Zoe Kleinman | The Future of Tech & The BBC

0:00This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today it's a real honour to have Zoe Kleinman, the BBC Technology Editor, join us in the studio. It's always interesting interviewing somebody whose job it is to interview people. She's interviewed everyone from Tim Cook to Satya Nadella and has got a really interesting insight onto the world of technology and how AI will both take jobs away but also create new ones.

1:27And that was one of the most interesting bits of this episode. was where we were talking to Zoe about the future of flying taxis and so on. She really does get to see it all in her role at the BBC. And I was also fascinated by how you prepare for interviews with Tim Cook, but also then how you think about disseminating that message to everyone that the BBC needs to reach. So I think it's a really interesting and important job at the moment. So it's a real honour to have Zoe onto Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests.

2:07Well let's talk about AI and jobs of the future etc because that's the kind of like point of the show and so on but you have a real kind of ringside seat into it and you've been out in the valley recently as well. What do you think the future looks like in five years time for word dramatically different dramatically different if you have young children well you have three young children i've got one i've got three as well i'm a bit older they will not i think have jobs when they leave school in the way that we recognize jobs today this is not new you know automation has been chipping away at traditional jobs for years ask deliveries ask fulfillment center staff ask you know ask ask people who make cars but what what ai is now doing is starting to come into the workplace of um the the i guess the white collar workers is it white collars yeah yeah and and and and so now everyone is starting to get twitchy about it in the white collar world um everyone i talk to says that there is a real importance for a human in the loop everyone who i talk to in this space talks about AI tools being a companion, a colleague, an assistant, but not somebody, anthropomorphising, you really shouldn't, not something that is going to replace humans.

3:48But ultimately, and I come up against this time and time again, you know, Microsoft says AI should take the drudgery out of work, which is a great line. But I think for so many people, like probably, arguably, the majority of people the drudgery is the work isn't it it's the admin it's the booking travel it's the minutes of meetings it's the diary management you know and and disproportionately as well probably women doing those sorts of jobs and i already know people who have lost their jobs because ai is now doing it and and i totally see the logic of that it's cheaper it doesn't get sick it doesn't need holidays you know all the rest of it but it is it and it is dramatically changing the workplace and i do also believe that it will create jobs i was at school well i left school in 1995 right and and seo was nothing i'd ever heard of and then suddenly as the internet took off seo became this huge industry and i have no doubt that that will happen with ai it will create jobs i do believe that but i also think you know a lot of a lot of the way we see work is gonna go okay what jobs do you think it might create first and then let's get on to the second bit i i think it's just too early to call that actually i i honestly do i i can already see you know the rise of prompt engineering for example i mean it's a dreadful name for it isn't it?

5:19But which is basically trying to get generative AI to do what you want it to do. Because you really have to be, I mean, I'm guessing you probably use them a lot as well. But, you know, you have to be quite prescriptive to get what you want. And it takes a lot of tweaking, doesn't it? To try and sort of manoeuvre it into the thing that you actually want it to be. It's kind of, I think, like instructing an intern, somebody who's very new to the job. And you can't, you can't, it's a bit like what I did at BBC anyway, you can't assume prior knowledge. You have to tell it absolutely everything that it needs to know to do the job.

5:55I suspect that will probably change. But at the moment, I think, I think that's a skill that is worth having for sure. But the other thing to bear in mind, you know, with AI is we talk about generative AI because it's what most people see and use. And it's kind of the sexy, funny, you know, disruptive end of it. But it's a tiny part of what AI does. And I think the way in which it is being used or has the potential to be used in health care is far more significant and groundbreaking and exciting in a way. you know there are some amazing ai tools that are really good at for example symptom spotting so spotting early signs of cancer in mammograms i did a story on it on one last year that was trialed and it caught cancers in 11 women that the human radiologists had missed um but it also by the way came up with hundreds of false positives because of the way data works it wasn't allowed to have patient history so it didn't know that assist had already been ruled out but anyway it was it was and is astonishingly good at that now an AI tool that's designed to spot cancer does not have to be able to spit out a poem in the style of Taylor Swift does it right there you know and yet these two things end up in the same pot and I think that's got to change actually I think the way we talk about AI has got to become a bit more nuanced than it is okay so what's some of the language that we should be using then around AI because I agree with these new sort of um sectors and developments it's it does open up a whole new kind of lexicon that we haven't used before which you must have to think about probably more than anyone yeah i mean it's not for me i don't think to create a new language but i think a new language will come you know to google became a verb didn't it um and and i'm sure that that that will follow um but i you know i i think we are i think it's just it's all happening so fast it's i i sometimes feel like I live with one foot in the future and one foot in the past I'm you know I'm so lucky that I get to go and see these and these incredible innovations you know that are absolutely game-changing and then sometimes the other day I was sitting on a train and I was sitting next to some people who were in absolute awe about the wireless charging point on the table and the train that they could charge their phone on I just thought this what this is just a mind-blowing difference between what's coming and what there is yeah you know it's like the future's already here but it's not distributed evenly what have been the things that have what have the ai developments recently that have made your jaw drop well

8:48what has made my jaw drop in ai i tell you what really has made my jaw drop in ai actually but this isn't an innovation is is the utter sort of bun fight that's broken out worldwide um i was at the ai action summits in february in paris and and i was expecting it to not really be super interesting and it just turned into this uh this this incredible battle for supremacy with the eu wanting to position itself because you've got to bear in mind this was just after deep seek had come out and deep seek it was such an interesting story because i actually don't think that well in fact it's almost certainly not been done like on the cheap like they said it was you know this sort of six million dollar figure that was banded around um that was there was an awful lot that had gone into it prior to that that was perhaps its final training phase and i also think yeah they used they used old nvidia chips but they used a lot of them and and had they managed to get hold of some new ones i mean i don't know um i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't be able to say but they'd also used open source they'd used llama which is matters um open source um kind of platform for large language models and they also used uh another one from uh from bidey so they you know they they hadn't just sort of knocked together this this um this this ai tool on the cheap as as it sort of the narrative played out but in a in a weird way in a kind of always Trumpian way, the fact that they said they did has changed the game because suddenly everyone else goes, oh yeah, actually we probably can do it a bit cheaper and then you saw this big chunk of money fall off the value of NVIDIA which has made so much money out of making AI chips and sort of wobbled everybody else so I think there was a moment where Europe was like maybe we can, maybe the US isn't this superpower actually, maybe we can compete and the UK is going, oh maybe we can and you know there was a lot of jostling going on and then in comes jd vance on day two and delivers this absolutely blistering speech i mean i was it i was i've never been in a room like that where you could have heard a pin drop and everybody's faces their jaws were like my jaws you know he was like all oath what he said it was an absolute master class in oration i thought because he stood there and he said the US is in charge here we want to collaborate with you but only if you want to play out by our rules you know we're not going to mess about we're sick of you trying to regulate our stuff um like the end goodbye and walked out and it was just an extraordinary political moment and then he was followed by Ursula von der Leyen from from the European Commission who was you know who gave a really great speech but I think everyone was so gobsmacked by what they'd just seen and heard that it I don't know that it was as effective as as perhaps she would have hoped and then they had this big declaration that they all signed and the US and the UK didn't sign it and it just sort of turned into this kind of slightly just very strange slightly chaotic experience and I remember doing my my last live was on the 10 o 'clock news that night but it was 11 o 'clock of course in paris because they're an hour ahead and i was standing on the i was standing on the chancelize with the um arc de triomphe behind me and this and just as we were getting to the spot where we were going to film this massive rat ran past and i went oh there's rats and that my my my producer oh the rats are lovely rats are not lovely yeah i've met david attenbred the only animal on the planet he doesn't like a rat i'm listening to him rats are not lovely and she goes well don't worry about it what do you mean don't worry about it she said well you've got to stand there so just don't think about it so there i am standing on the shores of luce hoping that the rat's not going to come back and trying to explain to people what the hell has just happened at this at this ai summit and just i had this moment of thinking that life is very surreal isn't it Yeah, it's so interesting.

13:00And what do you, like, I mean, the UK's done, I think, you know, sort of fair play to that, was the first mover on kind of a lot of the AI agenda in terms of the safety, et cetera. What do you think the UK's place in the world, role in the world will be when it comes to AI? I think we are, I think we are still trying to figure that out, aren't we? I mean, under Rishi Sinek's leadership, I think the idea was that we were going to kind of be the referee.

13:32Now, under Starmer, we seem to be a bit more like, no, let's go for it. Let's have our own data centers. The problem that the UK has is, and I don't, well, maybe I do know the answer to this, but I'd be interested to know what you think. we are we are really good at startups and we have a really thriving tech scene here but we don't have a tech giant the closest we got was arm and we sold that to softbank in which is japanese so we you know where is our google or our microsoft or our meta why don't we have that we've got the we've got the brains here a lot of tech innovation has traditionally come from here yeah and and i whenever i meet like loads of people that i talk to actually i always ask them because i think it's really important you know what is your metric for success what do you want to happen here and they almost always say they want to be bought by google or by one of the tech giants and they hardly ever say we want to be google or meta or facebook or you know or Microsoft or whatever.

14:45And I find that quite sad, but I also think, I wonder if it's a cultural thing. Mustafa Salaman said to me that in the UK, we are too afraid of failure in a way that they're not in the US. He said in the US, if somebody hasn't really failed, you don't really want to work with them because you think they don't know how to fail and they don't know how to get over it. Whereas in the UK, if you fail at something, saying, oh, you've had it, haven't you? I mean, that sticks. You are for years, the person who failed, whatever it is that didn't work. And maybe that's a cultural thing. I also think we just don't have the money, do we?

15:22I mean, we don't have anything like the resources that they have in the US. Yeah, but I think it's a cultural ambitious thing before that. I mean, we don't have the money that the US does, but I think one of the biggest things that we actually lack is partly the skills of scaling. So I think the money is there to a degree. okay fine not at the really big sort of you know getting to the kind of google level of companies but actually we sort of you know it's it's partly getting the kind of like you know the 100 million to the 500 million kind of company is a place that we really struggle and a lot of that i actually think comes down to kind of like management skills and that's quite boring like you know people don't like you know scaling a company is quite hard work and it's quite sort of you know there's a lot of kind of like ops and logistics side of it i think it's a really interesting um question because we have got the capabilities to do it um but we just don't i think a lot of it kind of comes down to cultural and yeah management skills that's quite boring isn't it but i i mean i think we have a broader issue with management which which is beyond the tech sector and that is it's it's a totally different job isn't it to to anything else and we have a tendency to go okay you know here you are you've been um you've been i'm looking i'm just looking at your mouthwash over there you've been making mouthwash for 20 years you've made the perfect mouthwash you're brilliant so now we want you to stop making mouthwash and start managing other people who make mouthwash but you don't know how to do that what you know how to do what you really want to do is make the mouthwash because that's been your thing and it's i think it's it's kind of unfair to throw people into that situation where it feels like a promotion, but it kind of isn't because they're stepping into a completely different zone, isn't it?

17:12Yeah, and it's very different. I mean, I do think it's quite interesting, like two of the people that I really want to try and get on this podcast are Will Shue of Deliveroo and Matt Moulding of THG because what I think is fascinating about them is they had the idea, they've taken it all the way to being listed on the stock exchange and are still running those companies now. You know, that is a completely different sort of skill set of getting from zero to one, as Peter Thiel would say. So, yeah, I think it's interesting. But I think we can, and I think there are companies out there that are doing it.

17:42I think what Gymshark have done is really interesting. But a lot of this, three companies that I've just name-checked there are e-commerce companies, right? Like, yeah, we are a nation of shopkeepers. And, yeah, I think that's the tech side of it. We sort of, we lack a little bit. Yeah, do you know what? I had a really interesting chat the other day with the European Patent Office, right, who oversee the patent applications for 39 countries, including the UK. And they told me that they've just released an annual report with loads of information in it. Like, again, this is just surprising, the interesting conversations that you have.

18:17They said, despite our global kind of warm words towards open source, everyone is still obsessed with patents and protecting their idea. And they had about 200 ,000 patent applications last year from these 39 countries. And they said the most prolific company I thought was IBM because they loved their patents. But apparently it was Samsung. Samsung filed about 4 ,000 patent applications. And the whole of the UK only filed 2 ,000. Which really surprised me because I thought, hang on, you know, I keep hearing that we're a nation of innovators. Where are all our patents? Wow. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

18:59So Samsung has done twice as many as the whole of the UK. Gosh. I know. I don't, I mean, I don't have an answer to that, by the way, but I just thought I need to sort of dig into that bit because that really surprised me. There was a brilliant email that I used to subscribe to. It actually got bought out by somebody that did the top three patent applications. I mean, that's fascinating though, isn't it? Of what companies were applying for and why they might be doing it. And it is that stuff of trying to sort of, like you say keep one foot that's almost beyond the future yeah and actually another thing they told me was that this sort of idea of you know the crazy inventor in the garage coming up with these ideas is gone yeah like almost all of those patent those 200 ,000 patent applications were from big companies SMEs and researchers and you know institutions hardly any from individuals It's kind of sad, isn't it?

19:54It is. But I think that's very interesting, just how deep a lot of this technology is getting there. I slightly worry about politicians as well being able to understand any of it and so on. I really feel for them because I think they have such a difficult job trying to regulate and navigate something that's changing so much more quickly than legislation. can ever keep up with. I was invited to give evidence across parliamentary committee at the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and I was really struck by that. I think they are interested and dedicated but there are just no easy answers to any of this.

20:41I was talking about data and AI and this whole conundrum about how AI is only going to be good if it's trained on good data. But of course good data is extremely valuable and there's there's a huge amount of debate isn't there around what how do we do this do we you know what do we do um and and i could just see that you know that there there's no easy answer yeah and i suggested something and they said oh that's a good idea is anyone else doing that and i said well i don't think so oh maybe we could be first and I said well maybe but you know please don't just do it because I've just said it please look into it a bit more.

21:22A quick thanks to Octopus Energy for supporting this episode now a lot of people know about Octopus for their home energy products I have recommended people switch them for years but what you might not know is that they are now rolling out more products across home and businesses from solar panels EV chargers heat pumps so if you're thinking of upgrading your home or business and you are a Jimmy's Jobs listener you can ping Jimmy at octopus.energy and get the very latest deals and insights and if you're already on the journey with Octopus leave us a comment or a message I'd love to hear how it's going with their wider products all right back to the episode what do you think it will look like what what would you be saying to teenagers today about what skills they should be trying to learn when it comes to the future of work well i have a teenager um and i'm trying very hard to have these discussions i i i mean i think that probably things like coding are going to become less valuable because ai will be doing that um i think in some ways there is an argument that that the most human skills will be the most valuable won't they you know whether that is in creativity or whether that is in decision making um i think you know things like fact checking things all of those sort of research skills are probably going to survive i think because there there's going to be human oversight of what these or there should be anyway human oversight of what these tools are doing um and what are the most sort of exciting innovations that you've kind of seen like you've talked about health um tech quite a bit but what what are the things that could make a difference to people's day-to-day lives do you think am i allowed to talk about flying taxis yes oh good um so everyone thinks i'm a bit mad right a couple of years ago in fact a long time ago when gosh let me think about that one source a few years ago i did this story about a flying car and it was invented i've just i know i've just said that inventors and garages don't exist anymore, but it was invented by this guy in Slovakia, I think.

23:33And it basically, it's like a flying car. So it drives off a runway. It's got wings that come out the sides. It takes off. It flies from one airport to another, comes back down again. The wings pack away and it drives off into town. And this story, of course, did phenomenally well. I mean, huge numbers online and all of that. And everyone was very happy. And for a while, I think it was part of some BBC training course, examples of good journalism. And I was like, yeah, but it's a flying car. I mean, this is actually not difficult journalism, is it? I could just have said, here's a flying car, and it would have still done really well.

24:06The challenge with journalism is telling the stories that are more boring, but arguably more important. Anyway, they then asked me if I could ride in this flying car. I was like, yes! I got really excited about it. It was going to be me and Jean-Michel Jarre, of all people. I don't know why. and then unfortunately I didn't get my my run the flying car because BBC insurance people were like what and it turns out there isn't really an insurance policy for flying cars and I did have to very reluctantly agree that as a mother of three children although it would be a spectacular way to go probably it's something that I can't risk without insurance so unfortunately I've yet to go in that particular car anyway that is that has been bought by a Chinese company, actually, the tech for that.

24:56On a more realistic level, there are lots of plans afoot for, you know, a vertical takeoff and landing. So more like drone-like, I guess kind of helicopter-looking things, really, to go short distances. and the government has sort of said that there is a possibility legislation wise for the for this to be opened up i think it's next year i think it's 2026 yeah and clearly they're not shouting this from the rooftops i know but they haven't changed that either and there's lots of companies working on these sort of um i guess kind of short distance like drone travel things and everybody thinks i'm mad because nobody's ever seen one but i do think it might become one of those things that suddenly we will start to see because it's not it you know uber has been looking at it for ages that they i think they were going to try and do it at the paris olympics but it didn't happen in the end um there's lots of there's vertical aerospace as well exactly you can't i mean my flying car thing was it's interesting but you can't you can't have cars you know can you imagine the carnage at Heathrow, alongside all of your jets, you've got cars taking off.

26:15We just don't have the infrastructure for that. I know that. But the idea of this Eftol kind of travel, I think that will change lives, change the game, be easier to get around. Interestingly, actually, I was talking to someone in Ukraine. There was a really quite serious helicopter crash in Ukraine, and we were chatting about it. And he said, the thing is, in Ukraine, like traveling by helicopter is quite common. There's lots of helicopters buzzing around. I didn't know this. There's lots of helicopters buzzing around. So although crashes is obviously always awful, there's quite a lot of helicopters.

26:51Yeah. And I wonder whether we will start to see that with these, I don't know what to call them. What do we call them? Drone taxis. I don't know. You know, will it be a case that suddenly? And the other thing that I think is going to come sooner rather than later, and nobody believes in this either, is driverless cars. Do you? Because Elon Musk is always saying next year, right? He's been saying next year since about 2008, I think. Yeah, I know. But they are out, you know, they are already in the US and in China in taxi form, aren't they? You can get in a driverless taxi. Yeah, you can. I mean, I get it on my feed all the time, people that visit San Francisco trying their first Waymo.

27:29Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to, it's the right passage. Exactly. But how, it's kind of interesting with that stuff in a way that it's so slow. because it's like, well, why is that not here? And also is how quickly this stuff becomes normalised. I mean, in some ways it very nearly is here. You know, cruise control is so good on newer cars. There's one car, the Ford Mach-E, that you can drive on the motorways without your hands on the wheel. And I've done it. And basically it's called the blue zone. So when you're on the road that you can do it on, and the thing goes blue inside. There's blue lights that go on, and then you can take your hand off the wheel, and it just does it for you.

28:11It's really weird. And actually, it's kind of strange, because you don't really know what to do with your hands. Many, many, many years ago, I quit smoking, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, and I relived that sitting in this car. I literally don't know what to do with my hands. And we were filming it, and I was doing this piece to camera, obviously looking at the road, because if you don't look at the road, it tracks your eyes. If you're not looking at the road, you have to take control again. so they really monitor the sort of human at the wheel thing is is still the law anyway so i'm doing this piece of camera looking at the end i'm like gesticulating a lot i do anyway but i was trying to make the point that you know i'm not driving this car and people but the cameraman said to me i was people were driving fast like looking at me what is she doing i was quite surprised i didn't end up with a police escort but anyway it is currently the only car that you can do that on the UK roads but that is looking to change next year as well and I think it will you know and in a way once you once you accept driverless cars you can completely redesign the car because you don't need the furniture you don't need any of it you know maybe you end up with a pod that's more like a train carriage or you know cafe table I mean I've seen some amazing concept cars and they say the most dangerous time will be when it's half driverless car and half human car and what i have found have you been in one no oh okay so what what what you find with them is first of all you're really nervous and then you actually get quite bored because they they are they are much safer drivers yeah maybe maybe this is more about my own driving skills they're much safer drivers than i am and so you know you're coming up to your light and and you think i'll get across that light no it's gonna stop you know it never breaks the speed limit it never over Like it's totally, you know, the most conservative driver, which is good.

29:59Yeah, yeah. But that in itself causes accidents, I think, because people driving behind expect it to do the lights, expect it to go over the roundabout, because they would. And that is, that's a really interesting insight window into the future. Yeah, yeah, automated travel, I think, will be the thing that we will all notice. Are you a fan of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future? Hi, I'm Sonny, one of the producers behind the show. Have you ever thought my business deserves to be in the spotlight too? Well, you're not alone. Companies reach out to us all the time, asking us to create podcasts and digital video content for them.

30:37But until now, we've only taken on a limited amount of projects. But here's the good news. In 2025, we're expanding. Our production company, Boxlight, is now ready to help more businesses like yours tell their stories with high-quality white-label content. Curious to see what we can do or how much it might cost? Head over to boxlight.io. You'll find examples of our work and even a podcast calculator to explore your options. That's boxlight.io. We'd love to help you shine in 2025. Now, back to Jimmy. Now, I think you have one of the most interesting, important, and hardest jobs in the United Kingdom being the BBC's technology editor because you're at the vanguard of all the technology changes but then you're also responsible for explaining it to the entire UK public.

31:26How do you sort of get into the mindset of doing that? I think my job is actually quite simple in many ways because I'm talking to a very large thankfully audience of people who some of whom know lots about tech, some of whom know nothing about tech. And I feel like my job is to explain these issues as simply as possible. Because tech runs the world. And it shapes the way in which all of us experience the world. And yet so many people very proudly declare themselves non-techie. and I want to change that because I think it's it's not possible to live in 21st century UK world and not be techie you have to know a little bit about not only the technology but these powerful companies behind it who have never been elected and have such an enormous role in everything and we see how much chaos ensues when it goes wrong we saw the crowd strike outage last year that grounded airlines, cancelled operations, closed banks, you know, it was absolute chaos.

32:40So I think my position is quite unique because I don't work for a tech company, I don't work for a government, I'm not here to try and persuade people to think a certain way or buy a certain product, I'm just here to say here's some information, make up your own mind and what I would like to try and get across is one point if you have to know one thing about this subject here's what I think it should be now that doesn't mean I only know one thing about the subject because I you know I can't just pick the first thing that I find out and go that'll do I do a lot of reading listening talking to people I'm very lucky that I'm able to talk to the you know the people who are at the coalface of tech and and the leaders in that world and and I suppose my job is to distill that into if you've got 30 seconds what what is it that I think would be really useful for you to know and how does that change depending on the audience do you how much do you think of it ahead of time if you're going on the today program versus say the six o 'clock news it changes because you're thinking about well first of all the today program's in the morning and the six o 'clock news is in the evening.

33:54So a story may well be quite different by that point in the day. I think there's also a timing issue. You know, it's always easier to have more time, isn't it? So on the radio, you might get three minutes. On the telly, you might get one minute 15. So it's a much more structured and short form of storytelling. I think television is a very different medium to radio. it's also there's some i think there's something less intimate about it and so i structure tv quite differently to the way i structure radio and it's it's kind of less conversational because you don't have time to get into a chat you know you might have one question one answer so everything that you think you need to say you've got to get into your first answer in case you don't get another question and i mean that's interesting as well because so much of radio now is being filmed as well right so how do you kind of think about the sort of different audiences also you're posting a lot social media as well now as well right so you've got this whole other aspect um how do you think about the different platforms that you've got to post to for socials social media is is really interesting at the moment i think it's massively in flux and i think the changes that have been made to X have sort of had a really wide ripple effect so not only are I think fewer people using X certainly fewer people in my world are using X and as a result they're going elsewhere so many more people are using LinkedIn I'm finding so that's become a much bigger platform for me than it used to be um and then there's you know smaller um platforms like blue sky which seems to be steadily but slowly i would say growing threads metas equivalent which um people seem to dip in and out of as well um i mean i think you can be more personal on social media can't you because you write something or you post something you share some content and people reply and some of them want to know more and some of them actually want to know less and you can tailor your response then to you know what exactly is it that you want to know about this story but you can't do that in broadcasting broadcasting is is still a it's still a sort of one-to-many um um medium isn't it a lot of the time and so you don't have that um you don't sort of get that audience that that immediate audience reaction when i do live events you know i'm always so interested i love the q a at the end I mean they terrify me but I love them because you then you get to know exactly what it is that people are asking and and that not only informs my reporting but it kind of informs me as a human being as well yeah no I often think actually like when you post when you've got guests coming on you can get some really interesting questions and ideas from people about it why do you think LinkedIn is increasing in such kind of prominence I think it's partly the sort of diaspora from X um I think it's just I I wonder if we are of a certain age Jimmy where you know let's be honest um perhaps it's something that you fall into at a certain age or stage of your career and your journey um I I sometimes wonder I I I think a lot about the way people represent themselves in social media and I think maybe it's quite healthy to have a space that's less personal and I've noticed when people start to get very personal on LinkedIn it doesn't always go well does it the comments are a bit like this isn't Facebook mate you know this isn't Instagram and and sometimes I think when you're posting to Instagram there's a kind of tendency to go here's this picture and it tells you about a time in my life when everything was awful whereas on linkedin you'll go here's this picture and it made me think about resilience you know you kind of it's it's a sort of more professional and um and and and i guess yeah less intimate medium and and and maybe that's a bit of a palate cleanser once you've poured your soul out everywhere else yeah no it's i think that's interesting why do you i mean how do you think in in the morning so let's come at this from two ways so i'm going to break a bit of a interview rule here of asking two questions but I can't guarantee I'll remember both how do you how do you sort of decide in the morning what to kind of cover like talk us through the sort of morning editorial meeting and then off that how do you then think I've got a poster threads blue sky twitter you know all I mean a huge amount of your job must be just sort of posting um so there are two ways in which I'm gonna also reply with two answers there you go uh there are two ways in which this works first of all my job i'm the on-screen editor so my uh priority is broadcast and uh and and digital as well but it's not really my job to do this all of the kind of on-the-day news if it's significantly big news i do it but you know i'm not the only person in my team there and there is a strong team of people who decide um primarily i would i would say for online i guess you know which is the which is the uh which has the biggest running order if you like yeah um they will decide in the morning what they think they're going to cover that day and that that process of deciding is really quite collaborative so they will distill down two or three stories that they think might make and then they'll go to the other editors and the website to see where it fits with the news agenda of the day um because there is you know there are so many factor that i i hear so often oh why wasn't this on the bbc and it drives me mad because first of all how do you know it wasn't on the bbc you know were you really across all like i mean five million platforms you know i i even i don't know that it wasn't on the bbc which bit of the bbc do you mean do you mean you didn't hear it on radio too when you had your kids in the car on the way to school at 8 30 right quite possibly it wasn't on them um and the other thing that that is really worth saying is it depends what else is going on in the world right so as we talk now we're in tariff turmoil aren't we and so that is dominating the news and rightly so and so that means that it just makes it a little bit harder to get other stuff on because there's not as much room um and i think it also depends on audience interest you know there are people whose job is to to to really very closely monitor what audiences are interested in and you find and in fairness i'm a human i'm probably the same there's there'll be like an obsessive interest in something for a bit and then it's like i'm quite bored with this now you know and so you're kind of surfing these waves and what do people actually want to want to read and know and the and the other thing of course is is the level of of knowledge that you need to to understand a particular story i mean i was really struck by um this this feels like a hundred years ago now but do you remember when rishi sunak called the general election yes i think it was about a year ago yeah yeah it was at the podcast show it happened oh was it i remember thinking my god and i saw nick romington and amal were both doing a thing there and we sort of spent lunch time trying to work out whether he was actually going to go and do it but yeah yeah well that so that day he called the general election and and caught everybody by surprise uh certainly me i i was i had my bets on it being towards the end of the year anyway whatever um that happened and the immediate um in the immediate aftermath the most googled question was what is a general election and and I I was I was really quite thrown by that in some ways but it also reminded me why what we do is so important you know you might think it's a stupid question you wouldn't ask it you I wouldn't I wouldn't have the courage to sit in a room and go what is a general election actually but people were really wondering and so So I think, you know, there's no shame in our job saying, right, let's just start with what this is.

42:07And then everyone who knows it goes, oh, yeah, come on, BBC, you know, we're not five. And everyone who doesn't know it goes, thank God somebody's told me what this thing is because it's really embarrassing that I don't know. But it's not embarrassing to not know something. It's the BBC's, it's part of the BBC's job is to make sure you do know. Well, it's a bit like the day after Brexit as well. The most Google question was, why is the European Union? Oh, a bit late. exactly um what's so so what is the job what is the job of the bbc technology editor um i ask myself that quite often uh so so my job really my i am the on-screen editor which means it's my job to to to bring original journalism to the bbc's platforms and also to reflect the news the big news of the day so that means at quarter to six every single morning my alarm goes off and I check my phone to see if anything's happened overnight and if the Today programme might want it.

43:05And if the Today programme does want it, they're on air at six in the morning. So it could be any. So basically, I've got potentially a 15 minute window to find out whatever it is that's happened overnight. Because I do sleep, by the way. But of course, you know, that is not really the moment to go cold into a story. You do not want to get that text at quarter to six and think, oh, what is artificial intelligence? Right. You know, I sort of I've got to know I've got I've got to have enough backgrounds to be to be finding out what the latest is at that moment rather than starting from scratch. And so that means I think a lot of my job is actually quite academic.

43:46I read, I listen, I go to as many things as I can. And I talk to as many people as I can. And I try to have a base understanding of a lot of subjects. Now, that does not mean that I have a degree level understanding in all of these subjects, because technology is an enormously broad church to cover. And, you know, if you think about it, it's sort of everything from social media, online safety, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity. I mean, it goes on and on. and and my brief really is to be the person who is most across as many of those things as I can be so that when something does happen I can say right well here's the new thing that's happened and and here's how we kind of knew it might be coming because of all the stuff that's happened before but all of that I have to know already really and what are the sources that you're then checking at that kind of like quarter six in the morning to kind of get up to speed on something um well it really does depend what it is i mean it's it's very helpful when it's been uh flashed by other news organizations of course i you know we we use i would look at reuters i would look at pa i would look at the guardian i'd look at the times you know it's it's always useful to see who who else is covering what and and there is always a slight vulnerability when it hasn't been covered and you're like oh okay it's going to be me then is it doing this am i sure and and and that is a That is really quite a difficult call to take.

45:14They say about TV presenters that they earn their money when things go wrong. I guess I earn my money by being that person who can make that call. Last summer, when the crowd strike outage happened, I was almost caught out by that. I woke up, I checked my phone, and there were reports of some problems in Australia. I read this article, and I thought, oh dear, that sounds bad. Poor Australia. and it was a Friday morning and I had a really really busy week at work and I was staying in London I was in a hotel um because I've been doing something the night before and I thought I'm not gonna I'm gonna treat myself I'm gonna go and have a hotel breakfast I'm gonna have a swim so I'm sitting there in my tracksuit and having my hotel breakfast like contemplating my swim and my phone just starts blowing up because of course as you know this story is sort of following the sun as people are waking up nothing is working and uh the the uh the deputy editor in the today program who i know really well rang me and he said do you think we should do something on this and i said yeah i think we should and he said what what's what what's going on what is it and i and i had to say i don't know i think that's the point nobody knows but i will uh i will try and find out something to tell you in the next 15 minutes so i had 15 minutes so forget the swim go back to my hotel room and i'm just like i'm the more i'm looking into this fingers are really pointing at crowd strike lots of fingers and somebody sent me and this is a good thing about working for a big platform i think people know the bbc and so they send you know they do get in touch when things are going on somebody sent me a page that linked to a crowd strike uh customer website and and he said there's a fix on this it must be them because they it's this page has appeared and it's issuing a fix but I couldn't get into it because it was passport protected obviously I don't have a cried strike account and I and I sat there and I thought nobody's nobody is saying it in in you know in public I guess you know nobody none of the papers are running this nobody's running this line but I really do think it's them do I do it or do I not and um just as I was about to go on air this guy sent me a screenshot of this CrowdStrike page and I saw it and I thought okay I'm gonna do it so I think it was about 16 minutes bars date and and it was me and Nick Robinson and we're you know we sort of run through what we know and then I said and he said do you think does it sound like a cyber attack and I said it's too early to call but the suggestions are that it isn't a cyber attack and there are lots of fingers pointing at this company called CrowdStrike and there's a suggestion that maybe there's something that's gone wrong with the code and it's used in a lot of and it's reacting badly with Microsoft powered computers of which there are millions and I came off air and I kind of chewed my fingers down to the bone for the next three hours thinking I really hope I haven't got that wrong and we were chasing crowd strike and they they disappeared and they'd gone to ground nobody was answering anything and I thought oh my god I'm going I'm going to get sued this is the moment where I'm going to get sued and then of course they came out with a statement and it turned out that I was right and I exhaled quite significantly at that point i was still too early for gin but i thought thank goodness but but actually you know that's part of being a journalist isn't it is making those big calls and i didn't do it lightly um and and i wouldn't do it i wouldn't i wouldn't have done it if i hadn't really felt very certain that this was the direction of travel yeah how um how interesting have you had any other sort of similar kind of calls have you had any times you got it wrong have I had times and I've got it wrong do you know what it's a bit like when you get stuff wrong in tech it's it's little things that you sometimes get wrong so I came I came um I came back from like seven months of maternity leave and my first day back at the BBC and in fact it was my first day really in this job because I got the job before I went to maternity but then I was off um Elon Musk decided to be wanted to buy Twitter and I was sitting there in my in my house because I had BBC you have to do lots of training um regular training you know uh I don't know legal stuff um you know how to how to work in a crowd how to work safely when you're around people all it's it's important stuff and it's mainly online it takes it takes a morning of your life and all of mine had expired so my plan for my first day back was like I'm just going to get up to speed with all of this training because i don't want to hit a wall where suddenly they go oh you haven't done your crowd safety training so you can't go and stand outside parliament right that's what happens so that was my plan so i'm sitting there in my fluffy slippers i get this call and i was like okay i suppose this is kind of my job isn't it um and uh and it's sort of been mad ever since anyway one of the stories i had to do really early on was about cookies you know cookies that track you online and i i misdescribed it on air as a i said it was a program and it isn't it's a text file oh it was you know the the pasting that i got and i was so annoyed at myself because i know that yeah and really it was a human error because i just have seven months of work you know looking after a small baby and i just hadn't been thinking about cookies but yeah i mean when you make a mistake you know it i think people say it's a bit like you know if the archers on radio four that that gets picked apart for every tiny little sort of you know inaccuracy and i think tech's kind of the same people who know their tech really know tech yes and they and they and they they really get quite offended if you make a mistake and rightly say you know i don't want to make mistakes i don't do it deliberately i'm not a troll I mean look we get picked up on all of our editing and stuff all the time I have to point out we aren't the BBC like it's not as kind of professional as um as that what's it what's it like you also spend a lot of time in kind of Silicon Valley interviewing sort of tech giants and so on you've done Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, how do you approach those interviews like how do they come about like is it you pitching or is it them coming to you which I imagine partly happens at the BBC see and how do you think how am i going to get something out of tim cook or satya nadela so it's a mixture of both and it takes a long time so we would we call it a bid so you would bid for a tech leader and you know it can take years they'll they'll start with a no and then they might go to well well maybe one day and then they'll and then you'll go well like you know i'm seeing them doing stuff for like the us media and they're like yeah yeah well they're not really doing any uk media and you go yeah but we are global and you and you kind of and then and then you start meeting you know you're on the right lines when you start meeting more and more senior people so you get sort of pushed up the food chain a bit and i've had i've had dinners and late night dinners in town with various senior executives at tech giants and it's weird because it's like an audition in a way and and they're all very relaxed and chilled but make no mistake you are being auditioned and then if you get further then you start meeting more people and then they start thinking about it it's a really long process so i've just i've just done a quite big story actually with the founder of roblox and that took two years of you know not not continuously obviously that would be super annoying but every now and then oh you know i'm still interested and then finally one day they came back to me and said you know that thing you've been asking we think we're ready now but you have to work at it and you have to build those relationships and that's another thing like when things go wrong that is not the time at which anyone is going to start talking to you if you haven't already got those relationships you're not going to start them when a company is in panic mode and everything is locked down you know you have to have your friends in these places before the uh the poo hits the fan because that's not the moment where sorry i don't know if you're allowed to swear on this podcast oh you can oh okay um because that's not the moment at which you know suddenly people are going to open up to you and I think that the two things that the first time I met Tim Cook was super interesting actually because I met him as part of a meeting he'd had in town so it wasn't a broadcast meeting it was just the meeting with the media with a very small number of people and then they phoned me up I must have passed the audition because they phoned me up an hour later and said oh he's going to um he's going to meet some women who have who are graduating from a some sort of women in stem program that apple's been running and it's in regent street would you would you like to come and i was like look i'm not going to get that on air it's great it's lovely but i won't get that on air so the only the only reason i'll come is if i can interview him and they were like well that won't happen i went okay fair enough well thanks for inviting me um and then they phoned me back and said maybe you can meet you can have eight minutes there's something about eight minutes rishi sunak also gave me eight minutes like this what is this about eight minutes maybe i should have given you eight minutes yeah yeah exactly no i find like i yeah i find it interesting i think with that there is a eight it'll almost certainly run to ten probably yeah kind of thing yeah i i don't i don't know i don't know i don't know what it is anyway and they were really they were really nervous about it i couldn't they said you can't do it on telly you can only do it for radio and they said if you they gave me a list of things if you ask if you ask anything that's not on this on these subjects you will be hauled out of that room so fast okay um anyway went and sat down with him and i have i have a battered old audio recorder which has traveled the world with me i love it and it's super it the audio quality is brilliant it's not sexy yeah it's you know it's it's like i don't know hand sizes it's bigger and fatter than a phone it's chunky but the and and it's got a big microphone that comes with it that occasionally i get problems with airports out because people think of the taser anyway i so i sit down with him and i get this thing out and he is like i'm bear in mind i'm like i've got eight minutes he picks up this record he's like this is amazing i love this where'd you get this from i'm like oh this is my bath as old being as he can anyway can i talk to you about you know turning it over intelligence with it yeah yeah it's like i just love it's so tactile he starts i'm like don't touch the levels do not anyway he was just very captivated by it so when i when i did this story and we had a really got a really nice interview out of him i did get more than eight minutes in the end um and when i ran this interview a part of it i mentioned that he loved this um this this audio recorder and for some reason that really seemed to strike a chord with people and I suppose it's like it's such a little detail I don't really know what made me mention it but I guess it's a bit about the man you know he's a hardware guy he likes gadgets he likes tech and he was genuinely very interested and the other thing about it is because it's so old it's got an audio jack so you need wired headphones and when I got there my headphones had broken and Apple that scrambled about bless them and they found me a pair of wired headphones and I I said to him you know I think I've got the Apple's last pair of wired headphones in the UK.

56:43And he went, no, no, we still sell them. I went, oh, good, good to hear. And then apparently a few months later, he was in Milan, I think, on a tour. And he walked into the Apple store there and there was a wall of accessories and he noticed that on the wall was these, you know, they still sell the wired headphones. And apparently he said, tell Zoe from the BBC, we still sell them in Milan. So there you go, we're into him, best friends. no no but I remember so I met him before he was meeting to his mayor at number 10 and it was he was completely captivated by his picture of the queen on the wall and he said oh you know I've just been watching the crown etc and I we were sort of chatting about that and so on I was like well do you want to see a bit of the building and so on so we went on this tour beforehand and I bet you loved that oh yeah exactly and I was like this is the most soft power example of the United Kingdom here it's like queen netflix and also taking tim cook around uh number 10 and it was all to do with the sort of battersea opening in 2016 and stuff so it was quite an important um meeting um but yeah it is but it's funny how you build that relationship and it must be hard because you're like i don't want to go in too hard on the eight minutes that i've got um but then it's like you also need to kind of like hold them to account as well right it's this really sort of tricky balancing act I was on a trip recently where I met I think I probably shouldn't name in shame so I'll try not to but I met a no in fact I think it might be obviously it was anyway so I mean I mean on a very small trip with a bunch of journalists and we are sitting in the room and we've got one question each to one of the tech giant leaders and you know one of one of the one of the big ones right and and uh i'm listening to these questions and and the person before me asks you know something about cricket and i was like you you know i obviously this is a great topic of conversation i i live with someone who's obsessed with cricket i do understand but this person you've got one question and that's the question don't ask about the cricket i said is there a danger that the legacy of the legacy of ai will be um unemployment and boredom that was my question and afterwards a couple of people came up to me and said you're so brave and i said this is my job this is literally my job you know you have to ask these people these questions they first of all they should expect you to ask these questions and secondly you are in a unique position where you're in a room with this person whose whose whose technology is upending the world you've got to hold them to account i think yeah you know the time to talk about the cricket is is not that one question in that one moment and that that that's that's my job really interesting and they also think that they can brand anything that you know they can get away with sticking ai on it they will um ai again is one of those stories that's super interesting to audiences and then isn't and then is again and then isn't so i'm not going to name and shame on you but um yeah there are a lot i mean i was at something recently and they were proud of their they were proud of their ai they were go and have an ai coffee a coffee made by ai and i don't drink coffee but i'll make an exception so i go over to this thing and basically you feed into it what you like and then it prints out a recipe which it gives to a barista who makes your coffee and i did feel a bit like um did we really need the the ai element could i not have just said to this guy hi i like coffee with milk please yeah yeah strip out all the human element of it um if If the BBC gave you a blank check to make a technology documentary.

1:00:38Oh, yes, please. Are you listening? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hopefully. What would you make it on, do you think? A blank check to make a tech documentary? Or I suppose any documentary. I mean, just what's something that's kind of under... Would you like to make Tomorrow's World for 2025? I'd love to make Tomorrow's World. That would be so cool, wouldn't it? Yeah. That would be so cool. I loved that show. I think in a way it got me interested in tech, actually. I remember watching it with my dad. He was quite an early adopter in his way. We had a BBC computer, BBC B computer, sorry, at home. Oh, yeah.

1:01:15And I remember it was massive and it took ages to load anything. And we had little games on cassettes. And I don't really know what he got it for, but I played games on it. and I think it sort of in its way it got me very interested in what this was you know what the point of it was um so yeah I'd love to do a show like that um but I think the the the thing with tech is on the one hand it's become such an enormous subject but on the other hand it's become part of the fabric of everything else hasn't it and and less of a kind of you know for years it was the and finally i remember i i wasn't there but i have seen one of our earlier tv reports where it was about a man who ordered a pizza using the internet and now it would be well what you know why would we run that story but it would be who was the man or what was on the pizza it would not be the fact that the internet was used to you know and i think that's right actually i think that's that's the direction of travel that we should be going in we should tech shouldn't necessarily be its own house um but it does it does mean that i guess this sort of you know what is a tech theme show one week it would be health care one week it would be science one week it would be global politics you know i i used to my my my big um my big sort of concern whenever i book any time off used to be like what if elon musk dies but now i think actually if elon musk died it would probably be global politics yeah i mean i would have part of it but it wouldn't be the big tech story that perhaps it would have been five years ago yeah i mean i think this whole kind of technology meets politics and so on we could we could do a whole nother hour but that has been going on for ages i mean i remember when wikileaks came out yeah and people were sort of saying to us oh you know it was an it was an email leak is that does that make it a tech story and we were like well no i don't think it does it's it's you know it's what was in the emails it's not the email itself and I think that for me marks a bit of a shift in my thinking about how these stories have changed you know what I mean and that evolution is still ongoing you know the AI cancer tool what's important that it was AI or that it found cancers in 11 women that's the bit you remember isn't it people being more of the story than the technology yeah that's a shift in news generally I think and maybe rightfully so it's much more it's become more of a personal thing how does it affect me how does it affect us that's really interesting development.

1:03:53What do you think you might write a book on? Oh, I've already got a book idea, but I can't tell you about it because someone else will write it. Tell me afterwards. Yeah, I'll tell you afterwards. What I will tell you is that I have already written a book. A friend of mine for Christmas ordered me a book that had been written by AI. It's this kind of company that does it as a joke. So you upload a few details of the life of anybody you want and a picture of them and it prints you out 240 page book written by ai and um i ended up doing a news story on it actually because i found it so bizarre it was really strange it's sort of it was what i've learned is reading 240 pages of ai generated content is a real pain a lot of it is repetitive a lot of it is it's just mad it just goes off on a tangent completely but some of it was quite alarming to someone like me who makes content for a living I suppose because it was in my voice you know the good bits obviously were in my voice and it mentioned the names of my kids and it it sort of hooked back to my life but it wasn't me and it's got my name on it and my my picture on the front cover and it wasn't me and and it um it was it was a very eye it was very interesting eye eye opening experience I suppose to look at this this thing that had been done in my name but but actually had nothing to do with me at all you know if anything the copyright belongs to the company not me yeah um i had no claim over it whatsoever i hadn't written it i hadn't approved it you can't buy it by the way it's it's it's a it's the firm only sells it to the person who commissions it they reckon they've sold 150 000 of these books in less than a year there's good money in it um so i don't need to write a book anymore no no not always both anyway Anyway, do you worry about sort of your job being automated?

1:05:41Yeah, yeah. I think if it's done smartly, it could work well. You know, I can only be here right now sitting here talking to you. Maybe 10 AI clones of me could be off doing other things while I'm doing this. And that would be hugely boosting my brand and maximizing, I guess, the work that I can do. but ultimately they'd probably be cheaper than me wouldn't they yeah and journalism is I don't know journalism is changing you know I think it's more important than ever and I also feel like it's becoming less valued than ever and that that does make me sad but that's not an AI problem that's a that's a cultural problem yeah and I like well a couple of weeks ago actually I spent a day at the royal courts of justice because i was trying to get into a court hearing um regarding a dispute between apple and the home office i spent six hours sitting outside that courtroom um and we weren't let in in the end but they have now acknowledged that it took place because the government wanted it to take place in secret because national security issues um even though it's the world's worst kept secret because everybody knew about it already and people are talking about it um and you know i sat there with a handful of journalists all from mainstream media and um and a couple of privacy campaigners and i felt like this is actually really important this is this is something that affects everybody's privacy in the uk and indeed it's also a discussion about national security and how do we protect how do we protect the country in the face of that is a debate to be had um and and yet the people who are here are the old school journalists yeah they're doing it and and that is not an ai job you know sitting outside that courtroom was a me job completely so from from courtrooms sitting on benches as a kind of final question for a young person wanting to kind of break into sort of technology media etc um what kind of events should they be going to and what should they be doing?