Good Life Project - Alec Ross: Middle School Teacher Turned Global Innovator

Episode Date: April 27, 2016

Alec Ross is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The New York Times bestseller The Industries of the Future.He recently served for four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Prior to his service in government, Alec was a social entrepreneur and served as convener from technology, media & telecommunications policy on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.Much of his interest in tapping technology and innovation to make a better world comes from his career as a sixth-grade teacher through Teach for America in inner-city Baltimore, during one of the most challenging times in the city's history, and also his upbringing in a small mining-turned-chemical town where opportunity was not always easily found.In his book, The Industries of the Future, he explores what he believes will be the major growth industries and also career opportunities for the next few decades, while also shining the light on some of the most fascinating innovations of our time and offers a lens into where they're headed (and why we might want to get on board).In This Episode, You'll Learn:How growing up in a coal-turned-chemical town profoundly shaped his lens of work and life.His path from inner city teacher to the founder of an NGO to the tech and media policy director for the Obama campaign to working in the State Department under Hilary Clinton.Why he fears 'the gray twilight'.How he hacked solutions to foreign policy problems.How he got abuelas in Mexico to take down cartel leadership through texting.Why his name was a banned search term in China for 2 years.Why he believes that the next trillion dollar industry will be created from genetic code and personalized medicine.Mentioned in This Episode:Theodore Roosevelt quote65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.Dr. Vogelstein considers the cancer genomeLuis Alberto Diaz, Jr, M.D. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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slash camp, or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. On to our show. I've come to the very, very strong conviction that the kids that I grew up with in West Virginia and the young people who I taught middle school for years in West Baltimore are made of the same stuff as the folks who I sat across the table from in the White House Situation Room. And, you know, the same people who, you know, the top of the business world who I work with now, I really do think they're made of the same stuff. It's, you know, talent is universally distributed. Opportunity is not. Imagine going from being a middle school teacher in Baltimore in one of the most troubling times in the city's history to working side by side with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on global innovation projects that end up taking you around the world to try and solve problems that are so complex that pretty much everybody else has given up on them. Well, that's the journey that today's guest,

Alec Ross, has taken. And he's really, he's taken this opportunity to travel around and work at the highest levels of government, not just in our government, but with other governments and agencies around the world, and almost on a tactical strike level to try and fix problems that almost nobody else can fix. And that's a lot of what our conversation today is about. He also has this really fascinating lens on the industries that he sees as being the places of extraordinary growth in the future. And we talk about that and it's all detailed actually in a book of his that he's written now called Industries in the future. And we talk about that, and it's all detailed, actually, in a book of his that he's written now called Industries of the Future.

So we explore that as well. Really fascinating, wide-ranging conversation with somebody who has been through extraordinary circumstances in life and business and work and is generous in how he shares it. I hope you enjoy the conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. You have a really interesting personal story also. It's a little atypical for people who are writing books about technology science in the future. It is. I mean, you came up in a part of the world that I actually know very little about.

Is that right? I'm curious. You know, that's really the hills of West Virginia. Take me back to your childhood a little bit. Is that right? And, you know, was basically told to leave the house at age 13 during the Depression because his family couldn't afford to feed him anymore. And so he grew up sort of a coal town tough and political fixer. And so those are sort of my roots in West Virginia, you know, I was lucky. I had my mother, whose nickname was Becky the Barbarian. My mother's nickname was Becky. There's got to be a story. There is. My mother's nickname was Becky the Barbarian because she was so strict. And it wasn't even so much with her kids, though.

She was incredibly strict with us but she was strict with like my whole network of friends to a degree to which like her friends the parents of my friends who are having a hard time with their kids would like call her and ask her you know what should i do can you help me so i like i got out of west virginia because of becky the barbarian so so she inherited kind of like the fixer mindset she did well she fixed it with a paddle every now and then. But, you know, so she like was just absolutely relentless about education. And, you know, like it's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a good reason. Like the way that a kid gets out of the hills of West Virginia is through education. But it strikes me also, especially when you came up in that part of the world, was that lens an outlier?

When you say that lens is an outlier. Was her sort of fixation on you must have an education, was that a pretty unusual stance or was it? Because when you were a kid, this was still, I guess it was emerging from coal into chemicals at that point. You know, I think that the difference, I think other parents believed in the importance of education, but for them, education oftentimes ran through high school, right? Like they thought school was done when you were 18 and then you went and got a job.

So I think my mother, her perspective was not only you're going to go to college, but you're going to go to a really good college. And after you go to a really good college, you're going to do whatever it is you want in the world. After I left West Virginia, the interesting thing about that was, you know, I stayed tied to it. I mean, as I describe in my book, during the summers when my friends were off doing their fancy internships, you know, unpaid internships at investment banks or law firms, or, you know, they got an apartment in Washington, D.C. so they could work on a congressional staff. I had to get a job that actually paid money. And so the jobs that I had oftentimes during college, I worked on a beer truck and I worked as a midnight janitor.

And honest to goodness, for all of my formal schooling and for all that has happened since, I think I learned as much working on a beer truck and working as a midnight janitor as I have anywhere else and doing anything else. And here I'm 44 years old now, but what I learned then and that set of experiences is still very much with me. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I so agree with that. I think so many of us try and sort of like opt our way out of those level jobs or those types of jobs. You know, we want to go straight to knowledge work or straight to the golden ring or whatever opportunity we have. And there's so much value in sort of on the ground, working per hour for not a whole lot of money, service oriented, sometimes doing the work that

nobody else wants to do. Those cultures, those jobs, those activities, they teach you something about both the world and about yourself that I think nothing else teaches you. them out so long as you don't forget them so long as you don't pretend like that was an aberrant past set of experiences that will make you stronger and better in the future deconstruct that a little bit for me though i mean a lot of people who grew up either in the hood you know either in in urban poverty or you know in the hills in rural poverty you once they become successful they go through this process of trying to forget, trying to cleanse themselves of it. And it might be because, you know, either they are ashamed of it. It might be because they have persistent guilt because they feel like they can't live lives

of privilege, you know, given that people from where they came from aren't living those kinds of lives. You know, so I think I do see, you know, having I was an inner city school teacher in inner city Baltimore after college. And what I've seen is people from both urban poverty and rural poverty, a significant percentage of them try to put it in a little box and put it in the past. And sometimes, too, that comes from trauma that I didn't have. You know, look, I grew up in West Virginia, but I would not misrepresent it as being an unhappy childhood. You know, me and my friends, we ran around in the woods and we didn't, you know, far as we were concerned. And to be clear, I wasn't poor, you know, and, you know, maybe some of my friends would have been classified as poor. We shouldn't feel like it.

Yeah. But I do think that a lot of people who grew up in poor environments also do have distinct traumas, you know, whether it's violence of a variety of different types or whatever it is. And so I think that may also in many cases contribute to why people put their pasts in a box. So I do understand and relate to people who come from, who weren't born on third base, but who have since rounded third base and made it home. I, you know, I guess I do understand a little bit about what they've lived through. Now, having said that, you know, as a father now of three kids who are growing up in very, very, very different circumstances, much more privileged circumstances, you know, my worry now is actually

that, you know, by virtue of their having been born on third base or maybe second base, you know, while they grow up as resilient as I did, you know, because of those experiences, I don't know. Yeah. It's such an interesting question, right? Because you're happy on the one hand that they've got safety and they've got food on the table and they feel like there's a level of security, you know, to maybe risk sharing sort of the essence of who they are in a different way, more like the top of Maslow's hierarchy.

But at the same time, you look back at your own childhood and you see how formative, you know, a bit more challenging your life was for you. And it's sort of like, you know, can you create the same learning and the same, like you used the word resilience, the same sort of stealing and the same psychological outcomes, but without them, yeah, without sort of having to artificially recreate the same hardships. So my wife and I, and my wife is the daughter of a high school principal in Michigan. You know, so we're both the oldest of three kids. We have three kids. And we spend a lot of time thinking about this and talking about this. But I don't know how to do it. She doesn't know how to do it to the extent that we can. It's through sort of artificially recreating. I don't know how to do it. She doesn't know how to do it to the extent that we can.

It's through sort of artificially recreating. It's like, all right, you know, like for my oldest son, he went on a 10-day outward bound trip, you know. Right. You know, no electronics, make your own food, and that's fine. But they're all, by the same token. It's not the same. It's a complete construction. Right, exactly. And on day 11, you're, you know, he's back with, you know, all his Apple devices and his on-demand life and his sushi.

Yeah, no, it's funny because we, my wife and I have talked her in some way to regularly to the fact that we live a life of relative privilege and that, you know, maybe by being in service of those who don't, even in our own city, you know, just so you can see on a regular basis that, you know what, there's stuff that you shouldn't take for granted. I think that helps with one side of it, but it's certainly – I don't know of any way to recreate that same having to deal with on an everyday level, sort of like moving through some level of hardship that just, over time, lets you see and process the world differently. No, that's right. And look, I wish I were omniscient. I'm not.

We all do. Yeah, I don't know how to do it, though. But, you know, yeah, so that's where I come from. So, you know, as somebody who wrote a book about the industries of the future, it's sort of a very different point of origin than most people. Indeed. You mentioned also that you ended up teaching public school in Baltimore. That's right, yes. When was this?

This was in the mid-'90s. So at the height of the crack cocaine wars. In, you know, one of the roughest little parts of West Baltimore. So if you've ever seen the TV series The Wire, in the first season of The Wire, there are these low rises. And if you were a middle schooler in the low rises in The Wire, you are my student. So I taught in one of the poorest, most violent communities in America at the height of the crack wars in the mid-90s. And it was really hard, but by the same token, really rewarding. And, you know, again, fast forward 20 years, I've come to the very, very strong conviction that the kids that I grew up with in West Virginia and the young people who I taught middle school for years in West

Baltimore are made of the same stuff as the folks who I sat across the table from in the White House Situation Room. And, you know, the same people who, you know, the top of the business world who I work with now, I really do think they're made of the same stuff. It's, you know, talent is universally distributed. Opportunity is not. That's a powerful sentence right there. You know, look, but I've come to believe it. I actually think I believe that more now than I did in, you know, the first 10 years after my experience teaching, for example. It's just as much as I've seen, you know, it's not to diminish or demean, you know, the people who sat across the table from me in the White House Situation Room or the people in the Gulf Streams. It's just I just see the really strong tailwind that a lot of those folks had and the really strong headwind that folks growing up in West Virginia and West Baltimore did. And so, you know, again, and bluntly, that's part of why I

wrote this book was to try to light a little path for people who, you know, don't necessarily get a lot of exposure to the conversations about what's coming. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. When, so where do you, and I want to dive into some of those, those paths that you illuminate, but I want to fill in a little bit more of the picture before we get there. So you go through, you graduate college, you end up teaching in Baltimore and one of the toughest times in the city's history and one of the toughest ways that you could serve. From there, you end up moving into government and eventually the highest levels of government. So take me through a little bit of this, that journey. Yeah. So I spent three years doing community development work. So, you know, when I was a teacher, you know, I would get these 12, 13, 14, 15 year old students, and it's a terrible thing to say, but as young as 12 years old, when they would walk into my classroom, you would oftentimes be damaged, you know, psychologically damaged, damaged by virtue of a lack of education, damaged by virtue of physical violence or something like this. And I had two 12-year-olds get pregnant.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Let me tell you what I was not doing when I was 12 years old. And so I did what I could from September to June, 35 kids in a classroom, close your door, you know, do as much as you can. And teachers can do a lot. But I became obsessed about the systems around them. I was like, all right, well, why are we getting these 12-year-olds in such bad shape? And so I spent three years doing

community development work after that, sort of focusing on systems change in poor communities. And like everybody else in the 90s, I was witnessing this technology-led transformation of the economy and the loss of America's industrial and manufacturing base. Baltimore, a port factory or mill, those jobs were gone, disappearing very quickly. And the area where there was going to be job growth was in the technology world. So I started an NGO in a basement with three buddies, focused on trying to bring broadband and technology training into poor communities. And, you know, I wouldn't have started it again now knowing what I now know, because I realize I would have realized just how little I knew and the likelihood of failure. Isn't that the case with so many? It is. It's such a cliche.

Whether it's NGOs or entrepreneurs or whatever it is. But it worked because I was 28 years old. I didn't know I was supposed to fail. So it sort of shot to the moon. So, you know, a couple of guys in a basement, you know, we built this big global NGO, the purpose of which was to accelerate sort of technology and its literacy in poor communities. And it was from that that I was recruited to run technology and media policy for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And it was from that because one, some of our work was on the South side of Chicago where I got to know Barack Obama when he was a state senator. Got it. And the other part was, you know, there were all these people who were so much more important than me and powerful than me, all these technology CEOs from Silicon Valley who were getting behind Obama's presidential run pretty early.

But they needed somebody to do the actual work, like in technology and media policy. You know, the CEO of Google is not going to sit down and write an eight page paper on, you know, intellectual property in the digital age. So I was this guy who they all knew and liked, you know, because I was sort of Mr. Technology for good. And so it was from that that I ran tech and media policy for the Obama campaign. And that then sort of slingshotted me into government. Yeah, it seems like you're almost I mean, in terms of, you know, how do you go from teaching middle school to being the guy who actually knows how to write an eight page policy paper representing an entire industry or, you know, like captains of industry. There's no course

that teaches you that. So this was it seems like it's really very much this was on the ground. Let me just figure this out. And the way that I ended up in that position and, you know, still to this day, I still feel like I'm in school. So a commitment to lifelong learning is really what enabled me to go from, you know, through these different stages, which were not necessarily, they're not really intuitively connected if you think about it. Right, that's right. Because I'm sort of looking for the through line. There's not one. No. No. I mean, and even like we just got up to the presidential campaign.

I ended up working in foreign policy at the intersection of technology and national security after the campaign. That's even less intuitive. And this came from, you know, when Hillary Clinton was asked to be Obama's secretary of state. I was summoned to see her. And I was like, why does Hillary Clinton want to see me? Does she want to, like, yell at me? She was like, Alec, I thought I was going to be president. And my big network of, you know, very capable supporters were going to fill out all the offices in the federal government.

She goes, no, I need to fit them all into one place, the State Department. She goes, but I need to make one exception. I need one of you innovation people. And she basically said, we whooped her pretty good during the campaign. But we did it with a little bit of class. And so she asked me to come work for her on national security. And so, yeah, so think about the road from the hills of West Virginia to an inner city classroom, to an NGO, to a presidential campaign, and then all of a sudden I'm dealing with the Syrians. I mean, it's kind of mind-boggling. This is a hard question to answer, I think, because it's sort of like trying to read the label from inside the jars, a friend of mine says.

But what is it inside of you that basically lets you say, well, hell yeah, let's give it a try. I don't look, uh, cause that's unusual. Do you, do you own the fact that that's extraordinarily unusual? I guess so. I guess I, I, wow, that's a great question. I guess I'm a little bit fearless in that respect. You know, I, I'm a big believer that fear is what destroys our humanity. It's

what destroys our goals. It's what breaks people down. People get a little bit comfortable and they're afraid that they're going to lose that sense of comfort. I guess maybe it comes in part from growing up in West Virginia where like, you're not, you might, if something fails, it might knock me back a couple steps. It's not a push me back into the hills of West Virginia. You know, look, I've already won, you know, relative to all my peers, I'm doing great. You know, I could do something incredibly stupid that would end me up in jail or cost me my marriage or something like that. But in the pure sort of scoreboard of like employment and well-being, I won. So, you know, relative to the kids that I grew up with in West Virginia, relative to the young people I taught in West Baltimore.

So at this point, you know, there's nothing to fear, right? And so I guess I, you know, the key for me is to now not be comfortable and to continue to have a spirit of audacity. Yeah. You know, what I fear is the gray twilight. Yeah. You know, Theodore Roosevelt said something that I find very inspirational. glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat and i guess i enjoy i guess i like enjoying much and suffering much more than i

like the gray twilight yeah so agree it's a you know his man in the arena it's um and it's it's really interesting the way that you frame it. It's, you know, his man in the arena. And it's really interesting the way that you frame it also. And sort of, you know, like I've already won, you know, and in terms of career. What's interesting also is that, you know, when your comparison point is sort of like where you've been, then this lens emerges. What I've seen so often, and I'm curious whether you've seen this also, because you've also run in circles where, you know, it's the height of power, it's the height of connectedness, it's the height of income, it's the height of opportunity. And, you know, there's a lot of psychology around us comparing, us determining our relative happiness, our relative satisfaction, fulfillment of life relative to sort of our immediate peers, which causes for so many people astonishing discontent. I see it. Look, and what's funny, and I think this is she's, again, the daughter of a high school principal and that we now are able to run in some of the circles that we do, we feel happy to be there.

And also, I think we're probably more appreciative of it than most people. And I know we're happier than a lot of these super wealthy people. And so, I mean, first of all, we don't spend, you know, even though I may work with a lot of these folks, we don't necessarily spend all of our social time with them. But also, you know, when we are amidst what I would call the, you know, the remarkable privilege of the plutocracy, we'll enjoy it. But by the same token, I don't think that those people are any happier than we are. And so it's not like when we go home, we're saying, oh my God, you know, we haven't really made it until we have a private jet or, oh my God, you know, we don't have a chef. No, we're fine. You know, and I guess as we've gotten into these people better, we do recognize that, you know, your happiness does not go up as a function of income.

So very. And the research supports that. Right. Yeah. But it is really easy to get swept up in it. So you end up at the State Department with working with Madam Secretary. And you mentioned that you found yourself in Syria. So fill in sort of your experience there a little bit for me as we sort of move into your bigger exploration of innovation, things like that. You know, the key thesis here was that technology was disrupting geopolitical power structures.

And this is something that I had studied, that I had a lot of ideas on, which at the time back in 2009, 2010 were really edgy. You know, I was writing these memos and, you know, all these powerful ambassadors and foreign secretaries were sort of waving their hand at it. Now it's all taken as, you know, obvious, right? So but at the time, there were all these things happening that were driven by technology, you know, leaderless revolutions facilitated by social media and other such things. There were, you know, there was WikiLeaks, there were all of you know, there were capacity programs that we were building and other such things for NGOs. And so it was my job to be the person who sort of hacked solutions to foreign policy problems.

And I would say among those foreign policy challenges was not Hillary's email. That was not my responsibility. But, you know, it was like, how can we use this really powerful tool set to advance the national interests? So like in Mexico, you know, most of my projects began with Madam Secretary being out of patience with something. And I think she'd gone, for example, to one too many meetings about all the billions of dollars we were spending in northern Mexico to dial down the violence fueled by the conflict with the narcotics cartels. And, you know, just totally ineffective. And, you know, she said, all right, Alec, why don't you take some of your crazy gang down to Mexico and see if you can come up with a solution that nobody else did.

And so I put together a crew of people. And one of the things that we saw when we were down in Ciudad Juarez and other places with one of the reasons why there was so much drug violence was because people were no longer reporting crime. And people were no longer reporting crime because of the degree to which the cartels had infiltrated the police forces. So if you did walk up the proverbial steps of the station house and report something, you got your head cut off. And one of the things that we noticed, though, because we were sort of the national security geeks, was every abuela and even the poorest barrios had a mobile phone and would text message like crazy. And so the solution we came up with was

to create an anonymous encrypted SMS program so that, again, abuelas who see cartel members can send a text message to a secure facility in Mexico City where only heavily vetted Mexican federal police would get it. They would say, hey, you know, I know where these members of the La Familia cartel are. They're drinking beer at this cafe. And so that program helped take down the leadership of a bunch of cartels and, you know, sort of restored crime reporting in northern Mexico, Mexico, the denuncia anonyma. And so the work that I did at the State Department was all sort of like that. It was about how do we use these very powerful tool sets to advance our foreign policy interests. Right. When you're doing work like that, you know, the example you just used, where you know

that you have just played a pivotal role in creating pretty profound change in the lives of large numbers of people. Do you step back at all? And just sort of, how does that land with you? You know, beyond the fact that i'm doing my job and i'm doing it well to actually see the on the ground like on abuela's face's impact that that work you know you're solving an innovation technology you're solving a practical problem but to actually look at the you know the human impact of what you're doing is that something that lands with you it It landed after I left government. So I was in government for four years. And for four years, it was like I had a football helmet

on, right? You know, you'd get onto the field and you never spiked the ball in the end zone either. So, you know, look, I worked on programs that were focused on reducing sexual violence in the East Congo. I worked on a program, the purpose of which was to wipe out a certain kind of surgical political assassination in Syria. I worked on this really edgy stuff and would go from one crisis to the next, one set of problems to solve to the next. And there was never sort of a moment to toast yourself or to even reflect and say, gosh, I feel really good about what I did there. You know, it took some time to sort of decompress after I left government and, you know, sort of took stock of what our team did and then felt really proud about what we did. And I felt really proud about what we did in part because, you know, as our team scattered, I recognized just how spectacular they were. You know, the team itself that I built, you know, it was a once-in-a-lifetime group of

people who we brought together, and I was so proud of them. And I think, you know, in sort of reflecting on what they had done, I came to realize, hey, it was all our team, you know? Yeah, that's got to be so powerful. I mean, I wonder if once you had that window to reflect and really just kind of spend some time with it, whether that, things went badly at different times there. You know, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, who was killed in Benghazi, he was a friend of mine. I mean, he and I worked together during the revolution in Libya, you know, to restore communications to rebel-held territory in eastern Libya, you know, things went badly there, like Chris getting killed. And, you know, it's, despite all of that, the bad that happened, you know, I eventually felt great about sort of what we had produced over four years. And I think the big impact is it made me feel more confident. You know, look, I went

nose to nose with Vladimir Putin on stuff. My name was a banned search term in China for two years. You know, I fought the cartels in Northern Mexico. Like, doesn't, you know, doesn't, the temperature doesn't get much hotter than that. So having emerged from, having come out of that, and having come out of that with all my, with all of my limbs, I guess I'm pretty confident now. Not arrogant, but confident. Yeah. Which also raises another interesting question for me, which is, you know, if you zoom the lens out even more, you're married, you're a dad. And to a certain extent, you have a target on your back.

Maybe not now so much, but during that window of time, is that something that you were sensitive to or aware of? It was in part because there was actually a credible threat against my kids at one point. Oh, my God. Yeah, no, there was actually a guy whose door ended up getting kicked down in the middle of the night in Indiana, of all places. No, there were people who hated us and, you know, who had ideas of things that we were trying to do that we weren't. You know, to this day, a lot of Putin's inner circle believes that I'm, you know, I was part of a movement to ferment regime overthrow there, which I don't like Vladimir Putin, but, you know, no, we were not fermenting revolution there. You know, I think that, you know, there definitely has been a target on my

back at different points. But I think that ultimately, with the exception of people who are deranged and in Indiana and getting their, you know, people whose doors need to get kicked down at midnight. When it's a government, they don't have the incentive to cross a line. That's interesting. Because ultimately, and that's what keeps you safe. Yeah. You know, ultimately the Chinese government, the Russian government, you know, these guys don't want to cross certain lines because they don't want the United States to cross certain lines. And even the association with Hillary Clinton, you know, if you crossed a line against one of her people, you know, these are people who don't want to have

her as an enemy. And that sounds pretty cold blooded, but it's true. But, you know, look, there are still there are also people who came out of that experience, my experience in government, who really dislike me. And that's okay. You know, there is a segment of the far left, sort of the, you know, people who are against our form of democratic capitalism. And I'm highly associated with our form of democratic capitalism and various of the players in it. And you know what? They really dislike me. and that's okay. It just, I mean, it also brings up this other thing of operating at a high level,

being exposed at a high level, knowing that there are people, we talked about having an actual target on your back, but also just knowing that there are people very strongly don't like you or disagree with you or the opinions that you take in a very public way. That's also something, I mean, it's so interesting. You seem, we're hanging out right now, and you seem like a chill guy. And I'm sure there were times where it was really stressful and it was tough to manage.

My blood boiled at different points. Yeah, I got to imagine because being, you know, just sort of living in a state where even getting past Oh, no, no, my blood boiled at different points. Like it shuts down so many people who would like to go out there and do what at least in their mind is share their voice, you know, like honestly and authentically and do what they perceive to be good work. And they won't do it because they're either fearful of and it circles back to being in a conversation, right, about fear. And this is a case where honestly my friends have been really important for me because there have been times, especially, you know, I had never been on the receiving end of, you know, the missile attacks. You know, look, I was a teacher. I ran an NGO. I worked on a presidential campaign where I was a relatively anonymous figure.

It's like you're wearing the white hat or people just don't see you. Exactly. But then, and, you know, so I would react very angrily and very personally. And, you know, I still, at times, you know, I'll get my blood up. But what I've found is that if I respond in a similarly angry way, they won. And, you know, it dials me down. And honestly, too, one thing I actually have learned from people in positions of really high power is they have rhinoceros skin. You know, you can shoot anything at them.

And it just it's, you know, it's a really thick hide. Because, you know, as much as people may go after me, I mean, multiply that by, you know, a million. And you've got much more prominent political figures or business figures out there and you've got a you have to have a little bit of ice water going through your veins and this is a case where honestly my friends really counseled me through there they basically made the point to me that my effectiveness is diminished when i allow those folks to get to me that's interesting and and ultimately that's what persuaded me. So, you know, you've got it.

So I've largely chilled out as long as I'm being attacked for things that I believe in. Yeah, that's it. You just nailed it. You know, I've operated on such a sort of lower profile than you, but I've come to that exact same place, which is that I know if I'm getting really upset about being attacked, the first question that I ask myself is like, what about what they're saying is actually true? Because like what was like – was I sort of out of integrity? That's right. On some level. And is that really what I'm responding to?

Look, that's exactly right and but the you know this is a case where i'm 44 years old now and where i recognize that i still have a lot of maturing to do and developing to do like my ability to have ice water in my veins on these kinds of things like this is a product of the last year or two or three you know so this is this was not something that you know coming out of again west virginia and west baltimore it's sort of I was well balanced at a chip on both shoulders, you know, and so, you know, you gotize them suddenly. You're engaging with them in this world that they've created that's not necessarily about you and the agenda that you're trying to drive, the change you're trying to drive. So this took me a while. And ultimately, it was my friends who sort of got me to the right place on this. Yeah.

I guess being tough and being, for lack of a better word, politic are different. Similar but nuanced in it. No, that's right. And part of it too is about being centered. So I started meditating a couple of years ago. And those little things, getting yourself out of their headspace and getting into a cleaner headspace,

like those things, like honestly, that kind of thing helped me deal with negativity more than anything else. You got to get the anger out. You got to get out of a really negative headspace, you know, that other people are pulling you into. And then if you do that, then you can sort of detach a little bit. But it's something I had to practice and work on and develop. And, you know, there was an intellectual point that

i had to arrive at there was a physical point you know managing my mind that i had to arrive at it's all it's all of a part yeah all connected um it's so interesting that you brought up a meditative practice also that's that's something that i've seen i've had you know some a lot of conversations with some some people who've done extraordinary things in the world. And it's become an increasing part of the conversation that as you do things and you go out into the world and you're more exposed, you're more vulnerable, that one of the things that really lets you kind of touch stone on a more regular basis or move through these really groundless situations with just enough equanimity to be okay

is some form of stilling practice. I know I have one personally, and it seems like, you know, mindfulness is sort of like the word of the day these days. But I think there's a reason. You know, underline just sort of like the fattiness of it. And I think there's a reason. Oh, let me tell you a dirty little secret. These guys who we see on the news every day, they all do it. These guys went, no, I'm dead serious. It's like this dirty little secret these guys who we see on the news every day yeah they all do it these guys

went no i'm dead serious it's like this dirty little secret like you know i am dead serious it's like you know when a lot of the time there's a foreign minister uh not hillary in this case but there was a foreign minister who's very well known and you know they would talk about his staff was prepared to say, oh, he's taking a nap. He's resting. And what he was doing was meditating. And, you know, Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, the guy who basically took down the narcotics cartels in Colombia, you know, religious about a stilling practice about meditation. And the more I sort of moved around this crowd, I started asking more and more about it. And they would say, if you don't tell anybody, oh, yeah. Which is really interesting. It's so funny that that's the dirty little secret. It's a dirty little secret is all of these folks meditate. They all do. These people who, you say, oh, how can you get up and give a speech in front of 10,000 people and you're on the front page and people are shooting arrows at you, they're all meditating. You know, we're hanging out. You have a book that's out that's really fascinating, which touches down on the point that you made

when you were in the Baltimore school system. And you saw these kids basically saying, you know, sort of essentially it sounds like seeing almost no possibility and not really having the tools to understand, okay, where's the world going in a way where if I could allocate my time, my energy to developing an interest, a path, a set of skills, it would align with that, with the needs, with the direction that the world is going. Was that a significant motivator in your desire to really focus on sort of like looking forward, identifying these big growth areas? It was. My attitude was I wish when I was leaving college in 1994, which was the year that the web browser came out, the birth of e-commerce. Netscape, right?

Yeah, Netscape. That's right. The birth of e-commerce, the birth of the search engine. It's basically the year that the commercial internet happened. Right. I wish somebody had written a book that I read that said, hey, there's this thing called the internet and here's what's going to happen. And so now I feel like there are all of these other fields, you know, 22 years later where

it is sort of chapter one, page one. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to be the guy that writes that book. And I want to write that book for,'s, it's necessarily a book for college educated audiences, but accessible, you know, it's not just for people in engineering programs at at MIT, it's not just for academics, it's not just for geeks, you know, so I wrote this book in part to light up try and light a little path for people beginning their careers in particular and for parents, you know, parents who are really worried about what the economy is going to

look like when their kids are coming out of school and are asking themselves, well, what do my kids need to be learning? I mean, there's a study that the World Economic Forum published that said for kids who are entering preschool today, 65% of the jobs that will be available when they leave college don't exist. Yeah, mind-blowing. You know, 65% of the job types. So, and, you know, and who is going to be best prepared for that world? Well, the people who are going to be best prepared for that world, again,

are the people who were born into positions of privilege. And so, so again with a with a sense of social mission i was like all right you know how do we take an understanding of the forces shaping our future to a broader audience you know not just the sons and daughters of the elite you know not just you know the you know the people who are already shaping our future how do we broaden that out a little bit? And that's why I wrote the book. Yeah.

And it's really interesting, too, because it's got to be such a fascinating challenge. I want to talk about a couple of the paths because I think it's really interesting. But one of the big challenges I'm curious about is when you're sort of looking, you're like, okay, over the next 10, 20 years, where know, where like the huge area is going to be where there's possibility. You know, so you're a hardcore futurist at that point. I mean, the world is in such a state of profound flux right now that it had to have been interesting for you to just take on this project, knowing that there are huge potential sources of disruption. And to look at this and say, you know, like, even in light of this, you know, like, what just looks like it's – there's such a pure vein of possibility here that there's almost no way that the sort of, like, these handful of paths are going to get derailed. You know, I think that, you know, anybody who claims to know exactly what's going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years is somebody who you should probably stop listening to. But, you know, after years of – after a couple years of research and reflection, I did get a handful of views of what I thought were going to pop and be really consequential when they did.

And then I got really excited about it. And the more I researched it, and the more people who I spoke to, and even the more that I engaged with skeptics, the more convinced I became, the more convicted I became about it. And so that's why, you know, there are, you know, not a ton of fields that I explore, maybe eight to ten fields that I explore. And there were a lot that I thought I would write about that didn't make it. And there were a lot of things that I thought that I'd almost never heard of. But after researching and getting in depth, again, going back to that lifelong learning, after really learning and learning and learning, I came to the conviction that yes, there's going to be breakthroughs here. Yeah, I love that. So one of the areas that you touch

on that I think is actually probably most interesting or most relevant to our community, especially, is what you call, I just wanted to make sure I had your language right, the human machine. Tell me a little bit about what you mean by that. You know, our bodies. It's interesting. You know, I think machines are in many respects becoming more human, and our bodies are becoming more machine-like. You know, from an economic perspective,

I think that the world's last trillion dollar industry was created out of computer code, and the world's next trillion dollar industry is going to be created out of genetic code. We're now about 15 years past the mapping of the human genome. And we're finally now at the point where we're able to draw meaning out of the building blocks that are the 20 to 25,000 genes in our body. And it's going to unleash, you know, use the word disruption, a level of disruption and change in the medical sciences that I think are going to be completely disorienting. So in the same way in which 10 or 12 years ago, people couldn't have imagined the smartphone.

They couldn't have imagined that you had a phone that you could do anything with other than make a phone call. Which people barely use it for these days. Exactly, right? Myself and my mother. It's like, oh yeah, there's a phone on this little thing, yeah. So a field that I believe is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years is the practice of medicine, you know, in two ways. First, in diagnostics and then in prescription medicines.

So in diagnostics, you know, I learned about this from a guy who I play racquetball with. And for years, I must confess, I thought it was just a gym rat. You know, scraggly gray hair, dingy old headband, wears a knee brace over these 1970s style gray sweatpants, brings his racquetball gear to the court in a dingy old Samsonite suitcase. Turns out this guy is the world's most sighted living scientist. That's awesome. Yeah, right? It was his team at Johns Hopkins that figured out how mutations in proteins cause cancer. Wow. Kind of a big deal, right?

And, you know, what I learned from Dr. Vogelstein is that, you know, his team of, you know, dozens of the world's best scientists have figured out how by drawing blood, you know, just like you might get done at your annual checkup where they check things like your cholesterol level, if you sequence the genetic material in that blood, you can detect cancerous cells at one one-hundredth the size of what can be detected by an MRI. what this means is that cancers that we now routinely find in stages three and four will be able to find early in stage one when they're far more curable. Now, cancer, as you know, is not just a product of genetics. It is as much, if not more, a product of environment and behaviors. But however the cancer got into your body, whether through an environmental factor, whether through a genetic factor, or whether through a combination of the two, if we're able to find cancer at 1% the size, 1-100 the size of what we're currently finding it at, it is going to add three to five years of life expectancy on a per capita basis, I believe. Now, the tricky bit right now is the cost.

So, you know, the cost to do this is about four or five thousand dollars. So, you know, the plutocrats, you know, the really wealthy, they get this. This is part of their annual checkup. But this is not something that's picked up by any insurance program, right? And so this is one of those innovations that's going to benefit the wealthy first, and it'll take about 10 years for it to trickle down. But the cost of genetic sequencing is going down at an exponential level. So the cost to map the first human genome was $2.7 billion. Five years ago, it was $100,000. Just the sequencing today is $1,000. So from $100,000 to $1,000 in five years. So the cost is going to continue to go way down. And then in the actual medicines, right now, when people say personalized medicine,

what that really means is if you're heavy, you get one dosage. If you're skinny, you get another. That's personalized medicine in America. That's personalized medicine anywhere when we're talking about prescription medications. of medicines that really map to the specific genetic material of who we are and the genetic makeup of our illnesses. And so this too will enable us to not poison ourselves to the degree that we do with the off-the-shelf medicines that we get right now. But this is going to take a while too to mainstream.

There's an FDA process that really works at cross purposes with how we would bring personalized medicines to market. So this is one of those industries of the future. It's one of those fields that I think is going to shape life for the vast majority of us within the next 10 years. Yeah, and it seems like one of the big challenges, too, is that the technology is moving so much faster than the regulations that govern its use. That's exactly right. This is not like, you know, a drug that's eight years in development that goes

through a, you know, a trial, a multibillion-dollar clinical trial process that gets brought to market by Pfizer, that then produces $30 billion worth of sales over the next 10 years. It's not really how this works. Yeah, it was interesting. I had a friend of mine that was in the space, and he was saying to me maybe a year ago, he said the the future medicine is entirely customized, it's tailored, and it's tailored towards, you know, your genome.

And he said, on top of that, he said, the intersection between the reduction in price to actually, you know, like get your genotype and combined with the reduction in price and the accuracy and the possibilities in 3D printing are going to mean that one day you're going to go to your doctor, you know, very quickly and inexpensively, you'll know exactly your genetic profile. And then they're going to 3D print, you know, like, and put into, you know, like tablets that are the optimal blend of exactly how much you need of different nutrients and different medications just for you. So, which is interesting, kind of ties in with what you're saying. Like, how do you run an FDA trial on a pill that somebody takes that's like a pill that nobody else on the planet takes because it's entirely tailored to their DNA?

This is what's waiting for us. Yeah. you know what they do to make money um you know how do they make money do they make money when there's a 3d printer of a specific medicine that you can get in the doctor's office you know are you you know can companies patent you know specific materials that are going into the pill and they therefore have the right to monetize it. I mean, you can see how this is sort of a plate of spaghetti in terms of the, you know, in China. It's fraught to say the least. It is fraught. But it's also so obviously the future.

So it's going to have to be figured out. It is. And this is a case where, you know, I think it's going to be figured out in the United States. But if it's not figured out in the United States, then there will be a place like China or Switzerland or, you know, who knows where. But, you know, the scientists are going to to follow or suddenly we're going to make people get on planes and fly to Singapore or Switzerland to get, you know, the specific, you know, personalized medicines. And that skews things economically even more. That's not right.

And that's not going to be tolerated. So these are the kinds of public policy questions that I think are going to really get people's heads swimming over the next 10 years. You know, and then as you were talking talking about popping into my mind, I just saw something on the gene editing technique. CRISPR has now made it so much more accurate and effective and inexpensive to actually edit genes. And now the question is, should you do that in humans and embryos? And different countries have very different views about this.

And it's the same thing, you know, like if China has figured out a way to do this reliably and, you know, like they don't have an ethical issue with something that we have a moral and ethical issue with and therefore we regulate in a way that some other country doesn't, are people going to get on planes? And I think that they will. I mean, what's interesting is right now, you know, when most women are pregnant, you know, around the end of the first trimester of their pregnancy, they'll go to the doctor. And if they want to know the sex of the baby, the doctor will say, congratulations, it's a girl. Congratulations, it's a boy. Well,

those doctors now have the capability, and this is going to continue to mainstream, where by drawing genetic material from a child still in embryo, they can say, congratulations, it's a boy. He's going to be between 5'6 and 5'8. He's going to have curly brown hair. There's a 13% chance he'll get Parkinson's. There's a 9% chance he'll be an alcoholic. There's a 7% chance of this and a 4% chance of that. And with CRISPR technology, I don't think most of us would necessarily object if we repaired a malfunctioning protein or something like that that would decrease the likelihood of somebody getting Parkinson's from 13% to 3%. I don't think most people would object to that.

But if they said brown eyes, I was hoping he would have blue eyes. Yeah. Five foot six. I was hoping for more like six foot one. Right. And if we can, somebody's gonna. No, look, I mean, just look at, the people who educated me about this were actually the faculty at Johns Hopkins where they were doing this work focused on disease prevention. And I said, well, what's it?

And I was getting really excited. I'm like, oh, my gosh, you know, I love the idea of, you know, people being able to live longer and healthier lives. What's the downside of this? There's a doctor. His name is Luis Diaz, who's a brilliant oncological researcher at Johns Hopkins. And he just sort of he goes designer babies. And he sort of broke it down for me. It's just like the same way in which we can draw information out and make interventions to prevent disease. So, too, can we draw information out and make interventions to design your design our babies and so that's you can see the moral and ethical issues that this raises and to your point yeah

look there are 196 countries on planet earth someone's gonna do it someone's gonna do it yeah it's it's so interesting we're in this amazing time of disruption, possibility, and also just giant moral and ethical questions. It's going to be so interesting to revisit a conversation like this 10 years from now. Right. You know, and just see where we are with all this stuff. Fascinating time to be alive, it really is. One of the things that there's a line that you drop actually towards the beginning of the book, which I kind of want to circle back before we wrap up the conversation.

And you write about a number of different areas that I think will be really interesting to our listeners. But there was an earlier comment that you made. I'm going to read it actually. You write, there's no greater indicator of an innovative culture than the empowerment of women. Fully integrating and empowering women economically and politically is the most important step that a country or a company can take to strengthen its competitiveness. Talk to me about that a little bit. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I didn't set out to write a feminist book, but I did. And it was, you know, again, it's a product of the research. You know, I totaled up

my travel and it was the mileage equivalent of two round trips to the moon with a side trip to New Zealand, 25 circumferences of the globe. And, you know, I tried to report truthfully in the industries of the future. And one of the strongest convictions, and this is one where I actually don't think there's any possibility of my being wrong. I'm just like, you know what, I'm right on this one. And that is that those states and societies that do the most to advantage women in the economy and the workforce are going to be those best position for tomorrow's world. And I think we're already seeing evidence of that. You know, there was a study published by the Peterson Institute a couple weeks ago. And you know, this is no lefty think tank. This is

like a center right pro markets think tank. And they did a study of 22,000 publicly traded companies. And they saw a correlation between profitability and the number of women on the executive team. And as I traveled the world and I thought about what are the attributes that societies need and companies need to be able to navigate the future, I came to the very strong belief that women play an indispensable role in this. And so, yeah, when people say, hey, we want to be the world's next Silicon Valley or, hey, you know, how do we position ourselves to reap the economic benefits of, you know, all of the wealth creation? The first thing I say is, well, what are you going to do to really make sure that women play a prominent place in all of this? I love that.

And a true believer as well. That's right. In this case, I am a true believer. Yeah, yeah. So coming full circle, the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? For me to live a good life, there's independence. I've come to understand I'm a pretty independent person. You know, lots of structures and strictures drive me a little bananas. I've come to really covet independence. It's connection. You know, so it means spending as much time and as much quality time with my real friends and with people with whom I've made good connections with my family. It's exploration.

You know, one thing I've also learned about myself is that, you know, like I like the two round trips to the moon with a side trip to New Zealand. I like going places where other people haven't been and seeing and doing things for the first time. And then, you know, I think that the last part of a good life for me is being happy with who you are. You know, I think that there are lots of people who you would say are very successful, but they aren't living a good life. And I would also say that there are people who you might look at and say, oh, well, they aren't as successful professionally, but they are living a good life. And it's because there's a level of self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-love that allows them to to be happy. And so, you know, look, I am a happier person at 44 than I was at 34

I'm a happier person at 44 than I was at 24 not because my life is necessarily better now but because I think I understand myself and my life a little bit better and yes I feel like I'm I feel blessed I feel like I'm living a good life that's awesome thank you listen thank you

hey thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. And you can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe

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