Dex Hunter-Torricke: Translating the Titans of Tech

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26:54Hello, Superman.

27:01So when did it flip for you? It's funny, I was actually reading a book. maybe you even know the person oh I'm going to be so bad with this is it called like Careless People you know it I do know that book and it's written by a woman who used to work at Facebook I worked with her oh you worked with her oh this is fascinating I'm in the book oh that's wild this is crazy for me wow okay so I was reading this book and the reason I started reading it was just because I was like alright I'm interested in tech I'll read a whole bunch of things about what's going on there, autobiographies, et cetera. But then I read this book and it was really interesting to see an account of Facebook's evolution.

27:48We like to deal in absolutes in society. So we go, Facebook, people will be like, it's absolutely bad. Or no, it's absolutely good. And it's like, when you read this book, you realize there was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn't see himself as anything other than a guy who was running a tech company that was trying to connect as many people as possible in the world. And the people who worked around him were like, we're just trying to connect the world. And every time the word politics was brought up, they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to meet with presidents. We don't want to know presidents.

28:17We just make tech that connects people all over the world. I didn't know that you were there for like that. This is crazy that I'm reading the book that you were basically a part of. So help me understand what went wrong. a bunch of those technologies are things that did exactly what they were designed to do. The world did get connected. There's billions of people using all those products. There was a very, very simplistic narrative and understanding of what would unfold as the world got connected, as all those technologies rolled out. And a bunch of the good things, fantastic. Tech can change the world.

29:04But there's another part of what happens. The world changes tech. It doesn't just show up in this vacuum. We never tell that story. And of course, a deeply complex world with technologies that change the way billions of people live and work, every industry, every government, the nature of our relationship with each other, with our communities. That's something which it turned out very few people had any real understanding of what the full scale of those challenges would be, how interconnected they would be. And I think there's been a widespread systemic failure of leadership across societies. The tech industry absolutely has a lot of that responsibility.

29:47They built these things. They're things which they had the closest understanding of as they emerged. But the failing is absolutely not exclusive. We also had a absolutely historic, you know, collapse in leadership from political leaders, from a bunch of other people who have immense power on the trajectory of those technologies and how our society should respond. If tech hadn't had all the effects it's had in the world, if you didn't have social media and smartphones and AI and so on, I think it's probably quite likely that we'd still be facing huge crises at this point. You bunch of these things are unfolding.

30:20And of course, AI is a thing which I'm very focused on and is a big part of this. But part of the reason what I'm doing now is in fact not just about tech really, is if AI vanished tomorrow, we would still have gargantuan problems. We would still be in really bad shape. It is the combination of the tech with a deeply broken world that adds up to the state of dysfunction we're in now. Yeah. In many ways, I like to think of it the same way I think of like a nuclear weapon. Humans will always fight, but a nuclear bomb means the effects of that fight are going to be so much greater than they would have been otherwise.

30:57I think the same goes for AI. I think the same goes for social media. People who work in these industries will often say, we aren't the cause of this. People will always find a way to blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yes, yes, I agree with that. You're not wrong. However, the tool that you've provided the people with has given them an outsized ability to inflict damage or harm on society. And so I want to go back to like your early days. So when you first got into the tech industry, you know, like let's use Facebook because, you know, Facebook is really like at the center of many of these conversations right now.

31:30So what were you doing at Facebook? I was a speechwriter. So I was the company's first speechwriter. The company was just about to go public, it needs to communicate a lot more. And, you know, folks like Zuckerberg, a lot of the other senior leaders, you know, they had to talk to everyone from Wall Street to Publix, media. You were constantly doing events and engaging with other leaders, moving the entire company. You know, this is an organization that grew enormously in the time I was there from a couple of thousand people to tens of thousands in just the space of a few years. and all along you know i was there to help figure out how do you manage the telling of that story at scale oh wow and that's something which of course you know in order to tell that story well you have to be able to get under the hood of any number of these deeply consequential issues all the things that are you know really controversial the things that are really significant you have to um deeply understand the executives and those voices as well um you know i was a speechwriter for a lot of my early career and people often think the voice of people is about combination of words and that's the easy part.

32:35The words are an expression of ideas. And that's really what made the job so fascinating. It was all about trying to figure out what are those ideas that can galvanize and move massive populations and audiences and all these communities on a set of technologies doing something completely new in history. And it was a very, very intellectually hard and extremely fulfilling perch in which to see history being made. It was also something where once you get under the hood, you realize, wow, there isn't actually a deeper level of thinking quite a lot of the time. And I think that's something that came out in the book you read.

33:15There were actually, there were lots of things I disagree with in that book. There were lots of details, which I think were like, you know, absolutely not, in fact, how things went down. Oh, okay. That's good to know. That's also part of history. You know, people will have very different perspectives on all all those things. So let's start with the good days then. You joined this company. It is changing the world. It is this burgeoning idea. What were the messages that you were trying to get to the public or what were the messages you were trying to help Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg get to the public about itself at that time that you thought were noble?

33:47The power of connectivity to change lives and move societies forward. That is absolutely true. It's still true. People can absolutely detest any number of these companies. Most of us still carry a smartphone. Most of us have social media. These are things which have become really valuable in our lives. And those are all real things. They're things which can mean a huge difference in the quality of life for communities and families and, you know, all sorts of people, you know, in fact, my own journey, you know, going from, from where I started to, you know, being able to do all the things I'm doing, you know, in my life.

34:28In fact, I think technology was a big part of that. You know, I remember I was at home, my parents were of no help guiding me in my career, obviously, like when I was a teenager and I was trying to figure out like, how do I apply to university? It's like my parents didn't go to university. So it was literally me staying up, like, you know, of typing away on my dad's old computer, literally flinging out queries into the early internet, trying to figure out like, what would you need to do to do all these things? Like, what is an internship? You know, stuff like that. Where would you find that information in those days?

34:55What was going to go in the library and ask the librarian? Like, so that's the value, right? And there were things when I was at the company, which really would fill you with pride. I remember going, you know, to rural India with Zuckerberg. I traveled on the trip. It's in the book, I think. And you would meet people whose lives have been completely changed by having access to the internet. I remember we were at this village in the middle of nowhere in India and it had just got access to an internet cafe. And this old man had come into the cafe to get help from one of the kids who had learned to use the internet because he wanted to track down his friend who he hadn't seen in years.

35:34And he was like, can you help me research thing because he was my best friend and I haven't seen him in like 20 years and like he's somewhere out there and I don't know where he is and like this kid found him in like five minutes and this guy started crying and it was like that is I mean that is the sort of that that's the magical tangible impact right yeah but this is the thing this is the tremendous duality of the moment that you can have things like that which are real and you can acknowledge those things but like there's all sorts of other things happening too so what what was what was the first thing that sort of triggered your spidey sense?

36:07Well, what was the first thing that made you question the noble mission you were on? It was the refugee crisis. Which one? Yeah, which one? So 2015, when the war in Syria was - Okay, yes. So the Syrian migration, people fleeing into Europe, going through Germany, et cetera. So you suddenly had this like rapid acceleration of the number of people being displaced and you had tens of millions of people on the move. So at the time, there were about 65 million refugees in the world. And it was the greatest number in history, biggest humanitarian disaster of all time. And my dad was really sick that year.

36:44So he had lung cancer. It was the last year of his life. We knew that he only had a few months left. He had started smoking when he was about 12 years old as a child refugee. That was the really deeply unhealthy life he had, living in the refugee camp. And anyway, it finally caught up with him he was in his late 70s so um you know i had really come to understand his story in that last year of his life because he never talked about it and i had a very bad relationship with my dad you know he you know had this terrible childhood he was like very abusive he was psychologically very scarred from from his childhood imagine yeah yeah and so i made i made peace with him in the last year of his life and so i was already like bubbling with a bunch of feelings.

37:26And then it was September 2015 and this photo went all over the world and you probably would recognize it if you saw it. It was this photo of this three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi, who was a Syrian refugee. I think so. Is it the one, if I'm not mistaken, in the back of the ambulance maybe? That was a different one. Oh, that's a different one. Okay. It was the little boy who drowned. Oh, no, no, no. Okay, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And there's a famous photo of the body on the shores of this island. It looks like he's sleeping. And, you know, he drowned along with his five-year-old brother and his mother trying to cross the Mediterranean to get away.

38:02And I remember that moment because all the world leaders were so shocked because Publix was so outraged and people were so upset. I remember, you know, you had prime ministers going on TV saying, right, that's it. We're going to stop this thing now. We're going to intervene. This is where we draw the line. Of course, 10 years later, there's now 135 million refugees in the world, which is more than two world wars combined. It hasn't gotten any better. It's getting worse by the day. But at that time, that was the first moment where I thought, look at the gulf between the ambitions of the world's richest people with all their vast technology, you know, saying that we're going to lift humanity up.

38:41And there is humanity right there, the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of our time. And you can say, well, why should it be up to the CEO of one of these tech companies to go and solve that problem? Well, maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe they have some part to play in it. But that's not the point. The point is, if you have a thesis that your technology is now going to be this thing, which automatically leads us to this better future, and the future is playing out right there, and you are not doing anything to even investigate how you might shape that, then your thesis starts to ring a little hollow.

39:16And I remember sitting at my desk in Facebook in this palatial headquarters, you know, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, just thinking, God, I'm like, I'm at the edge of the world in like air conditioned luxury. And that is the animating reality of people all over the world and people who are just like my dad when he was a kid. That's my dad's story playing out right there. Anyway, he, my dad passed away, you know, just a little bit more than a month after that photo came out and um you know i went back to england and uh you know i had a you know a bunch of time you know to to think over the next few weeks and i i decided that's it i i've got to find a different path through this industry and i was so i mean that really was something which started you know a bunch of these gear spinning i still was in tech for a bunch more time and it was something that i began to take more and more of a position that i had to be involved directly in shaping the cause and the movements and the issues that were playing out in very different parts of the world.

40:09So I understand that on an altruistic level, you know, as it pertains to the world, but I'm trying to understand where your disillusionment began with regards to Facebook. And then we'll move into like the broader tech world itself, because I'm hearing what you're saying. You know, you were taken aback by a story that was affecting the world. And on your side, it was affecting you personally as well because it had echoes of a past that had shaped you in many ways. But I don't understand how this then casts Facebook in a bad light. This is just a social media company. What is it that Facebook did?

40:48What is it that Mark Zuckerberg said or did that made you go, Facebook is part of the actual problem that we're not the cause of everything in the world, but Facebook is contributing to these problems. Facebook has become a central piece of the machinery for how you convince the world of things. It's the battleground of ideas played out across Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook connects billions of people. It connected the world. And all of the central problems of our time are playing out in those communities. And so Facebook absolutely has a role in how it prioritizes and it thinks about the architectures that might dramatically shape and shift how the entire world acts on any number of problems.

41:34And of course, the company absolutely would point to all the things that it thought might be positive stories for the company and how it did those things. You know, you'd look at, here's all the money that's raised on charity on Facebook. True thing. Very, very powerful for lots of organizations to raise money on Facebook. But at the same time, there'd be other things where, you know, the company would have a sort of, eh, we've got enough on our plate. You know, that's not really a thing for us right now. And so actually, I'm not saying that suddenly Zuckerberg had to make the refugee crisis the number one thing.

42:02I absolutely think if you have a thesis about you're connecting the world and you're building this motor of society and you happen to be one of the world's richest people, you probably should make it a part of your responsibility. But there's any number of other issues which absolutely are things that where the company dropped the ball on. Why is it our societies are so deeply divided and angry now in a world awash with disinformation and hate? That is something which absolutely wasn't the company's power, and it touched the lives of refugees and non-refugees alike. It shapes all of our lives.

42:33It shapes the entire digital ecosystem, and the company did not meet its obligations there. When I read this book and when I've read different accounts of people who've worked in Facebook and then to a lesser degree Twitter at the time, they'll talk about how they got frustrated at seeing which scales the company would put its thumb on. right tech companies generally will tell us the general public that they are not shaping anything right they will say we're a platform we're a message board it's part of the reason they don't um have the same obligations that a tv station does so you know if if somebody tells a lie or an egregious lie on cbs or nbc or one of those they get held accountable right Facebook, Twitter, all of them go like, no, no, no, no, no.

43:28We say nothing. All we do is provide a message board and the people say things, but we do not participate in what is being said or not being said. When you read accounts from people who've worked in these organizations, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, that's absurd. Look at how much the algorithm on X shifted once Twitter became X under Elon, right? You'd spend five seconds in there, it's just a complete cesspool of the absolute worst people who've been algorithmically boosted now to dominate your feeds. So like, absolutely, there are choices made every day in the architecture of these platforms and like the content they're surfacing.

44:08Like, you know, one of the things that, you know, occurred, you know, during the first Trump administration onwards was, you know, Facebook started experimenting with reducing the volume of news and political content in some feeds because they discovered that people were getting to the point where they were so like exhausted from the amount of political content that they said, oh, you know what? This is bad for engagement. Let's just get rid of the news. And that's the thing where, hey, maybe that actually gave people some better, you know, experience in their act. Maybe they spent more time. That would be how Facebook would define a better experience.

44:41But like, in fact, if your society's in flames, wouldn't it be like more responsible to actually share these things? Like if you had a thesis that this is the global town square. That was literally how Jack Dorsey used to describe Twitter. Yes, that's how they sold it, yes. And the global town square has to have all the conversations that matter in it, right? Not just the ones that give you the easier life when you're living in Palo Alto or San Francisco. Yeah, it's fascinating because you realize that these guys have built a world where

45:16it would be so much easier if they were just trying to be evil but it seems like the evil is a byproduct of the apathy or rather the appetite that they have for just getting their thing to grow as much as possible that's right i think that's spot on and that that is the complexity of this entire situation right if they were just cartoonishly villainous yes you know like zuckerberg was like right i'm gonna like get these people's data and it's like it was never like that in a way it's like you know the data's you know to fuel what facebook really is which is a big ad machine um you know his ultimate evil is to give you some crappy clickbaity ads in your feed i mean it's not it's not the most you know you know wild scheme ever invented but like the failure to engage with a whole bunch of other things which are within his power and which are playing out on the platforms, that can end up exerting tremendous evil in the world.

46:12So it's something where there's, again, this great duality about these things, right? And you can be an engineer working at Facebook, and every day you go in there and you work on things that are really, really boring, designed to sort of incrementally improve user experience, and they do improve user experience. And yet you are also part of an institution that might also be doing things which in some other part of this vast global machine actually aren't effects you like at all. And you still need people to go and do the good things as well, right? You know, all institutions are imperfect. And there's lots of good people, I think, who work within tech companies because they are driven by nothing more than they want to build systems that really do solve problems for people.

46:48Do you think we got it all wrong in terms of like assigning a political point of view to tech leaders? I think of all of them, Jeff Bezos, like when he bought the Washington Post, people were like, oh man, democracy has been saved and they came up with that slogan, democracy dies in darkness. And it was this whole thing. And it's like, oh, this is what we need mega titans to do is save the journalistic world that we... Mark Zuckerberg, people are like, oh, yes, he is a titan of free speech. And because of him, we will move this thing. You look at all of these figures, even Elon Musk, they're like, you know, electric cars.

47:25And here he is pioneering a world that gets us away from fossil fuels. And it seemed like they were liberal bastions. It seemed like they were progressive icons that were trying to move society to a place that was better for everyone. And then almost overnight, it was like, well, Jeff Bezos is like, nope, nope. Shut that down. Move that thing. Pay the people less. Get this. Go. I'm doing my own thing. Zuckerberg was like, actually, screw the news. And we're not fact-checking anything. And we're not doing that. And you know what? I'm actually pro this i actually think trump's a cool guy and i'm at the inauguration and you see this happening and elon musk is like you're like oh so he likes electric cars but not necessarily he doesn't care about the whole thing it's it's it's this weird like it's this weird gray that i think people struggle with yes from the inside did you see a shift or do you think that there was just a big misunderstanding of who these people were from the very beginning i think it was both um people are desperate for heroes.

48:28And I moved to New York in 2008, right on the eve of the economic crisis unfolding. And how many more crises have we been through since then? It's like the 21st century has been a never-ending series of disasters befalling most of the world. And in that context, people will always look for heroes. We're looking for good guys and bad guys. We're looking for a simplistic narrative to make sense of deeply complex events. Who were the good guys in the economic crisis? you know there were lots of different bad guys there were lots of different shades of gray every single day but the real villains weren't even just these individuals you know we would sort of say ah that person's going to prison right screw that person there's entire systems that are rotten and of course this is the nature of many of the problems that are playing out now we have deeply rotten you know systems that um you know are behind many of the problems that are you know unfolding in many many different domains um so i think that was part of it but also it was genuinely um you know it was a whole bunch of very new challenges emerging in the world which in ways these were leaders who simply weren't engaged at all um there were things where um they might have had more constructive roles they almost certainly would have had more constructive roles if they took those seriously but there's lots of other leaders who should share that blame too um the failure of technology in our societies is only part of a general failure of societies in the last couple of decades, which political leaders, a whole set of other thinkers and actors, they absolutely should share in that blame too.

49:59It's weird because it's like we're trying to figure out where the first domino fell, right? Some would argue there's a moment when Facebook said, we're going to allow political people on Facebook. We're going to allow them to run campaigns. We're going to allow them to buy ads. Some would say, oh, that was it. That was the domino. Other people would say, no, it's when the lawmakers allowed Facebook to have the thing that So where do you think the first time, like, were there conversations within the company in and around politics and Facebook when this was still, you know, sort of burgeoning? Oh, yeah.

50:32I mean, these conversations, you know, have been going for many, many years. You know, these were things that, you know, predated me. You know, companies were already really agonizing over these things, you know, as social media was, you know, getting started and reaching, you know, big scale. And a lot of the thinking, right, was, again, driven by things that were very idealistic. can you build a global town square in which, of course, you want democratic discourse. You want politicians on there and you want people exposed to their views. And these are things where, you know, political content would naturally appear because, you know, if you want to build something for free expression, then people will talk about, you know, something that is one of the central things in our lives and our societies.

51:07You know, that early idealistic moment in that journey of tech, you know, for me was the Arab Spring. You know, I remember walking into the hall at Google when news came through that the Egyptian government had fallen. People started cheering. And it was literally like, you know, there is something in the world happening, you know, fueled, you know, combined with the power of technology, you know, people power, plus these, you know, instruments for like mass communication and collaboration, suddenly like exerting, you know, dramatic shifts in societies. But it's very hard, I think, to think of like, that's the domino that, you know, played the central or when really, there were so many, you know, interconnected systems that really were breaking at the same time, the failures of leadership were happening on any number of fronts, right?

51:52You know, disinformation on Facebook, right? You've got the failures of platforms to think through how algorithms would, you know, shape content and shape, you know, communities. But at the same time, you had a global order breaking down in which nations like Russia, Iran, China, the US, a whole bunch of people were all employing cyber weapons and looking to drive influence operations through social media and to weaponize all of those new platforms in order to achieve their geopolitical interests. That's a reality too. And so you can't just, you know, look at one of these problems. You've got to actually have a thesis on how all these things play out together.

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54:13You said that you really had this moment for yourself in 2000 and? That was 2015 when I started having... 2015 is when you start feeling this. You then leave in 20... I left Facebook in 2016, but I was still in the tech industry. So you stayed around for a while. I was waiting for Elon then when I was at SpaceX. Interesting. I went to the space industry, which is something that should be deeply hopeful. I mean, I grew up watching Star Trek. And many elements of it have been. I often say this with my friends all the time. I go, look, man, I'm not a fan of half of the shit Elon says and his views on many things.

54:50But I'm like, Starlink and the idea is pretty amazing. We live in a world where many people are not connected to the internet. And we've seen what that can do to their financial outcomes. Totally. There's a young deck somewhere who's trying to find another internship. You can't do it. But if you have an internet that doesn't need last mile, it changes your life. So it's fascinating. Electric cars. I don't think the industry would have moved if it weren't for Tesla. That's right. So there's many elements where it is deeply hopeful. But you seem to have gone from one place to another. And am I correct in saying that you are disillusioned by the entire tech industry now?

55:28No. Tech, this is the duality of the moment. Yeah. It continues to this moment. I absolutely believe in the power of technology. No one's ever accusing me of being anti-tech. Okay. Like, technology is something that can be and should be deeply hopeful if it's managed well. Is it being managed well by our societies? No. Are tech industry leaders meeting the moment and the nature of the disruption that is now unfolding as a result of AI and a bunch of these breakthrough technologies? Absolutely not. And so that's why I'm no longer in the industry. I don't think that's the right perch to be for somebody who wants to focus their time on figuring out how as societies do we get out of the mess.

56:09That is the consequence, the backdrop of a technologically infused civilization in the year 2026. But the technology itself could do wonderful things, right? That is the complex everyday duality, which infects every part of how we think about these technologies, which is why lots of leaders, lots of institutions, lots of regulators, they really struggle with this stuff. AI might help us cure all diseases this century. That is something which lots of scientists are very hopeful about. We're going to see the first drugs coming to market in the next few years, which have been developed with the help of AI, which can treat cancers and all sorts of things.

56:45That's real. But at the same time, you also have AI driving disinformation and hate and cyber weapons and all these things, fueling autonomous weaponry and AI military targeting systems right now in action today in the Middle East, which are inflicting enormous damage on people's lives. You have an industry with a rapacious appetite for resources, which is absolutely going to be part of accelerating climate change and the devastation of ecosystems at a time when we're heading for some of the worst case climate change scenarios. And you have this soaring gulf in societies between the winners and losers in our economy.

57:20You know, 12 billionaires in this country have as much wealth as 49 % of the world now. And that's before we've seen most of the effects of AI on economies. If anyone thinks that's going to get better, they have got to bridge the future to sell them. Right before you left Facebook, did you voice your concerns and try and like shift the company? As a cog in a machine, I did all the bits that I felt were within my ability to go and do these things every single day. What could I do? I was a guy who was a words guy. And so my ability to argue over the message and how you frame these things and what are the things we should really be talking about, that's something which I absolutely exercise that power every single day.

58:06And that's what drove my whole career. Did you experience any wins? Yeah. I mean, you would get lots of sort of little wins. Yeah. Do you remember any? Yeah. I mean, like, even like how choosing to even like, you know, focus on, you know, topics which people would say, oh, really? Like, why is like some tech executive like posting about, you know, let's say international development? Okay. I took Zuckerberg to the UN in 2015. That's the thing where, for me as a former UN person, it felt really important actually that you bring Silicon Valley, people building these platforms with this immense reach together with a set of people who are deeply non-technological, but need to achieve really hard things in the world.

58:50So for me, a lot of the work I did was on advancing this idea that connectivity should be a human right. It should be something that people have access to and they have the ability to express themselves freely. I consider that a very, very small win. Lots of other things I would lose arguments all the time. One of the things that I was part of my sort of final chapter when I was at Facebook was Trump was now running. And I absolutely did not believe that Trump should be given an unfiltered megaphone to spew all sorts of hatred. And I had furious arguments with very senior people saying, you are the boss of Facebook.

59:30You have a megaphone. If nothing else, you get to say that that's not acceptable. And they wouldn't even do the bare minimum there. I remember I had a huge argument with some folks there about a post which I had drafted for Zuckerberg to take on Trump directly and call out his bullshit. Oh, interesting. And it's been reported, it's been covered in some other media over the years in the Washington Post, I think. But that was the thing where I lost that argument. You know, the company was absolutely, you know, you know, cowering with the idea that this is something that, you know, they should have any sort of direct view on.

1:00:00And so it ended up with one of those messy, unsatisfying compromises where like a post was put out and all the sort of sharp bits of language were, you know, watered down and it didn't mention Trump by name. It was just the sort of like thing expressed in the ether. And it was like, why are we playing coy with this stuff? Like, if you really do believe in, you know, the values, which at the time Zuckerberg really said he believed in, you know, things like standing up for dreamers, you know, standing up for the rights of, you know, underrepresented people, for immigrants, you know, for communities, you know, that were, you know, diverse.

1:00:32All those communities Trump attacked from literally day one when he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower. And he said that it was his mission to basically, you know, exorcise them from society and roll the clock back to the 50s. And if you're not going to stand up for your values when, you know, there's something as consequential as a future president of the United States, you know, starting to spew those things, when are you ever going to stand up to them? So, Facebook, I sort of understand because it's public facing in many ways and we see its effects. You see Facebook on trial or Meta on trial for like Instagram and the things they knew and how it affects younger users, particularly girls.

1:01:10You see them on trial for like trying to get kids addicted to the platforms that they create. So, they're pretty like front facing. Help me understand on like a SpaceX side, what could go wrong? It's space. You're launching rockets into space and this is a good thing. You launch the thing and you make it cheaper and you put satellites where they're supposed to be and we see the world and what could go wrong at SpaceX? Well, this is now well after I've left SpaceX, but now SpaceX is one of the companies that is obviously a prime defense contractor. And part of the work that is now unfolding is to obviously develop a new generation of weapons and infrastructure to enable the US to win future wars.

1:01:55There are proposals such as Golden Dome, the absolutely astonishing space-based missile defense system that Tron wants to build, which some estimates say will cost over a trillion dollars. SpaceX is going to be the primary contractor for all of that. And these are things now where, again, this is the duality of the moment. You could say, oh, it's a defensive missile shield designed to shoot down incoming nuclear warheads. maybe that's okay. Except if you are part of a nexus of leaders and institutions which are exerting tremendous political authority and economic power, because the technologies you're developing have become so central to economic growth in the United States, you have the ability to radically shift agendas here.

1:02:42If you've chosen instead to just make a bunch of money building space-based military infrastructure rather than using your overall influence, to in fact shift us to a world where maybe we don't have to fight. Why are we preparing for a nuclear war instead of trying to figure out how to not have nuclear wars? Then I would say that is a historic mismatch of resources. That is not the right strategy. And of course, Elon Musk himself, well after I worked for him, has now taken on a role which I think is unforgivable in the tech industry and in the world the the work he did on its own of gutting usa id through doge which we have emphatic reporting about the lives that have been lost yeah it's been devastating yeah he should not ever be rehabilitated like that as a guy should be on trial yeah it's um yeah that i mean that's that's probably one of the most heinous things him and the administration did because it was was spiteful that's right do you know what i mean it had no it had no material effect on the United States, on its budget, on its money, but the effect that it has now had on the countries and in the world that needed it has been like, like generationally devastating.

1:03:57That's right. So that's the thing, right? Space and space technology could just be brilliant. And if we just looked at that, if we just had a tunnel vision, we had a navel gazing on that, fantastic. But like when your boss is like out there gutting aid agencies and children are dying, like the two things are connected. So what do you feel like your mission is now then, now that you are not in the industry? What are you trying to rally? What are you trying to move people towards? I am very focused now on the societal implications of AI. I spent the last several years, you know, I was back at Google and, you know, a lot of the last 15 years have been involved in AI.

1:04:32And the technology and how quickly it is gathering steam, how much more advanced it's getting, how much more advanced it will be in the next decade, that is something which is going to be wildly more devastating than any of the consequences of the mismanaged technologies of the last 15 years, and the consequences will crash land on societies all over the world, we are not prepared for these things at all. Economically, societally, geopolitically, environmentally. And that's the agenda that I'm really focused on. The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things.

1:05:06We talk about AI governance, and there's a whole bunch of stuff which is about how you manage the AI systems themselves. That's like 1 % of the problem. 15 years from now, probably less than 15 years, when a lot of people have lost their jobs to AI and we have no economic solutions, we have no idea how to give people a good quality of life, that is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing in those systems. What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems, which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions, if not billions of people.

1:05:44um between 2018 and 2023 the world consumed almost as much resources as one third of the 20th century and it's accelerating all the time and these are these are things where in fact you know big tech companies they go to governments who are desperate for economic growth now right a lot of the advanced economies in the global north yeah they've got plateauing growth they've got declining living standards they go to them and say build this wonder technology build this infrastructure we will give you back the keys to a good future and of course that's not happening This is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States and mostly in China.

1:06:22And I think the world we're going to end up in, you know, in the next 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people. I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them that is not going to happen at all on the path we're on and so is the tech industry going to solve these things no and in fact they they have tried to minimize debate about these things they've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're going to do to manage all of those effects and that cannot be left up to the tech industry but now we're in a situation where Yeah.

1:07:10Like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech and now tech is affecting the world, right? In the lead up to some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some of the most insane amounts for political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint on AI. And whether we like it or not, money shapes a lot of an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed. and the people who are going to govern it being funded by them, it seems like an infinite loop that's for the most part already lost unless something big breaks, as we've seen in the past.

1:08:08It's only when something big breaks that something changes dramatically. I mean, I don't think we should be under any illusions. The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing. I've spent the last six months traveling the world talking to leaders and a whole bunch of people behind closed doors where you have some really spine-tingling conversations. And there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win this race for AI. And a bunch of other people will get screwed, but we'll be okay.

1:08:44And that's not going to happen when, of course, you have societies all over the world that are going to be in chaos. No one gets out of this thing in one piece. but uh we're in a moment now where i think actually a lot of people across societies you know who are paying a bit of attention they're seeing things are failing on any number of fronts yeah you know you look at all the polling why is it the overmallowing majority of societies in almost all the world say things are generally going in the wrong direction people are angry they realize that you know there aren't new answers there is no vision coming from the top anymore and in that context, you then have big tech racing to install these systems where people are now really worried about their jobs.

1:09:23You know, there's a lot of polling showing that the number one thing that gets people, you know, panicked about AI, which explains why it is in fact incredibly unpopular with societies is because they're worried about their future jobs. So this is something where I think actually there's a lot of people who already are looking for a very different approach to how you manage these things. The debate has not shifted there yet, because I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of what might happen, the speed at which this will unfold, and how interconnected all these agendas are. When people really do understand that the technologies that might give you your amazing apps on your phone also might be things that destroy the prospect of your kids having future jobs and also will threaten natural ecosystems, then it becomes a very different agenda.

1:10:06So I hear you on a macro scale, but like what are we actually doing what are we actually trying to do like where does it start who does it start with what is the first action the second action what do we hope to achieve on the other side of it i think before you can get really granular about lots of tactics you really need to have won on the idea like does anyone think donald trump is the president because of his exceptional ability to run a discipline campaign. Like he had an idea and it was an idea fit for a moment and, you know, poised to disrupt a whole bunch of bad incumbent ideas. His answer was another set of bad ideas, some really truly evil and villainous ideas, but he had ideas.

1:10:56And what is happening now is that in the absence of any vision of what our future could be, we're just staggering on, trying to prop up the things that are not working, the remnants of these old economic, political, geopolitical systems, the shreds of the international order built in the 1940s. No one is truly saying, this isn't working. What could something that actually worked look like? And don't focus on what's politically achievable. Focus on what do you actually want to build? If you could get away with it, what's the real best case scenario. And I think you have to start there because if you do that, the world isn't static.

1:11:36The moment you have leaders with vision, you can change reality around you in enormous ways. Donald Trump is the guy who was hosting The Apprentice, and now he's the most powerful man in the world. The moment you have a vision, you can start to really move things in ways that may seem utterly implausible. And I think actually the things that most people want in the world, including the United States and the UK, wherever you look, are generally things that were pretty timeless. They want to be able to give their kids a better quality of life than they have. They want to be able to live in peace.

1:12:08They don't want to have to worry about going to war. They want to preserve nature. They want to have a climate that isn't something that's collapsing. And when you really wake people up to the fact that there is no plan for any of these things now, and we're almost out of time and there is still a chance to not only avert the disaster but here's the thing what if we could use all that technology now with a very different vision of our societies and our politics and our economics to build a radically better future something that really does solve these problems for all time in a big way then a lot of people get really hopeful they get excited about that you know so this is the stuff that you know i'm going around the world talking about i absolutely don't believe we solve our problems by pretending they don't exist there's a certain strain of people who think, oh, this is too depressing.

1:12:55Let's not talk about all these things. But if you can admit the path we're on is not working, but then also wake people up to what could the tech really do if it was harnessed with an agenda designed to truly provide a good life to everyone, not just that narrow sliver of billionaires and to the tiny percentage of people, then people really, I think in many cases, they long for it. They wish that there was something coming that would save us that's an that's an interesting it's an interesting idea because it's it's um yeah it proposes it proposes something that i guess isn't often pushed which is first shift the mindset and then let's get into the granular let's sell like the idea of a future or a world and get people on the same page is it possible when we i mean like we even having this conversation at the mercy of the very machine that we are trying to disrupt i always think about that paradox i go you are putting a thing on the internet on social media platforms basically trashing the social media platforms and the way they run which which inherently is like this weird conflict of interest slash even like you go, will it even allow you to do it if it gets to a certain point?

1:14:16Like, how do you think of that conundrum? Like, how do you begin a movement when the very thing that is moving you is part of the thing you're trying to change? I mean, it's something which I think there probably are real consequences, right? I mean, things that we may not even know about, you know, the lack of transparency in how algorithms operate It means that certain content may be deprioritized when it's critical or touches certain issues. That's something, you know, I was at Meta's oversight board, you know, a few years ago, which, you know, was an independent body looking at how content was managed on these platforms.

1:14:48And the things that the company did every day to put its thumb on the scale were blow your mind. You can see all that data online. The board has made it publicly available. It would shock people. But they can't stop everyone. if conversations and agendas really are, you know, moving people. And there's lots of other channels which we can go for, right? These are agendas which have to be pushed politically in business, you know, in the vast majority of the world's economies, which are not the tech industry, through communities, through nations all over the world. You can advance ideas on infinite numbers of other vectors, which ultimately are going to penetrate.

1:15:26and you know you see lots of you know different points of view on social media even while you've got some platforms which have clearly tried to put their thumb on the scale people are going to shut up and in fact some of those heavy-handed attempts to muzzle debate or to pretend that everything's fine it's just the industrial revolution again that stuff backfired is so catastrophically on the people who say those things you know because of course you know i think every serious person realizes that's that's bullshit um so i think we have to try i mean ultimately it comes down to this right, the vision of the good future and then how we actually achieve that, turning it into a plan, you know, what does a new economic model look like for societies when machines will take jobs?

1:16:08That's going to be really hard. It's going to be the hardest thing we've ever achieved in history and the odds are stacked against us from the start and we would never choose to do it at this moment in time when we're already reading from crises and yet what other choice do we have? And that's the thing. I think there's a moment now where politicians, they can just keep trying to pretend everything's normal and they can try to cosplay basically as like 90s politicians when everything was sort of yeah yeah one-dimensional yeah they can do that and that's what most of them will do humans are just like ai they're bad pattern recognition machines so people will look at all this stuff and they'll be like ah actually it's not this doom and stuff it's just it's just this stuff over here uh it's stuff from the past we've really seen but they'll fail they won't solve these problems and because they will not succeed in solving them angry volatile populations facing declining living standards and rising chaos.

1:16:54They will overthrow those people. They will demand probably worse alternatives. That's why populists are coming to power. That's why nationalists are advancing every day. And then we end up in more and more chaos. But the politicians who realize that that is not a good future, and now we really need to say we don't have the answers, but we do understand what is happening and the problem, they will be the people who can begin to shift that agenda. And that's what I'm trying to do now, to work with the leaders, to work with people who really want to start having that radically different conversation.

1:17:25And I don't think talking about it is a sort of kumbaya kind of thing. It's not a, let's spend years having a nice conversation. It is, this has to happen really fast now. We have to have people understand specifically what is happening. And if we can do that, then we can very quickly get to practical tactics and an agenda. But we have a narrow window in which to do all these things now. A narrow window and a mighty tall ask. Thanks, thank you very much, man. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, man. Good luck. Good luck on the rest of the tour and the leaders that you meet. I think you've given us a lot to think about.

1:18:02Yeah. It's going to be a hell of a 15 years. There is a way out of this stuff. We are not destined to fail, but we have to admit that it's not working. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks, Aaron.

1:18:17What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

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