What does this crisis lead, trickle down to the daily lives of the people?

I think that's a very important question because what we certainly don't want to do is to be only looking at the sort of government responses and the elite responses.

Right.

And as I said, it's very difficult to find a segment of the population that was not affected by the situation.

So you look at students, for example, you had school closures that happened.

And I think we are not there where we have empirical data to support the observations that we're making.

But I think if you talk to policymakers who are working in the education space, they are very worried about what these geoeconomic and geopolitical shocks do.

So can you explore more on that topic about the waterways in Asia? And how is that awakening moment for those of us in Southeast Asian nations as well?

Why don't I, I start by asking you for the elevator pitch, right? What, what, what was the pitch to the publisher about this book, you know, Mandalas of Multialignment versus the old out-of-date Elusive Balances?

No, thanks a lot, Greg and Alina, for having me for the podcast, and I, I benefited a lot from both of your works on these subjects, as well as specific issues on the maritime domain and the digital domain.

And I think, you know, one of the things that I thought about a lot before writing the book was I was actually at the ASEAN Future Forum recently in, in Vietnam, uh, in Hanoi, uh, where they hosted it.

And, you know, one of the themes that appeared there was this theme of kind of shaping our future together, right? And I think this notion of shaping our future agency is something that we've seen come across a lot of Southeast Asian countries and a lot of regional conferences that all of us have kind of participated in in the last few years, right? The notion of rather than US-China competition, these countries have agency, and we need to recognize the fact that they need to exercise it.

And I was talking actually to, um, Singapore's former permanent secretary of their foreign ministry, Bilahari Kausikan, and one of the conversations that we had, he's written extensively about this.

And one of the things that he brought up was that, yes, agency is extremely important.

We need to recognize it.

Looking forward, what do you think the trend will be given this multi-alignment that we've seen in the past? I mean, is this going to be a continuing thread throughout in all sectors and domains? Is it going to be differentiated based on whether it's in the technological space or whether it's in the maritime space? What are the trends that you've picked up in writing this book?