2021 may go down in history as the year of the Great Awakening. Relentless disease, floods, fires, droughts, food insecurity, dramatic social and political unrest signal that deep structural changes in how our world works are underway. But amid the seemingly pervasive doom and gloom, the good news is that there are intensifying efforts to put people, countries and, indeed, humanity on a better path.

One of the most promising antidotes to what ails us is the enormous surge of scientific discovery and technological innovation that is also a hallmark of our age. Can we really innovate our way out of the mess? Are we smart enough to translate fantastic discoveries into tangible benefits for people? And, can we do so faster than pathogens mutate or accumulated emissions change weather or draughts destroy arable crop land?

Of course, no one knows for sure, but this week’s guest on the New Thinking for a New World podcast is working hard on answers, one challenge at a time. Livio Valenti sits exactly at the intersection of cutting-edge science and the demand for innovative solutions in healthcare, biotech, and material sciences. Listen as he discusses why he thinks we can do this.

The world is a mess: climate change in real time, the lingering and sometimes resurgent pandemic, widespread social and political unrest, high pitch geopolitical tensions. In the midst of this firestorm, people are suffering. Climate migrants need to escape fires, hurricanes and floods. Economic migrants want better lives. Families flee wars and oppression.

Where do they go and who will take them? What rights do migrants seeking safety have? Who worries about them in a world that is focused on coping with Covid?

Lawyers Becca Heller and Kristine Rembach are in the business of finding answers, one refugee or migrant at a time. Listen as they discuss the state of global migration today.

For all practical purposes, the 20th century ended when the Berlin Wall fell, followed by, rather quickly and relatively quietly, the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you've come of age since then, the struggles of The Cold War, including the very real possibility of nuclear Armageddon, are the stuff of history books, not memory. That is particularly true for Germany, which was transformed by reunification, and for German millennials who are starting to come to power in politics and in broader society. Inevitably, they look at the world differently than their predecessors, with different assumptions, different expectations.

How will this change the country? What does it mean for Europe and more broadly, for Germany and Europe's role in the world? The guest in this episode of the New Thinking for a New World podcast is both German and a millennial, and she has thought about these questions. Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who recently published an article titled, “A Millennial Considers the New German Problem After 30 years of Peace.”

In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote, "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." In turn, that implies that to control someone’s thoughts would create the possibility of controlling their actions, for good or for evil. Until recently, such control was the stuff of science fiction. But, that is changing.

Neuroscientists today know more about how the brain works than ever before; unlocking the brain's potential could transform our world. Achieving what from today's perspective would be superhuman cognition, could open whole new worlds of medicine, science, technology, and even humanity. But it could also be abused, with nightmarish consequences.

Dr. Rafael Yuste works on the forefront of neuroscience, based at Columbia University in New York. His pioneering work has led him to recognize the potential for abuse of rapidly advancing knowledge about how the brain works; as a consequence, he has become a champion for protecting individual neuro-identity and neurorights. In that initiative, he is joined by Jared Genser, a leading international human rights lawyer. Rafael and Jared, both past winners of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize, recently shared ideas in the New Thinking for a New World podcast.

What does China—or, more particularly China’s leadership and the Chinese Communist Party— want from the rest of the world? Domination or collaboration? Allies or subjects? War or peace?

Jonathan Ward, an American who is rapidly becoming one of that country's leading China experts, thinks they want victory. Dr. Ward, who has lived and worked in China and has a deep affinity for the Chinese people, recently published a new provocative book, China's Vision of Victory. Listen as he shares his perspective on the issue that could literally change the course of history.

We live in a time of profound change. For anyone who doubted how fundamentally our world is changing, the global pandemic was a catastrophic proof point. Even as we in the West become more conscious of inequalities that have been part of our societal fabric for a long time, we're becoming less sure of our identities. Even as technology breaks down borders and barriers, many of us are retreating to our tribes, becoming ever more local and isolated rather than global and engaged.

If art is a window on the soul of a nation, what does ours look like? Who do we, defined loosely as the West, think we are in the sense of identity? What's our mood?

Of course, these are questions without answers or, at least, unique answers. In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, Shirin Neshat, an acclaimed Iranian visual artist who has lived and worked in the United States for decades and Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Division at HarperCollins, discuss our evolving zeitgeist.

By any measure, Latin American democracy is in trouble. From Mexico to Argentina—and most of the countries in between—there has been an accelerating erosion of both the forms and realities of representative democracy. Is the witches’ brew of the pandemic, underperforming economies, weak rule of law, and structural inequalities more than democracy can bear? Will things get worse before they get better?

Eduardo Amadeo, Argentine economist and politician; Sergio Guzman, Colombian political risk analyst and commentator; Patricio Navia, Chilean political scientist and academic have some answers. They think (and certainly hope) that democracy will survive in their countries and in their region.

Even as the pandemic, like some giant glacier, slowly and unevenly recedes, the world seems frozen in place as it deals with the mess left behind. Increased poverty and malnutrition; greater inequality; damaged and depleted health care systems; rising social and political tensions. But is this a crisis or opportunity? Or, rather, are we smart enough and driven enough to turn what threatens to be a period of enormous strife—of the kind that often follows pandemics—into a new era of positive, life affirming change?

This week’s guests on the New Thinking for a New World podcast are dedicated to the latter proposition. They both are trying to make the world the kind of place it could and should be. Vidhya Ramalingam is a recognized expert on the use of technology to disrupt violent extremism online. Sarah Durieux focuses on mobilizing citizens online, to help them achieve policies they care about. They both also recently completed the Obama Foundation’s inaugural Emerging Leaders in Europe Program

A few weeks ago, Belarus shocked the world when it forced a commercial flight from Athens to Vilnius to land and seized two passengers, one a dissident journalist. But that outrage was only the most recent affront to international law and accepted state behavior by Belarusian autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, and more importantly, his patron, Russia's Vladimir Putin. For years, Putin has pressed the countries along Russia’s border: cyber attacks on Estonia and Ukraine, war with Georgia and then Ukraine, the seizure of Crimea, constant air and naval border violations, as well as aggressive disinformation campaigns—all designed to sow chaos.

Lithuania is a frontline state in the growing confrontation—some think it is already war—between East and West. Dalia Bankauskaitė, a defense and security expert at Vilnius University, and Marius Laurinavičius, a journalist and analyst at the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis are both in that camp. Moreover, in this episode of the New Thinking for a New World podcast, they insist that Russia’s hostility, partly exercised through its puppet Belarus, is aimed not just at Lithuania, but at Europe and the United States.

Is this what war in the 21st century feels like? What do Putin and Lukashenko want? What should we do? What do YOU think?

2020 will be remembered as the Pandemic Year, when a deadly pathogen somehow moved from bat to human—and the rest is history still being written. Six out of 10 infectious diseases are zoonotic: everything from COVID and the other coronaviruses to rabies, West Nile, even the plague. In a Croesus-like effort to break the cycle, Denmark recently killed 17 million farmed mink to try to prevent further human infection—but that seems immoral as well as stupid.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka has a better idea. Dr Gladys, as she is known, believes that zoonotic disease is controllable by simultaneously working to improve the health of humans and animals, at the points where they meet. Her work, primarily with the mountain gorillas of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, has contributed not only to resurgence in the gorilla population, but also to an improvement in the health and welfare of the human communities that live around the Park.

She explains her approach in this episode of New Thinking for a New World.