Rethink global destiny with futurist, traveler and prolific author Parag Khanna.

Parag Khanna is, first and foremost, a traveler – all seven books he has published so far are inspired and informed by intense traveling.

Born in India, Khanna is a product of Western education (Georgetown University, followed by the London School of Economics), who worked as a geopolitical advisor for the U.S. Special Operations Forces during their deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was after he published his first book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008), an exploration of ways for the U.S. to maintain its global leadership by forming closer alliances with “second world” countries. Back then he gave the example of Ukraine – a country with a young, educated, Western-oriented population.

But it is his newest book that Khanna will be most likely talking about when he visits the Sunset Center on April 27 – MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us (2021). The concept behind it is simple and scary: Those who move, win. Also, those who move are unstoppable.

“We always had mass migrations,” Khanna said in an interview with the Financial Times, reminding people about 60 million Europeans who moved to North America in the last 250 years. “The map of humanity is not settled.”

Khanna claims xenophobia might actually be the death of wealthy, aging countries (like Japan, and to a lesser degree the U.S.) – countries that will not open to the young populations they desperately need as a workforce. Here, Khanna gives the counterexample of Germany, a country that learned to offer citizenship to working aliens after a few years, concentrating on language training and cultural assimilation.

And herein lies Khanna’s most optimistic, bewildering message: while climate change forces global relocations, we should not fear overpopulation. Quite the opposite – an influx of young people, internationalized via social media culture, can make or break a countries’ future.

Khanna is definitely a big thinker, though there’s been some disagreement over the content of those thoughts. In 2008 Wired Magazine named him to their “Smart List”; in 2011 The New Republic put him on a list, instead, of “Most Over-Rated Thinkers.”

THE FUTURIST EDITION, 8pm Wednesday, April 27. Sunset Center, 9th Ave. and San Carlos, Carmel. $45-$225. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org