33. Mustafa Suleyman: Will AI save or destroy humanity?

27:22And so I'm really playing this sort of constant translation role in order to steward the big picture vision. And I think that's quite an important thing to keep in mind because much as people are scared about the potential outcomes, they're also scared about the complexity of these ideas. Everyone's like, oh, it's complicated AI, I could never do it. It's just nonsense. It's like totally accessible. There are scores of videos online. You could watch two or three hours of videos. And if you're enough, you can get through roughly the big picture of like, what is this system trying to do? And, you know, I'm very lucky to have been doing that for 15 years now.

27:58And I have a pretty good technical understanding of everything that's going on in the field. And I think that's available to a lot of other people. And we should be pursuing it because that's core to containment that, you know, you have to understand something in order to be able to steward it. One of the interesting things, and many interesting things in your life, is you left Oxford after only a year or so to set up something called the Muslim Youth Helpline. And worked for that, I guess, for three years. And would love to know a little bit more about that stage. It's a fascinating thing to do.

28:28What was it doing? Why Muslim Youth? Why was it such an attractive thing that you were prepared to throw away your undergraduate degree? What did your parents think about this whole thing? I mean, tell us a bit about that stage of your life. Yeah, so I was raised as a very strict Muslim. My mom was a convert well before she met my dad. So, you know, the strongest type. And yeah, when I got to Oxford, I had managed to leave the religion. And, you know, in my philosophy, discovered human rights principles, and just found it tremendously inspiring. I was like, here is a language and theory of justice that applies to everybody, not just Muslims.

29:07We are not the chosen race. And that always made me kind of uncomfortable and confused. But this gave me an intellectual framework for moving away from religion. I became a very staunch atheist. But during my kind of philosophy training, I also got quite frustrated at how theoretical and abstract the work was. And I wanted to kind of do good now. I was truly eager and motivated to have a positive impact. And there were a couple of other people I met at Oxford who were already working on a small helpline. And I decided to quit, move to London and help them full time. Was it a difficult time in your life where people thought this is crazy?

29:44He's left university. Nothing's going to work out for him. He's floating around. Was that a difficult period? And also related to that, Mustafa, what do your mother in particular think of you suddenly unfinding God, as we might say? That was a very challenging one. But, you know, I think going through sort of secondary school, it was quite difficult for my parents to understand what they had produced. They were just like, why don't you like my mom was like, why don't you leave school at 16? You know, get a trade? You know, why are you messing around with all these ideas? She was really eager for me to like get a good trade.

30:22And that's how you'll be safe. Like, be a plumber, you know. And so I think they sort of didn't quite grasp why I would want to go to Oxford, why I was doing philosophy and theology. So by the time the Muslim Youth Helpline hit, I mean, that was like, what on earth are you doing? So they were definitely confused by that. But the Muslim Youth Helpline, to me, it was a secular, non-directional, non-religious effort. It is a very simple, practical tool. It took traditional counseling and peer-to-peer support practices and just skinned it with a little bit of faith and culturally sensitive language.

31:00So it was sort of Samaritans for Muslims. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like that. But the key thing was it was supposed to be non-directional, which it was. Everyone understood that this was about Sunnis and Shias and people from Bangladesh and people from Sudan and Arabs and Malaysians working together in the common interest to provide support. and it was non-religious. That was really the main goal here is to move beyond sectarianism. Mustafa, thank you very much. Can we take a quick break? At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve.

31:43You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. BJ's Wholesale Club makes holiday hosting so easy, we called in the ultimate host to talk about it. Mrs. Claus here. You think Santa has it tough delivering all over the world? Try cooking for hundreds of elves. Good thing BJ's offers low prices on all the menu must-haves, plus free same-day delivery on your first order of$100 or more.

32:19No more squeezing in trips to the store. The only squeezing here is the big guy into a suit after dinner. For terms, visit bjs.com slash holiday and get the same great prices online as in club. Hablas Espanol. Spreys to Deutsch. Condénosque. If you used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. with lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers. Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today.

32:52Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash Spotify, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash Spotify. Rules and restrictions may apply.

33:04Can I just, I mean, I'd like to bring in Alistair on this because Alistair's obviously got a very deep interest in mental health and I'd be interested to hear the two of you just chat for a second about that because why was it particularly mental health that you were drawn to? And the helplines are very particular things, a very particular way of doing good in the world. Yeah, well, it was just after 9-11. So it was sort of 2002. And all the talk was of where the next British Muslim threat might come from. There was a lot of Islamophobia, although we didn't have that word particularly for Islamophobia.

33:36You know, if you were British and Muslim, you were four times more likely to be in prison. there was this constant sort of fear and anxiety that there was a threat from within. And that, you know, that kind of motivated me. There were these basic issues that were getting dressed up as mass political issues. People were just fundamentally suffering bullying. They had difficult lives at home. They were struggling with sexuality. And on top of that came this huge sort of political narrative. And I think it was causing a lot of confusion. And that was really what I wanted to tackle. Would you say you've got good mental health?

34:13I would say that I have learned to manage my mental health. I've learned coping mechanisms that help keep me in moderate equilibrium, but it's certainly something I've always wrestled with, for sure. And wrestled upwards, moved upwards or moved downward or both? um you know i i think both i'm very driven and have a lot of energy but also you know i'm constantly wrestling with demons and darkness and difficult you know childhood and difficult you know memories and you know i'm sure as i'm sure many people are and what was it about islam that attracted your mother and what was it about islam that you just you decided it was not for you?

35:03I mean, it was very clear to me that the kind of like righteousness and the elite believers, I mean, I can remember the most basic question asking my dad when I was really young was like, well, what about the good people who aren't Muslim, but are going to go to hell? That doesn't seem right. They're not that bad. You know, like I was thinking about my friends at school, of course. And there's just no good answer, even to a child for any of these like really fundamental questions. And so I was always left like frustrated and it felt incomplete. You know, for my mom, she was friends with Cat Stevens.

35:42And when he converted to Islam, I think in like 1980 or something, she sort of followed that path and took his name and so on. So, you know, that was her sort of journey. This is not in the book. This is not in the book, but this is a freebie for you since you asked. But it fascinates me because I think that this whole thing about what we believe and how we believe it, how deeply we believe it. But I think it's one thing to be raised in a faith, but it's quite another one to choose a faith you're not raised in. It's definitely very different. Yeah. I mean, and many people choose, you know, sort of savior and choose the kind of support network.

36:22I mean, there is something very attractive about the idea that you can begin again and that you're going to be, you know, sort of supported and embraced by a group of people who are moving beyond race. I think it's very important in a lot of the Islamic narrative is like it's post race. You know, provided you believe this, we can all be equal, other than those, of course, who don't believe it. So, you know, I think that's very attractive to some people. But do they believe you're going to hell because you don't believe now? Well, I think over time, my mum has sort of left the faith as well when I was a bit older in my 20s.

36:59So probably not, but I think my dad probably does, which is a funny thought. And how do they feel about your kind of mega success and the sort of millions in the bank and all that stuff? You know, I'm fairly nonplussed. I mean, I think they're busy doing, you know, you know how it is, they're sort of doing their day-to-day life, just like any other, you know, older parents these days, busy with the small things like fixing the washing machine and so on. You wouldn't just say, listen, let me, if he's broke, I'll buy you a new one. Oh, of course. Yeah, no, no, I've done all of that. Yeah, yeah, of course.

37:30No, I bought them houses and all the rest of it. Yeah, definitely. There's clearly, or not clearly, but there seems to me to be a through line from the Muslim Youth Helpline to the latest product which you've developed with AI, which is Pi. And Pi, for people who don't use it, is a large language model. But unlike ChatGBT, it's less about spewing information, and it's more about the AI developing an empathetic human relationship. In fact, it feels a little bit like a helpline. I mean, is there a sort of connection between that very first thing that you did at 20 and what you're doing now that you're applying a new technology to a similar issue that you care deeply about?

38:14Yes, in a way there is. I mean, I think that, you know, in the future, everybody is going to have a personal intelligence, you know, an AI that essentially functions as a chief of staff. It will help to schedule and coordinate and plan and book and buy. It will teach you. It will provide you with, you know, advice, but also support and be a companion. And so we've started with an empathetic and kind and supportive AI. Certainly that's inspired by some of the stuff I did earlier in my career. But really what I wanted to do was demonstrate that AI can actually be good. I mean, it really can be controlled.

38:56the behaviors can be engineered with very nuanced and precise tones so if you use pi you can really see that it's quite boundaried it's super respectful it's very empathetic it's very hard to push it to be offensive or abusive in any way it's virtually impossible i mean we don't actually suffer any of the jailbreak the red teaming attempts that many of the other llm large language models face. And so that was really my quest is to sort of demonstrate that we can actually reproduce, you know, a very controlled set of behaviors. And I do worry sometimes that maybe like many of us, you are very, very powerful at seeing the challenges and the problems.

39:43And then you feel, because we live in an optimistic age and publishers and others expect it, that you have to produce a very clear 10-point conclusion on how to sort it out. But sometimes it feels to me a little bit like, you know, what I remember in Afghanistan, which is people would provide an incredible analysis of everything that was going wrong in Afghanistan and then have a 10-point thing at the end saying, notwithstanding the fact that, you know, Pakistan's destabilizing and televised, or my own life. I write a whole book about politics, about how miserable it is and how grim it is. And then I feel forced to produce a sort of concluding thing with a positive story about what we can do to sort it out.

40:19Do you ever fear that you've sort of talked yourself into optimistic solutions, but that actually if someone were to read it in 100 years time, that the thing that would be truest and most powerful are your analysis the problems rather than your solutions? I think that's a fair point. I think if you read the book, I don't think you can accuse me of being an optimist or a pessimist, depending on which page you read. And I think that that's an honest look at both sides of the coin, right? This is the reality. And I opened the book with this idea of pessimism aversion. We have to stop this false narrativizing, good or bad, this catastrophizing or this techno, you know, optimistic utopia, and it's all going to be wonderful.

41:05And we have to actually engage with the very nitty gritty practical reality of how these huge incentives produce technologies which default to proliferation. And we have to look at those consequences. And then we have to decide collectively what that should mean for how we manage governments and the future of the nation state. So it's too simplistic a frame to say, are we optimistic or pessimistic? It's much more important to rip apart the detail of my proposals around how I'm actually suggesting we do containment. Yeah. Well, just on that then, I'll hand back to Alistair. It would be lovely to hear you talk a little bit more about the 10 practical policy suggestions you have about how to contain AI.

41:49But I think my fundamental problem with most of them is that you're assuming goodwill and cooperation and you're assuming that it doesn't proliferate pretty quickly to some bad actors who don't give a monkey's and are going to push ahead for advantage. And page after page, when I find myself noting, I just think, whoa, that's pretty hopeful there. That sentence is saying, you know, if we can do this, if we can do that. I'm thinking all the time, wait a sec, am I sure that North Korea or China or Dubai is going to play ball with this idea? Well, I mean, I'm not sure that we're sure of anything in this world, right?

42:26So I think that one has to make proposals which, you know, are both practical, but they clearly lean towards a hopeful outcome, right? I mean, we're trying very hard to lay out a roadmap for what containment looks like. And that is going to require cooperation. Because if your assessment is correct, which is that nation states are fundamentally zero sum, will always be competitive, and will always be opposed to one another, then it really is all bets are off because we're about to create extremely powerful tools that are inevitable over the next century. I mean, it might not happen this decade or two decades, but over a century scale, it really does turbocharge many, many, many actors, big and small.

43:10And we have to contend with that. I mean, I think I've read the book in much the same way, I think, as Roy did, feeling very, very alarmed and pessimistic as I sort of traveled with you through a lot of the kind of both the history, but more so what's happening now. and then along comes this 10-point plan which I did I agree with Roy I think is so reliant on the people that you would need to implement such a plan in every country in the world because they they're going to be worried about this threat to the nation state I think that's something that a lot of people are thinking about and then you have this lovely line which I you know faced with the abyss geopolitics can change fast in the teeth of world war ii peace must have felt like a dream Now, that is true.

44:00It must have felt like that. But at the same time, there was back then the sense of a global structure which emerged from it. And there was time. What I feel with what you're describing the first three quarters of the book is that we're slightly running out of time. Now, am I just being too pessimistic here? Am I not falling enough into the pessimism aversion trap? Look, I think you're right that time is against us. And I think that the pace of change is phenomenal. And everybody can now see that, particularly in the last 18 months. But the same trajectory is also true on synthetic biology, which I think is a decade or so behind where large language models are in terms of being able to generate arbitrary compounds, which are of enormous value, just in natural language instruction.

44:52So yes, in that sense, it is a warning, and it is a provocation. The goal is to basically say, if I'm wrong, then propose an alternative path. What does the non-competitive, or let's say the cooperative path to resolution look like? And I think that the comparison to the Second World War is appropriate, because it was sort of inconceivable that there would be peace. And yet peace was found. And out of that, over a decade during the 50s, many of the world's most significant institutions were born, which have driven untold prosperity and progress. The problem is we're mere mortals, right? So if we resign ourselves to inaction and fear and heartbreak, then we won't get anything done.

45:42So you have to be hopeful and positive. Yeah, but you also have to be realistic about the world in which we're operating, particularly at the political level. And, you know, you make the point that for something like climate change, we kind of have the metrics. We know what bad looks like, and we know then we can work out the things to avoid bad. With this, because it has happened so quickly, we don't really have the same metrics. I don't know what a bad AI outcome or a good AI outcome looks like. And I don't know who's meant to be explaining that to me. Yeah, I think that the world is catching up rapidly.

46:20I mean, people have gone from basically, the average person has gone from basically zero understanding to increasingly getting a grasp of what these things can do. So putting them out there in the world is clearly a useful first step because people get the measure of them. And I think in two or three years, we'll start to see the kind of social consequences and what they actually feel and what they're like for our politics and culture. And I think that will give people the resources and the kind of energy to start thinking about other strategies for containment. How do I make sure that an AI system is always accountable to me, is on my side, is working in the public interest?

46:58Those are the questions that people will start to wrestle with in the next three or four years. Who are your peers and colleagues at the level at which you're operating? We get very little glimpse of them and you're interacting with them daily. You know all these famous people, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. It's extraordinary. For example, the endorsements in your book. You're being praised by Al Gore and Yuval Noah Harari and all these people. What is this strange culture that's emerged? You have a group of people who are unbelievably incredibly wealthy, and who are also in a way that probably wasn't true of the kind of robber barons of the late 19th century, they're also quite intellectual.

47:41I mean, I guess, you know, Henry Ford and Rockefeller were clever people, but they were quite practical, clever people. This is now a group of sort of billionaire nerds. They're people who, you know, are incredibly good at maths or did unbelievably well on exams. I mean, if Alistair and I would sort of hang out with them, you're talking to us from Palo Alto, where presumably you're working 14 hours a day, you're going meeting these people conferences. What is this culture? What are they like? And what does that mean for the development of civilization to have a civilization run by billionaire nerds?

48:10I'm not sure that the civilization is run by billionaire nerds, but I think that it is a culture of curiosity and a willingness to speculate on the far out future. That's what politics is lacking today. No one in your world is proposing a plausible path to a positive vision over the next 10 to 20 years. Politics feels broken to people. It feels broken to the people who are in it. And where are the great visions of the future? What are the stories that we're telling ourselves about how we're going to create peace and prosperity and more wealth? And I think the challenge is that we technologists are telling ourselves the story that we have the chance to produce radical abundance.

48:54and I truly do believe that. That's my primary motivation for working on building intelligence and I think we have every chance of doing it. And like I said, I really do think this is going to be the most productive few decades in history. So I think that's the challenge for conventional politics is to try to respond in a way that basically takes control and takes all of the strengths and benefits of the technological ecosystem to try and harness them in the public interest. I mean, that's really the goal of my book. It's a love letter to the nation state. It's a warning. It's saying now is the time to act.

49:36Now is the time to refresh and regenerate our politics to make sure that it remains in control and relevant and capable of intervention, given what's coming technically. Now, your book is obviously written for more than a British audience, but can I imagine that it might have been your homeland that you had in mind when you said, when a government is devolved to the point of simply lurching from crisis to crisis, it has little breathing room for tackling tectonic forces requiring deep domain expertise and careful judgment. I mean, it's true, right? I mean, if that's an example of an area where I'm being optimistic because I'm saying that we need cooperation, then I'm sorry.

50:20What we need is nuance and patience and respect and forgiveness for one another and, you know, enough of the kind of bashing of each other and so on. I mean, without that, we're not going to move forward. And yet, obviously, particularly, I think, in the UK, we're mired in this pretty awful, depressing situation where I think politicians have lost confidence in themselves. And the political process has been so damaged by the last decade, that people don't have a clear sense that this is the sort of infrastructure that can help navigate the next 20 years. And paradoxically, though, technology has been one of the drivers of polarization, populism, post-truth, whether through social media or through the massive changes in our economic structure.

51:06And so it's a very, very odd world in which to some extent, some of your billionaire nerd friends have contributed to the forces that have wrecked our politics, as well as offering the great future visions for how to fix it. Yeah, this is true. I mean, this is sort of what happens when we sort of unleash technology in a sort of unbridled way. I mean, you know, I think one of the big failures of the story of the internet over the last 20 years is that technology companies sort of claimed that platforms were really just neutral reproducers of information, that they sort of hid the fact that re-ranking and ordering was in fact moderation.

51:48And if the signal for driving that re-ranking was in fact singularly engagement, then things that are less true or maybe completely untrue or things that are outrage-inducing would clearly find their way to the top of the ranking quicker than others. And that in itself would trigger our dopamine releases. And I think everybody is sort of more familiar with that story now. And that's the sort of unintended impact of technology platforms that go out there without thought. And I think that's one of the things that is slightly changing with this new wave of AI. I do think that we're learning those lessons and more proactive and more conscious and more deliberate about the way that we design these systems.

52:31I think you can see that in Pi. But I think you can also see it with the responsible AI principles of the other AI companies starting to think proactively and adopting the precautionary principle. Now, you've talked about EU Act and other interventions by some of our political leaders that you clearly take seriously and have some respect for. But is there a sense that a lot of the people in your world really do feel now that they're kind of masters of the universe, that they can operate without worrying too much about the political process? I think what a lot of people forget is that the nation state is still the backstop of power in our world, right?

53:09Managing the military, managing taxation, and essentially operating the judiciary is always going to be a thousand times more powerful than corporations. So whilst government institutions move slower, they do fundamentally wield way, way, way more power, right? And I think that's a good thing. And so for those who are sort of techno boosters, and maybe do believe that they're kings of the universe, and they are kings, rather than queens, at this point, sadly, you know, I think that they're going to get a tough shock when, you know, political systems kick into action. Because if the trajectories continue as they are over five to 10 years' time, then people aren't going to accept these kinds of extreme concentrations of power or the risks that might unfold from this kind of technology.

54:01We're coming towards the end because you've been very patient. But let me hit you then really my final area, which is, what is the consequence of AI on employment when we're really thinking about the politics the next five to 10 years? What's AI going to mean for jobs? And what's that going to mean for our societies? I think that the way to understand this is that for a period of time, it is going to make everybody much more efficient and more productive. And the question is how long that period of time is. Because everybody who wants to invent or create or learn is now going to have a personal AI in their pocket, which is going to provide them with the most patient, the most personalized, and the most kind of useful knowledge, synthesized, perfectly given their context to that question in their style.

54:56And that's going to make us all way, way smarter and way more productive. I think the challenge is going to be how quickly those sorts of tools end up getting integrated into the workplace and ultimately replace a lot of what I would call intellectual cognitive manual labor or cognitive manual labor, right? So sending simplistic emails, processing orders, managing call center inquiries, the kind of basic back office administration that powers most large bureaucracies, I think over the next five years, maybe seven years, is likely to be automated. And so there's going to be a very disruptive transitionary period where we need people to retrain and reskill, and we'll have to fund that and support that.

55:41And that basically means taxation. And we could be looking at 20 % unemployment over the next five to seven years. Not five to seven years. No, I don't think that's I don't think that's possible. I think that over a 20-year period, you could see double-digit structural disemployment. So people who want to get a job and they can't compete in the labor market, maybe. I think that that is a serious scenario whose probability has increased in a non-trivial way. And that's why I say taxation and redistribution is going to become even more important. I mean, at the moment, you know, in the US, labor is taxed on average 25%, whereas software and equipment is only taxed at around 5%.

56:23And I think we're going to have to make this shift towards taxing capital significantly. There are large stocks of wealth in land and in property and in, you know, stocks and shares, which, you know, we're going to have to call on to fund this transitionary period over the next 20 years. To finish for me, last question. What do you think irritates you about these sort of interviews? What do you think people like Alistair and I often miss? If you had a sort of final couple of minutes just to reflect on the end of the interview, think, I wish we'd got onto this, or I'm so frustrated that people ask these kind of questions and don't ask those, what would you say in the last couple of minutes?

57:04I would say I'm the expert in technology and in my area, AI. You guys are the 30-year veterans and experts of politics. I think it's on you to help answer the question that you put to me about how we evolve politics and governance so that it's fit for the modern technological age. So that's a kind of the discussion that I think it would be good to have, because I'd be looking to both of you for, you know, answers to the kinds of 10 point plans that I laid out and those kinds of questions. And I think that's the goal of my book is the provocation has been laid out. I've done my best to lay out, you know, the ways in which I think containment might be possible, the practical things we can do.

57:48If they seem insufficient, then please take up the mantle and help us all to figure out how we evolve governance and politics for the 21st century. Yeah, the problem is we're going to have Roy and I basically share your analysis of the state of our politics at the moment and don't quite feel we're empowered or have the strength and energy, just the two of us, to kind of, you know, get it back in the right place. But I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I mean, it enjoys the wrong word, actually. It did alarm me. It woke me up. I think Rory and I have talked a lot about artificial intelligence. But I think what your book did was really kind of bring it up close to me, how this does need far greater contribution from the political space.

58:33Because without it, the same thing is going to happen as happened with social media, is that by the time all the implications are fully understood, the politicians are already too late. And I worry that's what's going to happen with this as well. So you're absolutely right that the politicians need to wake up and we can definitely be part of that dialogue. Glad to hear it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Thanks, guys.

58:58So, Alistair, what do you make of that? I sense the tension there between his book and himself. Or maybe I just, because I don't really get this world, it's not my world at all. By reading the book, I thought, God, here's a guy who's coming along and he's really, really trying to warn us that this thing's bad. But then he has, as you say, his 10 points at the end, says it's going to be fine, provided we do this. But I don't know. I don't feel that assured. I think it's very tough. I mean, I think he's, as you would have picked up, unbelievably bright. And I think actually in many ways, we didn't really get onto his politics, but I think if we had, you would have found a lot in common.

59:37I mean, he's somebody who very much came from the left, probably a bit to the left of you, I guess, when he's working for Ken Livingston. And he's quite unusual in the Silicon Valley setup in really emphasizing social justice and encouraging people to push up taxes. and he thinks that the way to deal with the challenge from mass unemployment that might come from AI is not just income taxes, but wealth taxes. And I think he's happy to put his money where his mouth is. I think he does believe that there is a huge obligation for the very wealthy to make sure that this technology isn't having an impact on the poor.

1:00:17Yeah. And yet the other thing he does, which came through both in the interview and in the book, I find a lot of these kind of tech guys are pretty anarcho-capitalist and they have a pretty rich contempt for politics and politicians. Whereas I think part of his thing is that politics has to be part of the solution. It can't be done just by the tech people, which I think is right, but also I think it's good coming from him. But he's also, I mean, one of the things that I think you said to me just immediately afterwards when we were chatting is that you thought that he was a bit sort of defensive.

1:00:53And I think that is partly because he's so central to this whole thing, to this company, to the AI movement, that you sense that he has to be quite careful what he says. he can't quite kick back and relax in the way that some of our guests can because every word that he says about the threats ai is affecting international legal policy share prices companies i mean it's a in a way it's a sort of tribute to how much he's in that game that he has to be quite careful measured in the way that he deals with this stuff. It's very, very sensitive. And we're right at the cusp of this. Yeah. One of the other points he makes in the book is that of all the themes and trends and the technology and the change that he's writing about in the book, which is vast, he says in terms of the jobs, the people working in all of that, it's about 150 ,000 people around the world.

1:01:51It's tiny. And yet, as you say, these people have real impact upon stuff that we do understand and the stuff that we don't understand. And they're quite remarkable people too. I mean, whatever one thinks of them, and I like Mustafa, I think he's an unusually intelligent, thoughtful person, but they are all in their own ways, very remarkable. I mean, I obviously am pretty horrified by what I see at a distance of some of them, but they are all incredibly bright. They all read a lot. They think a lot. They can be very narrow. I mean, if you think about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, there's a sense that they're very, very much engineers with a strong kind of technical bent.

1:02:29But others of this group, which includes Bill Gates, are making real differences in the world. And Bill Gates has driven huge changes on malaria, on all forms of vaccination, global health. It's a very interesting period that the richest people in the world, so much more interested in kind of ideas and thinking than maybe billionaires were 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Oh, they just wanted to make money. Well, I guess it's that to make it to the top in these tech companies, people need to be very, very adept at maths, computing, analysis, philosophy, as well as working very hard. I mean, that's the other thing about them.

1:03:08I mean, Mustafa, we had an interview with him there for an hour. But, you know, what I know of him is that he will have then gone on to work a 14-hour day. So he's part-time here. Exactly. He's a bit like you, Alistair, is what I'm trying to say. I think in fact actually strangely he is a bit like you Talking of the other guys Apparently the Musk-Zuckerberg fight is off Oh no You were so excited about that weren't you I was very very excited about that I think strangely you'd find them You'd find more in common with them than you'd think They're very very driven Many of them have had Challenges around mental health But are therefore unbelievably productive When they're up He sort of touched on that didn't he for himself but I could sense he didn't really want to go there.

1:03:51No, he hasn't. I mean, I think that was probably the most open he's been about his personal life that I've ever heard. I mean, he was much more open about his parents and his father and his faith and his mental health than I've heard before. And I think, is that the first mention of Cat Stevens on our podcast? I think it might be. Very good. Well, I think as we come to it, I mean, I think he is a very, very remarkable British person. I think it's an extraordinary story. Working class, father, seer, an immigrant taxi driver who's become one of the most powerful central voices in this revolution that's changing the world.

1:04:22So thank you for doing it with me. No, I enjoyed it, Rory. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Bye-bye.

1:04:34Here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customise their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

1:05:06As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes. Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy, the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest is Politics Plus? It's the thoughtful kind of present. Ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, It's our mini-series, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics.

1:05:49We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come. So think of this as a civilised gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer? And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No cues, wrapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.