out and explore the world. We're curious. We want to see as many opinions as we can get. And we want to see where the opportunities to be a part of this new world, right? And then we go back into these pessimistic phases where we are kind of like this chimpanzee mother and everyone who is not from our tribe, we just bite them off and try to kill them. And I think we have both of these things in our genes. And it seems like we go through these many, many depressive phases. And I think we just came out of a very depressive phase. I think it's just getting better now. I feel to see in San Francisco where everything was shut down obviously because of COVID, but people got extremely depressed. And I feel they're just seeing the light again, so to speak, right now, and they want to be part of the community, they stop outside and talk to someone else with a dog, and they talk to other people in the coffee shop. That hasn't happened in years. I'm really surprised it's finally getting better. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty simple principle, isn't it? If you deprive people of one of their most fundamental pleasures for a long time, they're going to cheer up when you give it back to them. I think that we do on the whole, the planetary mood does vacillate. And I see this in my research. What I think I'm measuring is people's perceptions of other countries. But actually what I see tells me far more about the mood of the human population than it does about what those countries are doing or failing to do. Some years, everybody feels more positive about all countries. Other years, everybody feels less positive about all countries. But that's quite a surprising result. You would sort of imagine that if you were measuring how people regard countries that they would all go all over the place depending on what they're doing. And if a country's behaving itself, it'll get more popular, and if it's being aggressive, then it will get less popular. That's not it at all. The images of countries move as a cohort. They move together. So it's actually got nothing to do with how they're behaving. It's to do what I'm actually measuring accidentally is the mood of the human population. And the most interesting thing about the mood of the human population is that over time it gets better and better and better. And ever since I've started measuring this back in 2005, there's been a continuous gradual movement uphill. Everybody on average likes all countries slightly more than they did the year before, year after year after year. Sometimes it goes down, but then it always goes up again. And the general tendency is always upwards. That's the trend. Now that's fascinating. It's one of the things that makes me feel unfashionably optimistic. That's extremely positive. Yeah. That's great to hear. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I'd be interested to know what you think. My hypothesis is that this is simply the effect of globalization, that as a result of us getting more information, being more aware every year of the fact that we share the planet with a bunch of other countries, we're more used to them. And it's human nature that as you become used to things, you trust them more. It's survival. You know, something that's been sitting in your room for a few years and it's never killed you. You learn to trust it. And so I think year after year after year, we're learning to trust other countries. I never heard about the statistic. It's fascinating. I haven't published it. I really should do. Yeah, you should. You should put it in Steve Pinker's book. I think that's one of the things he's missing on that global scale. He talks about a lot, you know, on vaccines and the way our life gets better. We don't really appreciate it. I think that's a bit of a problem because we adjusted a new level, kind of like the new generation. We were using whatever we achieved as a base level and as grumpy about our failings. And I think what I talked about before on the show is what I really feel is such helpful. So helpful to people. It's just crossing national borders. And that's even true in the European Union today where it seems to be, let's use the pre COVID European Union where everyone thinks it's one domestic market. But actually it's 25 or 30 different localities and even Germany where I was born, you know, every state is quite different. They even have different languages and they have different customs and you can't just, you're not the same like Berlin is not the same as Munich, not by any means and people behave different, different social standards. But once you get to travel, and this is why I think travel is really the solution to world peace. Once you experience all these, these places and you don't have to go to all the places you can start small and go to like 20 or 30 different bonds. You will never come back and say, and I think this is your experience too, you don't come back and say, oh, I went to Afghanistan and these people are terrible, all we have to nuke them off the planet. This is never going to, it's never going to happen, right? So I mean, there's exceptions, you know, you can go to Iraq and maybe you're, but even the veterans and I had James Wilcox on and, you know, he's like, we do this towards Afghanistan and to Somalia and you know, who's a really strong group who wants to go to these places. It's just the average traveler, but it's also a lot of veterans. So even if you, if you've fought there, if you've been injured, if you've seen the other side and they tried to kill you, you still, a lot of people develop an appreciation for something different that, because you go, wherever you go, there's something you hold close to your heart. And it's often especially outside the tourist economy. And I feel if people go through this process and it's gotten much cheaper, they've always come back and slowly, slowly appreciate other countries more and appreciate other cultures, other ways of solving the same problem. And you, it's almost impossible to come back and make enemies when you go out there on a, it's a little bit open. I mean, there's, there's other examples, but I think this is a process that you can't reverse it. Two things I would say about that on the whole, I agree with you and I have always subscribed to the old idea that travel broadens the mind. One of the things I remember writing in a previous book of mine is we, we grow up wearing a shirt that has a different pattern from the wallpaper in our room. No, I'm sorry, I said that wrong. We grow up wearing a shirt that has the same pattern as the wallpaper in our room. And so when you look at yourself in your own room, it's very difficult to see where your own outline is because you merge into the wall and you can't see where your shirt begins and where the wall ends. So you identify yourself within the culture as part of the culture and it's almost inseparable. The moment you walk out of that room into an unfamiliar room, suddenly you're wearing a flowery shirt and the wallpaper is striped and suddenly you can see your own outline. You suddenly realize who you are because you don't match the culture. I've always felt that that's one of the reasons why travel broadens the mind. I wish it were invariably true, but it's not invariably true. And one of the interesting things is that a certain number of people, I think it's a minority, tend to be made even more narrow minded by the experience of travel. We all know people who are expats, who have lived perhaps all of their lives in another country and become professional haters of that country. The British are quite good at this. You find British expat communities all over the world. It's a British German experience, I feel. And they've been living in this country for most of their lives and it suits them to live there because it's cheap or whatever. And they even speak the language rather aggressively and they eat the local food rather in a state of constant irritation, but they become hardened racists as a result of it. So there's some complexity, some mystery going on there. It's not simply that travel always broadens your mind. It broadens the mind for most people, but there's a chemical mixture going on there, which is something to do with your character before you travel and the impact that the travel has on you afterwards. What I can confirm from my own research is that it's definitely true that people on the whole like countries more after they visited than when they haven't. Looking at just tourism numbers from my research, you can find that if anybody visits a country generally speaking, it doesn't matter. Even if they have a bad experience there, they will generally rank that country higher after that point as far as I can tell for the rest of their lives. And that's simply because it's turned from being something imaginary to something real. When you can only imagine a country and you'd never been there, your imagination tends to make it look rather fuzzy, a little bit weird, a little bit gray. You're just sort of vaguely picturing things. And there's a thing called negativity bias, which tends to make you afraid of the things that you can't see. It's a little bit like a nightmare. You know, sometimes you're falling asleep and you wake up with a start because you know you're having a nightmare, even though nothing bad has happened. You know that the axe murderer hasn't even appeared, but you know you're having a nightmare because you can't see properly. And that's the nightmarish aspect of it. So when you've never been to a country, it looks like a nightmare. The moment you actually get off the plane and you step on the tarmac or off the train or whatever it is, and suddenly you realize that the colors are there, that the sun is in the sky, that you can smell things if you're lucky enough to be able to smell. I'm not, but I understand it's a wonderful thing. Suddenly you realize you're in reality. And from that moment onwards, it's real people. It's a real place. And of course, people are lovely wherever you go. In fact, the more desperate a country is, the more troubled, the more war torn, the more corrupt on the whole, the nicer the people are. Yeah. Well, I agree. I agree. I call it positive PTSD. You know, it's this, this, this, and I think this is also where the minority comes from that doesn't take trouble so well. And I think the problem is you learn about yourself things you wouldn't have known before and maybe you didn't even want to know about those things. And a lot of times I think it's very positive. But if you, especially if you go to the edges of your own experience, if you, if you're trapped in a tourist economy, I think, yes, there's no newer experience, but even that is good if you're like 16 year olds and do a go on your solo trip, 18 years old. Maybe you're right. If you're a crap person and you go to another country and you learn as a result of going to the other country, what a crap person you are, that will cause you to hate the country because it's made you feel bad about yourself. Yeah. I think that's what it is. And then, you know, the problem is with PTSD, it's not necessarily what you see. It is what you are capable of doing in light of whatever people, other people force you to because they put you in a dangerous situation or they put you in a new situation. You have to deal with newer experiences. I think this is, this is where this comes from. You did something very interesting and I want to learn more about this. You said you started a new country. How did that work? And does it still exist? It was an experiment, which a pilot project, which, which ran its course. So it's, it's over now, but it was a very, very interesting experiment when it lasted. Basically what happened was this. In 2014, I launched the good country index, which we may or may not have time to talk about later on. Very, very quickly, the good country index tries to measure what each country on earth contributes to the world outside its own borders. So irrespective of how it treats its own people or its own territory, this exclude, excludes all of that and just looks at whether a country is a good global citizen or not. And I, I launched the first edition of this index at a TED event in Berlin. And to everybody's astonishment, the TED talk did really well. It went viral. Now this doesn't normally happen with talks about international politics. I actually saw today that that TED talk from 2014 is the number one all time most viewed TED talk on the subject of government. Congratulations, that's hard to pull off, extremely hard to pull off. Yeah. It's, it's, it's had over 12 million views. And the more interesting thing was that the moment it went out, I started getting hundreds and hundreds and then gradually thousands and thousands and then eventually tens of thousands of emails. I always put my email address on the internet in case people want to write to me and I always answer them. And they were all basically from people describing themselves in the same way that I would describe myself. They were basically saying, I think I'm a citizen of the world first and a citizen of my own nation second. I love my country, but I love being human more. I feel I have something in common with everybody on the planet. I love diversity. I don't suffer from racism. I get fed up with domestic politics because it seems trivial compared to the big issues that we're all facing. And as they were describing themselves, I thought to myself, these people are just like me. This is almost like a character type. I wonder if this has ever been studied before. So I started researching and I couldn't find any description of this character type. So I thought, okay, I'll give it a name and I called them natural cosmopolitans. These are people who are just born believing that they owe their allegiance to a bigger tribe than their own nation. And I did some research together with my colleague Robert Govers and we eventually managed to put an estimate on the number. We discovered that these people, these natural cosmopolitans, are definitely no less than 10% of the world's adult population. China is over 700 million people. So I found myself thinking, wow, 700 million people, that's too big to be a startup, that's too big to be an NGO or a charity or whatever. That's a nation. In fact, if it was a nation, it would be the third largest nation on the planet after India and China. And a nation of natural cosmopolitans, the third largest nation on the planet, could really be a force for good. It could really, really kick some ass in the international community and encourage countries to work together and to focus on the stuff that's really important instead of focusing exclusively on their own interests. So that was the point at which I decided that it would be a really cool idea to create a virtual nation for these 700 million natural cosmopolitans. And together with my then cofounder, we created this virtual country and we ran a pilot for just under a year to see how many people would sign up. We asked them to pay $5 each per year as their taxes because we calculated we didn't need more than $5. The point about it being a virtual nation is it has no territory. And that's good because territory is a nuisance. Once you have territory, you start needing to get an army to defend it and things become complicated. But we didn't need to offer these people a society because they were already nationals of another state. And $5, if we'd got all 760 million citizens, would have given us the GDP of Sierra Leone to play with every year, which is quite a substantial war chest. And we'd have been able to do some serious work. You could have been king of that country. That's the very, very last thing I wanted. Most of the – in fact, one of the really important things about the project was that we devised a method of using artificial intelligence, which actually enabled this to be the first state in history that was self governing. It didn't need a government and it didn't need leaders because artificial intelligence enables you to have basically collective decision making with a group of infinite size. Yeah, a lot of people – I find this super interesting. A lot of people talk about this from the crypto community where they say, you know, our cities are basically broken, especially in the U.S. They seem to go through these cycles of extreme depression and we just had a really big one. Why don't we take the people that we actually love, people, other people on the Internet and the crypto. We take crypto money and we stake it against it. We build a virtual community first, a virtual country, so to speak. I don't know if you can issue passports, but there's been cases like the order of St. John from Malta, right? So they used to have a territory in Malta and then they lost it, but they still a country and they don't have a territory anymore, but they're still recognized as a country by many other countries. And we also recognize the Vatican with a very minimal territory. So the idea is, can you actually institute, say, take a million crypto users, they would set up their own country maybe far out and see if the territory is easy to defend or a little island. Do you think you can just start it and put that money against it and they get citizenship and they get, say, ultra liberal or non liberal, whatever policies you want to enact. They just kind of go off to that island, but they obviously never really go there. It's all virtual. Yeah, the problem that I have with pretty much every single other start up nation that I've ever seen is that they are fundamentally tribalist in principle. What they're trying to do is they're trying to get together the people that they feel are the right people. And this was absolutely not the, in fact, that was the opposite of what the good country was about. Sure, we were going to start with those 700 million natural Cosmic Policies, but not because we wanted to exclude everybody else, but because we felt that we're starting with those people who already shared the dream. It would be the easier way to then build and build and build and eventually get perhaps a majority of the world's population signing up to those values of collaboration. The problem with all of these other start up nations is they're always running away from things. They always want to, because in many, many cases they feel in some way either explicit or sort of hidden, that they're in some way superior to the rest of society. And very often the person or the people who run it want to run something. They've got a power mania and they want to be the president of somewhere and they figure that the only way they're ever going to be the president of somewhere is by starting somewhere and getting a bunch of dumb people to pay obeisance to them. So it seems to me that all of these things are devised in exactly the opposite spirit to the one that's really required here. You're not supposed to be running away. The whole point of the good country project was that we were running towards the grand challenges, running towards humanity, engaging with it, not trying to escape. Yeah, I mean, that's a very philosophical distinction. I don't know if I know enough to really go down deep into this, but it's a bit like the promised land, right? So the promised land is you define something other people want where everything is the way God designs it. So obviously there's challenges in order to get there and it's theoretically open. It's very open and it's less open, you know, changes over time in the Old Testament stories. So I think this is how usually, how marketing at least has found and usually works. You define something other people want. You tell them this is the price. This is how you get there. This is your challenge. And in that process, you become a better person. That's at least the idea, right? You become a better person in the eye of the person who designed it in the first place. And I think this is also the idea of a chapter city that are kind of keep floating from time to time. And then you don't hear about them anymore, that you design something that works so well like a new Dubai and say the Congo, that it works so well that it would make everyone want to live there. And this is the only reason you get it off the ground because people are excited about it and they put their money to it. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, there are an awful lot of these experiments going on at the moment and it'd be interesting to see if anybody does actually make critical mass. I think the idea of building new cities is very interesting and I'm aware of a couple of groups who are doing things like that. Sometimes it's ecologically driven. They're floating cities that are resilient to rising water levels. Sometimes it's to solve a particular problem. There's a group I'm associated with, an NGO called Andan, who are looking to build cities specifically to house migrants. Now, that's a really interesting question. It's, in some senses, the opposite of a refugee camp. It's a place where they can actually make a life if they choose to. But of course, this is a really, really, really controversial idea because there's a moral hazard attached to it. If you create a wonderful city where all of the stateless persons and the refugees can go and live where they're safe, isn't that then relieving ordinary societies of their duty to take in migrants? Isn't that like just saying, okay, we accept that human beings in rich countries are never going to feel a sense of duty towards people in less fortunate countries. So we take away that obligation by creating a super ghetto where all of these poor refugees can go and live. And there are some uncomfortable ideas associated with this that still need to be worked through. But I like the fact that there are big, bold solutions being debated at this point in history because this is surely the point where we should be doing that. Yeah, I'm with you. There's one idea being floated here in the US. It's not very realistic right now, but it's definitely a big idea that we're going to have like a 10 year, 20 year master plan to go to 1 billion citizens in the US. And the way we go there is basically open the borders and let everyone in who delivers stories within the criteria we want, if you can even determine this that far. I really like that plan. But I still... What's the advantage of having such a large population? Well, the idea obviously is that we have to compete with China, right? So China is soon going to be around 1 billion because the population is decreasing. It's not falling apart. How depressing. So it's basically in order to... It's very nation state, yeah, very nation state. But what I wanted to get at is, you know, isn't... Can you pull this off without borders, right? What I'm trying to say, even if you let anyone in who wants to come to the US, literally you let anyone in, there's no restrictions. But once they're inside you, or you can do this with the European Union, any major big state out there, but can you... If you just say there's no borders, there's no restrictions, the United States basically doesn't exist anymore. There's no cities, but the United States doesn't exist anymore because we are all citizens of the world, right? If you take that that far, do you think that can work? Because it seems to be that there is... You need to define something that you want to dangle in front of people as a carrot, right? So that's what we talked about just earlier. If you don't define it, if you don't say, okay, this is the border, this is where we can't protect you anymore, then it seems like the nation state basically stops existing, but also your carrot stops existing, and the carrot can be really good because I feel these modern institutions of the state, they've moved us to where we are, right? They brought us this enlightenment over time, and a lot of people I think are not aware of this. They see how the state works, but they don't know why it is designed that way. There's certainly an issue with the size of many, if not most, modern nation states. My day job is, I'm a policy advisor, I advise governments on how they can run their countries better. And one of the things that I've observed is that most states over a population of, I don't know, three, four million are quite literally ungovernable. It's just too many people. And countries like Mexico or the United States, where you've got hundreds of millions of people, albeit federalized, that makes it ever so slightly easier to manage, but these are basically ungovernable territories. The group of people is simply too large for any central government to really have any idea what it's doing. And so I have no doubt whatsoever that governance is effective in proportion to its closeness to the governed. You can do a better job if you're closer to the people that you're governing, which is one of the reasons why this old bugbear, which haunts Americans to this day of one world government, is such a terrible idea. Americans who don't listen to what I'm saying often assume that that's what I'm pitching because they know that's what bad people pitch, and it's the worst idea in the world. Can you imagine anything worse than a government in New York or anywhere else dictating the lives of people thousands of miles away? I'm glad you say that. Yeah, I'm glad you say that. That's one thing people need to understand. How is that a recipe for good anything? That's a recipe for tyranny at best and chaos at worst. So I feel quite nostalgic about the medieval European city states. I think that Florence or Siena, those are pretty good jurisdictions, those are a human size. Many times during my career, I've looked back at the way that citizens, prominent and otherwise, behaved in those medieval city states and the relationship they had with them. It's impossible not to notice how pathological our relationship is to our nation states today compared to the relationship that say Cosimo de Medici had towards Florence. I mean, okay, he ran the place, so he was a special kind of citizen. But it was obvious that for almost all the citizens of Florence in the Middle Ages, there was a relationship of mutual love, trust and understanding between those people and their city. And that's been replaced in the modern age with a relationship of prostitution. We throw a handful of coins at our administrations, at our governments, and say, here, run the place for me. And you won't hear from me again unless you screw up, in which case I'm going to call customer service and I'm going to protest. This is pathological. This is not a good relationship. And there needs to be a way of correcting that. That correction, I think, inevitably involves running things on a smaller scale. Yeah, I think you touched a really important point. I think you all feel this. It's like the Florence was kind of the Singapore of the days or Dubai, and you go to these places and you see how closely people are aligned. And there's nothing to do with their nationality, right? Because Singapore is now at least half South Indian, or maybe one third. And there's a 20% occasion. And the original Chinese founders were a few Malays. But the original Chinese founders, original ethnic group, they've done a really good job of integrating everyone. I think you can feel the love for their nation state and for their common project, at least until like 10 years ago, it was very visible. And I think this is even true in Dubai, which couldn't be further in ethnic lines than any other place. And I think the problem is, and I think this is coming from the crypto community a lot, how can we instill this sense of we are in this together, we have an impact on society, an impact on that nation state. And it certainly must be bigger because nobody has an impact on China as a single entity, or even as a few hundred or a few thousand people. But how do we fix that level where we clearly need some borders? Or it's some kind of, okay, this is where it ends. And then we have this, the superstructure around us, right? And I'm glad you said that earlier. You don't think of this one government policy. But how do we make all these little things entities? And I think there's a lot to say about that. To say like a Miami could be their own city or San Francisco, they are their own city, but it could be their own semi nation state. How do we integrate all those different, that's kind of the idea of competition, right? How do they all work together? Well, let's look at how they work individually first. And I think a very, very important part of that journey has to be developments, advances in self governance. Getting citizens directly involved in the way that their communities are managed, because this is the thing that we've lost. And there's no better evidence for this than the fact that community service in many, many countries around the world is actually a punishment. Yeah? Yeah, that's true. I never thought about that. Yeah, absolutely fucked up is that, you know, it should be an honor to serve your community. In fact, I think it should be an alternative to taxation. I think you should be allowed to sweep the leaves in the park instead of paying taxes if you can't afford your taxes. That to me would make sense, contribution to your state. And I think that there's an awful lot of good work being done these days at the local level, at the domestic level, by organizations like the Alternative Party in Denmark in particular, and their UK cousins, Alternative UK, who are all about getting citizens actively involved in the way that they are actively involved in the management of places. And then a lot of these issues about where does the authority lie just sort of vaporized because there isn't really authority. If people are totally, genuinely wholly committed to participating, or at least if they're not committed, they have the ability to pass that on to somebody else through a single transferable vote, liquid democracy, all of this kind of stuff that's so often in the news these days. So that's the first thing. I think the other thing that we really do need to have to look at, very, very carefully, is the question of people's sense of loyalty to their tribe or unit or whatever it is. Where does the point come where that benign nationalism or benign city feeling crosses a boundary and becomes malignant? Most citizens of medieval Florence would have gone around noisily claiming that their city state was better than any other city state. You could argue that that's fine. That's just high spirits and that's decent pride. But then when you take another step and they're starting to say, we're so much better that they shouldn't exist. Or we're so much better that their citizens would be better off if they were under our jurisdiction instead of their jurisdiction. There's this dividing line where loyalty to the tribe turns malignant, becomes arrogant, becomes superior, and eventually becomes hostile. And that's the thing we need to look at. I think benign nationalism, benign patriotism is natural and fine. I love my country. I love its landscape. I don't love my nation state. I don't love its leaders. I don't love its institutions. I don't love its army. I don't love its president. But I love my home. So these things all need to be carefully sorted out and catered for. Yeah, what this reminds me of, and I think it's still one of the best books I've read on that topic. And I'm curious what you think. Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. And I think we're talking about the same topic. We're just looking at states and we're looking at the level of entity. And what he was basically saying, why is that that the 15th, 16th century Europeans were light years ahead of everyone else and literally 100 Spanish could sub to, I don't know, 10 million Southern Americans with the East, basically. And how is it that there's still, and his example was Papua New Guinea, how there's still a lot of people in the world who live in similar concepts like Europe lived 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago as hunter and gatherers. And he never moved beyond that. So it seems to be something that is, it doesn't come necessarily natural. It doesn't come with our DNA, the way we are organized. So there's several layers you put on top of it, several software upgrade layers. I traced them back to the Old Testament, but I'm curious about your opinion. And we put these layers on top of it and they really give us the compounded results, especially in the last couple of hundred years. But the question is a little bit, well, I think, and Jared wasn't really answering this in his book. He didn't say, you know, and that's kind of a spoiler. He said, he runs you through all this history and in the end says, you know, it was all an accident. And whoever is not part of this development, you can learn from it, but it wasn't never your fault. And maybe he's onto something, but I always felt that isn't the answer I was looking for. I was kind of looking for a way to tell me, how do we advance? How do we build these civilizations? How do we make the better planet? And he wasn't really answering that question. I don't know if you have a better answer for me. Well, I have to admit, first of all, that I haven't read Jared Diamond, so I can't fully join you in that conversation. I probably should, shouldn't I? It's a good book. Yeah, it's very revolved, very well researched. I don't like the conclusions, but I think the facts are fantastic. Yeah, there are so many good books out there. You never have time to read all of them. Anyway, I prefer to read fiction at my age. I find, I find these kinds of books on macroeconomics or history or sociology to be quite heavy going, most of them, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why I wrote my latest book, The Good Country Equation, The Way I Did. I wanted it to be more like an adventure story than a textbook, so that actually it's a book written in color, so that there would be characters and locations and episodes and fun. I mean, there are things in there that I'm meant to make people laugh. I'm grieved to hear that you've only read one chapter. I hope that your attention span is capable of... Because I didn't order it early enough, I would have read more. So usually I make a big effort diving into reading the books and listen to a lot of talks from... No, I didn't want to put you on the spot there, Torsten. I'm very curious to read it. I think there's a lot of truth in it, and then I can already hear that, of course. So the basic question is the oldest question of all. Why do some nations develop and others not? What's the, where does progress come from? Well, I don't know. There was a very interesting book I read many years ago by David Landis called... Called... What was it called? You know the one I mean. I don't know him. No, I don't know him. David Landis? I don't know him. Landis, if I hadn't paused then, I would have The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Oh, yeah. And that's a book which attempts to answer the same sort of question. And although, again, it is an absolutely fascinating read, I had a somewhat similar response to the book at the end, as you did to Jared Diamond, in the sense that the final conclusions just seemed to be a little unsatisfactory. David Landis is very good on climate, for example. And a lot of the stuff that he says about the climate that people live in has an influence over the economic activities that they engage in, and therefore the amount of growth that they develop. I'm also very interested in unpicking this sort of hidden assumption in the question that the economic development is necessarily, A, a good result, and B, the only good result. That's a very good question. But the obvious answer is, and that's the 14th, 15th century right there, you can think whatever you want about economic development, if you're not ahead of everyone else, you're going to die. T