The following is a production of New Mexico State University. In New Mexico, drought is a life-and-death situation for farmers and ranchers. Even irrigated crops fall well below yield expectations during years of severe persistent drought. It was the drastic droughts of the 1950s in this region that made water delivery one of the key engineering challenges in this state. But not all regions have adequate storage or water delivery systems. Water loss is high, simply in moving irrigation water down open canals for long distances. New Mexico State University is working with water uses throughout the state to help improve efficiency and management of valuable water resources. There are several factors to consider to optimize water usage in severe drought situations. One way to approach optimization of landscape and agricultural irrigation is to look at the actual plant water needs, the timing of irrigation water application and the irrigation efficiency of the water system. There are aesthetic and community benefits derived from using irrigation, creating vegetative moths that anchors soil allow respite from the weather and other climate elements. In New Mexico, less than 15% of the state's acres are irrigated. 90% of total production cropland requires irrigation. Homeowner irrigation systems, however, make up a larger portion of the total irrigation use. Irrigation technology is based on available resources, soils, salinity, water requirements, drainage, land shaping and water delivery systems. Here in Wella Lupa County, we're working on a project to maintain and optimize our water, the use of plastic piping underground. We presently on the Agriculture Hispanic Center have a 16-inch pipeline that we put underground and then from that 16-inch pipeline we have a riser, we come up and we go to an alfalfa system and the system is the riser on top and then the bonnet and out of the bonnet we have our water but it has maintained and saved us a high cost of having to maintain a ditch and then optimize our water as we get it on the surface. Plant water use is being evaluated on various crops and landscape plants to ensure optimization of applications. If we can know more about the moisture needed with each plant type, then irrigation scheduling can be organized to limit water waste or loss. Through research, much of the information on specific plant needs has been determined and this work continues in order to improve timing and water needs for crops and home landscapes. We're here in southern New Mexico in a pecan orchard and the grower here, Jeff Graham, has had trouble being able to get his water allocation onto the land here. We've had some drought conditions and he's been short on his water allocation. We've been looking at some different ways to get water onto the property here. The soils are pretty light and so we've looked at a sprinkler system and the sprinkler system will do a more adequate job of covering the root zone area here in the orchard and be able to wet the root zone down. We have some sensors that we've installed to measure the moisture in the ground and see whether the sprinkler is carrying the moisture down to the depth that we needed for the tree roots and the sensor also is picking up what the water content of the soil is. Jeff is able to download this information onto his computer and develop a graph from that that shows how the soil is being depleted as far as moisture and then he can time his irrigation when to start the sprinklers up or if he has a year that he does have some water allocation then he can go ahead and flood the field. We also have a tensiometer in the field and the tensiometer is a device that's been used for several years by different parts of the ag industry but it is a tool that also can be used so we're kind of comparing the two instruments to see if they're reading the same information but both these will give a farmer an indication of where their moisture content is and when they need to irrigate. In both the landscape and agricultural commodities water use models and soil moisture monitors have been tweaked to optimize water use, limit overuse and utilize climate data and knowledge of plant water use in order to provide water need that is economically feasible. Soil moisture sensors can use real-time plant needs with soil moisture status to minimize water use in crops and landscapes across the state. At Artesia, an evaluation of moisture sensors has led to a joint project with Sandia Labs research to determine actual plant needs and system costs. Water in the Picos Valley is very critical and agriculture gets blamed for diverting a lot of water but in reality it uses very little water, it only uses what the plant uses and that's what we're trying to determine, how much water does the plant need and how to most efficiently apply that water so that we don't lose water to other places in the ecosystem. We're going to more and more with the pivot irrigation systems and our farmers this is a new system for them, they've never used it before and so they have a learning curve on learning how to use that pivot system and by using this type of technology we're able to teach them how to irrigate with the pivot irrigation system so they don't have to take that six or seven years experience it takes to learn how to do it right, they can do it within one or two years and reduce their cost, reduce their maintenance and reduce their losses. Satellite technology can now beam soil moisture readings from remote locations in the field to researchers while at the same time saving farmers valuable time in interpreting data and limiting erosion from wind or water to crops. Here at Arteja this year in the 2005 growing season we're scanning with a new probe to us anyway a probe that can measure soil moisture with depth we're scanning several probes or several profiles, several soil profiles across the valley all the way from Loving to hopefully we'll be up in Roswell this summer and we're trying to quantify just how much water, how quickly that water is used in the soil that soil is really a great reservoir for holding water but of course our crops are using it and any kind of practices that we can take on from a agronomic point of view and conserve that water from evaporation and letting it get into the crop is perhaps the best method to conserve soil water. The use of drip irrigation on drought tolerant crops such as cotton has led to new research avenues such as variety selection and limited water use for crops in New Mexico Research addresses needs and how to knowledge to implement rotations that not only conserve moisture supplies but also provide efficiency and other inputs such as fertility needs and pest control Drip irrigation is an excellent resource to use in New Mexico particularly on a variety of crops in particular some of the tap-rooted crops such as cotton one of the reasons is because it provides a ready supply of irrigation water right when the plant needs it at that particular growth stage and likewise it can be easily monitored through something like the watermark moisture sensors are some of the others with that with drip irrigation we actually have the water come through the tubing and actually provide the supply that we need for the crop again with drip irrigation we see some special uses that will be a big advantage in New Mexico In recent years we've been applying drip systems to our farm because of the efficiency of water since we've had drought in the past two or three years we've been trying to economize on the water what water we save with the drip systems we utilize in other areas where we don't have wells or we're not able to get water efficiently into some fields we've noticed that our yields have stabilized with the drip system because we are able to apply water much more efficiently drought is related to heat and salinity in our region so if we improve drought tolerance in cotton we can also improve heat tolerance and drought tolerance so therefore increase in cotton yield and improve fiber quality so what we have been doing and trying to do is to use genetics and genomics technology to identify those drought responsive genes to map those genes on cotton genome and then to evaluate the functions with drought tolerance then we will use DNA markers associated with those drought tolerance genes to transfer them into high yielding cotton varieties this strategy is called molecular breeding because we are using molecular markers to assist us in our breeding program NMSU's agricultural science centers located across New Mexico are working to optimize water use experimenting with different timing and systems of irrigation they have been able to find economical and efficient systems to help producers and homeowners save water at the Clovis Science Center crop management under row, pivot and drip irrigation allow clients in the region to see firsthand the irrigation efficiency that can be obtained under intensive management we are very fortunate here at the Clovis Science Center to have just received this brand new center pivot irrigation system I think it is going to help tremendously in our research efforts here since this station was created back in 1949 all the variety trials and research efforts have been irrigated with row water or furrow irrigation not only is that the most inefficient type of irrigation that there is not very many producers in this area using furrow irrigation anymore and so I think the biggest advantage to this center pivot system is going to be that we will be able to conduct research that producers can relate to a little bit better because it is actually what they are doing on their own farms and they can relate to it a little bit better more so than in the past eventually we would like to get subsurface drip irrigation here at the station as well that would allow us to compare the efficiencies of both pivot and subsurface irrigation and also the water use efficiencies of the various crops grown in our area at Farmington the NMSU Science Center is working with specialty crops as well as irrigation supplies to optimize water use in the Navajo Nation the Navajo agricultural products industry has computerized all of their irrigation pivots to develop crop regions that are optimized the Science Center is working to show that even specialty crops can be managed using minimal water knowledge of the crop and its growth cycle can help in minimizing the impact of introduced crops to the region but at the same time provide a means to be economical and save moisture here we are in San Juan County at the NMSU Agricultural Science Center we are looking at ways to judiciously use San Juan River water and by doing that we are trying to grow popular trees on old abandoned rectangular fields for Navajo agricultural products industry we've got ten different clones here that we are looking at to see how they can produce under our local soil conditions elevated soil pH and how well they can use the river water you'll notice some of them are doing very very well this particular clone OP367 is about thirty feet high on average after what is it three years and then some of the other clones you can see down the way are not doing so well we're using surface irrigation surface drip irrigation it's a micro system where we use limited amounts of water and it's applied along this drip line we're looking at the popular trees because Western Accelsior located in Mancus just further north from here is an Accelsior company which shreds aspen but they're looking for a long term sustainable source of raw material and the popular tree can be substituted for the aspen and used to shred and make the Accelsior that you use at home in your cooler pads in the summertime in urban areas up to fifty percent of the total water used goes towards irrigation of landscapes a lot of this water could be saved not only through appropriate plant selection but through irrigating appropriately here at the Ag Science Center at Farmington we've initiated a zero-scape demonstration garden where we're demonstrating appropriate plants for the native landscapes not only are we demonstrating some of this plant species that are appropriate towards the area but also we want to identify the water requirements of these plants so that we can make recommendations on irrigation scheduling in this garden it's split into four different sections and each section is irrigated differently section number one receives no water whatsoever but just natural rainfall last year that amounted to about seven inches here in Farmington the second area receives about twenty percent of our reference ET value that we compute from the weather station this amounted to about forty to fifty gallons of water per plant per season or about one to two gallons per week during the summer the medium irrigation plot is forty percent of that reference ET value and it receives about two to three gallons of water per week per plant the high irrigation level receives about a hundred gallons of water throughout the year, 120 gallons per water and about three or four gallons of water per week plants are irrigated using a above ground drip irrigation system consisting of manifolds and then distribution lines to each plant we're developing a database using the information we collect here so that we can make recommendations to the citizens of New Mexico and plants that they can select for their landscapes and also the water requirements and irrigation recommendations for those plants at Los Lunas, use of the sun is the energy system that optimizes use of shallow water supplies on high value crops such as grapes the center has introduced technology not only on valuable vegetation that can conserve and preserve New Mexican soils but has also provided information on specialized water systems hundreds of farmers and ranchers in the region and around the state have been briefed on how to efficiently pull up water from shallow surface supplies for use in irrigation as well as for water supplied to livestock and wildlife solar panels can capture the sun's energy to pull shallow water supplies up and through drip irrigation systems or into water troughs to provide needed moisture in remote locations here at the Ag Science Center in Valencia County, middle real grand of New Mexico we've got a project using solar energy to run a drip system on our grapevine unfortunately we're in an area where we've got a water system we can drill down about 9 feet, get it 70 gallons of water a minute we put in a 2 inch well right here we've got a solar panel about 30 by 40 inches span that will run our drip system we've got in, this is actually an experimental vineyard basically a half acre we're running a drip line with half inch emitters there's two to each one of these vines we're able to save an awful lot of water in that regard versus flood irrigation the farming community here in the middle real grand is extremely interested in saving water and getting good high quality water using a drip system here we're able to reduce the amount of water we use also one of the things that's happened to us the last several years with the droughts we've had 5 or 6 years of running drought in the Mexico it makes the water real short late in the season so we're able to use this drip system on this shallow well to water our grapes way into October and even into November if we need to here in Socorro County many of our local producers are looking to these solar paneled units to produce water for livestock and wildlife here at the National Sevillette Refuge they've been very effective in utilizing this new technology as the new technology decreases in price it's becoming very competitive with most of our local windmills for livestock production these units are now able to keep up with the large amounts of water that are needed for livestock production and even the small amount of water that's used for our wildlife our solar powered water systems are commonly made up of three components our solar units which some of these have the free on tracking devices that can maintain with the sun so that they maintain a constant flow of water supply all day long a storage tank and then often times whatever drinker that we're going to be supplying either wildlife or livestock with continuing research and outreach through New Mexico State University has been key in optimizing water use in the state the Tucumcari Science Center is introducing the use of a biological control agent to limit weed spread a mite is being used to control bindweed and testing is being conducted on forage rotations to maximize soil moisture within different soil depths the main focus of the research program at the Agricultural Science Center at Tucumcari in Quay County has mainly to do with forage crops, irrigated perennials like pastures and alfalfa but occasionally we also work with other things like the field bindweed mite we have several projects going on right now one has to do with the migration of the mite throughout the plant because we know that different seasons of the year it'll be found at different places on the plant but also we're working with herbicides to measure their effect on mite-infested bindweed and here we have a demonstration of one of those herbicides that was sprayed last fall this side was sprayed with herbicide this side was not and then we came back and sprayed with another herbicide so that all we see this spring is bindweed or where there is no bindweed where it's been treated the mite, actually when the bindweed is growing the mite feeds on leaf tissue or photosynthate that's made by the leaves and prevents that from going to the root system it causes the leaves to fold along the mid vein where the feeding is done and reduces photosynthetic area and also reduces the amount of photosynthate or sugars that are translocated to the root system as you can see field bindweed is very invasive it covers an area, very healthy bindweed competes very well with other plants we've noticed lately that it's only when the bindweed has been weakened by the mite that other plants like these grasses can start invading any plant will compete with water for whatever the desirable crop is we work mainly here with alfalfa and we know that well-managed, well-watered, well-fertilized alfalfa harvested properly that is protected from insects and diseases and other pests can compete very well with field bindweed in fact we are certain that well-managed alfalfa will not have very much bindweed in it it's a very good competitive crop because they compete in the same part of the root zone for water and nutrients but the alfalfa is more competitive than the field bindweed when it's managed properly in Currie County we are doing some bindweed trials out north of Clovis about 30 miles on some dryland farmland it is a three-way rotation with wheat, grain sorghum and fallow land and we are actually using a wide variety of chemical applications and with that we are also looking at the possibility of the bindweed mite we feel like that we get a better control of the bindweed if we burn it back with a chemical first and it gives the bindweed mite an opportunity to get a hold and doesn't have as much work to do to get the job done as the mite eats the bindweed it gnaws off the nodule so that it can't put out another runner and if it's got a bunch of runners already it can't go ahead and get control of that but when we burn it back then it can get underground or even right at the surface of the ground and can eat those nodes off to where it can't ever put out another runner and therefore it will kill the plant so we are all familiar with the definition of a weed which is a plant not desired or a plant out of place in agricultural settings these are pretty obvious they are not the plants that are growing in the field that we desire to harvest we are well aware that plants need water for growth and these weeds need water for growth as well and a lot of times they compete with desirable plants for water what we are not aware of is that a lot of times they use excessive water that could be used for other purposes for example some of our common weeds that we find throughout New Mexico on an individual plant level use 20 to 30 gallons of water to complete their life cycle if we scale that up to an acreage with a 10% infestation that can be 2 to 3000 gallons of water that these weeds use per acre and that's only a 10% infestation if we were to increase an area we would get more water used so water use can be quite excessive depending upon the species and simply by eliminating these plants you are going to eliminate their need to have water for growth and you have more growth water for the crops as well as more water for other uses whether it's agricultural or urban uses providing research and outreach to clients throughout New Mexico the Cooperative Extension Service the experiment stations and science centers are working with local residents and landowners to optimize water supplies and the use of irrigation and plant material people demand more information on optimization, reliability and maintenance on the use of asecias or hand dug irrigation systems here at the Alcalde Science Center I'm working with Sam Fernald a water resource specialist at New Mexico State University on a unique project that's looking at asecia hydrology asecia being the local Spanish term for the traditional irrigation ditches that were put in for the most part a few hundred years ago and these asecias tend to be earthen lined we're looking to see how much water seeps out of these asecias and how that water influences shallow groundwater levels and shallow groundwater quality farmers in this area as they deal with water rights adjudication want to know of the water they have a right to how much makes it back to the river and perhaps be able to claim credit for that water also we would like to determine to what extent this water that seeps out of the asecias is stored underground only to be released later downstream and perhaps this seepage and the storage going on may be a significant factor in remaining in stream river flows here at the Alcalda Science Center which is located in the northern part of New Mexico about 30 miles north of Santa Fe we're looking at some apple trees right here the apple industry is probably one of the basic industries up here in northern New Mexico when we talk about fruit of course the apples are the number one crop as we take a look at what we're doing here at the Science Center we're using cover crops within our rows to keep the moisture to stop the trans evaporation of our waters one of the systems that we use up here in northern New Mexico of course are the micro systems micro systems are micro spray systems has a head on top of a pipe that throws out a micro spray of water of course we can control the amount of water that we apply on our fields over here at the same time we can control the amount of water that we put on these fields with the micro spray systems we can actually control the amount of water that we apply and only apply enough water to maintain our trees and also to maintain our grass and legume covers that we have within our rows at the lion decker in Fabian Garcia's setters near Las Cruces in the southern portion of New Mexico Alfa Varieties testing examines and secures better variety selection and planting programs to optimize ground cover and pasture forage use of expert software optimizes irrigation system parameters on a crop by crop basis so our laboratory is taking a genetic engineering approach to produce drought tolerant alfalfa so what we have done is identified genes that have a role in drought tolerance we have used molecular tools to identify and isolate these genes these genes have then been put into alfalfa using transgenic approaches the approach that we do take is to engineer the gene in the test tube put it back into plants and then test the plants in the greenhouse we're here at the lion decker plant science research farm in southern New Mexico in Donyana County where the major emphasis of my alfalfa breeding program is to develop alfalfa cultivars that use water more efficiently and therefore use less irrigation water what I need to point out is that drought is the most significant environmental stress factor limiting crop productivity in the United States this field that we're standing in represents a five-year field and laboratory study that's supported by both state and federal funds to develop molecular, genetic and biochemical tools to improve drought tolerance in alfalfa which is the most important cultivated forage in the United States we're evaluating several hundred populations here for their ability to produce forage yield using 50% less water once we identify drought tolerant populations those tolerant populations are being characterized for unique biochemical traits that protect photosynthesis and plant productivity from drought induced damage these populations are also being characterized for how they partition their carbohydrates to both shoots and roots to help them persist and survive over time we're also tracking several hundred genes in each of these populations and have determined that many of these genes are actually activated under drought stress ultimately we integrate both the field and the laboratory data using genetic linkage analysis methods to determine which of these genes and biochemical traits are suitable candidates for us to advance for DNA marker technology development so that we can develop improved cultivars of alfalfa that use water more efficiently producers have a lot of options when it comes to scheduling irrigation and a lot of tools one of the tools is a climate-based irrigation scheduling tool that is available on the New Mexico climate center this data can be acquired by clicking on the New Mexico climate stations selecting a irrigation management and growing degree day climate retrieval system selecting the climate stations of interest including the HORT experiment station in Las Cruces, New Mexico and then selecting the crop of interest when you hit the retrieve form you will get back the date the air temperature, the relative humidity soil temperature, solar radiation and reference ET along with information on the ET or water use of the crop on a daily basis that then is the amount of water that needs to be applied with a drip irrigation system or this information stuck into a spreadsheet to determine when to schedule using flood irrigation from crops to landscapes water use in New Mexico has long been limited and has required efforts by farmers and homeowners to be economical and to preserve water everyone has a share in optimizing water use in the state to conserve supplies for the future maintaining erosion protection from wind and water can help toward preserving the green aesthetics in the state more water is wasted by dripping faucets and overuse in homes than an irrigation supplied to landscapes and crops irrigation can give back to shallow water supplies and provide moisture to the air while maintaining green plant material to protect precious soils in the state New Mexico State University is working throughout the state to provide current, indispensable information on crop use in landscapes and in food and fiber production be water wise and irrigation efficient around the home, landscape and across the fields conserve water supplies to sustain the populations of New Mexicans for years to come contact your county extension office or your local agricultural science center for more information on water use efficiency and optimizing irrigation systems Additional information can also be found online at www.cahe.nmsu.edu The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University The views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents


The Pentagon plans to speed up the delivery of Abrams tanks to Ukraine, a US official and a source familiar with the situation said, providing the vital equipment to Kiev as soon as this fall. The Biden administration pledged to supply Ukraine with 31 advanced M1 Abrams tanks after months of shunning the idea of deploying the difficult to maintain tanks to Ukraine. The new plan speeds up delivery by about a year, according to a congressional aid briefed on the matter. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the faster timeline because the Department of Defense had not previously offered any specific date for its effort to get the tanks into Ukrainian hands, only saying it would take months. We're working on that, White House spokesperson John Kirby told CNN on Tuesday. There's some changes that you can make to the process to sort of speed that up.


inertia is the most powerful force really and inertia is a negative force it holds us back it prevents us from changing things but right now we live in a time of the greatest possible misalignment of the geography of where our resources are and the geography of where people are and what stands in the way is the geography of borders and politics and we need to reconcile these geographies. Dr. Parag Khanna is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Parag is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler and best-selling author. He is founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario-based strategic advisory firm. Parag's newest book is Move, The Forces Uprooting Us. Just barely hot off the presses this is a physical copy I have but it's also available on Audible and Kindle. The Future is Asian is also a book he has Commerce Conflict and Culture in the 21st century released in 2019. He is the author of a trilogy of books on the future of the world order beginning with the second world empires and influence in new global order in 2008 followed by how to run the world charting a course to the next renaissance in 2011 and concluding with Connectography, Mapping the Future of Global Civilization in 2016. I have Connectography a copy of that. He is also the author of Technocracy in America Rise of the Info State in 2017 and co-author of Hybrid Reality Thriving in the Emergent Human Technology Civilization in 2012. Parag was named one of Esquire's 75 most influential people in the 21st century and featured in Wired Magazine's smart list. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Bachelor's and Master's Degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has traveled to nearly 150 countries and as a young global leader of the World Economic Forum. Parag, it's so good to have you. Welcome to the show. Great to see you Mark. Thanks so much. I'm glad you could come back on. The last time we spoke about a couple of your books and had you on the podcast and that was wonderful. It looks like you're out and about traveling today. We're doing the podcast from your car but it's a video podcast so we'll have a mix for those. Most of the listeners are on podcast format but I'm so glad you could take the time out of your busy schedule and you hold true to who you are. You're always on the move. You're all over the place. Renounding success since this book has come out. I've seen you all over speaking about it and heard you whether it's audio podcast or on videos. Speaking to the mayor of Miami and many other great people about this wonderful book and so timely and I can't believe how up to date everything is. How you just have your finger on the pulse of what's going on in this world and I'm sure that's because of your companies but I'm really glad you could take the time to be here. Thank you. Oh such a pleasure and it may seem like everything is super timely and up to the minute but that's I mean partially just an accident. The book was finished before the pandemic and I took a bit of time obviously to update it but not necessarily all that much because you know it's a long term thesis and the pandemic has accelerated some of the trends even in the area of mobility and that's obviously a great paradox to many people but you know now here it is it's out and we are entering gradually a painfully that post-pandemic world where I think we'll see a lot of these trends come to life around people yearning to relocate to new places as has always been the case throughout history. So I have a couple of questions specifically around that. With people experiencing this pandemic and seeing a lot of moving and uprooting during this time do you think there are some learning lessons that they're saying okay well this is probably not the first pandemic that that we're going to have or live through and so they're preparing like where can we live in the future? Where's the best place for this? Are you seeing any trends or anything that that people are preparing for maybe the next pandemic the next wave of something else and already preparing? Well I don't think that people are focused on the next pandemic because we're still in this one but one of the points I make is that a pandemic is just one of the big phenomena one of the huge kinds of events that has a systemic impact on economics, on geography, on labor markets that kind of thing but the others of course are political upheaval and political unrest right you know we're still in an age of civil wars and state failure and conflicts and that obviously shifts people and forces people to become refugees for example Syria, Afghanistan that hasn't stopped just because of the pandemic and the same thing is true obviously of technological disruptions which are accelerating right we've had globalization outsourcing of jobs and now digitization remote work all of that also enables creates more opportunities for people to relocate to new places and of course there's the demographic issues the imbalances between old and young in societies and that accounts for most human migration of the 20th century is simply people pursuing economic opportunity and obviously that has not stopped because of the pandemic so all of these deeper forces that compel people to want to move are as I say really in overdrive right now and we also have to take into account of course climate change and even though most people historically move for economic reasons there's no doubt that climate change is going to overtake all of those forces in terms of the driver the driving role that it plays in in migration and that's something that of course I focus so much of the book on you think do you think people are are trying to make their lifestyles more mobile in some respects regardless of what's coming in the future that they're able to go where where they can work the best where they can live the best at a moment's notice so that that they kind of might know that there are some unease or unrest in the world and they want to keep that that sense of security or resilience by having the ability to be mobile or to move to that place which which they can thrive as a family as an individual the best as possible that's right and that happens both domestically and internationally so domestically you can see in nearly record levels since the since the big broke out and again it kind of betrays the notion of a lockdown right because in fact you had record relocation during the lockdown enough people who could afford to say I want to move you know to have a more spacious home in a rural or suburban area or people saying I've been paying such high rent in a downtown city you know in San Francisco or LA and now my job can be remote so I'll move to a lower cost place and ultimately every person in a way has that has that right has that ability or ideally they do to make those choices but I think you know one of the things I point out is that we've got to appreciate the people who work in local domestic services where they are pinned down to a certain place and those people deserve to have a recognition for the for the I guess you would call essential services they provide deserve to be better compensated as well on the flip side to that there was actually what occurred in the brexit where during the pandemic where those usual migrant workers that go into the united kingdom were not allowed to not only because of lockdown but because of the brexit and so now we're kind of seeing as they merge out out of the pandemic or kind of start to ease travel restrictions and things that a lot of those delivery drivers even if they were going through the channel and those ships and those people who were doing those sometimes essential services are just not they don't want to go back to work anymore there there's just a kind of a hesitation that they feel that their the lifestyle is not as good as as it was before or that they've found they don't feel that long-term sense of security in those positions or in that country anymore and I'm wondering if it's not I'm sure brexit is the biggest part but are there are you seeing that elsewhere and what can you kind of tell us about that that those who who should be returning to work but are not it's a great point I think there are a couple of interesting things in there the first is that if you think about the european workers who were in the UK prior to brexit and then left because of the uncertainty of brexit the UK is now realized that they need them very badly during the pandemic the UK realized that had a shortage of nurses and now truck drivers and basically it's just been you know a reminder of how awful their immigration policy has been now why aren't the polish and other workers going back to the UK well because britain doesn't offer those kinds of generous working conditions and they're just offering short-term contracts come to the UK work for a few hours sure will pay you a lot more than you otherwise would have received but you're not going to get any benefits but if you're a citizen of the european union such as polish people are you're entitled to certain benefits and now that brexit has happened for the last few years all of them are now living in countries with better working conditions and higher salaries and fixed contracts so why would they go back to england so quite frankly i don't want to be cruel here but this is how countries learn either the hard way or the easy way and britain has chosen to learn the hard way that it's better to have these essential workers rather than castigate them and denigrate them and consider them to be you know unwanted extras when in fact they are truly the lifeblood of your economy and you were very foolish to let them go and now you're not gaining them back just when you need the most and that that's really kind of how in some respects you open up the book uh that that migrants really make the world go around and economies go around and thrive and flourish um can on the flip side can you give us any examples of places that really during this economic downturn and issues of the pandemic and other things really thrived and flourished and and we're seeing something totally different because they had a different structure or they were better prepared well i mean there are a few examples and i suppose that you could break them down into big and small countries i mean let's take a big country like canada canada has the most generous migration policy in the world and has continued despite the pandemic to import migrants in record numbers right literally about um you know 400 000 people per year an extraordinary number of inward migrants into the youth into canada and um and and you know they have this commitment they just had an election and even in their election you had a sort of you know a sort of um reelection of justin trudeau you don't have migration as a big politically volatile controversial issue in canada the way you do in the united states and i think that's a very positive thing in terms of smaller countries what you saw happen was that um you had about 75 countries suddenly declare that they are going to have uh nomad visa programs right and that's really remarkable that too is a reminder that countries realized that over the past year and a half two years suddenly immigration dried up right tourism gone conference conference events gone so they really were suffering because we realized how vital the tourism hospitality and travel industries are to our economies and suddenly once all of those guests and tourists dried up they realized oh my goodness we don't want to be xenophobic and populist and put up walls and borders we need to do the exact opposite we need to attract as many young people as we possibly can we need the digital nomads hence they launch these digital nomad visa schemes and they all got FOMO you know sort of so they all started doing it too so that's how you want wound up in a situation where instead of two countries having digital nomad schemes 75 or 80 countries now have those schemes and that's a great example of a learning from crisis be appreciating the importance of migration and talent and see this kind of really move into a new direction a new tangent where you know I think the new narrative is going to be openness and the desire to attract young people uh because we realize what happens to your economy when things stand still you don't have those young migrants and young professionals who make your country go around who make everything work I love that so there I'm sure there's many more forces that are uprooting us and for example I have a lot of from New York originally I have a lot of friends from New York and I just know that pretty much almost every one of them moved during this time to another place Santa Fe, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, some to Canada as you say and some to Europe and they're all really different stories and and then you saw these reports you heard these reports about this mass exodus from from people in America in certain states and just saying why pay this expensive rent and be in a place where I'm working from home anyway but I can work anywhere from from home not not pay these expensive cost of living has that slowed has that increased what what is what are you seeing not just in the US but all over during this time oh I think this is just the beginning of the shakeout and fallout from this process we have billions of young people who are mobile and we don't know where they're going to wind up and even the people who did make that initial move they'll keep on moving you know in the theme of this book is not really about one way moves it's really about constant mobility and the constant search for what I call the right latitude altitude and attitude or more formally you know the search for for social for political and for economic stability and well-being and that's not a search that ends in just one place and one promised land of course it makes sense for people to have chosen lower cost sunnier you know destinations with more fresh air but that doesn't mean that they're going to keep their job forever because the next disruption may be coming I quote the the British journalist Simon Cooper from the Financial Times who said if you can do your job from anywhere then someone anywhere can do your job so what happens if you say okay well I'm going to leave San Francisco and I'll hop in my trailer I'm going to move to Santa Fe I'm going to work remotely for a while but then your employer decides to give your job away to someone in India or someone in Egypt who's a really good software programmer then some of you realize uh-oh now I have to get this new job but they want me to go and do training and orientation so now I've got to go back to some town in California and that's the reality for most people even if they're lucky enough to be quote unquote digital nomads so it's a precarious existence you know for for young people even for young talent and so that's why I emphasize that there isn't a one-way street there isn't a single answer you know to where you go and settle this is not like our parents generation it's going to be constant movement and nomadism in the book you say one future four scenarios and was that what you just mentioned though are those the four scenarios you're talking about well actually so the four scenarios in the book are much more sort of you know you could say radical or extreme or or systemic the scenarios are really about characterizing the whole world in the future so one scenario is what I call regional fortresses right where the northern continents north america europe northeast asia these are regions that are rich stable secure they invest in their own sustainability they share some technology with poor regions but they don't actually allow a lot of migration it's kind of like the present extrapolated into the future and then there's a couple of scenarios I flush out called the new middle ages and barbarians at the gate where you have very little sustainability and uncontrolled migration either a little or a lot but the bottom line is it's violent it's not done sustainably and you can have resource conflicts water wars that kind of thing so it's kind of a hunter-gatherer geopolitical and archical kind of kind of world and the final scenario before and the one that I hope resonates most of all with people is what I call northern lights and in that fourth scenario you have a world where you have a relocation of populations that are vulnerable areas where we do a lot of technology transfer to assist popular vulnerable populations to allow them to you know do their own localized agriculture more efficiently provide them with water desalination solar power renewable energy technologies but where we need to we locate hundreds of millions if not billions of people to stable climate resilient areas in the northern hemisphere but again we do so sustainably we build new settlements that are also circular you know with with renewable power hydroponic agriculture and wastewater treatment rainwater collection all of these things so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past in terms of mass urbanization so the northern light scenario is unfortunately only one out of four scenarios in the book and it's not necessarily the most likely one but it's the one that I think we should aspire to throughout the book I see that you really touch upon sustainability and climate and the future and that is really not getting better and that there's that this also is a big factor of of your lifestyle and also why you want to be mobile and and why there's so many so many people moving around the world as well um this I do a lot with foresight and futurism and kind of speaking to organizations international organizations about what are sustainable futures what are resilient futures what are regenerative futures and that the whole basis of regeneration is sustainability and a solid infrastructure that no matter what happens tomorrow the economy goes on the energy goes on the food is still there you have a place that is pretty resilient and secure and not necessarily that it's it's continuing to get worse obviously with climate change and what's happening but it's been going on for quite some time I guess people are saying that there's really not one place to go and hide from climate change or to to say okay this is the only sustainable place on on the earth uh it's over and over again um it's it's moving it's constantly dependent upon those cities and those structures that are uh building the right infrastructures to sustain that that lifestyle and so with this foresight that you do with your companies and the mapping and in the book there's there's the beautiful mapping can you kind of is is there a form of a prediction is there a form of foresight there that you can see what some of those trends are and how how that's looking those cities and places that are really making that shift to provide those places of openness that's a great question mark so the thing is about scenarios is that you know all four of those scenarios that I mentioned earlier are kind of they're all true at the same time it just depends on where you are so there are places that are being generous and open and bringing in your new migrants look at Germany since the Syrian refugee crisis its population has grown because of these migrants its labor force has grown it's integrated into the economy it's raised its output it's made the most of the situation despite the tragedy of the Syrian civil war and so on again a place like Canada that I mentioned earlier that it's bringing in migrants from every corner of the planet four hundred thousand a year so those are examples of that but you still have places you know like Russia right they don't have as generous migration policies Canada even though they have similar size and latitude and are becoming trying to become more diversified economies so culture plays a strong role so the answer really depends on where you might say but one thing that is important is as you mentioned cities and what happens with thriving bustling global cities what they all have in common whether it's New York or Toronto or London or Dubai or Singapore they're always open to talent right they're always open to talent and they're more or less color blind about it and these are the places that are the most desirable places in the world they're the most productive cities in the world the most dynamic cities in the world and they have the highest percentage of foreign born people you know these are very diverse thriving melting pot places and I think that in the future we're going to have a lot more places like that because you can imagine that the new kinds of settlements that I'm talking about as populations recirculate and new economies and the northern parts of the world need to be developed and cultivated you'll see people from everywhere gathering there and this is what I write about in the book I talk about Northism you know Northism is that there is it's a sad fact that the northern hemisphere is going to in a way you know sort of survive climate change better than the southern hemisphere but Northism is this idea that actually the people of the Arctic regions and stuff have thought less in terms of borders and more in terms of nature and stewardship of nature and protection of nature and that's a very important thing that we should remember and some of the towns I've been to that used to be very under populated and very small tiny places in Norway for example now have Brazilians and Indians and all manner of people are living in these random villages in northern Norway because there's work to be done and we're building the future and one of the phrases I use is the Latin homo favor man who makes man who builds and you know that's a phrase from John C. Lee Brown who's one of the great Silicon Valley pioneers and my argument is that we need to really mobilize humanity to build those future sustainable settlements and in order to mobilize them we need to enable them to move unlock their potential by enabling their mobility because most people today are still trapped behind borders. Yeah in the book you actually even say homo economic and then homo favor and kind of how what it what it needs to or what would be a desirable future of how homo sapien kind of involves an integrated participation in those cities in those places that where they live to create a lifestyle but also to build that infrastructure of sustainability that we need. There is this huge war for young talent that's going on around the world and you were speaking just recently with the mayor of Miami and Florida and you know a lot of people see Florida as a place of where retirees go but they really are a young vibrant kind of hip place in many respects but all over the world we're seeing this this this war on young talent how do you see that applicable for for this move and what's available what kind of trends are you seeing there and and tell us a little bit more about that. Well young people are obviously central you know if this book has as one protagonist it is global youth right and that's not one person it's four and a half billion people who are young and Mark it's really very simple if you want to be a futurist and you want to forecast the future you don't look at the world through the eyes of the elderly you know and nationalists and parochial people you look at the world to the eyes of young people because they will inhabit the future they will dominate the future demographically they already dominate the present so I think that you know I consciously decided to take a youth focus lens you know in this book and in this research and to look at how youth identity has become something of a common set of values around the world and this is extremely important because in the 20th century identity was much more national right old Germans and old you know Brits and old Americans and young ones see the world the same according to their national prism but today what you have is this generational identity where young people value sustainability connectivity and mobility above all else and they have more in common with each other a young Nigerian a young Chinese person a young Mexican have more in common with each other ideologically ideologically than they do with their own elderly people in their own country so identity has gone from vertical to horizontal I love that a lot of this has to do as well with this identity identification actual IDs passports this global citizen concept this how what kind of visas and passports and and tools are being made available for this generation move so to say which you also talk about in the book to attract this young talent to attract those people and and are they the right setup I would make a presumption that the most most move to the big cities is because there's already some form of infrastructure but it's also those big cities are the ones that are that are in need because they have people who are leaving and saying oh there's got to be something better as well and so that it's a continual rotation so part of the the war for young talent is that you know again you're almost always fighting it because you know we were talking about Miami earlier right now Miami is a quote unquote winner lots of young people have been pouring in since the pandemic started but you know another place could become attractive too and then maybe young people will start flocking there so you have to retain those young people and part of it of course is the policies of those places are do they have affordable housing do they have access to good public services and education are they safe in terms of the physical environment security you know do they have a liberal culture right and embrace diversity those are things that young people want and so so cities that embody those virtues are going to be the ones that attract young people and hopefully retain those young people. Do you see any kind of new form of global passports nomad visas some new things emerging that are more on a global framework of like maybe a UN 2020 ID there's a lot of things going in with the WEF and the UN for these self-sovereign identifications or some kind of almost like a global passport discussions through blockchain and secure contracts do you see any movement or discussions in that respect and and hope from from those who may come from a place where they're very technically savvy but they don't have the best social services structures identifications passports visas etc a strong passport so to say right and this is a huge theme in the book a real priority for me something I've been pushing for you know 10 years now and I think it's an idea whose time has come and that is the so the so-called global passport now when you think about you know right now those people the billions of people who come from countries where they don't have a privileged passport you know that their their mobility is penalized by their nationality right their nationality prohibits them from moving freely and so this is an idea where if you can share your data on a secure blockchain and only when needed with the relevant authorities when you're applying for a job or a student visa and so forth you've you share your vaccination certificates your records your criminal history financial statements education records employment history this may seem like it's terribly intrusive but remember all of this data is already there somewhere right but it's your own benefit if you're from Bolivia or you know Equatorial Guinea to provide this data so that if a country you know is willing to accept applications or migrants from people anywhere you can provide this documentation prove that you are a person in good standing and maybe it'll be a lot faster to get approval because you've put everything on the blockchain rather than having to go fly on a plane save all your money to go fly just to an embassy that's not anywhere near where you're from and then stand in front of bullet proof glass and pay hundreds of dollars and wait months and months for potential approval we have the opportunity to short circuit and circumvent all of that and to divorce mobility from nationality and that's the goal that I have in mind and that's what I've tried to outline in terms of a strategy moving forward that's beautiful and I believe that also plays a lot into this concept of quantum people quantum experiences that I have a lot of books on my shelf here about quantum mechanics and it's kind of both at the same time on and off and you're this global citizen but yes you're from the United States or you're from India or you're from Africa but you're this quantum person and can you tell us explain how you see that what you mean by quantum people is this idea or this global passport a part of that or is there much more to it well so um you know I really enjoyed playing around with this terminology when I was developing this so you know it's the idea that you know people are going to be on the move especially young people to some degree you could say wealthy people of multiple passports and residences are on the move all the time but of course the quantum analogy is that you can know the location of the velocity of a particle but not both so you can know the location of velocity of a person or the direction they're moving in but maybe not both because that's how much some people are moving and you know to be frank the this is very important the quantum people that I really celebrated the book are not billionaires with 20 passports right the people that I celebrate are the Filipino nurses and the South Asian construction workers they are to me the quantum people they're the ones who are heroes they're building entire countries they're caring for the elderly and the sick they're the reason why people aren't dying and nursing homes and hospitals around the world they're building the modern infrastructure all across the Middle East and Africa and they're the ones who are moving on all the time and they're quite used to it right you know they're not flashy digital nomads they're not software engineers they're hardworking people who are willing to go anywhere um you know to care for their families and send remittances back and those are the real quantum people in the world I think more and more people going back to the homo favor point and the new geographies of growth in the north and all of the other disruptions those are the people who are going to be the kind of circulating workers of the world and I think that again we need to appreciate them and and compensate them because they're not only taking care of us through the work that they do but they're also sending that support and those their salaries back home to care for their families I absolutely love it and and I think you know that's that's what we should strive for for this more global citizenry this more open world and we see that all the time with not just Philippines and and Indians and and people from all over the world going up to build up complete civilization so United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai have these numerous worker camps where people come in and they work hard and they send their money home the reason that I kind of want to dive a little bit deeper into that model is a lot of these have become worker camps and and we've seen it from Apple and and other companies where it's not necessarily a good thing for livability and worker conditions always and really needs a lot of room for improvement but with some of these passports these identifications with some other options hopefully that is a situation that they can say no we're going to go somewhere else that offers better working conditions and better living conditions but we've seen that over the years in India and China and Dubai even where they have these worker camps that are actually abhorrent conditions to live in in some respects and to work in and that's something that we really need to change the status or the level of of of inequality in people who are building these sustainable futures but then they're not really allowed to take part of it as they're building it in some respects and I think I'd like to know kind of your stance on that and how if you address that at all in the book and what your thoughts are on that I do it's something we have to track over time you know if you think about what's happened in the countries like the UAE or Saudi Arabia there have been improvements made you know I've actually personally gone to these camps I've gone there in the middle of the night because a lot of these jobs are done at night because it's so hot during the day this construction work is often done at night and these camps are often near the work sites and so on so I've you know I've tracked this issue closely and the more foreign pressure outside pressure or internal pressure or competition in the market has you know sort of been spotlighted in these places the more they've started to improve their conditions and in some cases quite substantially improve those conditions and I think obviously that's long overdue you know but but but I think that it's a process of learning that's going on these countries know they can do a lot better but one of the key things is also the workers themselves who are saying you know what the country I come from the economy is growing you know doing pretty well I don't have to leave and then you'll have those wage pressures and other kinds of pressures in these host countries so again I think it's a it's a process that that evolves and it's evolving in the right direction overall and do you do you believe that's just a general evolution of humanity is that a cultural evolution is it a mix between the scenarios that you talk about we we see and I want to give an example so that make it a little more clear we see cities like neom a sustainable city in Saudi Arabia that's popping up the red sea project and many other almost civilization frameworks these major sustainable cities that are popping up where they're thinking what is the future of mobility are we going to build another airport are we going to build something that maybe has biometrics instead of passports and contactless futures are we going to build something that's 15 these 15 minute cities and I believe you also talk about that in the book a little bit what what is your finding on that direction or movement moving forward for the the cities or the places of the future well you know I think it's a great point and again this is where history and pandemic experience really proved to have you know a lot of learning value and utility because you know we learn that we want that we value social connectivity social contact green space fresh air all of those things and and and that's what cities are striving and competing to do now a lot of people are looking at the post pandemic landscape and saying you know this is the end of the city you know it's New York is going to lose people in Los Angeles is going to lose people and so on well it's not that the city the city never loses right for 7 000 years humans have sought to move to cities and and congregate in cities you know because we're social animals and because there's an economic benefit logic to it but there are different cities now that they're going to really thrive it's not all going to be New York or London or LA or whatever so I what I do in the book is I tour around these places like Berlin or Toronto or Almaty and Kazakhstan and all sorts of places that are really becoming melting pots of the future because again they're attracting diverse youth from all directions and I think that's the kind of the strategy in the end that cities have to pursue and it'll be a new roster of the top cities and most desirable cities and livable cities in the future that it has been in the past that's one thing I really loved about the book there's a couple great things so right in the beginning you have a nice little acknowledgement from a super author super writer and almost futurist Kim Stanley Robinson says a real eye opener move makes clear that through mobility though mobility can be for some a desperate flight for refuge it's also for younger generations growing into a multicultural one planet civilization a new expression of possibility unbelievable statement from a fabulous I don't know if you've read all his books but fabulous books and fabulous future that he presents and throughout the entire book you touch I'm it's almost like you the geography lesson because you almost touch on every place in the world I think there was not very many that you did not touch on I'm sure there was but I could not believe places that I'd never been to never heard of that you were telling us what the culture what was going on there so it's a fabulous read I thank you for the read but I want to ask is there any takeaways that you can give us some things that really you you want to say with the book that maybe we haven't touched upon during our short little podcast here that you really want to hit home for people to know going forward some not only a sustainable takeaway but something that will kind of give them a knowledge of to put on a different lens on globalization on moving on the future well thanks for the opportunity and for sure you know I mean part of the the moral of the story of the lesson is that inertia is the most powerful force really and inertia is a negative force it holds us back it prevents us from changing things but right now we live in a time of the greatest possible misalignment of the geography of where our resources are in the geography of where people are and what stands in the way is the geography of borders and politics and we need to reconcile these geographies and this is fundamentally a book about geography kind of like all my other books too and at root but it's not about one geography the geographies geography again resources people borders and infrastructure and bringing those together in a dynamic way that actually benefits us because right now these misalignments don't benefit us they don't even necessarily privilege that many people they do a lot more harm than good and nobody mark not the United Nations not the American government that the Chinese government not an alien invasion is going to do this for us no one is going to untangle the situation that we are in for us we have to acknowledge it and do something about it and that's fundamentally what this idea of reconciling geographies is all about that I get into deeply in the book you definitely do and you do such a wonderful job of that my last question for you is a question twist that I asked you last time we were on the podcast together but it's one I ask all my guests and you probably answered in your last your last statement but I want to ask it again just to see if it's a little bit different what does a world that works for everyone look like for you it's a great question well there's two answers one is the philosophical and the other is the sort of material I want to hear about yeah so philosophically I call it cosmopolitan utilitarianism right so we treat each other with as equals with respect but we and we also want the greatest good for the greatest number and that's in a nutshell what cosmopolitan utilitarianism is about that's in theory and in practice what it looks like is again if we really truly care about each other if we really have this sense of fraternity besides just talking about it if you really want to do it and you have to enable people allow people to move you have to help people adapt and I you know I take for example you know bretta thunberg you know in the book and I say look you know it's easy not easy but but it's you know easier to be leading school strikes in a rich country one that benefits from climate change of course it's not her fault right you know I mean she's you know born into a privileged country but the true test of solidarity is not did you strike in Stockholm on behalf of the environment and then talk about the plight of people that are being afflicted by climate change at the end of the day there's really for me only one test is did you accept them did you welcome them in did you say who's ever faulted is this land is not my land this land is not your land this land is our land and you're only truly in my view you know a um you know embodying that principle of cosmopolitan utilitarianism if you're willing to accept people to move them across that border and to enjoy the same privileges that we do and that's what I want to see I love it in the book you have this you created a new term it's kind of a mix uh geography and philosophy together um you I can't even say it geosophy geosophy there we go I love it thank you so much prerog for letting us all inside of your ideas it's been wonderful please greet that wonderful wife of yours and your your family and I wish you all the best uh that's all I have unless you want to ask me something or have anything else that we didn't touch upon oh thank you so much mark it's been a real pleasure to see you again and uh these are great great questions such a great conversation and I look forward to next time uh keep up the good work you too I'm sure we'll see more books from you as well you're doing a good job thank you mark let's take care bye bye take care


My fellow Americans, the holiday season is a time of gift-giving and merrymaking, a time when millions help churches, synagogues and organizations like the Salvation Army and Toys for Tots provide for the less fortunate among us, a time when huge turkey dinners are cooked, parents find themselves staying up late wrapping toys and children's eyes are filled with more and more excitement every day, a time indeed when all the world seems taken up with plans and celebrations and family. That last word, family, is one that I'd like to consider for a moment, to be sure family is very much in our minds during the holidays as children and grandchildren, parents and grandparents gather to share the happiness of the season. We know how good it feels to be with our families, how it warms and comforts us, how it gives us strength and joy, but I wonder whether we always give our families all the appreciation they deserve. Here for example that the philosopher historians Will and Ariel Durant called the family the nucleus of civilization. They understood that all those aspects of civilized life that we most deeply cherish, freedom, the rule of law, economic prosperity and opportunity, that all these depend upon the strength and integrity of the family. If you think about it, you'll see that it's in the family that we must all learn the fundamental lesson of life, right and wrong, respect for others, self-discipline, the importance of knowledge, and yes, a sense of our own self-worth. All of our lives, it's the love of our families that sustains us when times are hard. And it is perhaps above all to provide for our children that we work and save. Some have suggested that in today's world, the family has somehow become less important. Well, I can't help thinking just the opposite, that when so much around us is whispering the little lie that we should live only for the moment and ourselves, it's more important than ever for our families to affirm an older and more lasting set of values. Yet for all that in recent decades, the American family has come under virtual attack. It has lost authority to government rule writers. It has seen its central role in the education of young people narrowed and distorted, and it's been forced to turn over to big government far too many of its own resources in the form of taxation. Even so, the family today remains the fundamental unit of American life. But statistics show that it has lost ground, and I don't believe there's much doubt that the American family could be and should be much, much stronger. Just last month, I received a report on this from my working group on the family, providing recommendations for giving the family new strength. Our administration will be giving these recommendations serious consideration in the days ahead. But for now, we might all do well to keep our families in mind, to make certain that we don't take them for granted. For perhaps at no other time of the year are we able to enjoy our families so thoroughly or see so clearly their importance to ourselves and our country. Now let us remember that in the midst of all the happy bustle of the season, there is a certain quietness, a certain calm, the calm of one still night long ago, and of a family, father, mother, and newborn child. Listen for a moment to the words of the Scriptures. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you, ye shall find the babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men. Some revert Christ as just a great prophet, others worship Him as the Son of God, but to all this season in which we mark His birth is indeed a time of glad tidings. So in the midst of our celebrations, let us remember that one holy family in a manger on that still night in Bethlehem so long ago, and give renewed thanks for the blessings of our own families. And yes, let us pray for peace on earth, good will toward men. Until next week, thanks for listening, God bless, and from the Reagan family to your family, Merry Christmas. I'm getting pretty good at stretching that last, that fifth minute out.


Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.com virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in the Splunks studios in Silicon Valley. We're all the execs are here. It's basically a Splunk studio. It's everyone's here telling the stories. We also got some remote guests coming in, customers, partners and other Splunk execs. We've got Katie Bianchi, Senior Vice President of Customer Success. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank, great to see you. Thanks John, great to be here. Yeah, I love the customer success stories because at the end of the day, customers vote with their wallet and when basically like solutions, they'll use this customer examples and customer testimonials. There's one thing that I've learned covering Splunk over the past decade and done in many.coms is you guys have very happy customers and over the years have continued to have great customer success organically. Now at the high end on the enterprise, now with cloud scale, a lot's changing, a lot's growing. The world is going completely cloud. And again, data's at the center of the value as it always was more than important than ever. So what's new with the customers? What are some of the successful ones that you're seeing? What's new in your world? Yeah, thanks for asking John. I think we've been talking about how things have been changing over the past 18 months. And if I oversimplify our customer obsession means that everything we do is designed to make sure we're helping customers get the most out of their investment with Splunk every single day. So we do this across our global team and our partner ecosystem who are providing both the right adoption and technical services. And we're architecting and deploying thousands of Splunk environments to help our customers get to ongoing value. But in the world that we're living in today, I talked to so many customers who are doing amazing things with Splunk but dealing with really tough challenges, right? So through the pandemic, everyone's dealing with more complexity, more change and a velocity that we have never seen before. And on top of all this, shifting to a fully digital business model, there's whole new challenges to effectively monitoring infrastructure and applications and maintaining security posture. With this too, customers that I'm talking to are also having to figure out ways to do a lot more with less. I think we all know it's an incredibly competitive talent market out there. So our customers are relying on Splunk and customer success more and more to make it easier and faster to get to value, to investigate, to monitor, to detect and to remediate. So that pace and all of that change of what's happening means that we have to continually check ourselves to be that right strategic partners that can move at the pace of our customers because customers are counting on us to provide right services at the right time for every stage of their journey with us. You know, Katie, great point, great insight there. I want to ask you because that Splunk has always had this kind of in their DNA because when Splunk started, it was always something new and it wasn't, it was a new thing, net new thing not seen before. Now, as the world continues, you guys continue to do that. You bring something new to the market, you operationalize, you bring value to customers, then it happens again and again and again. But now more than ever, the data roles of cloud and customer applications is new for customers. So you have a diverse customer base. I know you're obsessed with customer service, but how do you, how do you, I'm a customer success, how do you deal with the fact that sometimes things are so new? And there may not be a benchmark there and you can't go with the proven form and sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. How do you solve its new to me problem that customers want, this new thing? Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of what we see today is that the power of Splunk as a data platform to bring in complex data allows customers to do many different things, whether it's infrastructure monitoring, whether it's security use cases or whether it's application performance. And all of that is new for our customers. So oftentimes, like you said, we grew up having customers use us for single use case when we're bringing this much data into the platform and they see what can be unlocked through the value of Splunk. What we have to make sure that they can do is most seamlessly move from use case and value point. So that means from a CS perspective, we have to continually make sure that we're doing what customers are asking us to do, which is having the right services that deliver the right outcomes that are as prescriptive as possible and that we're doing that across the domain of all of our entire portfolio. So we spend a lot of time making sure that our technical services are scaling to the needs of customers, but also everything that we do around success, planning and adoption and use case guidance and best practices, as well as our education and enablement are as prescriptive as possible for customers, whether they are new to Splunk or whether they are scaling Splunk across multiple use cases and multiple areas of their business. Yeah, certainly a lot of not a multi-vendor, multi-vendor activities, modern application development. Secure is a big part of it. So I have to ask you, given all that, what are the top things, top three things, for instance, that your customers are asking from you guys from a CS perspective, customer success perspective? Yeah, great question. So I think over, I think what we hear the most frequently is give me a more seamless buying experience with services that are really easy to consume and speed my time to value. Second, and I just mentioned this, is I need services that aren't just task-based to work. I need services that deliver the outcome that I need for the business problem or business opportunity that I am trying to solve for. So make sure that your portfolio lines up with our outcomes. And I think third is all about more prescriptive guidance. The world is hard, the world is complex, data is only getting more complex while the opportunity is big. Our role is all about prescription and making it as easy as possible. So I have to ask you the question that I'm observing and many people are in the industry as well is that Splunk is changing as a company. Everyone knows the vibe of Splunk is very cool, very chill, very organic, big community vibe, good customer success, everything's going great.  Your customers are getting bigger and bigger. You have existing customers, you're getting new customers. You have new offerings. There's a whole nother Splunk coming, another level. Yeah, absolutely. How do you view that from a customer's perspective? And can you share your reaction to that? Yeah, I think it's an honor to be part of a company that has such a strong culture and has such great partnership with our customers. And it really is all because of who our customers are and I think who our people are internally. But I think growing and scaling and making sure that we are able to deliver the right services at scale is a critical component of what we have to do to help customers along this journey. So the role of, I keep saying this, but the role of customer success is to make the complex easy. And we do that by making sure that we as an organization have the right data, the right prescription, the right way to serve our customers and the right coverage model, no matter where customers are on the journey or who they are and getting the most prescription to them at the right time. And that's quite frankly how we scale, but also what our customers are asking for. They're asking for more modularized content and they're asking us for more ways that they can drive best practices and use case guidance from right within the product. And those are things that we are working on to help continue to scale out what we're able to do. That's a great point. Team the complexity, make it simple and enable them to be successful. I think data does that. You guys are offering that platform, which is a great business model, by the way, if you could provide those kind of value. That's always a winning formula. Make things easy, reduce the steps it takes to do things and make it fast and simple. I have to ask you, because you mentioned earlier at the top of this interview about digital business. You know, we're here, Splunk canceled the conference, now it's virtual. We were coming in remotely here on site at the studio.  They're now in the media business, which is a data business. You know, you guys are now doing TV with a cubist here. Everyone is realizing with the pandemic that digital business now is standard. You're seeing the impact of the instrumentation you mentioned. So as the digital business transformation is accelerated here in this time, not for everybody. It's going to change how customers are behaving. What have you, what have you observed with the pandemic? Because it's kind of, the pandemic has cleared the runway a little bit for people to do this properly because you can see what's not working, right? So what's your thoughts on this whole digital business? Everyone's connected and data's at the center of it. What's your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think, you know, what we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months with this acceleration to a digital business model is that things, and the other dynamics going on are that things are only getting more complex, right? So as long customers can come to Splunk Cloud because we know it reduces like complexity in their moves because we are that data platform that allows them to search, investigate and monitor across cloud, across multi-cloud and across hybrid environments, but that's complex. Over the last year, we've seen customers get to much quicker value in Splunk Cloud, right? They're going through large complex transformation. One of the easiest things you can do is shed the amount of time and money you're spending managing, monitoring your infrastructure. So coming to Splunk Cloud helps accelerate time to value for them in that way. But let's make no mistake, that is really complex. And so part of what we are doing is ramping up our level of focus on those modernization services for customers. So customers who are choosing to come to Splunk Cloud for those benefits, we are there from planning and cutover and beyond with more prescriptive tools, more automation and how we move data, more resources and more experts to get customers to Splunk Cloud more seamlessly. And that for us from a modernization perspective is one thing that we are hearing clearly customers asking for specific in the space so they can take more advantage and move more quickly. You know, one of the trends that we're reporting on, and I'll get to the headline on SiliconANGLE in a minute or what's reporting on this event is there's more surface area, there's more data, there's more tools and tools are important for helping people automate. But at the same time, if you have more tools and you have more blind spots or silos. So when you get into this world of architecture, customers are struggling that we talk to around trying to find the ideal equation of okay balancing architecture, platform and tools, that's equilibrium if you will by getting access to the data. What's your reaction to that? Because this becomes one of those decisions where I think Splunk shines where you can kind of have the best of a platform. At the same time, use tooling where relevant to accelerate whether it's automation or other jobs versus buying tools or everything. Yeah, and so I think part of the thing that we continue to see is with the proliferation of data and data sources and a different degree of complexity in tooling the decisions around what's important and what's not important become much more complex for customers and much more difficult for customers to make. So we're changing a lot on the product and pricing side to sort of facilitate that piece. But I think when you're talking about how do I get the most value immediately, what we do across our go-to-market organization is make sure that we're partnering with customers to say, what are the outcomes that you want and need as a priority from an infrastructure monitoring for an application performance or security perspective? And then how do we make sure that we're prioritizing your maturity journey very prescriptively to say, here are the use cases that are most material, here are the data sources that are most material and here's a success plan that helps you get deployed to your priorities. So you can start the journey with us and build on that as we go. So again, it's really about how do we make the complex really easy through higher degrees of prescription but really making sure that we're doing our job and tying the prescription to what our customers need most when they need it. That's a great segue on my next question. In fact, my final question is, because the headline on siliconangle.com that we're reporting for this event is, I'll read it to you. Splunk doubles downs on multi-cloud data access, observability and security at its annual summit. Okay, so balancing the Sheninu toy in the North Star direction vision to practical prescriptive customer journeys is always a balance because you want to talk to customers about the future multi-cloud obviously, observability super important and honestly it's security got to be built in. Okay, we all know that. Back to the mainstream customer. You're in the customer success. So you want to show them the North Star, show them the headroom, whatever metaphor you want to use but at the same time, they're dealing with problems and things that they're trying to solve right now. What's your thoughts on customer success, knowing that there's a lot of cool new things coming? Yeah, I think our job, like I said, I'll start and I'm the same sort of start and end the same way. Our job at the end of the day is to help customers get the most out of their current investment with Splunk. And that is all about working on what that maturity journey looks like, prioritizing outcomes that our customers care about and starting that journey. So there's foundational work that needs to be done aligned to priorities. That's where we start. And then if we're doing what we need to be doing, creating those prescriptive plans and those success plans, then all of how we deliver to that value is prioritized through what customers need the most when they need it. And that is our role. And then we believe that by doing that and moving as quickly as we can with customers to get to that value, then we're enabling them to continue on that journey for all the new stuff that's out there that they can explore and get more value from. Yeah, it's always good to have that North Star and that Chinese new toy, new technology. So I have to ask you a final, final question since I have you here. What have you learned during the pandemic that you could share with other practitioners that are watching or maybe watching this as they look at the best practice? Because we've seen a lot of evidence where some people have fallen to the side or failed, weren't prepared. People who were in the cloud experimenting got that tailwind and survived and thrived. Some were refactoring, new business were emerging. So you kind of see a pattern. Is there anything that you've noticed on your end that you could share with, how to lean into something new so you don't be left out in the cold if the wave comes or new trend comes that they need to take advantage of, like data at the edge or cloud scale. What are some of the things you've observed and learned? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think for me, my personal learning through the pandemic has been like we always need to be looking around corners and planning specifically for our customers and thinking for them in terms of what problems that they will have. And we have to anticipate that so that we can pivot and create the right services that help them leverage to do what they need. So very early on, even very early on in the pandemic, our professional services team flipped within a two week period to doing fully remote and virtual deployments because we knew we couldn't stop time to value. Given the shift to remote work, our customers were relying on us to deploy so that they could monitor infrastructure and monitor work from home usage. And I think along with that, as we started to see through the back half digital transformations really pick up and customers moved to cloud, we've been working across the last really 12 to 15 months to really start to plan around what does it take to create the right services and the right capability, not just within Splunk, but within our partner ecosystem to effectively move customers to Splunk cloud and help them navigate a hybrid multi-cloud world with much more speed. And so for me, those are the two things that we really leaned into hard because we were always looking around corners and saying what's next for our customers based on what we're seeing happen in the external environment. Great insight, Katie. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. That's awesome. And I think, you know, customers are seeing success formulas and the new ones are emerging and you guys are going to the next level. It's always fun to talk about the future and today at the same time. So great to have you on. And certainly at the end of the day, the customers are the ones who are deploying and creating the innovation with software and data. So thanks for sharing. Yeah, thanks, John. Really, really happy to spend the time. There's nothing I like to do more than talk about our customers and to all of our customers. Huge thank you to you for your partnership and all you're doing to continue to power the world with data. It's always good to have a lot of customers to tell the story for you, but I appreciate you coming on. Congratulations on your success. It's theCUBE. We are here live in the studio of Splunk Studios for their virtual event with the remote interview. We're talking all the people in the industry we can. We're bringing them in. We're doing the interviews here in person as well. It's a hybrid event. I'm John Furrier theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Darkness slowly turned into light once more, blinding red, fiery light. At first it was amazing, the sun rising to greet his vision, warming his bones, just as everything else since the accident, though, it was a false warmth, a false feeling of hope. Sure, the first couple times he managed to turn his head to view the earth, he was filled with the hope that he could be brought back, that somehow his comrades would find him and bring him home. Now he's glad they didn't, because it would have meant their end. It somehow tuned into the radio, too. Over the years he heard a constant stream of broadcasts from his home, oh what the world had become. It was probably just to lure him in though, get him to fall, but he wouldn't. Not now, not ever. He wasn't sure exactly how it had happened or exactly what it was. One day he was on his shuttle, a secret flight into space, and next, well, he was where he is now, and this presence was around him. At first he thought it was a figment of his imagination, a way to keep himself sane in the cold void of space, but as he began to drift towards the earth he began to realize he wasn't drifting, he was being pulled, and the closer he got the stronger the presence was, and it felt wrong. So he stopped it. He's not sure how he did that either, but he stopped himself, stopped his unnatural inertia, caught himself in the earth's orbit. No, the presence had raged, but what he didn't expect was for it to defend itself so well. It wrapped itself around him and his suit. Not something solid, just a presence, and it was that presence that had made him unstoppable. Anything he touched broke before his velocity and density. Even those who were sent out to collect him. They could do nothing but fail or die, but you know what, I stopped it. I saved my comrades, I saved us, or rather I've, guess I've just halted what was inevitable, but I'm not going to let go, even though I'm trapped in this body, in this suit. I won't let go. Sometimes I even gain control, I just smash my visor. I try to expose it to the vacuum of space when the presence is so ingrained in me that it would kill us both, but it's too smart for that. Too old, and too smart, so I will continue to hold.


Hello, I'm here to talk to you about a very interesting dynamic course. We're going to be looking at ethics, but in a global and sustainability context. And we all are very familiar with the terms globalization and sustainability, but they usually are cross-purposes because globalization has been mostly conducted with an economic view in mind, and that has created a lot of issues in the social and environmental spheres. So in this course we're going to be looking at those issues, at those problems, those dilemmas that arise, and we're going to understand how ethics can help us make the proper decisions on how to resolve them. So we're going to be looking at what ethics is, the philosophy behind it. We're going to be looking at those issues and we're going to be mostly debating on what can be done, how can we use rational ethical thinking to resolve them. So I encourage you all to come and hopefully see you there.