Looking Outside Exploration: Zak Dychtwald, Founder Young China Group

In the latest episode of Looking Outside, we explore Exploration itself, and what it means to be truly curious about people, places and the future, with Zak Dychtwald, Founder of Young China Group and author of Young China.

Zak shares how he approaches exploration: from visiting countries that are ‘misunderstood’, to immersing himself in stories about the far off possible future, to building an ‘intimacy’ with foreign cultures, places and people that you wouldn’t get from descriptions by outsiders.

Zak and Jo also discuss their love of science fiction. It was Zak’s love of sci-fi that drove him to study, live and start a company in China, a place he found more unique and exciting than any other part of the world, more indicative of the future, and greatly misunderstood by foreigners.

Jo and Zak also speak to the responsibility of science fiction to craft more positive futures, vs the dystopian ones we’re used to fearing, because those visions are, as Zak says, ‘seeds into the consciousness of the world’; they help others imagine what could be and ultimately influence the futures that are created.

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To look outside, Zak likes to read (a lot). When Zak is about to travel, he likes to read stories, narrative non-fiction or modern fiction, written by authors from those places he’s about to visit. Zak believes in the power of stories to impact people.

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On the show we mentioned:

• AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee & Chen Qiufan
• Ray Bradbury
• Abundance by Peter Diamandis (co-founder of Singularity University)
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Lu
• Waste Tide by Chen Quifan
• Young China by Zak himself
• Great Sci-Fi including Minority Report, Solaris, Star Trek, Interstellar.

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Zak Dychtwald is the author of critically acclaimed Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World and founder of market insights firm, Young China Group.

Zak’s work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and many other platforms. A fluent mandarin speaker with over a decade on the ground in