Dex Hunter-Torricke: Translating the Titans of Tech

In this episode, Trevor sits down with author and strategist Dex Hunter-Torricke, who has spent years behind the scenes with some of the most powerful people in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt, and has seen influence move from institutions into the hands of a few companies and the people running them. Together, they explore what that shift feels like from the inside, how much power is concentrated at the top, accountability and the lack of it, and what it means when the people shaping the future are also writing the rules as they go.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The verdict is in that landmark social media addiction trial Meta and YouTube found liable for a product that harms the very children who use it.

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  Big Tech, your gig is over.

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• 0:17Speaker 03

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• 0:25Speaker 04

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• 0:31Speaker 05

  Every kid with a cellphone, with any device with a camera and connection to the internet is in danger.

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• 3:32Trevor Noah?

  How do I pronounce your name, by the way?

• 3:33Speaker 07

  Dex and then Hunter Torek.

• 3:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh, Torek, okay. So the E, no, it's not a...

• 3:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:39Trevor Noah?

  Okay. Where's the last name from?

• 3:42Speaker 07

  Scottish.

• 3:43Trevor Noah?

  Scottish?

• 3:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my dad's side of the family went to India in like the 19th century. They were Scottish, and they were part of the East India Company. So they were like the working-class Scots who made up like a huge part of the East India Company. And then that's how the British Empire went and conquered places. So, I think they were like merchants or like soldiers.

• 4:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 4:06Speaker 07

  It's such a hazy bit of history. And then there was, of course, just this one, like, very elderly aunt, you know, in her 90s, who like told me like the family history. She was the only person who'd like mapped this thing out. Yeah.

• 4:17Trevor Noah?

  She was the only one who knew?

• 4:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the Dutch East India Trading Company.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:21Trevor Noah?

  What a story, man.

• 4:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:23Trevor Noah?

  What a... It's funny, it's... Sometimes it feels like we're living through new times all the time. And then you you read like a history book or you read like, you know, an old story that's being told about something and you go huh. It feels like everything is the same, just with the technology of the day.

• 4:43Speaker 07

  And a different cast of characters.

• 4:44Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 4:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, just this revolving door.

• 4:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because because when I when I think about like a lot of the work that you're doing now. Uh, and the conversations you're having. I go, some of the conversations we have about tech feel very similar to the Dutch East India Trading Company.

• 5:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:01Trevor Noah?

  We're talking about an organization that got so big, it had the power to shift governments.

• 5:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, had its own armies.

• 5:08Trevor Noah?

  And yeah, it had its own armies. It it it changed how people lived their lives. It started living, it it sort of was lawless.

• 5:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:16Trevor Noah?

  Had shareholders.

• 5:17Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 5:17Trevor Noah?

  Right, I think it was the first publicly traded company ever.

• 5:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:20Trevor Noah?

  And because of that, it just shaped the world in many ways that weren't necessarily for the better.

• 5:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it's really funny because like now, when you talk about the future and the fact that you've got this immense concentration of power.

• 5:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  And you then try to figure out what could that look like a hundred years from now? And people say, oh, well, obviously like this is all just dystopian nonsense. You're not going to have these mega corporations like ruling things. It's like, we already had that.

• 5:47Trevor Noah?

  We've literally come from that.

• 5:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:49Trevor Noah?

  We've literally, literally come from that. But let's let's let's talk about your story in this, you know, um. I I remember the first time your your name came up in my world. I I was reading something about the tech industry and I've always been fascinated by. How the tech industry has evolved.

• 6:05Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 6:05Trevor Noah?

  You know? I've met many people involved in tech. Founders of some of the biggest companies, founders of startups, still trying to get their thing going. And there's one thing I'll say, for the for the most part, every single one of them seemed to have, in Silicon Valley in particular, an idealistic view of the world. And how they planned to make it a better place.

• 6:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:29Trevor Noah?

  You know, they were like, I've got this app and, you know, it's gonna make accommodation better for everybody. And I've got this app and it's it's gonna make getting a car easy for everybody. And I've got this app and it's gonna make restaurant deliveries easier. And I've got this app and it's gonna improve how people connect with loved ones. And I've got this app and it's gonna. And everyone, everyone came in with this wide eyed optimism. But I'd love to know how you started in this world. Like, what was your original journey? How did you get into Silicon Valley? You know, and then we'll get to the world of you, like, knowing Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Elon Musk and all of these people. But but let's start at the beginning. How did you get in Silicon Valley?

• 7:03Speaker 07

  I was obsessed with changing the world from a very early age. I was a very weird kid. And part of it was just, I was growing up in the UK in the eighties and nineties. And my dad was the, you know, he was a person who was a refugee as a kid. You know, he was four years old when he was a refugee during the Second World War. He'd grown up in a refugee camp in India.

• 7:27Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 7:28Speaker 07

  And he'd come to the UK in the late fifties. You know, total outsider, you know, probably a few pounds in his pocket. You know, society was deeply racist. And, you know, his life was just terrible. Like, I didn't learn about it until many years later, actually, near the end of his life, you know. When I was thirty years old and I was working in Silicon Valley at that point. My mom, she was an immigrant from Malaysia, came to the UK in the seventies to be a nurse in Britain's National Health Service. And growing up, we had absolutely nothing. There was no money. You know, I grew up mostly in the southeast of England, in this town, Tunbridge. And it was sufficiently provincial at the time that when me and my sister walked down the street,

• 8:12Speaker 07

  people would literally stop and stare because they'd never seen people who weren't white. You know, kids would come up to you on the playground, they'd say, can I feel your hair, mate?

• 8:19Speaker 07

  I always remembered, like, kids would would ask, do you speak Chinese or Japanese? And I thought, I was born in Hammersmith. I mean, like, how how likely is it that I speak Chinese or Japanese? But like, that was annoying enough for me that, like, from this very early age, I was like, interested in like, why we even. Sign these ridiculous labels.

• 8:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  And we make these assumptions and they constrain our whole lives. And like, if I had spoken Chinese or Japanese, like, so what?

• 8:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 07

  Um, and so like, I really wanted to like, spend my life trying to figure out like, how do you improve these systems? That shape your whole life from before you're even born. Why is it some kids get these amazing lives from the beginning? Why is it that others really are struggling the whole time against the tide of history? And the logical place to start there was at the UN. So I moved to New York in two thousand and eight and I I got a job at the UN. Um, I'd done research on the UN for my masters. Um, I got a scholarship to go to university. Um, and you know, I was the first in my family to get a degree. So I got two of them for good measure. I thought I will just like absolutely like work really hard now to like, you know, try and rise through this system. And, um, you know, at the UN, I realized really quickly that

• 9:28Speaker 07

  it's not the sort of place that actually you can change the world most days. You're just trying to get through the day.

• 9:33Trevor Noah?

  That's, that's, you, you're not the first person I've heard say this. And it's, it's,

• 9:40Trevor Noah?

  it's one of the most, um, depressing and frustrating things to hear people say.

• 9:45Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 9:45Trevor Noah?

  Is that they go work at the UN. I would argue most of the people who go work at the UN are smart, idealistic, world-changing people who want to see things become better.

• 9:58Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 9:59Trevor Noah?

  You know, so it's everything from like the best lawyers, the best like accountants, the bit like whatever it is, they they go, I want to use these talents to help make the world a better place. They get to the UN and they're like, oh, this place doesn't seem to move anything.

• 10:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:14Trevor Noah?

  But, but, but help me understand why, like, like, what, what is happening at the UN? Or rather, what is not happening at the UN that could be or should be happening?

• 10:22Speaker 07

  I think people don't really understand how poorly resourced and how weak the UN is structurally. Like, the New York City Police Department has a budget orders of magnitude larger than the entire UN globally. And like, that's shocking to a lot of people. The UN has hundreds of thousands of peacekeeping troops in the field worldwide. They feed millions of people globally through their aid programs.

• 10:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  It's an organization that's supposed to be at the center of international law.

• 10:49Trevor Noah?

  Right, right.

• 10:50Speaker 07

  Stopping conflict. But like, ultimately, the UN is just a vessel for its member states. You know, it's for a hundred and, you know, ninety several, you know, countries.

• 11:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 07

  These are the folks who call the shots. And it's really a very small number who really call the shots. It's the UN Security Council.

• 11:05Trevor Noah?

  Right, because they have veto powers.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  They have veto power. You know, it's the UK, France, the US, Russia, China. And I think a lot of countries, a lot of people in the world would argue, should that be the club that gets to have a vote? You know.

• 11:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the deciding vote, not just a vote.

• 11:20Speaker 07

  The deciding vote on all manner of things that shape the entire world and all of our lives and the course of conflicts and the fate of nations. And that's why the UN fundamentally doesn't work. It is a structure designed not to save the world. It was designed to stop us having World War III. It was designed to freeze the international system in nineteen forty-five. That's literally what it was for. People misread the original functioning of the organization, and I misread it. And that's why after, you know, I was at the UN for only like two, two and a half years. Every day was deeply frustrating because I thought, there's a problem, there's a crisis, there's a disaster. Why can't we fix these things? And the answer was structural. It's not, it will never be in position to do those things, probably.

• 12:01Trevor Noah?

  Is that, is that because fundamentally, you can't have a body that is ruling over autonomous bodies? Like, I mean, you have the UN, which is a club for countries. But countries already have their own laws, they have their own rules, they have their own everything. So how do you have a club telling other people what to do? At some point, every country just goes, no.

• 12:24Speaker 07

  I mean, throughout history, nations have agreed to compromises, to alliances, to international institutions that do constrain their actions in some ways when they believe it's ultimately in their national interest. So obviously, you have things like the European Union, you have NATO, you have the oldest international organization, the International Postal Union. You know, literally the rules of how you get post delivered from one country to another. We have all these things, right? Air safety. But like the UN is something that was crafted for a very narrow strand of things. And over time.

• 12:54Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 12:55Speaker 07

  You know, the the nature of the actors behind that has shifted enormously. And of course, we're in a moment now, right? Where the United States, which had at least a rhetorical commitment to advancing, you know, political liberalization and free markets. Has very clearly chosen to take a different path, which I'm sure we'll get to. But after after the time I was at the UN, I thought. This is not going to work, at least not for me. I don't feel I'm having an impact. Where can I go? Tech seemed the obvious place to go, a place which has lots of resources. And technology clearly is one of those other motors of transformation in the world. It's something that should be deeply hopeful and about fixing a bunch of these problems.

• 13:31Trevor Noah?

  So what did you what did you study in university? What are the two degrees?

• 13:34Speaker 07

  I did politics and then for my master's, I went and did Russian studies. So actually.

• 13:39Trevor Noah?

  Russian studies?

• 13:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, I focused on Russia's foreign policy in the world, which was already deeply destabilizing.

• 13:45Trevor Noah?

  Why? Why? Of everything you could have studied, why that?

• 13:47Speaker 07

  I was living in Europe. I went to do my undergrad two thousand and three.

• 13:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  And this was just before the European Union and NATO had expanded to the east and Russia was about to become the bordering state. And I immediately had questions about that. You know, I was a teenager. I thought. We've got the world's largest country with a very patchy track record on human rights and rule of law and democracy. And it's about to become our next door neighbor. And surely we need to prepare to understand how to deal with that new strategic. Challenge. And it was interesting because this was pre Putin, you know, starting to, you know, march into other countries.

• 14:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 07

  You know, two thousand and eight, when I arrived at the UN was when.

• 14:28Trevor Noah?

  He was in power by this time, though, right?

• 14:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, he took power in two thousand.

• 14:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, right.

• 14:31Speaker 07

  And, you know, he was still seen as an ally of the West. You know, he would get invited to all these, you know, summits with, you know, Blair and Bush and so on.

• 14:38Trevor Noah?

  Wow, you forget that that was a time.

• 14:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. And a lot of the students who are on my program at Oxford, these were kids who were apologists for Putin. It was the wildest thing.

• 14:47Trevor Noah?

  What do you what do you mean? In what way?

• 14:49Speaker 07

  You'd literally get into debates with them and they'd say, oh, he's making Russia strong again. And he's a, you know, he's a great ally of the West and, you know, anyone. Who like questions that entire thesis is just anti Russian. And it was like, I love Russian literature. I, you know, if you want me to, you know, talk about Russian literature and food and all of that, we can do that. But like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the the fate of nations. And of course, uh, you know, we got to a moment when suddenly um, people realized that all the things that we had sort of swept under the rug in the uh, name of just having a nice cozy alliance, having Vlad Putin at the table in the club. All these things were utterly meaningless. There are a different set of interests at work.

• 15:26Trevor Noah?

  So he he has something I've I've always wondered about Russia is like.

• 15:32Trevor Noah?

  Is is Russia acting or are they reacting? And what what I mean by this is, you know, when you when you look at the Cold War, which you studied, I mean, clearly, like, like all of this. There are parts of the Cold War where I go, huh. It feels like Russia is reacting to what America is doing. It feels like Russia is reacting to its perceived like threats or it's worried about like bombs or not having, you know.

• 16:00Trevor Noah?

  And there's there's there's moments where like Russia is like bluffing throughout history, which I I find like if it wasn't on a on a geopolitical scale, it would be great comedy.

• 16:08Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 16:08Trevor Noah?

  Because Russia is constantly bluffing. We've also got a bomb. Oh, we've got a bomb just as big as yours. We've got a military just as good as yours. We've got. And there's all these moments where they're bluffing, bluffing, bluffing, bluffing, bluffing. You you you you find these moments where it comes to a head. And then it simmers down. And then from the inside, Russia Russians seem to go like, yeah, when you look at it in hindsight, they go, we actually never wanted any of that.

• 16:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 16:30Trevor Noah?

  We never wanted the fight. You know, Gorbachev being like, I didn't want that shit. Come on, man.

• 16:36Trevor Noah?

  As somebody who's studied it, and you know, you've been at the UN and all of that is. How do you? How do you perceive Russia's reaction to the world? You know, like, some people will go. Well, Russia was always going to react to NATO being in its backyard, the same way America would react to a another country's force being in its backyard. How how do you process that, having studied it, actually?

• 16:57Speaker 07

  I mean, I think it's it's possible that a nation as complex as Russia is both being reactive uh, and proactive.

• 17:06Speaker 07

  Both at the same time and has a very divergent range of interests that might explain all the things it's done over the last couple of decades, right? I mean, there are fascinating historical debates now about were there moments in the lead up to the end of the Cold War and right after where you could have dramatically shifted?

• 17:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 07

  You know, the path that Russia eventually took. And, you know, there were moments where, you know, even after Vladimir Putin came to power, he, at least rhetorically, you know, explored, you know, very different scenarios, what a different security architecture could look like for Europe. People back in the early 2000s literally had discussions about could Russia join NATO?

• 17:44Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 17:44Speaker 07

  You know, which was something that, you know, Vladimir Putin, literally, you know, he held events where he would talk about that as potentially a long range goal for Russia. But, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, scholars will debate this stuff. You know, actually, at the, at the dawn of the Cold War, there were proposals from the United States to put all the nuclear weapons in the world under the control of the UN. And it turned out that wasn't really a sincere thing.

• 18:06Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 18:07Speaker 07

  That was in fact them trying to call Russia's bluff, because they knew Russia actually would never agree to it. They would just want to have their own arsenal. And so it was just a way to get the US to have some nice PR. But, you know, it's something where I think this speaks to kind of the moment we're in, right? This actually is very relevant to some of the stuff I'm working on. There was no vision really for what a post-Cold War international order.

• 18:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 07

  That really was inclusive, that would represent the world's people, that would stop nations simply descending into grievances and, you know, end up butting up against just Western hegemonic power. There was no plan whatsoever. And we're sort of still in that moment. There's a bunch of leaders now who really regret the states of the world, but they have no vision for what a real future could look like. In many ways, they just want to go back to some idealized moment of the past.

• 18:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  It's the 90s, it's 2007 before the economic crisis, it's 2015 before Trump. We're never going back to any of those moments. That is not the way to actually save, you know, societies, that is not the way to ultimately stop any of these problems. And so that is something that is deeply cyclical, a bunch of elites constantly being off balance.

• 19:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we, we had Mia Motley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, on, on, on the podcast. And it was interesting because she really helped frame how the world and the UN are working through a unique lens. And it was that. Larger countries and more powerful nations have often dealt with, you know, a one-way sort of streets. It was like, we say and we do, and then that's it. We, we, we don't look for feedback. We don't seek a response. But now the world has changed, you know, whether it's because of globalization, whether it's because of trade, whether it's because of migration and immigration.

• 19:56Trevor Noah?

  Smaller countries affect the bigger countries. You know, it's, it's, it's gonna be climate change, it's gonna be famine, it's gonna be, people are gonna move around the world. The people who can't move are gonna end up finding themselves in some of the worst places where then the worst things happen. You know, you look at ISIS, et cetera, what's happening in Libya and stuff like that. And that affects the quote-unquote "Western world" and you, you, you can't have it as a one-way street anymore. You can't just tell small nations what to do or who to be. You have to be in a dialogue with them, and I don't think the bigger countries are used to that.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  Uh, they're not, and, uh, you know, the West was top of its game for a long time. Economically, militarily, very stable societies, it got to dictate terms of the world, to your point. And so many of the things that are unfolding now, where our economic might and our institutions are in decay and our place in the world is being questioned, these are things now where a lot of leaders, a lot of publics, who have grown up in that world where the West was at the top of its game, they think, oh, it's all a lot of alarmism to believe that things could really dramatically deteriorate. Fundamentally, this is all just a bit of turbulence and then things will go back to normal. And they don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people in the world have lived

• 21:12Speaker 07

  through everything that's unfolding now and much, much worse. When people talk about doom or the breakdown of societies, that's happened to so many people. It's happened in our lives in just the last few years, which is why, you know, there's now tens of millions of refugees in the world.

• 21:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's one of those situations where...

• 21:31Trevor Noah?

  It feels like for the first time in history, or rather for the first time in modern history, the major countries are experiencing what all the smaller countries have always been experiencing.

• 21:41Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 21:41Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean? So, so, so you, you have this UN epiphany. You realize that nothing seems to be moving in the way that it could be moving, or at least how you thought it would be moving. And then you decide to go into tech. But this is, this is, this is when around two thousand and five, six, somewhere there way.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  End of two thousand and ten.

• 22:02Trevor Noah?

  Two thousand and ten, or okay, so it's much further on.

• 22:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:04Trevor Noah?

  All right, so two thousand and ten.

• 22:06Speaker 07

  Still very early for a lot of those companies.

• 22:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, tech wasn't what it is now. Like, it was a burgeoning world of like, maybe-ness. The dot com boom still had like the effects where people like, I don't know, the bubble could burst, you know? So it, it, it was almost like punk in a way, tech at that time.

• 22:22Speaker 07

  That's right. I mean, it's, it's kind of wild to think back to that moment now because of course, we only think about those Silicon Valley companies as big tech.

• 22:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 07

  That wasn't even the label.

• 22:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 07

  And it was sufficiently quaint that, you know, there was a film being made at Google, the first time I went to Google in my career. Um, so I started at the beginning of twenty eleven and, uh, my buddy Jim, who sat next to me, he was the PR guy assigned to manage this film, which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were making, set at Google, the internship, or like the intern.

• 22:51Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 07

  And it was actually like, it was like a rom com set at Google.

• 22:54Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yes, yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 07

  Because you could pull off that kind of warm fuzzy shtick and people would go and see it. Cause it was like, oh, Google, it's this warm fuzzy company where everyone sits on colored balls and events the future.

• 23:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and they have the food and everyone chills and there's no real offices and it's just, yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 07

  Totally, and like Steve Jobs was, you know, still alive, you know, the iPhone had just been, you know, announced two thousand and seven. So it was like very recent, you know, um, Facebook wasn't even a public company yet. Um, you know, and after, after I was working at Google the first time, I was working for Eric Schmidt, who was the executive chair, uh, chairman then, I then went to work for Zuckerberg. You know, I went over to Facebook right before the IPO and it was a tiny, tiny company. It was less than two thousand employees. Um, you know, it was only a few years past the point where everyone was just hurriedly adding all your friends, you know, as soon as, you know, Facebook got extended to your, your college. And yeah, at the time, it was just sort of, we're, we're making it up as we go, but it still feels like the early years of the internet when, you know, every day was a new discovery and things were deeply hopeful in a lot of ways.

• 23:51Speaker 07

  You felt like you were part of inventing this amazing future.

• 23:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  Connecting people and look, all the mission statements, they sound brilliant, don't they? You're connecting the world.

• 23:58Trevor Noah?

  You are.

• 23:59Speaker 07

  Isn't that a brilliant thing? We should all want the world.

• 24:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 07

  But then it turns out the world's really complex. And a whole bunch of things that you're not expecting will happen when you connect the world.

• 24:09Trevor Noah?

  We'll be right back after this short break.

• 24:13Trevor Noah?

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• 24:56Trevor Noah?

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• 25:41Trevor Noah?

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• 25:52Trevor Noah?

  I think one of the things you realize when you start caring about clothes is that simple doesn't have to mean basic. Because a T-shirt is a T-shirt until you find the right T-shirt. Ooh, then suddenly you're talking about the cut, the fit, the weight, the way it falls on your body. Then you're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Look at the sleeve. And that's what I've really enjoyed about Quince. One of my favorite things is their Pima Cotton Lux Touch T-shirts. And it's become one of those pieces I keep reaching for. The cotton has this really smooth, premium feel to it. The fit is great. And it just lays really nicely. And I think that's what you sometimes take for granted with simple clothes. When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit.

• 26:37Trevor Noah?

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• 27:23Trevor Noah?

  So, so when did it, when did it flip for you? I, I, it's funny. I was actually reading a book. Um, maybe you even know the person. Oh, I'm gonna be so bad with this. Is it called like Careless People?

• 27:34Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:34Trevor Noah?

  You know it.

• 27:35Speaker 07

  I do know that one.

• 27:36Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yeah. And it's, it's, it's written by a woman who used to work at Facebook.

• 27:42Speaker 07

  I worked with her, yeah.

• 27:43Trevor Noah?

  Oh, you worked with her?

• 27:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:44Trevor Noah?

  Okay. Oh, this is fascinating.

• 27:45Speaker 07

  I'm in the book.

• 27:46Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's wild. Oh, this is even, 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, all right, I'm, I'm, 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.

• 28:08Trevor Noah?

  Evolution.

• 28:09Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 28:09Trevor Noah?

  You know, like, we we like to deal in absolutes in society. So we go Facebook, you know, people be like, is absolutely bad.

• 28:15Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 28:16Trevor Noah?

  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're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to meet with presidents. We don't want to know presidents. We just make tech that connects people all over the world. I didn't know that you were there for like that. I this is crazy that I'm reading the book that you were basically a part of.

• 28:48Trevor Noah?

  So help help me understand what went wrong?

• 28:56Speaker 07

  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.

• 29:08Speaker 07

  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. But there's another part of what happens. The world changes tech. It doesn't just show up in this vacuum.

• 29:30Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 29:31Speaker 07

  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.

• 29:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 07

  And I think there's been a widespread. Systemic failure of leadership across societies. The tech industry absolutely, you know, has a lot of that responsibility. They 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.

• 30:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  I think it's probably quite likely that we'd still be facing huge crises at this point, you know, a bunch of these things unfolding, you know. And of course, you know, 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.

• 31:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, in many ways, I 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, right? I 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 I want to go back to like you, your, your early days. So when you, when you first got into the tech industry, you know, like, let's use Facebook

• 31:48Trevor Noah?

  because you know, Facebook is really like at the center of many of these conversations right now. So what were you, what were you doing at Facebook?

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Uh, 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, um, you know, they had to talk to everyone from Wall Street to Publix Media. You were constantly doing events and engaging with other leaders.

• 32:18Speaker 07

  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?

• 32:33Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  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 deeply understand the executives and those voices as well. You know, I was a speechwriter for a lot of my early career and people often think the voice of people is about the combination of words. And that's the easy part. The 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, you know, massive, you know, populations and audiences and all these communities on a set of technologies

• 33:15Speaker 07

  doing something completely new in history. And it was, it was a very, very, you know, intellectually, you know, 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, came out in, in the book you read. There 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.

• 33:42Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay. That's good to know.

• 33:43Speaker 07

  But I mean, that's also part of history, you know, people will have very different perspectives on all of those things.

• 33:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's, let's start with the good days then. You, you join this company. It is changing the world. It is this burgeoning idea. What, 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?

• 34:08Speaker 07

  The power of connectivity to change lives and move societies forward. That is absolutely true. It's still true.

• 34:18Speaker 07

  People can absolutely detest, you know, 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, real things. They're things which, you know, 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, you know, doing, you know, in my life. In 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.

• 35:01Speaker 07

  So it was literally me staying up like, you know, 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, where would, where would you find that information in those days?

• 35:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 07

  What 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, in the book, I think. And you would meet people whose lives have been completely changed by having access to the internet. I remember there was a, we were at this village in the middle of nowhere in India and I had just got access to like an internet cafe. And this old man had come into the cafe to get help from one of the like kids who like had learned to use the internet because he wanted to track down his friend who he hadn't seen in like years. And he was like, can you help me like research things? Cause he was my best friend and I haven't seen him in like 20 years.

• 36:01Speaker 07

  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

• 36:10Trevor Noah?

  That, that's the magical side of it.

• 36:11Speaker 07

  Deeply tangible impact, right? 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.

• 36:23Trevor Noah?

  So what was the first thing that sort of triggered your spidey sense? What was the first thing that made you question the noble mission you were on?

• 36:33Speaker 07

  It was the refugee crisis.

• 36:35Trevor Noah?

  Which one?

• 36:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, which one? So 2015, when the war in Syria was-

• 36:43Trevor Noah?

  Okay, yes, so the Syrian migration, people fleeing into Europe, going to Germany, etc.

• 36:48Speaker 07

  Suddenly you have this rapid acceleration, 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. So 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. You know, that was the really deeply unhealthy life he had, you know, living in the refugee camp. And anyway, it finally caught up with him, he was in his late 70s. So, 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.

• 37:32Speaker 07

  You know, he had this terrible childhood. He was like very abusive. He was psychologically very scarred from his childhood.

• 37:39Trevor Noah?

  I can only imagine, yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, and so I made peace with him in the last year of his life. And so I was already like bubbling with a bunch of feelings.

• 37:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  And 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 Curdie, who was a Syrian refugee.

• 38:01Trevor Noah?

  I think so. Is it the one, if I'm not mistaken, in the back of the ambulance maybe? Or is it like-

• 38:05Speaker 07

  That was a different one.

• 38:05Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's a different one, okay.

• 38:06Speaker 07

  It was the little boy who drowned on the shores of Lesotho.

• 38:10Trevor Noah?

  Okay, no, no, no, yeah, yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 07

  And there's a famous photo of the body on the shores of this island. It looks like he's sleeping.

• 38:19Speaker 07

  You know, he drowned along with his five year old brother and his mother trying to cross the Mediterranean to get away. And 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 gonna, we're gonna stop this thing now. We're gonna intervene. This is where we draw the line. Of course, ten years later, there's now one hundred and thirty five 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.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  You know, saying that we're going to lift humanity up. And 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 and solve that problem? Well, maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe they have some part to play in it. But that's, 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. And I remember sitting at my desk in Facebook in this palatial headquarters, you know, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, just thinking,

• 39:44Speaker 07

  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 gears 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 causes and the movements and the issues that were playing out in very

• 40:29Speaker 07

  different parts of the world.

• 40:30Trevor Noah?

  So I understand that on a 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 and then we'll move into like the broader tech world itself because I'm hearing I'm hearing what you're saying, you know, you were taken aback by a story that was affecting the world and on your on your side, it was affecting you personally as well because it, you know, it had echoes of a past that had shaped you in many ways. But I but I don't understand how this then casts Facebook in a bad light, you know, this is just a social media company. What is it that Facebook did? What is it that Mark Zuckerberg said or did that made you go, Facebook is part of the

• 41:15Trevor Noah?

  actual problem that we're not not the cause of everything in the world, but Facebook is contributing to these problems?

• 41:22Speaker 07

  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. And of course, the company absolutely would point to all the things that it thought might be positive stories for the company and how it it did those things, you know, you'd look

• 42:05Speaker 07

  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, yeah, we've got enough on our plate, you know, that's 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 a number one thing. I 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?

• 42:48Speaker 07

  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, it shapes the entire digital ecosystem, and the company did not meet its obligations there.

• 42:59Trevor Noah?

  When I, when I read, you know, 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.

• 43:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 43:31Trevor Noah?

  They will say, we're a platform, we're a message board. It's part of the reason they don't 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.

• 43:46Speaker 07

  Right.

• 43:47Trevor Noah?

  Facebook, Twitter, all of them go like, no, no, no, no, no, we 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, all right? When you read accounts from people who've worked in these organizations, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth.

• 44:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's absurd. Like, look at how much the algorithm on X shifted once Twitter became X under Elon, right? You'd like spend five seconds in there, it's just a complete cesspool

• 44:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 07

  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. Like, 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, maybe they spent more time. That would be how Facebook would define

• 45:02Speaker 07

  a better experience. But 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, you know, global town square, that was literally how, you know, Jack Dorsey used to describe Twitter.

• 45:17Trevor Noah?

  Yes, that's how they sold it, yes.

• 45:18Speaker 07

  And the global town square has to have all the conversations that matter in it, right? Not just the ones that, you know, give you the easier life when you're living, you know, in Palo Alto or San Francisco.

• 45:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's fascinating because you realize that these guys have built a world where it would be so much easier if they were just trying to be evil.

• 45:47Trevor Noah?

  But it seems like their 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.

• 45:56Speaker 07

  That's right. I think that's spot on. And that is the complexity of this entire situation, right? If they were just cartoonishly villainous.

• 46:02Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 46:03Speaker 07

  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. 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.

• 46:23Trevor Noah?

  Uh huh.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  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. So it's something where there's a, there's a, 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.

• 47:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 07

  Because they, they are driven by nothing more than they want to build systems that really do solve problems for people.

• 47:10Trevor Noah?

  Do you think, do 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 like, oh, yes, he is a titan of free speech. And because of him, we will move this thing. You you you look at all of these these figures, even Elon Musk, they're like, you know, electric cars. And here he is pioneering a world that gets us away from fossil fuels. And it seemed like they were liberal bastions.

• 47:55Trevor Noah?

  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 I'm doing my own thing. Zuckerberg was like, actually, screw the news and and we're not fact checking anything and we're not doing that. And and you know what? I 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.

• 48:36Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 48:37Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 48:46Speaker 07

  I think it was both. People are desperate for heroes and, you know, I moved to New York in two thousand and eight, you know, right on the eve of, you know, the economic crisis unfolding. And how many more crises have we been through since then? It's like the twenty first 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?

• 49:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  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.

• 50:01Speaker 07

  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, you know, thinkers and actors, they absolutely should share in that blame too.

• 50:20Trevor Noah?

  It'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. We're going to, 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 it was. So where do you think the first, like, were there conversations within the company in and around politics and Facebook when this was still, you know, sort of burgeoning?

• 50:53Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. I mean, these conversations, uh, you know, have been going on for many, many years, you know, um, these were things that, you know, predated me, um, you know, companies were already really agonizing over these things, you know, as, 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?

• 51:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:13Speaker 07

  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, in our lives and our societies, you know, that early idealistic moment in that journey of tech, um, you know, It 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.

• 51:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 07

  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. Um, but it's, it's very hard, I think, to think of like, that's the domino that, you know, played the central role when really. There were so many, you know, interconnected systems that really were, were breaking at the same time. The failures of leadership were happening on any number of fronts, right? You 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.

• 52:30Speaker 07

  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, uh, you know, look at one of these problems. You've got to actually have a thesis on how all these things play out together.

• 52:52Trevor Noah?

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• 52:58Trevor Noah?

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• 53:43Trevor Noah?

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• 54:28Trevor Noah?

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• 55:54Trevor Noah?

  You said that you, you really had this moment for yourself in 2000?

• 55:59Speaker 07

  That was 2015 when I started having.

• 56:01Trevor Noah?

  2015 is when you, when you start feeling this. You then leave in twenty?

• 56:07Speaker 07

  I left Facebook in twenty sixteen, but I was still in the tech industry.

• 56:10Trevor Noah?

  So you so you stayed around for a while?

• 56:12Speaker 07

  I was waiting for Elon then, when I was at SpaceX. And so I went to the space industry, which is something that should be deeply hopeful. I mean, I grew up watching Star Trek, um, you know.

• 56:21Trevor Noah?

  And many elements of it have been like, I I often say this like with my friends all the time. I go, look, man, I'm not a fan of like half of the shit Elon says and like his views on many things. But I'm like, you know, Starlink and the idea is pretty amazing. You know, we live in a world where many people are not connected

• 56:36Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 56:36Trevor Noah?

  to the internet and we've seen what that can do to their financial outcomes.

• 56:40Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 56:40Trevor Noah?

  You know, 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 your life. So it's fascinating. Electric cars, I don't think the industry would have moved if it weren't for Tesla.

• 56:54Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 56:55Trevor Noah?

  You know, so there's there's many elements where it is deeply hopeful.

• 56:59Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 56:59Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 57:08Speaker 07

  No, tech, this is the duality of the moment.

• 57:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 07

  It continues to this moment. I absolutely believe in the power of technology. No, no one's ever accusing me of being anti-tech.

• 57:18Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 57:18Speaker 07

  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?

• 57:36Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:36Speaker 07

  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? That is the consequence, the backdrop of a technologically infused civilization in the year twenty twenty six. 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, you know, lots of leaders, lots of institutions, lots of regulators, they really struggle with this stuff. AI might help us cure all this. Diseases this century. That is something which lots of scientists are very hopeful about.

• 58:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 07

  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. That'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 repitious 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.

• 59:01Speaker 07

  You 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 think, think that's, that's going to get better. They have got a bridge to the future to sell.

• 59:16Trevor Noah?

  Right before you left Facebook, did you voice your concerns and try and like shift the company?

• 59:23Speaker 07

  As a cog in a machine, I did all the bits that I felt were within my ability to go and do these things.

• 59:32Speaker 07

  Every single day. What could I do? I was a guy who was a words guy. And so my, 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. And that's, that's what drove my whole career.

• 59:48Trevor Noah?

  Did you experience any wins?

• 59:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you would get lots of sort of little wins.

• 59:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Do you remember any?

• 59:54Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:00:11Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:00:12Speaker 07

  I took Zuckerberg to the UN in 2015. You know, like, that's the thing where, you know, for me, as a former UN person, it felt really important actually that you bring Silicon Valley, you know, people building these platforms with this immense reach, together with a set of people who are deeply non-technological.

• 1:00:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 07

  But need to achieve really hard things in the world. So for me, you know, 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.

• 1:00:44Speaker 07

  I consider that that a very, very small win. Um, lots of other things I would, I would lose arguments all the time. One of the things that I, you know, was part of my sort of final chapter when I was, you know, at Facebook was, um, Trump was now running.

• 1:00:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  And I absolutely did not believe that Trump should be given a, um, you know, an unfiltered megaphone to spew all sorts of hatred. And I had furious arguments with, you know, very senior people, you know, saying, you are the boss of Facebook, you 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, you know, they sort of, you know, I remember I had a huge argument with some folks there about, you know, a post which I had drafted for Zuckerberg to take on Trump directly and call out his bullshit.

• 1:01:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:01:26Speaker 07

  And, you know, it's been reported, it's been covered in some other media over the years, uh, in the Washington Post, I think, but, you know, 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. And so that 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,

• 1:02:05Speaker 07

  underrepresented people, for immigrants, um, you know, for communities, you know, that were, you know, diverse. All 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?

• 1:02:33Trevor Noah?

  So, so Facebook, I sort of understand because it's, you know, it's, it's public facing in many ways. And, and we see its effects, you know, you see. Um. Facebook on trial or Meta on trial for like Instagram and the things they knew in how it affects um. You know, younger users, particularly girls, um. You see them on trial for like. Trying to get kids addicted to the platforms that they create.

• 1:02:55Speaker 07

  Um hum.

• 1:02:56Trevor Noah?

  So so they're they're pretty like front facing. Help me understand on like a SpaceX side, what could go wrong? It's it's space. You you're launching rockets into space and this is a good thing, you know, 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. And like, uh, what what could go wrong at SpaceX?

• 1:03:13Speaker 07

  Well, uh, this is now well after I've left SpaceX, but now SpaceX is one of the companies. That is a obviously a prime defense contractor and part of the work. Um, you know, that is now unfolding is, you know, to obviously develop a new generation of weapons and infrastructure. To enable the US to win future wars. Um, you know, there are proposals such as Golden Dome, you know, the absolutely astonishing space-based missile defense system. That Trump 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.

• 1:03:48Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:49Speaker 07

  And these are things now where, again, this is the duality of the the moment. Um, you could say, oh, it's a defensive missile shield designed to shoot down incoming, you know, nuclear warheads.

• 1:04:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 07

  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. If 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.

• 1:04:45Speaker 07

  That is like not the wrong strategy, that's 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 work he did on its own of gutting USAID through Doge, which we have emphatic reporting about the lives that have been lost.

• 1:05:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's devastating, yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 07

  He should not ever be rehabilitated. Like, that is a guy who should be on trial.

• 1:05:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that, I mean, that's probably one of the most heinous things him and the administration did.

• 1:05:19Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:20Trevor Noah?

  Because it was spiteful.

• 1:05:23Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 1:05:23Trevor Noah?

  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 generationally devastating.

• 1:05:37Speaker 07

  That'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 naval 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.

• 1:05:51Trevor Noah?

  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?

• 1:06:01Speaker 07

  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. And 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.

• 1:06:42Speaker 07

  The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things. We talk about AI governance.

• 1:06:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 07

  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 life. That is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing in those systems. What happens when AI turbocharge 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. Between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one-third of the 20th century,

• 1:07:32Speaker 07

  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, 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, mostly in China. And I think the world we're going to end up in, you know, in the next, you know, 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

• 1:08:16Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:08:47Trevor Noah?

  But now we're in a situation where, like you said earlier in the conversation,

• 1:08:54Trevor Noah?

  The world affected tech and now tech is affecting the world. Right? In the lead up to, you know, some of the elections happening in the US. The tech giants have put together some of the most insane like amounts for, for, for um political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint on um AI. And whether we like it or not, you know, money shapes a lot of uh an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed.

• 1:09:37Trevor Noah?

  And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them. It seems like a, an infinite loop that's, that's for the most part already lost unless something big breaks. As we've seen, you know, in the past, it's only when something big breaks that, that something changes dramatically.

• 1:09:52Speaker 07

  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, you know, six months traveling the world, talking to leaders and, you know, a whole bunch of people behind closed doors. Where you have some really, you know, spine tingling conversations. And there's a, there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win this, this race for AI. And yeah, a bunch of other people get screwed, but we'll be okay. And 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.

• 1:10:32Speaker 07

  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 a number of fronts.

• 1:10:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Speaker 07

  You know, you look at all the polling, why is it the overwhelming 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 nuances, 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 job. You 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

• 1:11:25Speaker 07

  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, you know, natural ecosystems. Then it becomes a very different agenda.

• 1:11:47Trevor Noah?

  So I hear you on a, on a, on a, on a macro scale, but like,

• 1:11:56Trevor Noah?

  what are we actually doing or what are we actually trying to do? Like where, where, 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?

• 1:12:09Speaker 07

  I think before you can get really granular about lots of tactics, you really need to have one on the idea. Like, does anyone think Donald Trump is the president because of his exceptional ability to run a disciplined 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. And 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.

• 1:12:51Speaker 07

  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, 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. The moment you have leaders with vision, you can change reality around you in enormous ways. You know, 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.

• 1:13:34Speaker 07

  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. They don't want to have to worry about going to war. They want to preserve nature. They want to have a climate, you know, that is something that, you know, isn't something that's, you know, 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

• 1:14:18Speaker 07

  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. Let'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 to 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.

• 1:15:01Trevor Noah?

  That's an, that's an interesting, it's an interesting idea because it's, it's, um, yeah, it proposes,

• 1:15:09Trevor Noah?

  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 are 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 inherently is like this weird

• 1:15:49Trevor Noah?

  conflict of interests slash even like you go, will it even allow you to do it if it gets to a certain point? Like, how do you think of that conundrum? Like, how do you, how do you begin a movement when the very thing that is moving you is part of the thing you're trying to change?

• 1:16:05Speaker 07

  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 our algorithms operate means that certain content may be deprioritized when it's critical or, you know, touches certain issues. That's something, you know, I was at Metta'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. And the things that the company did every day to put its thumb on the scale, well, 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?

• 1:16:48Speaker 07

  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,

• 1:16:58Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:16:59Speaker 07

  through nations all over the world. You can, you can advance ideas on infinite numbers of other vectors, which ultimately are going to penetrate. And, 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 gonna 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 backfires so catastrophically on the people who say those things. You know, because of course, you know, I think every serious person realizes that's bullshit. So I think we have to try. I mean, ultimately it comes down to this, right? The, the vision of the good future and then how we actually achieve that, turn it into a plan.

• 1:17:42Speaker 07

  You know, what does a new economic model look like for societies when machines will take jobs? That's gonna be really hard. It's gonna 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 reeling 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

• 1:18:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, simpler, yeah.

• 1:18:11Speaker 07

  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. 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, they 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.

• 1:18:55Speaker 07

  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. And I don't think talking about it is a sort of kumbaya kind of thing. It's not a, let's spend years, you know, 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, we have a narrow window in which to do all these things now.

• 1:19:26Trevor Noah?

  A narrow window and a, yeah, a mighty, mighty tall ask. Thanks. Thank you very much, man.

• 1:19:32Speaker 07

  Thanks, Harry.

• 1:19:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, man. Good luck. Good luck on the, on the rest of the tour and the leaders that you meet. I think you've given us a lot to think about. Yeah, it's gonna be a hell of a 15 years.

• 1:19:46Speaker 07

  There is a way out of this stuff. We are not destined to fail, but we have to admit that it's not working.

• 1:19:51Trevor Noah?

  All right. Thank you so much.

• 1:19:53Speaker 07

  Thanks, Harry.

• 1:19:57Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Parduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.