Truth be told, I decided to launch the podcast for myself. I was having numerous interesting conversations with experts, colleagues, and friends and recording the conversations seemed a better way to internalize their insights than writing notes. (And who wants to converse with someone writing notes anyway?)

In August – which feels like an eon ago – I mentioned off-hand on the podcast that I was headed to Portugal to celebrate the wedding of my college roommate (John Minnich – himself a recent podcast guest and the most thoughtful U.S. expert on China I know). Much to my surprise, two podcast listeners wrote to me offering their hospitality in Lisbon.

Initially I was skeptical. My wife and I have a beautiful 1-year old baby and I am utterly consumed with love and admiration for her – but parenting is also hard, and this was going to be our first “just-us” vacation since Annie Love arrived. Did I really want to spend a precious evening in Portugal with some randos I’d never met before? Besides, I am an adept and frequent traveler – surely, I could swatch told Anthony Bourdain episodes on Portugal and otherwise rely on my savviness to find local flavor in a foreign land?

In the end, we decided to take up the listeners on their offers – and I am so glad we did. For the sake of their privacy, I will keep their identities anonymous, but I met the first listener and his sister for a promised architectural walking tour of the city. I did not tell the first listener that I had invited the second listener on the tour as well.

We had been in Lisbon for days already, but now we walked the streets through the eyes of locals, who told us about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and how it impacts the city to this day; how Lisbon might be the city most like New Orleans, which I call home these days, in the world due to its complicated relationship with water; the legacy of the grim Salazar years and Portugal’s colonial wars; the depressing, drug-addicted 90s, when city apartments could be had for pennies on the euro; the building boom of the 2010s (and perhaps the seeds sown for future crisis); the Portuguese penchant for pessimism.

My two listeners also happened to be on opposing ends of the political spectrum – and yet their conversation was decorous – I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen people with different views discuss them so respectfully and eloquently.

We ended the evening in a traditional Portuguese restaurant, where the conversation turned to what an old mentor of mine, Werner Dannhauser (z”l), used to joke all conversations ultimately boil down: god and love. I told them a bit about my past, and unveiled some of the political opinions I cannot discuss on the podcast or in writing because when inserted there, they drown out my analysis.

The spirit of Anthony Bourdain was with me the whole trip – in both Porto and Lisbon, I relied on his previous travels and experiences to guide our way. His picture seemed ubiquitous in both cities, no doubt because others like me were making similar pilgrimages to dampen his loss.

And yet here I was, our last night in Lisbon, with my wife, two friends from home also in town for the wedding, and two Portuguese podcast listeners, eating bitoque and discussing the meaning of life. It was as if, for a night, I got to walk in Anthony Bourdain’s shoes. We stepped out into the rain – I had even brought my fedora, and the rain trickle down the brim and I felt cool and warm and connected and hopeful about the human condition for a change.

It occurs to me I know exactly who my listener is – I have met him, sipped ginjinha with her, watched him roll a cigarette, seen a city through her eyes. It is too much to expect I’ll ever have an evening like that again – I should be thankful I had just the one, but as it turns out –

I’m hungry for more.

The post Hungry For More | Traveling Lisbon appeared first on Jacob Shapiro.

Now, by optimism, I don’t mean a willful naivete to pretend like everything is going great in the world when, clearly, there are serious problems we face as a species, let alone as companies, nations, and individuals.

I simply mean that I felt there was ample opportunity even amid disruption (whether of the political, economic, cultural, or everyday variety)—and that, on balance, the world still offers more of the former than the latter.

You can’t glean that sentiment from the headlines in any newspaper, anywhere in the world. Indeed, one of the questions I get most often when giving presentations or briefings to clients is, “How do you stay sane?”—the implication being that spending one’s time thinking about global politics must lend itself more to a penchant for self-destruction than a sterling bill of mental health.

A few months ago, two scholars (Adam Mastroianni at Columbia Business School and Daniel T. Gilbert at Harvard) published a paper in Nature entitled, “The illusion of moral decline.” Like me, these scholars had an anecdotal sense that everyone felt the world was going to hell in a handbasket. They decided to hack into that gut feeling and produced some incredible insights.

Indeed, what they found validated this optimist’s sense of the world. According to their survey data, people all over the world—not just in the United States—believe that morality has declined, and with it the social fabric that links modern human societies. And yet, when asked specifically about the morality of their contemporaries (i.e., their friends, families, and personal networks), survey respondents were far more sanguine.

Mastroianni and Gilbert explain this conundrum with reference to two psychological phenomena: “biased exposure effect” and “biased memory effect.”

Biased exposure effect is shorthand for the human tendency “to seek and attend to negative information about others.” (Conrad called this the “fascination of the abomination,” which has a better ring to it than “biased exposure effect.”)

Biased memory effect is when we look back at events in the past and misremember them for being better than they were. (This kind of “golden age” thinking got its best treatment in Midnight in Paris, the only Woody Allen movie I have ever enjoyed.)

In other words: Humans pursue negative information and consume it like junk food, but sitting on their couches decades in the future, they look back on the past and remember it as the time when things were good: “The problem is these millennials and Gen Z’ers today and how society is falling apart due to the collapse of social norms and blah blah blah.”

I would argue that this kind of thinking has infected the discipline of geopolitics like a disease. Most analysts in my field focus on negative risks. When will China invade Taiwan and what will happen? What will it mean if the dollar loses its status as a reserve currency? Is Mexican President AMLO going to usurp the constitution and become a dictator?

Case in point: Peter Zeihan—a former colleague at Stratfor and a far better-known analyst than I—recently published a best-seller entitled, “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.”

Not only is the world not ending, but thinking it is so inevitably moving toward such a conclusion strips us of the agency that has proven every Malthusian-style catastrophist wrong in the long run.

To be clear—I pay close attention to risks too, and they abound, as the Russia-Ukraine war clearly demonstrated to anyone that still doubted the relevance of geopolitics in the 21st century. But I also pay close attention to the opportunities that disruption creates.

The mental map I use to understand the world today has nothing to do with the Cold War or either of the World Wars, everyone’s favorite metaphor for the end of the world as we know it. Instead, I look back to the world of the 1890s—a time of rising and falling great powers, of tremendous technological innovation, of revolutionary change in how we store and use energy, and of global cultural effervescence—and see similarities with the new era beginning in global geopolitics.

In practical terms, this means that now is not a time to be crouched in a fetal position yearning for “the good ole days.” Now is the time to be “making moves” as we millennials like to say. There will be time for doom and gloom later. There are plenty of disturbing trends on the horizon, the most serious of which are U.S.-China relations, nuclear proliferation, and climate change. They aren’t going anywhere, and future generations will face difficult challenges unraveling these threads.

But here, today—these are the good times. I think future generations will look back and long for this decade, in the same way that I long for the 90s and my parents longed for the 60s. This optimism is harder to sell than fascination with the abomination, but it has the virtue of being a more accurate portrayal of what is happening in the world.

And that, dear friends, is all I really care about. Being accurate. And that is what geopolitics is all about—cutting through the noise and the ideologies and the stale narratives and grasping, however tenuously, a sense of the Truth, and using that understanding to prepare for what the future holds, both good and bad.

And so here I am, almost 15 years after initially setting out on this geopolitical journey, spreading the gospel of geopolitics to audiences, corporate clients, and the investors I work directly with as a partner at Cognitive Investments.

If you think your audience might find my perspective valuable, don’t hesitate to reach out. You now know where to find me.

— Jacob

The post Feelin’ pretty psyched appeared first on Jacob Shapiro.