← Jimmy's Jobs of the Future
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- [00:01]
A
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B
Welcome to today's episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I'm joined by Dex Hunter Torick, who is one of the great thinkers about the future of technology and where this all might be leading. He's worked with some of the biggest names out there. Mark Zuckerberg, Dennis Hasabis, Elon Musk. We talked about his journey from London to Silicon Valley over the course of the next hour. We also talked about his new projects and what he's decided to do and spend the main part of his career on. It's a fascinating episode. I really hope you enjoy this interview with Dex. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests. Dex, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, great to be here.
- [01:14]
B
Can you give us a potted history of your cv, please, to start with? Because you have had some of the most interesting jobs on the planet.
- [01:20]
A
Yeah, some jobs of the future. Well, I started at the UN and I was a sort of lowly staff member working on communications. And then because I was working in the Secretary General's office, I ended up getting quite an interesting hybrid role where I was touching a lot of comms and policy and working on a lot of different crises quite often. And then end of 2010, I got approached by Google to interview for a role working with Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO at the time. And Google was a much younger company at the time. It was sort of 25,000 employees or so. Now it's about 200,000. And Eric was looking for a speechwriter. And Google had never had an executive speechwriter before. The company was starting to really think much more professionally about how do we shape our voice, how do we engage with policymakers and stakeholders in a lot of different parts of the world. And Eric was somebody who, you know, I've always believed to the present day is one of the most prescient and thoughtful tech leaders in thinking about the intersection of technology and geopolitics and societal issues. And so Eric really wanted somebody who understood both the political realm and international affairs, as well as had a passion for technology. And I was a big science fiction geek and nerd, you know, so, you know, I always loved tech, you know, grew up watching Star Trek. So I went and interviewed with Google and I got the job and I moved to Silicon Valley at the start of 2011, and I then went and spent 15 years in, in mostly big tech. So it was Google. Then I went to work for Zuckerberg, joined Facebook before the ipo, back when it was still Facebook, you know, very. Again, much smaller, younger company. And, you know, fascinating chapter in Silicon Valley, right? You know, when we were going through the smartphone revolution, you know, the mobile revolution. And then about 10 years ago, I was getting ready to get out of tech. Honestly, there are a whole bunch of things happening in the world which just, like, really, you know, deeply concerned and, you know, really frustrated me, including the global refugee crisis. My father was a refugee, you know, and he passed away in 2015. And I thought about leaving the industry at that point. I did one more tech thing before I left California, which was I went and worked for Elon Musk. And obviously, it seems incredible to believe now, but, like, that was a chapter in time when Elon was this deeply hopeful character for a lot of people. And I went to run communications at Space X and I left right after the US election. So I became one of the first senior, I think I might have been the first senior Silicon Valley person to resign in the Trump era. I went and resigned basically the morning after the US election in 2016. And I went off and did a bunch of pro bono work for a lot of different causes, mostly connected to refugee issues and immigrant communities who were all under attack during that chapter. And this coincided with becoming much more political, much more socially focused. And I moved back to the UK in 2018 as part of that, that, you know, and was doing a whole bunch of advisory for different folks, including Philip Hammond, who was the Chancellor at the time. So my first, you know, real, real focus on thinking about jobs in the UK and the future of the economy here. And I've been based in the UK ever since. I carried on doing tech roles. You know, I launched Meta's oversight board, you know, during the pandemic. And then the last several years, I was at Google DeepMind, running communications and marketing on that central AI story in the generative AI boom. But I finished at Google last day in September last year, and now I've got a whole new chapter which is really all about how the heck do we manage all of this stuff as society.
- [04:53]
B
Exactly. So bring us up to speed. What is the sort of new venture that you're launching today.
- [04:59]
A
I seriously believe that most decision makers from both public and private sector and just ordinary folks are not prepared at all for the future. The consequences of AI and what happens when AI and other emerging technologies intersect with our societies which are already groaning at the seams with a whole bunch of major problems. They will be devastating for most people. On the current path we are on, we are not prepared for a future in which advanced AI is going to have vast economic implications and transformation of jobs and will probably displace a lot of jobs. Our international order is imploding in real time. We've literally just seen the extraordinary events of the first few weeks of this year unfolding from Venezuela to Greenland. And climate change is heading for some of the absolute worst case scenarios under the IPCC data. Our international framework for managing climate change is clearly failing. And all of those things show up together and they all will be shaped by the arrival of these technologies. And on the path we're on, where, you know, most societies, you know, have not been able to manage, you know, even the previous generation of tech, well, I absolutely do not think we're on track to give a good future to people. And so what I'm launching is a new effort which is focused on how do we get the really bold new thinking on how to handle all of these pieces well, that intersecting, cross cutting, you know, framework of ideas and do it so that we get to a good future. Because I, I am an optimist about technology. No one's ever accused me of being anti tech in my life. And the choice is not between the path we're currently on, which leads to decline, I think, and a lot of suffering for a lot of people. It's not a choice between that and just hanging on to what we have now. There is a vastly better future if we think creatively about how to use all of these technologies and to manage them well. It will require us to transform our systems, our institutions, our leadership is in order to get to a future where the technology really can be liberating for people. But currently that's not a mainstream conversation at all. It's something where we're pretending that what is happening now is mostly just incremental or it's a rerun of the past. Anytime I hear a speech from some leader where they're saying it's like the Industrial Revolution, I want to curl up and die. Because this is not the Industrial revolution, that was 200 years ago and it involves steam. This is something totally Different?
- [07:27]
B
How has, why is it different? Talk us through that.
- [07:32]
A
You are inventing the most powerful technology in history. Now it's something that's general purpose. It can be applied to almost any domain. And what's happening now is the world's top AI labs, the so called Frontier Labs, you know, the most well resourced companies in history are all racing to develop AGI, artificial general intelligence, which literally is all about building a technology that is at least comparable cognitively to the average human. So this is stuff that can be applied to white collar jobs, any sort of domain of knowledge work. It's not designed to be just a helpful, you know, way of augmenting our existing work. It is literally designed to be as good as the average worker at any white collar task. And that is going to have profoundly transformative implications for every domain of society. And it's something where honestly, we will be able to automate a huge swathe of jobs. Now that opens up a bunch of questions which are deeply political, almost philosophical, existential. What are people for? What do we want people to be for? What kind of world do we want to live in? And these are much bigger questions which, if you want to have a real conversation about that, where the majority of people have a voice in those arguments, where it's not just left up to a tiny sliver of elites or a set of tech leaders, mostly living in California or living in China, then we need to urgently open up that conversation now, while there's still time to adapt to all of that. Because AGI, by the way, is going to arrive imminently. The leaders of all of those frontier labs all believe that AGI will arrive in the next decade. And many of them believe it will be closer to five years. You can argue about how quickly it will scale and how quickly it will ripple out across the economy and around the world, but it's coming so fast now. And 10 years, 20 years, that's not long at all if you want to reinvent societies and the whole world. Because the other unfortunate truth is most of the solutions we'll need. If you want to build a humane economy and thriving, you know, robust societies and an international order that isn't, you know, so frail, these are things that we do not have the ability to just create on our own. You cannot fiddle with a bunch of levers inside, you know, a single government and hope that you'll end up with a comprehensive solution. This will be stuff that can only be shaped by working with a lot of countries.
- [09:55]
B
And what are you calling the new venture?
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A
It's called the center for Tomorrow.
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B
Exactly. What do you think tomorrow looks like
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A
tomorrow's economy looks like on the path we're on? I think tomorrow's economy looks like a very small sliver of the population who have disproportionate rewards from new technologies. They're the folks who jumped in with both feet into the future. They were able to adapt to it faster, they were able to innovate. They will probably end up enjoying incredible qualities of life and rewards. A much larger swathe of people will probably end up in jobs that frankly are not fulfilling, where you suffer from the awful euphemism of role compression where AI eats a lot of the meaningful opportunities for growth and development. You might have a job, you might have to do multiple jobs to pay the bills. You might end up with some sort of subsistence level universal income in a lot of societies in order to keep people afloat. But it certainly won't be the good life. It won't be one where we can think our kids will have a better quality of life than we do, which has always been a motivating dream for generations of parents. And that is something that's just inexcusable. I also think because AGI and advanced AI, all of these technologies will probably be often invented in the United States and in China, you'll end up in a very interesting and challenging scenario where to access some of those technologies to enjoy the full, untrammeled fruits of all of those capabilities. We're going to have to make some deals with the US and China. And those powers may well say, if you want access to this technology which has now become central to your competitiveness, central to your ability to operate at the top tier economically and societally, hand over your minerals, rewrite your trade rules to favor our industries, frankly, rewrite your societies to take orders from Washington or Beijing. And that is unacceptable, I think, for most of the world's population. It's certainly unacceptable to me. That's the path we're currently on. But it does not have to be like that. That's the path. If we just pretend these problems don't exist and we have no thinking about it, if we actually want to use this technology to reorganize our societies and our economies and to say maybe actually people get to have a totally different quality of life, maybe a whole bunch of these jobs shouldn't exist. They're not things that ever gave people fulfillment. Maybe that we should have a model where people don't have to work to survive anymore and work becomes something Almost, you know, like volunteering. It's something that people choose to do and if they don't choose to do it, they might get to go and do lots of other things which provide fulfillment in their lives. And of course, I believe technology will open up vastly more opportunities. You know, these are the kinds of tools that, you know, we're just seeing in science right now how having an astonishing accelerating effect on the pace of research, we're going through the biggest scientific boom in history. That's one of the things that gives me hope. But that's the sort of thing where it will open up new jobs which may not be things that are mass employment. It may not provide opportunities for lots and lots of people, certainly not in a way that pays the bills for lots of people. It will be something that if you want to go and work in it, you can choose to go and do it. But we will fundamentally need a different economic model to provide people resources. We, which we should be able to do because these are technologies that should be able to optimize and improve access to those resources to provide abundance, you know, in ways that are truly liberating.
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B
I think it's so interesting because you are, we're almost talking about redefining job and work and so on and, and you look at the history of, of work, it is, it is about sort of doing things that people don't want to do, you know, putting a shift in all that kind of like manual labor, et cetera. And that has changed in the last 30 years every anyway with the kind of like knowledge economy and so on. What do you think jobs will look like over the next 20 and 30 years? And perhaps this is normally a question that we ask at the end, but like what advice would you give to a 22 year old today who's thinking about their career?
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A
I mean, so the way I think about it is organizations and companies and the places where you have job creation, they're going to be much smaller. They're going to be ultra lean, efficient. The days of companies just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I think we're going to be, you know, I think we're past that now. The future is vastly smaller teams having much larger impact. And this is where, you know, again, if it's not managed well and we don't have that broader societal set of solutions, it becomes deeply worrying because what will happen is what is happening now. You retrench to having small elite teams of experienced professionals, usually at the senior level, literally within organizations. And you don't need the Juniors, you don't need a lot of the average workers in the middle. It's something where again, that just goes into amplifying, you know, existing, you know, you know, rewards and inequalities. You know, in the economy, that senior, you know, elite level of workers, they get all the rewards and they keep expanding and then everyone else is sort of stuck. That's, that's one model, of course. You know, I think if we are able to come up with those systemic, you know, fixes and we're able to think about how to really ensure that the rewards from this massive economic boom are shared with people, then you can have jobs where people will be able to do all sorts of things that make use of those technologies, and technology will be integrated into all these things. It will vastly expand our ability to solve different knowledge problems. It will obviously with the intersection with things like robotics, which is really, really exciting, you'll be able to do all sorts of new things in the physical world in a way. We don't know what those jobs are like. You probably have a good idea, having spent years talking to people about the future of jobs. But, but what I do suspect is in terms of the skills which I would advise people to go and get, and you know, young people today, even anyone who's looking to get more resilient, it's really to be like a well rounded person and not to over index, for example, on things like stem. Cause actually, guess what? Machines are really good at numbers and they're really good at science. If your value as a worker or a leader is mostly based on, on just knowing a bunch of stuff that might be objectively true, you're going to have a really bad time in a decade. If your value is based on doing things that humans do best, you know, relationship building, exerting critical thinking and making judgment calls, deeply subjective, personal things, you know, which reflect, you know, the fact that humans are emotional creatures. We aren't always fully rational. The nature of societies is not based on just an ordering of numbers. It is based on value choices. Then that is something which probably puts you in a good position to be successful and certainly to have an interesting perch, no matter where that exact sort of distribution of jobs comes from in the future. I personally think that art and creativity, jobs and hospitality will be some of the most valuable industries in the world in this future because they're things where we have just a profound subjective attachment to people doing those things. Like no one has ever said, oh, this AI art is excellent. It's much better than that. Human art. No one's ever said that we just attached intangible value to it. It's like lab grown diamonds compared to, you know, actual diamonds. You know, nobody's ever going to be like, yeah, I can't believe you generated this thing in a lab in half an hour. Like, how beautiful.
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B
I think is interesting on the hospitality side because I think this with coffee, like the advancement of coffee machines that you can have in your home, like, is extraordinary, right? Yet on high streets in London, lots of coffee shops still remain and lots keep on opening as well. And I do think it is about, you know, there is, there is an intangible nature to the human connection of it, which is, is really important and we're not very good at kind of valuing that. How would you advise young people to become well rounded? Like what's, what are the different things? Because I think you're completely right in terms of get lots of blocks of information and knowledge and so on a bit like have as wider perspective as possible. How do you go about doing those things? Because you've had a huge variety of jobs.
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A
I mean, it's something where, you know, I think it's really about paying attention to things. And I actually, I have a great deal of faith in the younger generations. I know every, every generation is supposed to, you know, say the young people, you know, they've got all sorts of problems and it used to be better in my day. I don't think that's true necessarily. I have a great faith in the fact that young people have such diverse information appetites these days and cultural appetites. You know, we have a highly interconnected world. Now you're talking about coff and, you know, I often talk to people about the fact that, you know, literally consumer taste evolved because, you know, for example, young people really got into things like Matcha, which was fueled because of the boom in social media content from East Asian social media influencers who literally then reshaped consumer taste to the extent that some of those stately, you know, high street coffee chains are not doing well and they're falling to, you know, the new insurgent chains which offer a much broader range of drinks, often things that are much healthier. And so even that is an example, right, of if you want to be somebody who is having a thriving career and life in this future, you just need to pay attention to the world and draw on that richness of what is happening everywhere in the world, but also genuinely paying attention to the challenges and the opportunities that are arising in lots of different Ecosystems. So here's the thing, right? People always ask, where will those new jobs come from? If, for example, in the advanced economies, we end up in a scenario where AGI just actually automates a lot of jobs, you end up in something where the IMF chief last week at Davos said 60% of jobs in the advanced economies are vulnerable to automation. And, well, you know what, it's going to take a really long time to transform the entire world. There's a whole world of opportunities out there. There are whole societies which are not advanced economies. And we're going to need a whole generation to go out there and rebuild the world using that technology. And so actually, the way you think about Korea now might be vastly international from the beginning. It won't be a narrow sliver of the world's population which, you know, actually chooses to, you know, become immigrants or to, you know, go and work internationally. It might end up with, you know, a huge outward push from all societies.
- [20:15]
B
And I think you're absolutely right with that as well, is that jobs aren't sort of disappearing yet, although they are if you, if it's a single task, and graduate jobs. But that's the point, is that essentially people aren't hiring new people. Right? And it's that compression point that you talk about. You see it happening those, you know, because jobs are a collection of tasks effectively, and those tasks are just slowly sort of being chipped away in terms of what people do. It worries me, and I don't think that Westminster or Washington has got its head around this stuff at all yet. Because you're talking about such a fundamental change to our economic model of which everything is, is built. I mean, you're also a non exec, the treasury, right?
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A
Like, that's right.
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B
Who is owning this kind of AI strategy within government?
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A
I mean, there's folks working on thinking about the future of AI and how to manage it across different, lots of different parts of government. I mean, it's something that, you know, I think I've been very impressed, actually, that across government and multiple administrations, including the last administration, you had a lot of, you know, good thinking and genuinely, I think a lot of good solutions for managing some of the dimensions of what's happening. But there is just a much larger agenda that I think no government has really begun to scratch out in a, in a deep way. You're absolutely right. Washington, you know, which is of course intimately, you know, bound with the tech industry, especially now, you know, has had, you know, the ability to understand deeply what is happening at the Very forefront of frontier. The thinking is absolutely, you know, sort of superficial when it comes to thinking of a future economic model.
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B
Talk to us about how power has changed over the course of, you know, you've been working 15, 20 years. What have been your observations of how power and influence has shifted?
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A
Because we have ended up in an age of just unbelievable complexity. The world is too complex now, I think, for most decision makers and most incumbent institutions to actually navigate well, which is why we are just reeling from crisis to crisis. You know, I think there's a whole generation of leaders and institutions which are intellectually and even physically exhausted. They're just tapped out from the day to day. They're in a wholly reactive mode, you know, while all these massive changes are happening. And in that context, the people who end up being most influential are the ones who actually just have a longer term perspective on things and understand how to filter out the reactive from the true big animating forces that will drive change. And that has ended up being, by default, almost people who deeply understand the tech and in many cases are building it. The innovators, the entrepreneurs and the tech industry. And that also obviously comes along with the fact they have sort of hegemonic power in a bunch of the systems and communication and the platforms that have become central to our economies, to our way of life and as a planet. But it's something where you look at the valuations of these companies. Right now, Nvidia has a $5 trillion valuation, which is more than the GDP of what, 175 plus countries. I mean, it's wild. And a decade from now on the path we're on, I would not be surprised at all if Nvidia had a 10x valuation. And they are already arguably politically untouchable. Governments literally compete to get Jensen to show up and to cut deals with Nvidia and to have access to their chips. And so this is a deeply worrying path to be on, where tech and a tiny sliver of companies now are wielding untrammeled power, even as all the other decision makers who should have a voice and a stake in that future. And of course, all of us are sort of moving reactively from crisis to crisis and not able to engage in shaping these things to build on that
- [24:06]
B
idea of power and how it's shifting. Because I think it's interesting in terms of, you know, where does that sit between tech companies and governments at the moment? Right? Like, because it was interesting, obviously, with Trump's second inauguration, you know, the whole of Silicon Valley going there, like, yeah, what just what were your reflections watching that?
- [24:28]
A
My reflection seeing a whole bunch of tech CEOs line up at the inauguration. I mean, frankly, I was horrified. The intertwining of this vast technological apparatus with the U.S. administration. And this U.S. administration, I think is deeply worrying. Certainly it is for me. I'm old fashioned enough to have attachment to values like democracy and human rights and rule of law. And this is an administration I have lots of views on and I don't think observes many of those things and doesn't have great respect for them. But the fact that the industry has chosen to take a stance where essentially they've rolled over and are doing anything to keep the administration happy in, I think the interests in many cases of simply having a very strong deregulatory agenda around AI so they can race as fast as possible towards AGI. I think that's extremely worrying because it's also coincided with the Trump administration adopting officially a whole doctrine around AI regulation, which is about dominance, you know, ripping up all of the work that took place in partnership with the British government under the last administration, you know, the executive order that came from the Biden administration, you know, setting up a safety institute modeled on the very successful UK Safety Institute. And so, yeah, we're in a, we're in a moment now where the industry, you know, I think is very much, you know, sort of untrammeled and the kind of deals that they've been cutting, you know, you know, on infrastructure and things with the support of the US administration are just designed to accelerate them as quickly as possible so that they can get to AGI and then use it on behalf of US national interests. So it doesn't give me a huge amount of confidence that the power will be wielded necessarily for our interests over here.
- [26:13]
B
It's interesting though, isn't it, because it was almost like it was a growing up moment for Silicon Valley, them being there. But also it suggests that government is perhaps more powerful than we give credit for in terms of that they went there. But you think essentially in the next four years it could potentially flip, really.
- [26:34]
A
I do think government is more powerful than often people, including government think. When I was in the center of big Tech, the narrative would always come along that these are companies that are more powerful than nation states. And on a day to day basis, sure, these companies wield a certain type of power, but it's deeply brittle and the capacity for action, the nature of how decision makers within the tech industry make decisions is wildly brittle. And in many cases these companies are Caught off balance every day by events as well. These are companies which are focused on building technology products. They're not designed to be governments. They don't have the capabilities, the expertise or even the interest necessarily in exerting power over a whole bunch of things. So they will go back to defending and advancing a narrow sliver of interests on a certain agenda. When it comes to things like the societal impacts of technology, governments should be in the driving seat. You know, if they're democratic and representing their populations, it's their job to there defend and advance the point of view on these things. Not to just leave it up to the people inventing the technology to tell us what they think is the best way to organize around these things.
- [27:44]
B
Because it's interesting, Nick Clegg is sometimes asked whether he felt more powerful when he was at Meta than when he was deputy Prime Minister and he would always sort of rubbish the argument. And his point proof on it was saying that, you know, technology companies are not in charge of armies, they can't go to war, etc. And yeah, I think that's a completely rational sort of point to make and demonstrates it well. But I just think it comes back to what we're talking about in terms of power shifting so much now is that, well, that isn't really the way that wars are conducted anyway. Okay, Russia and Ukraine is different, but now so much of it is kind of fought online in the digital world. What are your reflections on that?
- [28:25]
A
I mean, I agree with Nick on that. On a daily basis, government leaders, for even middle powers, I actually think are exerting vastly more influence on the world than many of those tech companies because the nature of the power is so much more sophisticated, the levers of power, frankly, just those capabilities. Companies, because they have that very narrow focus and they obviously have vast financial resources connected to a narrow slew of things they need to do. They can seem superficially sort of monolithic in their ability to project influence. But these are companies which are also essentially advertising machines. Meta is an advertising company that is first and foremost what it is. Their power is based on, you know, listening to a relatively narrow sliver of big spenders on ads. They are not out there, you know, orchestrating or, you know, attempting to orchestrate decisions across a whole bunch of other, you know, things, you know, they, they have a bottom line which they need to focus on and that makes their power actually like relatively self contained, I think.
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B
Yeah. And in some ways it's quite a simple company actually. Like.
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A
Yes, what
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B
do you think in terms of like, take us behind the psychology of these people. You know, you've worked with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Demis Hasabis. What drives these people? Because for a lot of people that go to work to get money, get financially secure, these guys are, well, well beyond that. What drives them?
- [30:01]
A
I mean, these are folks who've changed enormously, you know, during the time I worked for them and since. And I think certainly some of the things that they're doing now, I think reflect choices and values that were not always obvious when I worked for them. Certainly a shift which can be quite dramatic in the case of folks like Elon, who was very hopeful when I went to work for him and was somebody who, if you'd asked me that question 10 years ago, what drives Elon, I would have said this is somebody who is exceptionally driven to advance technologies on behalf of humanity. And he may well still think that. But his conception of what humanity is and which bits of humanity he now wants to, you know, advance the interests of, I think has clearly changed enormously. And he's ended up in a place that I think is extraordinarily destructive, you know, for societies and for humanity. It's not, it's not humanity if you're just picking like narrow slivers of it and you've dismissed, you know, entire chunks of it. You know, generally, I think these are folks who have an interest in building systems which shape the world at scale. And they would of course have a vision of, of what that impact is, which, you know, in their minds is deeply positive. It's something that over time has evolved enormously, though. And I think lots of people would say it isn't necessarily having that kind of impact in a positive way.
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B
What has happened, do you think, specifically in the case of Elon Musk, to change his views of what humanity is?
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A
I mean, I think it's. He's somebody who really has become radicalized. Clearly it will be a fascinating history of Silicon Valley to figure out, like how did an industry that was overwhelmingly seen as Democratic, you know, progressive, left leaning, and which certainly, I think still the majority of rank and file, you know, tech workers, you know, are to something where, you know, the leadership of many of these companies is, you know, very, very, you know, hard line and has a different set of values entirely. I think for him, you know, if I was going to make a guess at it, you know, I think partly it is repeatedly confronting opposition from folks who he thought would be intellectually sympathetic to his arguments on the left and in the center and not finding sympathetic allies. We have had a very strong anti tech sentiment that has arisen, you know, over the last couple of decades. And you know, in many cases, I think some of these folks felt they were being unfairly treated. And so they chose to then go and find political allies in other parts of the spectrum who then absolutely had a vision of what they could do with that technological power when linked to their goals. And so in a way, I think, you know, partly it might be a marriage convenience, partly it might be feeling spurned by other allies who they might have liked to work with. And partly it might just be, you know, their own personal evolution as individuals, you know, for all sorts of reasons we can't even fathom what.
- [32:57]
B
How do they view sort of status? Right, because it's one of my big things about work is that it gives people status and, you know, fulfillment and meaning and so on. But I'd be fascinated for your reflections in your experience what status symbols these guys are kind of after. Is it being listened to?
- [33:20]
A
I mean, I think honestly their biggest status symbols are of competing with each other, which is part of the unhealthy dynamic. You know, when you're racing to build this most powerful technology ever. You know, all these people, they've really got unlimited money. They could, you know, stop working right now and they couldn't spend it in, in thousands of lifetimes. They already have the ability to speak to the entire world. They have megaphones with, you know, you know, vast influence. They could go off and do charitable works the rest of their lives and attack, you know, a million different, you know, social, you know, environmental problems that, you know, need attention. They've chosen not to do those things. They've chosen to instead keep building. And so partly that is because they believe what they're doing is advancing humanity, but also I think it's just a raw competitive dynamic. They want to be first at things. They want to defeat their opposition. They enjoy, you know, saying that, you know, they're so systems are superior to others, you know, with whatever benchmarking, you know, they want to see their corporate performance, you know, exceed their competitors. Those are very strange metrics to me to still be fueled by when you've reached that kind of scale.
- [34:22]
B
Exactly. Talk to us about the, the craft and the art of speechwriting because I think it's a fascinating job in politics. It, there's a lot of emphasis on it, arguably less important than it was, but, but talk to us about what that job involves in kind of corporate
- [34:43]
A
sort of speechwriting Yeah, I mean, there's this terrible term, thought leadership. I hate it because it literally commoditizes the idea about ideas. Like you can have an industry and a whole sort of model built around creating people who then become this category of folks. And you know, when I was at Google the first time, you know, when I went to work for Eric, one of my hats was I was basically driving thought leadership strategies at Google. And I used to get very frustrated at the number of executives who would turn up at my desk saying, I want to be a thought leader. And I'd always say, well, if you want to be a thought leader, you have to have thoughts. You know, this is not just a nice gig where you get to stand in front of a TED logo and wave your arms around you get the picture? Which is basically what a lot of people wanted to do. And that's why in a way, I think the art of speech giving and presenting, which should be about advancing powerful ideas and getting them to resonate with people the way it always has been, has become in many cases, absolutely, you know, delegitimized and cheapened because we just have treated it as this commoditized content now because the world is so awash with all sorts of garbage content, you know, you know, this right from, from putting out content that a lot of people tune into. We've got some nice awards here which literally attest to that. Like it's a thing where the value of actually going out there and saying something really original, novel, high quality, that's never been greater. People are desperate for answers. People are desperate for vision. They really want to hear, you know, leaders, you know, advance ideas in a big way. And so I actually think, I don't think speechwriting or speech giving has actually gone down in value. I think that a lot of leaders are missing a trick by going for the cheap commodities, content and not thinking. This could truly be a moment to change the world. I mean, we just saw in the last few weeks an extraordinary speech from Mark Carney which literally, you know, that is a, that will be a historic speech which really, you know, drew a line in the sand, you know, for a whole, you know, set of leaders around the world and you know, in societies around the world about the passing of an American led global order. And that's an example of taking the opportunity of giving a speech really seriously and saying something important.
- [36:55]
B
What makes a great speech, I think
- [36:57]
A
it is, to say something important like a great speech is not just you're trying to please the group inside the room. And this is, you know, classic mistake. I mean, I've encountered this all through my career when I've been sporting people, giving speeches. I mostly give speeches now. But, you know, one of the big mistakes is when people, you know, when they're getting ready for a thing and they're a bit nervous and you know, it's a bunch of important people, they think, I've got to find out what this room once, what do they believe in so I can go and say things they agree with. I have never paid attention to that in my life. I don't care what the room agrees with, I'm going to tell them what I agree with. And if they don't like it, that's on them. I can't be accountable for their feelings. Like you're there to tell them something original which can contribute to them being better at whatever they're doing, to extend their thinking, to be better leaders, to be better decision makers, to be better people. And you know, you've got to go and say something original.
- [37:48]
B
But that is one of the biggest problems that I think we have had in Western politics For the last 25, 30 years is politicians getting up and trying to persuade the room that they already agree with them. Like Ken Clark once said to me at a Derby Knots Forest game, but he's like, yeah, I'm of the old opinion that I was going to try and do the voice, but I won't. But the old opinion that I want to get up in front of a room and persuade them for them to agree with me, not that I agree with them and I just thought it was such an interesting kind of observation. And I think that's part of the problem that we've had in the last 25 years is that we haven't had the honest conversations about where we want to go as a society and what government can achieve and what it can actually afford.
- [38:29]
A
Absolutely. I mean, this is, this has always been fascinating to me and I've studied it, you know, very much up close throughout my career and especially now that I'm spending a lot of time in, you know, rooms with political folks and folks, you know, working in places like Westminster and Washington. It's extraordinary, like the group dynamics and the way elites and decision makers interact with each other and often, you know, adopt sort of very cozy cross party consensuses because they don't want to rock the boat and because it's natural for people to want to like each other and to get on with each other. You generally like when you're up close and you're interacting with people every day. You know, you want to, you know, get on well with them. And over time, that has a moderating impact on some of the ways, you know, you end up sharing ideas and defending your vision. Actually, there should be fundamental debates and disagreements about things. We shouldn't just be trying to please the people in the room or the people who are in these stately debating halls. We've got to believe in things and say what we want and just really, truly defend what we want. In a way. I think the other thing is there's a lot of clever people in an age of complexity who've tricked themselves into believing the world is too complex to be fixed. And this is exactly why, you know, with what I'm building with the center for Tomorrow, our focus is on really going for those bold, almost unattainable ideas about what does an economic model for the age of AGI look like? If we were to reimagine international order so we don't have an international system based on the 1940s, what would that look like? So we get out of always being five minutes away from one final world war, and everyone will tell you, every serious person will tell you that's not realistic. And they're right, it's not realistic. None of those things are politically feasible at all right now. We haven't had a conversation about them in mainstream politics, nor in mainstream public conversation. And yet, if you want to make people change the world, you've got to first stand up and say, this is what I believe. And then you see how people react to that. If you just look at the world as it is, as a static environment around you, of course, nothing will ever change.
- [40:29]
B
Absolutely. You talk about as being in a pre war era. What do you mean by that?
- [40:38]
A
We're clearly seeing the breakdown of systems that have held the world back from cataclysmic conflict in our lifetime. An international order that was invented after the Second World War with the UN and other institutions and the alignment of leaders, which was designed to hold back the worst impulses of superpowers to fight it out. And now we're obviously in a moment where things like the Mark Carney speech showed that decision makers are now optimizing for a might makes right vision of the world. And powers are moving into position and pouring their resources into gaining the capabilities so that they can have a true open confrontation with each other. Militarily like that isn't a secret. There's a reason that NATO is arming up and trying to reach 5% of GDP on arms. The largest military rearmament in history is underway right now. And all of those breakthrough technologies are intersecting with that. They will go into fuelling the next generation of weapons as well. And so it's a moment where you've got that you obviously have highly unstable, increasingly unstable, volatile, polarized societies, where in many cases you have democratic societies failing from within. You have populations who are much more open towards using force and to doing things that are much more aggressive in defense of their national interests. The dream of when we were kids and, you know, our generation, that globalization would open up just this shared global agenda and we'd shift to a collective set of interests that's receding by the day. And then you look at all these other crises, right? Things which, you know, that could be the trigger and is being the trigger every day, things like climate change, where you already are facing, you know, thousands of different crises in different parts of the world. You know, all of these things are adding up to just a brew of circumstances and factors that are deeply, deeply threatening to a whole model of the world and a way of life that we've kind of taken for granted. And so that's the pre war environment. And the other thing that makes it pre war, a whole bunch of the incumbent decision makers just don't take it seriously. There are a whole bunch of people who, right up to the eve of the Second World War, absolutely thought we could just muddle our way through it and didn't realize that that future was slipping away.
- [42:52]
B
So how is the center for tomorrow going to operate? How are you going to have this conversation, talk us through the sort of actual operations, dynamics of it?
- [43:02]
A
So there's part of the center which will be more like a classic think tank. You need to get research and credible ideas and policy proposals that can be actually actionable by decision makers on live agendas and working with researchers, producing our own pipeline of research? I think that will be a core part of it. It's not the only part of it, though. I think, you know, I've worked with think tanks for a very long time. Lots of them are almost like lifestyle organisations. You produce some nice PDFs, they live on your website, you get a nice day of headlines. Nothing changes. And worse than that, you could actually change things. You could spend years convincing people to pass some narrow bit of wonky legislation. But we are in societies and politics now, which are so volatile that you could spend years, you could spend hundreds of millions passing things, and then everything you've done gets deleted in one day. When the new administration comes into office, I of course think of things like the online safety bill, you know, something which took years, you know, the economic cost of implementing that and the amount of time consumed by decision makers in the public and private sectors, astronomical. Nigel Farage wants to delete it on day one in office, in his words. And so actually, I think what you really need to do is you need to build a community of decision makers and also a community which really draws in publics at scale to actually mainstream the conversations and the thinking around all of these ideas. There is no public platform for solving a bunch of these things right now. If you ask people what's the biggest set of things they're worried about, most of them wouldn't think I need to build a new economic model for the uk. They're going to go to a set of very tactical things which reflect, you know, in many cases, just the existing incremental thinking that's reflected in our media discourse about these things. But we do need to have this. And if we don't begin to have a serious conversation about what are people for, what kind of lives do we want our kids to have? How are we going to give, you know, people, you know, real good qualities of life, you know, throughout their lives? You know, we're basically winging it through the most powerful technology history, you know, in history. And that's just a really bad model.
- [45:05]
B
And how do you think it will do? Because it used to be totally right if you want to bring in legislation, change, essentially it was like recruit a think tank to sort of come up with some ideas etc, that were loosely aligned with it, you know, host some kind of like roundtables, Whitehall, Parliament, etc, then hope that those people sort of land in a kind of like position of power in a few years time, etc, and, and the change would be implemented. That was pretty much the kind of like standard way of it happening. How do you think it will look over the next 10 years? Because it's shifted a lot. You're getting a lot more kind of like campaigning groups now. You know, I think of like Taxpayers alliance, who were incredibly innovative in the kind of noughties of sort of spearing this. How do you think that sort of legislation change will come about in the next 10 years?
- [45:51]
A
I mean, I think the basic model there isn't, isn't totally broken. I mean, that's like, it's a theory of change that has worked in lots of cases, but the pace of it and the focus on the things you want to change that has to Change enormously. So a lot of the think tanks, they pursue really wonky, intricate legislative changes which can then unfold over the course of many years. And that's the win. And the world is changing too quickly now and the agendas are far too cross cutting for you to be driving change in that way in many cases. What's interesting is activists and think tanks and campaigning groups, they have a really, really narrow focus on one particular bit of the problem. They will be focused on housing or they will be focused on climate change. But the climate change people aren't talking to the tech people and the tech people aren't talking to the geopolitical people. And so they end up with these highly distorted, very niche solutions to win in passing one narrow bit of legislation, which then doesn't solve the problem. Shocker. Because this whole other glaring dumpster fire over here never got that attention, it never got that level of political prioritisation. And so again with the centre, our strategy is very much to make it clear these are all the same agenda. In fact, if you want to have comprehensive solutions which get you a new economic model and give you good jobs of the future, it's probably going to have to also be built with a highly coordinated foreign policy dimension. Like we're going to need a totally different model of how we sit alongside our international partners if we want to unlock resources to do all the things that we need to keep our societies afloat and thriving. And that all has to be done sustainably as well. So it's something where I think, you know, the basic model of you go and recruit people, you know, who can be change makers and you equip them with ideas and legislation thing, we'll still need to do all of that, but it needs to be something driven at a much more urgent pace in a very interdisciplinary, interdimensional way.
- [47:39]
B
You have this great thing that you say that you do every year in terms of thinking back 100 years. Can you talk us through it?
- [47:47]
A
Yeah, it's almost like just a sort of neat comparison. I look at what was life like exactly 100 years ago. So, you know, when you look back at a much larger period of time, rather than just thinking, you know, you know, in the space of 10, 20 years, you see just how dramatic that entire trajectory can be. And you think back what was life 100 years ago from now? Right. You know, the world population was barely over 2 billion and people were driving Ford Model Ts. And there are only about 90 sovereign countries in the world because European empires ran most of the world. And in the space of one single lifetime, what did that trajectory look like? You know, if you were born in 1926, you know, you were a teenager when, you know, the European leg of the Second World War began. You lived through the beginning of the atomic age when you were, you know, becoming an adult. You know, it was 1958, you know, when the first regular transatlantic flights began. You know, you're in your 60s when Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon. And then, you know, you live through the Internet, you know, AI, self driving cars, robotics, test flights of rockets to take people to Mars, all just in this tiny bit at the end. And that's all obviously pre, you know, advanced AI, when now we're just in such a rapid cycle of innovation and advancement. And so I think it's a useful, instructive way to think about things, because, of course, if you have kids today, they're going to be alive 100 years from now, you know, and, you know, they're probably potentially going to live much longer than that. And we have an obligation to think about the full scope of their lives if we want them to have really good lives. And that means we need a set of decisions which reflects the whole scale and grandeur, in a way, of what this century could be like. Not just to optimize for the next electoral cycle, not to optimize for, you know, quarter by quarter economic thinking. There's something up for grabs here which is vastly more important than. Than thinking about this is the balance sheet of big tech companies over the next couple of years. It is definitional when it comes to human civilization. What kind of people do we want to be?
- [49:48]
B
We are unfortunately going to have to bring it to a close shortly because I've got to go and teach podcasting at my daughter.
- [49:55]
A
Amazing.
- [49:57]
B
Speaking about jobs in the future. So I'm really impressed at doing. Actually, I'm going to be intrigued. I'm going to ask them for that, who they want to see on the show as well. But you've been very open about sort of being neurodivergent, and I think it's important to kind of touch on that. I'm dyslexic and feel a responsibility to talk about it more and so on. Just when did you kind of get diagnosed? How has it kind of impacted you? And you've got ADHD, right?
- [50:22]
A
ADHD and autism. Yeah. Went 39 years without getting diagnosed, you know, so got it done just in time for my 40th birthday, you know, and it's something where, you know, I could have happily not got diagnosed and wouldn't have made that much, you know, difference potentially, you know, to my life. But I felt actually it was worthwhile learning about it. And it turned out it really was worthwhile because you learn something about your own brain and how you think about the world from it. And of course, you know, there are millions of people who are neurodivergent and turned out, you know, almost every single one of my bosses in Silicon Valley was neurodivergent, you know, and so it's something where once you, once you understand, you know, what, what this means, you can actually go and learn more about how to manage some of the ways that you operate, which may not be things that you're actually, you know, finding that useful anymore. There are things which I absolutely now can trace to be neurodivergent which make me, you know, very, very capable in how I, you know, think about information, how I do certain things. And there are other things which are also why, you know, some tasks, some, you know, activities are not things that I enjoy, not things that I think I've done well in my life and which I could have been doing vastly better if I understood the strategies for managing them. So it's actually something I, I strongly recommend if people are sort of sitting on the fence thinking, should, should I get tested? You know, is that a thing worth exploring? I feel it's had a life changing impact actually.
- [51:46]
B
Was there anything sort of specific that led to, you think, I'm going to go get this diagnosed and so on?
- [51:51]
A
You know, it was actually so many of my friends, by far the majority of my friends are like, are ADHD or autistic or some combo of that. I mean, it's almost like, you know, because so many people in tech are that. And over the years, you know, many of my friends would say, you are like the most ADHD person like we've ever met who has not been diagnosed. And in the end I just thought, yeah, it's actually worth checking out, you know, now. And it was actually, it was having a conversation with one friend, you know, who was telling me all about their experience of being diagnosed and how life changing it had been that made me think, oh, actually I should take this seriously rather than just dismissing it and saying, you know what, this is just a consequence of living in a fast paced world where we're all multitasking at all times. You know, I think the other thing was, honestly, because life is so fast paced now and the world is so complex, I felt, you know, I Was often, you know, butting up against the limits of my own ability to navigate some of these, you know, different sort of incoming streams of information every day. I think I was, if not overwhelmed, certainly I was reaching sort of my maximum sort of bandwidth and I was thinking, am I managing this as well as I could be? And that that really meant I had to explore how I think about things and work.
- [53:01]
B
Where did you go to get it done?
- [53:04]
A
It was just through, through a service, through, through actually a health provider in London. So yeah, it's something which, you know, there's, there's obviously the NHS where people can get diagnosed. The waiting lists are outrageously long. And then there are, there are the private treatment options as well, which, you know, a lot of people are having to opt for simply to get treatment in a reasonable time frame.
- [53:24]
B
What car do you drive?
- [53:25]
A
A Honda. Just a little, little Honda.
- [53:28]
B
Have you ever thought about going electric?
- [53:30]
A
I absolutely would. And this is one of the things where I've got on street parking, I don't have a driveway, can't install a charger and there's basically like two chargers nearby. So it stops you adapting to it because it'd be so wildly inconvenient. And I mean, it's an example of the kind of infrastructure we need to build and we should be doing at scale, which we haven't done yet completely.
- [53:49]
B
How do you think self driving cars might change our economy and the way that we live?
- [53:53]
A
Oh, vastly in ways that we can both already predict in ways that we can't. I was in Los Angeles and San Francisco last year and I was there for a whole week and I only drove around in self driving cars. I never got into an Uber with a driver or a taxi or anything like that. And it was, it was actually great. The cars were cheaper than an Uber, weren't waiting for a job to finish, so it got there faster. No weird music, no small talk, no, you know, whatever. Those cars are going to be on the roads here, you know, in the coming months, you know, now that we're having, you know, vehicles tested here. And this is something where, you know, we've had more than a decade of research in the Bay Area, in San Francisco about what happens when you get self driving cars. And you see things, for example, like the fact that there's some people who are much more prepared to take longer commutes because of self driving cars. It's very stressful getting to work when you're driving, you know, which a lot of people do. And if you can get into A vehicle you're not driving yourself. You can watch Netflix, you can go back to sleep, you can get to work immediately if you want. You can operate in a bunch of different ways. And it might mean that people are prepared to live farther out from where they currently are. In the industrial economy, we encourage most people to live near their jobs, usually within cities. And obviously rent prices have gone through the roof and people have been pushed further out already. But people might just choose to live in different places now and commute to work in that way. And then that could radically change the nature of real estate prices. If you're running retail and your business relies on footfall traffic going past it, you might have implications. All sorts of things might have a knock on effect. And then even things like, you know, the average US city, 70% of its real estate is just car parking spaces.
- [55:31]
B
Yeah.
- [55:31]
A
So like, how much like land could you reclaim and convert for other purposes? Right. And our cities aren't just based around allocating huge chunks of land for vehicles. That, according to research, more than 95% of the lifetime of the average car involves the car not moving at all. Total waste.
- [55:49]
B
Completely. Completely. That would be fascinating. We could get you back on and have a whole episode on that. What? Two final questions for you. I'll let you take them in turn. What is your favorite speech of all time? And what is the most underrated speech of all time? Like what. What are. What are Dex's favorites?
- [56:11]
A
My favorite speech of all time is JFK's Rice University speech. When everyone probably has heard that famous line, we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And that was just a magnificent speech because when you read it, and it's my preferred format of giving a speech as well, it's a very modern recent phenomenon that lots of people say, ah, a good speech has to be riddled with stories. No, it doesn't. That's one model. And if it works for you, it's great. I tell stories. But actually, JFK speeches are for me the pinnacle of good speech giving. It's a speech which has no stories. It's a vision speech. And vision is not some airy fairy thing. It is backed up by examples and intellectual argument, logic, you know, an emotive cell for why America should make it a priority to send a person to the moon and what space means for the whole future of America and the world. And it is just magnificent, you know, so that, that's one, the one that's really underrated. I've been Spending a lot of the last year reading Martin Luther King Jr. Speeches, which we've sort of reduced them, like a lot of historical figures, to just, you know, inspirational quotes on dorm room posters. Everyone knows I have a dream. Yeah. Nobody reads actually the raw material or the vast number of other speeches you gave. And there was a speech he gave, which it was at Oberlin College in the 60s, and the title of the speech is Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. And that is probably my second favorite speech, which almost nobody has read. And it is a case for why we need to adopt a different perspective, vastly international, and change the lens through which we view our societies and the decisions we make in those societies in order to get to a good life for our people and all people in the world. It is a case for how to actually manage the consequences of technology and globalization. And it remains 100% as relevant today as it did when. When he gave that speech. And, you know, he has some lines in there which are just so beautiful and profound, and they are absolutely sort of bolted to my brain now. And, you know, the one that always sticks on my. My mind is he said, I can never become who I am meant to be unless you get to become who you are meant to be. And that, in a way, has become my sort of core philosophy and belief in what we need to do now. As nations and as societies, there is no good life for the United Kingdom and our future and for our kids in that future, unless we also advance a different world in which all other peoples get to become who they're meant to be as well. Because the nature of all these challenges and opportunities are also deeply intertwined. It doesn't work if half the world economy has collapsed in the age of AI.
- [59:07]
B
What a finish. My gosh. My daughter's school are about to get quite an inspirational podcasting.
- [59:12]
A
Brilliant.
- [59:13]
B
Thanks, Dex, for coming on. It's been brilliant. I'm so pleased that we've got to do this. We've talked about it for ages. It's been terrific.
- [59:18]
A
Thanks, Jimmy.
- [59:19]
B
The new venture,
- [59:24]
A
Sam.