Musk, Zuckerberg & The Future of AI Dex Hunter-Torricke

21:25Jimmy McLoughlin:That's right.

21:26Dex Hunter-Torricke:Who is owning this kind of AI strategy within government?

21:30Jimmy McLoughlin:I mean, there's folks working on thinking about the future of AI and how to manage it across lots of different parts of government. I mean, it's something that, you know, I think I've been very impressed, actually, that across, you know, 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 at in a deep way. You're absolutely right. Washington, you know, which is, of course, intimately bound with the tech industry, especially now, you know, has had the ability to understand deeply what is happening at the very forefront of Frontier Eye.

22:13Jimmy McLoughlin:The thinking is absolutely, you know, sort of superficial when it comes to thinking of a future economic model.

22:19Dex Hunter-Torricke: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?

22:32Jimmy McLoughlin: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. 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, 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.

23:20Jimmy McLoughlin: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, you know, 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 as a planet. But it's something where, you know, 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.

23:56Jimmy McLoughlin: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 you know 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 you know moving reactively from crisis to crisis

24:32Dex Hunter-Torricke:and not able to engage in shaping these things to build on that 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

24:55Jimmy McLoughlin:reflections watching that my reflection seeing a whole bunch of tech ceos line up you know at the inauguration i mean frankly i was horrified um you know 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 you know 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 you know rolled over um you know and are doing anything you know to keep the administration happy um you know 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.

25:51Jimmy McLoughlin:I think that's extremely worrying because it's also coincided with the Trump administration, you know, 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 AI 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.

26:23Jimmy McLoughlin:And the kind of deals that they've been cutting, you know, on infrastructure and things with the support of the 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 U.S. 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.

26:42Dex Hunter-Torricke:it's interesting though isn't it because it was almost like it was a growing up moment for silicon valley than 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 that essentially in the next four years it could potentially flip really i do think government is more powerful than

27:05Jimmy McLoughlin: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.

27:43Jimmy McLoughlin: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. 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 organise around these things.

28:14Dex Hunter-Torricke: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. 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 for online in the digital world what are your kind of reflections on that I mean I agree with Nick on that you know on a

28:58Jimmy McLoughlin:daily basis, you know, government leaders, you know, for even middle powers, you know, 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, you know, frankly, just those capabilities. Companies, because they have that very narrow focus, and they obviously have vast financial resources connected to a narrow sort of things they need to do they can seem superficially you know sort of monolithic in their ability to you know project influence but you know these are companies which are also essentially advertising machines you know you know meta is an advertising company that is first and foremost what it is um their power is based on um you know listening to a relatively narrow sliver of big spenders on ads um they are not out there you know orchestrating or you know attempting to orchestrate decisions across a whole bunch of other um you know things um 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 yeah and in some ways it's quite a simple company actually like yes what do you think in terms of like take us

30:12Dex Hunter-Torricke:behind the psychology of these people you know you've worked with elon musk mark zuckerberg Eric Schmidt, Demis and Sabis what drives these people because for a lot of people they go to work to get money and get financially secure these guys are well beyond that what drives them?

30:31Jimmy McLoughlin:I mean these are folks who have changed enormously 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 advanced 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, advanced the interests of, I think has clearly changed enormously.

31:19Jimmy McLoughlin:And he's ended up in a place that I think is extraordinarily destructive for societies and for humanity. It's not humanity if you're just picking narrow slivers of it and you've dismissed entire chunks of it. 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 what that impact is, which 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.

31:54Dex Hunter-Torricke:What has happened, do you think, specifically in the case of Elon Musk to change his views of what humanity is?

32:02Jimmy McLoughlin:I think he's somebody who really has become radicalized, clearly. It will be a fascinating history of Silicon Valley to figure out 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.

32:48Jimmy McLoughlin: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 partly it might be a marriage of convenience, partly it might be feeling spurned by other allies who they might have liked to work with, and partly it might just be their own personal evolution as individuals for all sorts of reasons we can't even fathom.

33:27Dex Hunter-Torricke: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 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 um I mean I think honestly their biggest status symbols are

33:52Jimmy McLoughlin:competing with each other which is part of the unhealthy dynamic you know when you're racing to build this most powerful technology ever um 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.

34:22Jimmy McLoughlin: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 um they enjoy you know saying that you know their systems are superior to others you know with whatever benchmarking um you know they want to see their corporate performance you know exceed other competitors those are very strange metrics to me to still be fueled by when you've reached that kind of scale exactly um talk to us about the

34:55Dex Hunter-Torricke:the craft and the art of speech writing 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 talk to us about what that job involves in kind of corporate sort of speech writing.

35:14Jimmy McLoughlin:Yeah, I mean, there's this terrible, you know, term thought leadership. I hate it because it literally commoditizes, you know, the idea about ideas. like you can have an industry and uh you know a whole sort of model built around you know creating people who then become this category um of folks and you know when i was at google the first time you know when i went to it for eric you know 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 and you get the picture, which is basically what a lot of people wanted to do.

35:59Jimmy McLoughlin: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 putting out content that a lot of people tune into. We've got some nice awards here, which literally attests 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.

36:36Jimmy McLoughlin: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 speech writing 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 commoditized 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 set of leaders around the world and societies around the world about the passing of an American led global order.

37:18Jimmy McLoughlin:and that's an example of taking the opportunity of giving a speech really seriously and saying

37:24Dex Hunter-Torricke:something important what makes a great speech i think it is to say something important like a

37:29Jimmy McLoughlin:great speech is not just uh 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 supporting people giving speeches i mostly give speeches now but you know one of the big mistakes is when people uh 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 wants what do they believe in so i can go and say things they agree with i 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 see something original.

38:17Dex Hunter-Torricke: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. Yes. Like Ken Clark once said to me at a Derby Knott's Forest game, but he's like, you know, I'm of the old opinion that I was going to try and do the voice, but I won't. But of 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.

38:59Jimmy McLoughlin: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.

39:38Jimmy McLoughlin:And over time, that has a moderating impact on some of the ways you end up, you know, sharing ideas and defending your vision. You know, actually, you know, 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, you know, who are in these, you know, stately debating halls. We've got to believe in things and say what we want and just really, truly defend what we want. You know, 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.

40:09Jimmy McLoughlin: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 a 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 you know look at the world as it is as a static you know

40:56Dex Hunter-Torricke:environment around you of course nothing will ever change yep absolutely you talk about as being

41:01Jimmy McLoughlin:in a pre-war era what do you mean by that um we're clearly seeing the breakdown of systems that have held the world back from cataclysmic conflict in our lifetime an international order of 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 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 five percent 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 fueling 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 you know 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 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, you know, are adding up to just a brew of circumstances and factors that are, you know, deeply, deeply threatening to a whole model of the world and a way of life that we've kind of taken for granted.

43:06Jimmy McLoughlin: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.

43:22Dex Hunter-Torricke: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.

43:31Jimmy McLoughlin: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'll 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 organizations. 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.

44:02Jimmy McLoughlin: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 frage wants to delete it on day one in office uh 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.

44:52Jimmy McLoughlin: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 worry about? Most of them wouldn't think, I need to build a new economic model for the UK. They're gonna 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.

45:31Jimmy McLoughlin:And that's just a really bad model. And how do you think it will do?

45:37Dex Hunter-Torricke:Because it used to be totally right. If you wanted to bring in legislation change, essentially it was like recruit a think tank to sort of come up with some ideas, et cetera, that were loosely aligned with it. You know, host some kind of like round tables in Whitehall Parliament, et cetera. Then hope that those people sort of land in a kind of like position of power in a few years' time, et cetera, 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 the taxpayers alliance who were incredibly innovative in the kind of naughties of sort of spearing this how do you think that sort of legislation change will come about in the next 10 years um i mean i think the

46:21Jimmy McLoughlin: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 you know think tanks they pursue really wonky intricate you know legislative you know 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 like in many cases what's interesting is you know activists and think tanks and campaigning groups they have a really really narrow focus on one particular bit of the problem.

46:59Jimmy McLoughlin: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 prioritization. And so again, with the centre, our strategy is very much to make it clear these are all the same agenda.

47:28Jimmy McLoughlin: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

48:07Dex Hunter-Torricke:interdimensional way you have this great thing that you say that you do every year in terms of thinking back a hundred years can you talk us through it yeah i mean it's almost like just a

48:18Jimmy McLoughlin:sort of neat comparison i look at what was life like exactly a hundred 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 were only about 90 sovereign countries in the world because European empires ran most of the world and in the space of one single lifetime time 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 um 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 lived 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.

49:23Jimmy McLoughlin:And that's all obviously pre-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. And 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.

50:03Jimmy McLoughlin:There's something up for grabs here, which is vastly more important 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

50:16Dex Hunter-Torricke:do we want to be uh we are unfortunately gonna have to bring it to a close shortly because i've got to go and teach podcasting at my daughter's amazing speaking about jobs in the future so i'm really impressed with doing it 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 quite interesting um 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're you've got ADHD right?

50:52Jimmy McLoughlin: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 um you know to my life but i felt um 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 um it turned out you know almost every single one of my bosses in silicon valley was neurodivergent um you know and so um it's something where once you once you understand um 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 um you know finding that useful anymore um there are things which i absolutely now can trace to being neurodivergent which make me you know uh 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 um 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 strongly recommend if people are sort of sitting on the fence thinking should I get tested you know is it a thing worth exploring I feel it's had a life-changing impact actually.

52:16Dex Hunter-Torricke:Was there anything sort of specific that led to you thinking I'm going to go get this diagnosed and so on?

52:20Jimmy McLoughlin:You know it was actually it was 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 um you know many of my friends would you know 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 um you know who was telling me all about their experience of 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.

53:01Jimmy McLoughlin: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 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 what car do you drive a honda just a little little honda have you ever thought about going electric 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 um 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

54:18Dex Hunter-Torricke:completely how do you think self-driving cars might change our economy and the way that we live

54:23Jimmy McLoughlin:oh um vastly in ways that we can both already predict in ways that we can't um i was in los angeles in 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 uh 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.

54:56Jimmy McLoughlin: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 you know in the industrial economy we encourage most people to live near their jobs you know 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 um if you 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 u.s city 70 of its real estate is just car parking spaces yeah 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 percent of the lifetime of the average car involves the car not moving at all total waste completely completely

56:20Dex Hunter-Torricke:that would be fascinating we could get you back on and have a whole episode on that what um two final questions for you I'll let you take them in turn what is your favourite speech of all time and what is the most underrated speech of all time like what are Dex's favourites

56:40Jimmy McLoughlin:my favourite 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's speeches are for me the pinnacle of good speech giving. It's a speech which has no stories.

57:21Jimmy McLoughlin: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'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 posters everyone knows i have a dream yeah nobody reads actually the raw material or the vast number of other speeches he gave and there was a speech he gave um which um it was at obeline college in the 60s and uh 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 in my my mind is he said um 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

59:34Dex Hunter-Torricke:collapsed in the age of ai what a finish my gosh my daughter's school are about to get quite an inspirational podcasting. Brilliant. 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. Thanks, Jimmy. With a new venture.