Fareed Zakaria at the Folly Theater

Tonight we got the opportunity to listen to Fareed Zakaria present at the Folly Theater.

Zakaria is a writer for Newsweek, author, and talkshow host on CNN.

Zakaria was there on a sorta-book tour for his book the Post-American World. The book, and the presentation, were a nice historical rundown of how -- starting with several events in 1979 -- the entire world started to globalize. And that, the United States, has had an interesting roll in helping many other countries develop -- but as a country, has to learn how to live in a world where we are just one of many economic superpowers.

His opinion was that the best way to solve our current economic situation is to look at how we got here in the first place.

Zakaria took an educated (and surprisingly humorous) look at globalization, our struggling economy, US over-consumption, immigration, health care, investing, and even the current war on the drug cartel in Mexico and how it affects us.

It was a great presentation -- and Kansas City was really lucky to have him come to town. The presentation was brought in by Park University (and XEROX!). Kudos to Park University for bringing such a great, nationally recognized speaker. The event was sold out (even though I don't feel like it was terribly well promoted).  Sadly, I don't think that any of the local media outlets covered his speech - we're not very good at covering the good events in this city.

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Footnote: If you are a corporate executive, that pays to be the sponsor of a speaking event, do the guest the common courtesy and be sure to learn how to pronouce the speaker's name. That was bad. Not to mention the guy's title was the Sr. VP of Commincations and Business Process Outsourcing.  Ouch.

Comments

[MichelleD]

This event was amazing! Nice to see our local media missing the boat yet AGAIN.

[Eric]

DAMN DAMN DAMN I wish I had known about this :(

[Brent]

I know - -I really think that this event, if promoted well, could have been moved to a much larger venue. I know several people who tried to get tickets but it was sold out. We found out about it on Facebook of all places. It really was a great event and I wish more of our politicians would listen to his lines of thinking vs all of the partisan crap we have going on right.

[Toni Cardarella]

Hi Brent,

Glad you came last night to the event.

Wish we could have met...

Send me an email so we connect.