TRIGGERnometry - Dr Pippa Malmgren on Trump, Social Credit, AI & Virtual Reality

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Former US Presidential advisor and tech entrepreneur, Dr Pippa Malmgren (@DrPippaM) discusses the Trump presidency, impeachment, her new book (The Leadership Lab), China's social credit system, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, the future of technology, free will, teledildonics, haptics, virtual reality, social media, liberal bias and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is the show for you. If you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects, they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our fantastic expert guest this week is a returning guest to Trigionometry, the first returning guest to Trigonometry.

She's a former advisor to you as president and the founder of H-Robotics, Dr. Pippa Malmgren. I got it, right? Yes. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Did you say I guess, so I got it wrong? No, you guys, good. I got it's good. All right. Look at Swedish. It's got too many consonants. Nobody can. Yeah, I struggled, to be honest. But it's so great to have you back. We're really, really pleased you've come back to talk to us. You're one of our absolutely favorite guests. And for anyone who didn't watch the first interview, just remind everybody who you are, what's been your journey through life, kind of, you know, how are you, where you are? Oh, well, bottom line is, look, I'm an economist. So what I try to do is help shape economic policy by advising governments.

So I'm currently a non-executive director of the British government on the Brexit and trade policy issues. I try to explain the economy by writing books. And I got a new book coming out. Oh, it's right there. Yeah, we'll be talking. We'll be talking. And then I kind of got tired of just being an economist who talked about the world economy and decided to start building it. So I have a robotics company that I co-founded.

As you do. As you do, exactly. And that's one of the reasons we want, there's lots of reasons we wanted to speak to you. because last time we talked about all kinds of things. There was a particular moment, I think, about 40 minutes in, when you just started talking about technology, and Francis's head just started to explode a little bit, and so did mine, and we were just like,

we have to come back and talk about this for a good portion of time. But before we get to that, there is something that's been going on with Donald Trump recently that we just wanted to get your take on. Really? Yeah. One or two things. Yeah.

And obviously, by the time this goes out a couple of weeks from now, he might not be president anymore, right? That's a possibility. Is he going to be impeached? Do you think is that where this is going? So my dad served four presidents. I've served two presidents. I've grown up in this environment, and here's my instinct. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to have their fingerprints on an impeachment because it rips the nation apart.

It is so devastating to the soul of the country, leaving aside how much people might hate the current. president, that you can't do it, you can't pull the trigger on that without, you were going to go down the drain too. And that's why everybody says, let's not do it. Let's get the prosecutor to do it. Prosecutors are supposed to do this. They love grabbing on to the ankle of a bad guy and then hauling him down to jails. Let him do the job. And so that was the plan. But it turns out not so easy. And we've seen the Mueller investigation dragging on, not that many charges brought, to be fair, considering how much time. And I personally think the real game in town is not Mueller. It's Barbara Underwood, who is the state attorney general in New York. And they have been

very aggressive saying they are coming after the Trump family, the Trump companies. That matters because you got to remember, in the Mueller case, really theoretically, the president can pardon and everyone, including himself. So there's no teeth in it. Whereas the state level, the state level is totally different from federal, and the president has zero capacity to pardon anyone. And the penalty for a New York state charge is not federal penitentiary. That's a white-collar prison with a golf course and tennis courts.

New York state penitentiary is almost not survivable for a white-collar criminal. So it's a complete, I mean, it's viewed in Washington as literally a death sentence. So this is the negotiating point. And that's why I tell everybody, watch Barbara Underwood. Sounds like a character of House of Cards. Well, he is, and this is House of Cards. By the way, I met the guy who wrote House of Cards, and I said to him, I think that you're toning it down for the audience.

And he goes, you're from Washington, D.C. And I'm going, I am. And he went, you're right, I am toning it down. So, you know, it's a tough town, Washington. So if you were Trump at this point, and I realize it's quite a cool, quite a load of it's Okay, this is a leap into this man's head. Yeah. Would you be worried with everything that's going on?

Bear in mind, in terms of front, he almost seems untouchable to the outside eye, because everybody else gets arrested, everybody else goes down, and he just carries on regardless. He's got a lot of teflon factor, just like Ronald Reagan, who I worked for, as a kid. kids right out of college. He also had incredible Teflon. He also had charm, which is absent in this case. But at any rate, you know, who knows what's going on inside of Trump's head? I mean, we know a little more because of Bob Woodward's book, and he taped everything. I would say this. The way to think about Trump is he's a property guy who wants to win the deal and get the prize. So, you know, I've talked a lot about his interest in the North Korea deal. It's all about

he may not get the Nobel, but if we get resolution between North and South Korea, the leaders of those two countries are going to get the Nobel, and he'll be basking in the aura of that. And for him, that's totally worth it. I think that he's got all kinds of things like this where he sees a prize. And as long as he gets those, then he feels like, whatever. You can do what you like, but I'm going to win anyway. including, you know, I would keep a little eye on any announcements out of the U.S. Space Station and NASA

that we might even aim to do a moonshot during the Trump administration. And I know, amazing as that sounds, but that would be so up his alley to create a, and what does he just announce? The Space Force. What is that a cover story for? getting a man back up in space or a woman maybe this time this is the kind of thing he's thinking I'm going to do this and it's going to make history

and you can try to take me down that's the way he thinks Hey you know what I'm gonna well I think most people would prefer him to be in space but you know I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump but I would love for him to get the Nobel Peace Prize

just to see how badly everyone gets triggered by this I would love about trigonometry yeah right oh my gosh Gosh, well, it would change the whole perception of the peace prize. But listen, your book is about leadership, the leadership lab. What do you think is kind of happening with Donald Trump vis-a-vis this leadership?

Like, what's happening there? Why have we, why has America opted for him and what's going on there? I have to say, I just spent a month in the U.S., different parts of America. And, I mean, I grew up in America. I'm American. What I felt like was, oh, my God, Kramer, the television show on CNBC, and Shark Tank, that is how Americans speak to each other. That is normal dialogue now.

That used to be just one television program that was kind of for people who are extreme. No, the whole country. What about this? You want a newspaper? Do you have the money? I mean, literally this kind of attitude is really heavy on everybody.

Everybody wears it on their sleeve, the attitude. So I wonder, I'm like, he's kind of a creation of our own making in many respects because the whole country behaves like this now. What I also detect, and I've heard, the private polls that the politicians have, which are run by companies that are what they call purple, they're kind of not red, they're not blue,

they're genuinely neutral. They're all showing that there's a massive backlash, but it's particularly female voters, and they don't care anymore about public policy stances. They care about having someone, their children can watch without being embarrassed. It's literally like, don't even talk to me about public policy, politics, law, strategy. I want a person that my child can turn the television on,

and I don't have to explain what they're saying, you know. And I think that this is one of the reasons we're seeing a record number of female and minority political candidates at every level of government, and they're starting to get voted in because people don't care that they don't have any experience. It's ironically the same motivation they had for electing Trump, which is I don't care if they have experience. I want this guy to take the government down from the inside. We have the exact same view.

Just now we went a different person to take it down from the inside. So the hostility of the public towards the federal government remains very, very high. And I would argue it has been that way, because that was partly how Obama got elected, right? He was elected on a radical change mandate. And a lot of people felt he didn't delay. as much radical change as they wanted, so they went for something even more radical, in a sense. They may do the same again. And by the way, I'll finish last thing is, you know, we have a long tradition of electing

very outside candidates, right? Nobody ever heard of Bill Clinton two years before he became president. Nobody heard of Obama two years before he being president. The president I worked for, George W., I'm just like, don't be ridiculous, that's such an outside possibility he'll never win. that he wins. So I would put a lot of money on the person you never heard of right now. Amazing. And would you say he's a good leader, Trump, what he does? Because, I mean, if you look at the figures economically, they're not doing too badly. Well, I agree. But here's the question,

how much is because of the president. Right. According to him. Yeah, well, all of it. It's mine. It's all mine. And I touch with everything is mine. Well, so every president, to be fair, gets to claim credit for the good stuff that happens during their watch. And they all do this. You know, my last book, you know, I wrote about how the economy was absolutely improving, and exports would increase, and foreign direct investment would increase, and jobs were moving from China, back to the U.S. That was years before Trump came to office.

So the real issue, I think, is, yes, the economy is getting better, and that's a big problem in politics, because the Democrats now not only don't have a candidate, they don't have a story. Right. The story used to be, the economy's up the creek. You've got to vote for me. Yeah, what are you going to say now? Because the economy is not up the creek.

And I think it's actually going to keep getting stronger. I think I'm the only bull left in the entire financial markets, because everybody's like, the crash is coming. The crash is coming tomorrow. Really? Because we're not in that world. People are now saying the crash is coming. People are really genuinely prepared for a meltdown on an epic scale.

Because we're booming, therefore the bust is coming. It has to be, because we've had the longest full run in history, so that can't last. And we've just seen fairly recently Amazon's valuation, the first company hit a trillion dollar valuation. So most people think that's it. We're at the top. I have the opposite view. I think the Amazon hitting a trillion is the beginning of a whole new era of valuations,

that we are in a whole new category. And that's partly because we still have $20 trillion from quantitative easing left in the system that now is coming off the sidelines because investors are going, wait a minute, inflation is definitely picking up. And we can see that now in the data. It's no longer that every time you go out for dinner, you're like, what? The steak costs what? You know, the wine costs more.

I mean, everyone palpably knows prices are higher, but the data is now really reflecting that it's higher. So investors know you lose money every day that you have inflation if you have cash. So they're going, I've got to get out of cash. So what are they going to get into? If you have inflation, you're not about bonds. So you're going to buy equities, what they call private equity, which means private investment and private businesses, or hard assets like infrastructure. And all of those, guess what they do? They make the markets go higher.

So I actually think that we should be preparing for several more years of stronger performance rather than a sudden crash. So he's going to get reelected? Well, no, not necessarily, because you can have the economy performing well and have so turned off the public. even in your own team, that everybody goes, Basta, enough. Has that happened in history of American elections? I haven't gone back and done the numbers, but I would say it would be hugely exceptional

to have a strong economy and get tucked out. Right. But if you're hugely obnoxious, maybe this is possible. Well, it's just like your former boss is a good example. I mean, the Iraq War was deeply unpopular. Same in Britain, Tony Blair was deeply unpopular for going into. Iraq, but they both got re-elected because the economy was doing well, right? They did.

And so the question is, is that decision about Iraq less offensive to people than what Trump has done? It's kind of sad in the way, isn't it? Yeah, and interestingly, maybe. And what does that say about all of us and our interest in people affected by our own decisions? These are powerful things to consider. When you put it that way, that is pretty crazy. I mean, you know, the war in Iraq killed at least a million people.

I know. I saw something that's quite shocking. The other thing is it's very awkward. You know, a lot of Republicans like myself, we wanted someone who was going to, you know, push the establishment, shake it up a bit, make government smaller, reduce taxes, hopefully rein in the spending. You know, we like this as libertarians. But what we weren't really banking on was someone who would do it in such a way. to create enemies at every turn and send messages to the public that unless you're in my particular category or a second-class citizen, this is totally inconsistent with these core values that you're trying to promote individual freedoms versus centralized government. So now there's this awful situation that you got a lot of Republicans who are like, uh, I like the philosophy, but I can't handle the delivery. And I think this, again, is going to be really hard. Because now what I'm arguing is that we're going to see a Republican go up against the president.

And that is a very unusual thing. Has I ever happened? I'm sure it has, but it has, but it's usually a dead end. But on this occasion, maybe not. Maybe not. And then I haven't even got into the whole business of the real possibility that Trump doesn't run. He voluntarily doesn't run. He announces I'm going to step down, but he'll never say step down.

What he'll say is, I have bigger plans. And my bigger plan is I am going to launch what they're calling TNN. It's the Trump version of CNN. It is the Trump platform that will have everything from reality TV to political talk shows, I mean, literally it'll be TNN. And my guess is if that's where he wants to go, I think he does want to go. I think he was planning for that when he ran for the presidency. He didn't expect to win.

He expected to use that to launch this thing. But I think he's probably already raised a good chunk of change to do that and wouldn't have a hard time raising money to do it if he leaves. And actually the politicians on the left and the right might say, you know what, that would be an excellent solution because then nobody has to pull the trigger on an impeachment. We bargain with him that if he goes, we don't prosecute him. The New York State Attorney General vaguely says, yeah. And then as soon as he's out begins prosecution, because they're not going to hold back.

They're going to go for what they go for. But at least then the fight is private. It's not a public fight of the president in the Oval Office. It's a private fight of a former president about his businesses. And Donald, if you're watching, we're massive fans. And we would love to be on TNN. Yeah, I'm sure he's watching that's what's happening. But to be fair, the TN thing, don't forget, there's a huge component of the American

public who do think in this way and will like what he's doing. Oh, absolutely. You know, and you can see that. His popularity approval, you know, it remains like 48, 48%, 48%, 48% no matter what happens. And so we can't be too dismissive of that side. They're real and they're not going to go away. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right.

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Let's move on to technology. You've got a whole chapter in your book which talks about that. And like I said, last time we were absolutely fascinated by it. And you know what I was thinking? you and I met two years ago at Kilkenomics in Ireland doing comedy yeah I was doing the same thing

I was doing comedy and we were chatting in the bar after one of the shows that we were on and you were telling me about this new thing in China where they're going to have this system where they're going to track everybody's behavior and all the stuff and I'll be honestly

to you Pippa I really like you but I was sitting there listening to you going she's a little bit crazy she could be a little bit crazy maybe she smoked a lot of weed when she was... Really? Yes, so interesting. Yeah, I was sitting there

and then a year later, boom. It's happened. It's real. And that's what you were talking to us about last time you were on the show. What the hell is going on and what's to come?

Because now I believe you. Thank you. Okay, so let's just quickly go through what is already real. Right. If you jaywalk in not all of China, only rolled it out in one city, but they're going to roll it out nationally. If you jaywalk, it clocks that you've done it because the cameras are ubiquitous now. So the facial recognition

is incredibly strong. They have the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in the world, in fact, the most valuable startup in the world, called SenseTime, and it can recognize an individual out of a crowd of 10,000, and it can recognize your emotional state at any given time. So it clocks, it's you and particularly you. Next thing you know, you pick your mobile phone up, and the fine for having jaywalked is already in your text messages, if not already deducted from your bank account, and your name or your government number is already broadcast on the OLED screen that's above the intersection, the nearest intersection. So you've now been broadcast to everyone nearby that you are bad and you just violated the law. Now, this is important because what it does

is affects your effectively personal Uber score. The social credit system is based on the idea that you're given a score, which reflects your social compliance. So if you Google stuff that they don't want you looking at, your score goes down. If your brother or your sister does it, your score goes down, right? Because Mao always said the best eyes and watchers, or it's not the government, is to get everybody to report on each other. And this is a kind of a, I mean, the Stasi would love the system. But it's bigger than that.

Within the last few weeks, it's been announced that when you tap, swipe, and pinch on your mobile device, it's a better indicator of who you are than your thumbprint. So now, even if you're using someone else's phone, they know it's you. Triangulate that with the way you walk. It turns out your walking gate is also a better indicator of who you are than your thumbprint. So what they're doing is taking all these things and triangulating. Think about it as previously independent silos of data. Now they triangulate using artificial intelligence to pull it all together.

But it goes even deeper than that. And recently they arrested someone at a rock concert of like 60,000 people because, again, the face went by one camera, bang it clocks. This person is wanted. And they went to the person's seat. You know, the debit card. Yep, the ticket. They're arrested. I think they now have 11 million people who are,

you can buy a train ticket or a plane ticket, but you can't board it. They won't permit you. So effectively, wherever you are. No, no, so they're putting you into digital prisons. So I think one of the spouses of one of the dissenters, she's like blocked into a very small, few block area around her house. And anytime she tries to move beyond it, the officials are alerted and the police will be right there.

So she literally is stuck in a digital prison. This is basically what the technology permits. And it rewards you if you do things that are supportive of what government's interested. And it basically penalizes you if you don't. We're doing the same thing in the West. It's just it's not government that's doing it. We have private entities that do it. We have Facebook that does it.

We have Amazon that does it. We have Uber that does it. And I don't know if you saw, but there's been an announcement that there's been a deal between, it seems, Google and MasterCard. So now if I go to, you know, I don't know, a department store and I buy this color lipstick, Google's going to know. And now they know what they're going to advertise to me. So I'm concerned about this, and I write a lot about this in my book,

because imagine what we've got. It's a world where you are emitting. data points about yourself all the time without even knowing it because you've turned all the fitness apps off on your phone but the fact is the way you walk is revealing a lot about you including by the way your cardiac condition a lot about your health is revealed by how you walk so this multiplicity of data points that you're throwing off but you don't know who gets to see it but whoever does get to see it they know more about you than you know about yourself and by the way it's a two-way thing if i'm a chief executive and I go on, let's say, this program, and I start talking about my company and I'm

lying, this same facial recognition technology can identify your micro facial movements and they know that you're lying and they can set the algorithms to short the stock of your company as you're talking on, say, CNBC squawk box. So think of it as almost like a crystal ball of data points. And on the one side, it will let us conjure forth answers that will do things like solve cancer. Literally. We will solve extraordinarily difficult problems by having all this data. But it also changes the balance of power between companies and customers because companies will have so much information that I've argued, you know, we used to have insider trading laws. We may need insider trading laws.

If I am MasterCard now or Google, my knowledge of you is so great. Forget Cambridge Analytica. They only had 5,000 data points on 81 million people. And that was enough. to begin to influence your political position. I can sell you way more than a political position. If I have more than that, I can sell you a refrigerator. I can say anything I want. So I think human beings are very vulnerable to this kind of power being exercised.

And similarly, what kind of world do we have if people don't know how they appear and should we have a right to know how do we look with that data slice looking at us at any given time? So in the book, I've tried to lay this out because we have a lot of leads. who are making decisions about the landscape of our future who don't understand what I'm saying.

And so they're literally missing a profound shift in humanity. Well, this is the future. I mean, this is the future of one of us, right? This is now. It's not even the future. This is nothing I'm not telling you is for the future. It is already existing right now. Jesus Christ.

I've never smoking weed again. You won't need to. So, I mean, joking aside, but then that literally means if you're being tracked of every single second of every day, if they're reading what you were doing, if they can manipulate you, is that the end of free will eventually? This is the, so what's really interesting to me is when I was in college, I studied political philosophy, and everyone went, oh my God, you will never get a job. I mean, you are permanently unemployed if you study. Now we get to this and I'm like, these are quite.

of political philosophy. That's exactly what this is. This is about the balance of power between states and citizens, companies and customers, between citizens. It's about the invasion of a person's free will. Absolutely. These are all core questions now. They're not tangential anymore. And the more we develop artificial intelligence, the greater it's going to be. For example, I know a guy who's building an extraordinary company. It is effectively going to place nanochips, which are so small that they can fit inside the body. They are at the level, or they're below the level of atoms, right? You're basically into the level of, you can see someone's atomic structure, their DNA, their cellular structure, and their organs.

Because it just, they float around in your body at the nano level. So that means, the good news is, when you get cancer, you get proteins in advance of the cancer, which now we don't detect very well, but then you'll be able to say, you're building up proteins, we see it coming, we can hit this thing, and you'll never get cancer. But the bad news is you're emitting information about what is physically happening to you to whoever has access to that data. Again, the good news is that will create a kind of, he calls it a cure chain, the guy who founded it, Steve Papermaster, like blockchain, it's a cure chain.

We'll be able to cure many obscure diseases that only a few people have that right now aren't worth fixing, but with that you can fix it easily. But talk about privacy. I mean, the healthcare companies will know more about your health than you will ever know about your own health. So, yes, these are really profound philosophical questions. Well, here's the thing is it's not just health as well, because we had an evolutionary psychologist on the show a few weeks back. I don't know if you caught that episode, Diana Fleischman. One of the things she was talking about is genetic studies,

the study of genetics is now coming to a point where we can pretty confidently say that there's a very strong genetic component to behavior. Yes, right? So if you can analyze people at that level and their DNA and their genetics, you're not just going to be able to tell what disease they might develop or whatever.

You're going to be able to tell what their personality type is to some extent, what their choices are going to be, what their political leanings are going to be. It would make dating really easy. That would actually make dating much easier. Imagine Tinder. No, I want a left-leaning. I can see, you're good for three dates and then you're good.

You're good for a one-night stand. I think you're missing the key part of it. I think you guys are really missing their borders. But you know what? Remember Minority Report? And there was that idea of pre-crime. Pre-crime. Yeah.

That is already real in China. They are already using the artificial intelligence in conjunction with this extraordinary data sweep, and they are determining which people look more inclined to cut corners than others, and then to start corraling them into a corner and putting pressure to behave better. That's today. That's not maybe someday. We already see this in motion. So again, this is a huge philosophical question, is this question of pre-jubes. prejudging, precognition, premeditation, where do we draw these lines? I ended up going back and reading a book, which actually I have to really strongly recommend,

actually an author called Norbert Wiener and a guy called Manuel Delanda, but Norbert Weiner who wrote a book called The Human Use of Human Beings. And it's a profound book. He wrote in the late 1940s, and he's the guy who came up with this word cybernetics, which which means the interface between humans and machines. So in 1949, he's writing about how we're going to have this interface and even assuming that machinery will begin to enter our bodies, which already it is. But this conversation between humans and machines is going to be central to our society.

It's so beautifully written, it's so clear, it's so absent of jargon or anything. And it's a wonderful baseline for anybody who's interested in this. subject. I would say, go back and read Norbert Wiener. It's very short. He was considered the father of modern artificial intelligence, and that's where we've got to go back to start at the beginning. And do you think it's the way we're moving, I know it's a very broad question, but do you think it's positive on the whole, or do you think this is actually quite worrying and we're heading to a dystopia? I am very positive. My leaning is positive. I think that all this innovation, artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics are fundamentally going to solve

many more problems than they create. But the problems they create are very serious. So it's a bit like cars. I think cars are marvelous and can they kill thousands of people every year? Yes, they can. So, you know, we don't say, okay, anybody can vent any kind of car they want and just put it on the road. No, we have rules of the road, right? We have manufacturing standards. We have health and safety. safety. And we've gotten better at it, right? When I was a kid, they just dates me. But, you know, we didn't even, we didn't have seatbelts. We didn't have airbags. You know, the seats weren't even fixed. They used to just flop back and forth. We just thought that was normal, you know. So now we have airbags and seatbelts. That's a very good thing. We're going to have airbags and seat belts for

the robotic era too, for sure. So I'm definitely lean on the side that this is hugely beneficial to society. And I think it's massively democratizing because it's putting power in the hands of people who haven't had it before. And everybody always argues with me and says, well, you got to have a PhD from Stanford or Berkeley in order to even play in this game. And I say, no, that's not true any longer. I was recently at a really cool event held by the Founders Forum called Accelerate Her. And it was about promoting women in robotics and business. And anyway, fascinating. woman there who was into fashion, fashion blogging, but never was able to make any money out of it. And she basically just used apps that you create on your phone and created an app that lets fashion

bloggers all over the world actually sell the product they're writing about through their app. So they get a little piece. They get to take, I don't know, whatever, 10%, 5%. Suddenly you've got women all over the world. They tend to be women. the women who are making half a million bucks a year from their Instagram account just sitting playing on it because the technology is empowered this. So it's not the story that the insiders have a lock on this anymore. It's becoming ubiquitous and I think that's a super beneficial thing to society.

So then it's a race between the citizen and the state who's got that information and how is it permitted to be used. Well, my concern would be the recent stuff that we've seen, Francis, like, Facebook and Twitter, you know, they've not come out well of recent news stories about them. And you look at, you know, Donald Trump got laughed at when he said that Twitter and Facebook is biased or whatever. But actually, then Twitter came out and said, yes, yes, we are. Yeah, yeah, we are. We are. And we're going to just shut down the accounts of those people that we don't like, which they're doing. Well, yeah, so this raises to me really interesting question about why is it, we only have one Facebook? Why don't we have more competition? Why do you? Why do

Why do we have its monopoly positions in these social media arenas? It's very interesting. I'm not sure I have an answer as to why. Well, their currency is the ubiquity, isn't it? Like, everyone is on it? That's what makes it Facebook. But why is it that so few of them? And they all serve kind of very different purposes, so they tend to have monopolies over

the space that they're in. Where are the competitors? This is super interesting to me why it's harder to create competition in this tech space than it is if it's a grocery store on the corner, but it seems to be. But I do think all of these things, for me, it changes the landscape of leadership. And by that, I'm speaking very broadly. I don't just mean political leaders and business leaders, even religious and community leaders. I mean, all of us have to kind of think about what is the same and what's changed.

And so what I've argued here with my co-author, Chris Lewis, is some things have profoundly changed. So one of them is, we used to, in the 20th century, the answer was always in drilling down into greater quantitative detail. Because somewhere in there, there'd be some of a black box, and that's where your answer was. Actually, that didn't really work out so well. And the financial crisis, I would say, arose in large part because of this approach. Now in the 21st century, okay, you can drill down if you want,

but the answer resides in the look across, not the analytical thinking, but the parenthetical thinking, this connecting the dots between the silos, seeing the whole landscape. Or another way of putting it is, we used to be all about measuring the math. What are the numbers? Give me the data points.

Now it's equally important, or maybe more so, to understand the mood. The facts and the feelings are very different things. And I know we'll get a lot of pushback because people say, well, you can't analyze feelings. And I'm like, well, I'm sorry, you can when you get voted in or out of office. and you feel it when your customers turn on you

for no reason that you can quantify, but everybody knows. So it's about using not only your head, but all the parts, your left brain and your right brain and really joined up thinking and also including in your thought process, what's the heart aspect? Because that's the part, when I talk about technology,

it's not your intellect that twists so much. You're like, for your heart, because you're like, but what happens to individuals? What happens to people? Right. that's your heart speaking. And so the book is very much about we need a lot more heart in our leadership. We need a lot more joined up thinking. And also, I know this sounds really corny, but leadership in the 20th century was all about the leader. It was the cult of the leader.

It was the Jack Welch, you know, it was one infallible leader, kind of the Jesus Christ model of management. Now it's about the ship. It's about the team. It's about the organization. It's about bottom up, not top down. And a lot of our leaders today have no idea how to manage in that environment. They don't think inclusively. So if there's anything, the core message of the book is we need much more diversity of thinking. And diversity of people is critical to that, and I'm hugely supportive, that we have much, much more diversity of people. And I don't just mean gender, although that's a big push in the book, but I mean ethnicity, income background,

Neuroplasticity, how your brain is wired up. I mean, diversity of experience. But you can still have a room full of people who all look very different, who go, Trump will never win. Then you have a problem. So one of the things leaders need to do is to stop focusing on prediction, because if you say Trump will never happen, that's a prediction.

And instead get focused on preparedness for things that sound way out there and use scenarios to test your robustness and your adjustment, I was just going to say, if we just move on a little bit to virtual reality, I was at a comedy club, playing this comedy club, and one of the guys working there is sort of a graduate, and he was saying that actually in a few years' time, comedy clubs will become obsolete, you know, bars will becoming, well, obsolete, and that this will all go into the virtual environment. Is that a reality, or do you think people will always need to be sitting in a room together and having that emotional and physical? connection? Buckle your seatbelt. Because I work in this space because with my robotics company, we're making drones, commercial drones. One of the ways we deliver the information is through virtual reality. So our clients can put on goggles and then walk through an asset that's on the other side of the world. So if you had an avalanche to a mining site, suddenly you can be

inside that mining site and viscerally feel it as opposed to watching a video in a two-dimension. So I spent a lot of time in this space and it is so realistic the brain cannot distinguish between real and virtual. I recently did a new virtual reality game and it was like in a big warehouse and I know I'm standing on a flat floor in a big warehouse and there's nothing to bump into. And yet at one point I am like on the 157th floor of a building that has been blown out by explosives and I have to cross a rickety bridge and I'm I'm literally like,

and then I'm going, don't be an idiot. It's a floor. You're in a building. Your brain is going, you might fall, you might fall. It is so realistic, and now the real kicker, we're starting to get haptics. And this is a word. Everybody should look up and know. Haptics are items of clothing that permit feeling from a remote location.

So haptic gloves, people are familiar with haptic gloves, so you can grab things in a video game by going like this. But now we're getting full-body haptic. So let's say I go on a virtual reality boxing program. When the guy in Tokyo, who's playing the game at midnight and I'm sitting here in London, when we go against each other in that boxing ring and he hits me in the solar plexus,

I'm going to feel that because the haptic thing that I'm wearing is going to give me that punch. Now, I may be able to choose. that I only want to feel one-tenth of what he's throwing, right? I could do that, but it'll all be scored. Because the Internet is a scoring mechanism, which is actually one of my political philosophy questions, is do we want to live in a world where we're all being scored all the time?

Because where is there any place for beauty? I mean, how do you see? Well, you guys, they do score beauty, which I just find incredible. You know, the women one out of ten. You know what I mean, though. Beauty is not a thing that can happen. on a numerical scale. And so this business of moving into a world

where everything is scored and then marry that up with haptics and virtual reality, you're going to have people who are going to go, I've got to have full force. I don't know if you saw the Spielberg film Ready Player 1. It is super worth watching. It is our first time that we really are shown what living in a virtual reality world

is going to look and feel like. And at one point, the main character is in this situation and his friends say, turn it down so you don't feel the full blow. And he goes, oh, I'm a real guy. And so he sets his outfit to feel whatever the other player is throwing at him. The point is, people are going to get hurt. Put it another way, the Germans recently developed really interesting virtual reality chair. Basically sits on bungee ropes that are attached to the sides of the room,

so that when you sit in the chair with your goggles on, not only, well, you see the VR world, but you're going to feel the actual G-forces now. You will be moving. And I took one look at that, and I went, that chair, someone's going to have a heart attack in that chair, because the brain can't tell the difference. They're going to step off the edge of the building in the VR,

and then the chair is going to go, woof, and that guy's going to have a heart attack. It's like the matrix. The matrix, your mind makes a real. In fact, we've even been talking with the Red Cross about torture and the need to have a new Geneva Convention on torture because if I am given these VR goggles and I'm a victim of torture, well, if what I see is that someone's just cut my hand off, my brain is going to process as if that injury is real. You won't be able to,

and if you touch me when that happens on my screen, my brain will know. Something has happened. visually see what's happened, the brain starts responding to that. So I think this waterboarding will have nothing on what this can bring. And equally, even things that seem innocent, the fact that this is what Spielberg shows in that film Ready Player 1, that you can enter alternative worlds and live there and just stay there. You don't ever have to come back into reality. And again, a big message we have in the book, we looked at all the research. What's happening is people are, in theory, more connected because of the internet, but in practice, there's less and less conversation, less and less human connectedness, and virtual reality and augmented reality

take you to an even greater level of disconnectedness. And create a world where you think that certain things are normal that are not at all normal in real life, because what's created in a virtual reality world is it's comics, it's pictures and its drawings. but they're so real that you start to believe that's the standard. I want that in my life. But I do wonder, I mean, with your question, Francis, right, about will people stop coming to comedy clubs

or will comedy clubs stop existing? I mean, right now, you can pay 30 pounds or whatever it is for Netflix or even less a month, right? And you can watch a Netflix special from the best comedian in the world, whoever you think that is for that amount. Or you can go to your local comedy night and pay that same amount twice a month

right to go and see some far inferior comedians by comparison in person and there are loads and loads of people I run a comedy club where I live right people will come and do that so do you think maybe we sometimes we we kind of overestimate the or maybe underestimate people's desire to be physically doing something physically present with others physically connected in a space that is without screens that is without that thing where it's just right you're right there that moment. I think there's a market for both, and I think humans will be doing both. But I also think that it's not one or the other. Like one thing that I'm working on right now is being able to

bring augmented reality to the audiences that I speak to when I do my public speaking, and you guys will be doing the same at some stage, you'll be able to say to the audience, if you pick your phone up and point it at the stage, I'm going to show you something. And we're standing next to you on the stage is suddenly going to be a Pokemon type thing that you've. You've chosen an example of something that's in your comedy routine. And now you guys are creating an augmented reality experience for that audience. So it's not either or, it's going to merge more and more. But also it's a different level of risk.

If I decide to come watch you guys live, of course this is an extremely risky thing for me to do. But there's a certain level of risk that you might mess up. Or you might surprise me because the mood in that audience that night creates a different energy level in you guys then, right? Because your routine changes depending on the audience, right? Versus going to watch it on that kind of VR landscape might actually be, it's more like watching a pre-programmed thing. So the level of risk that it might screw up is much lower or different. So it depends what your risk

appetite is. And you'll measure that on any given day and decide what's the right venue to express that risk appetite. But what I do think is it's going to become so mainstream that it'll reach the point we start finding it hard to distinguish one from the other in the same way that robotics and automation will be increasingly inside of us and it'll be hard to distinguish between a person who's 100% human and a person who's not we're kind of already there as well I mean it's also going to impact on people's mental health yeah big time because like you said you know you're gonna go into these virtual reality worlds where you know they

in a sense, there are no consequences for your actions. You can always, you know, get to the end of the game, start again, whatever else. And then once you get into real life, the rules are completely different. Totally. And when it comes as well, you know, when things between, you know, relationships, sex, all the rest of it. So in the book, we talk at some length about the fact that a ever larger proportion, and now it looks like in some industrialized countries, it's heading towards 15% of males under the age of 25, have never had a relationship.

Because they live so much online or are in a position where they can avoid the human interaction that they do, which means they have no capacity to negotiate with other human beings. Because you have to learn that. You have to learn how to negotiate with other human beings. We're seeing record numbers of elderly people. I shouldn't say elderly

older people people over the age of 40 who are not I don't even need to get to elderly people over the age of 40 are not living together anymore If you're over the age of 40, you're elderly not say bye-bye

I'm in that but even people over the age of 40 are not living together any longer they are not they may share a roof but they don't share a life They're not with a partner. They're in a rent-share space.

And those numbers are going up. So the real human consequences of all this technology seems to be that it is separating us from one another. It's ironic, but that is what we're finding as the result. And this is a profound change in the society. We talk about it being it's an atomization that people becoming more and more isolated and they don't identify,

you know, with larger groups, they feel alone and isolated. And maybe that helps account for the rise of identity politics. It feeds off of that sense of, I'm alone. I'm not connected. So how weird you're Uber-connected and simultaneously disconnected. And are there any remedies to this on a personal level? Like, is there something you do as a human being to kind of plug yourself back into reality?

in this? Yeah. So, yeah, and isn't it interesting that all the magnets in Silicon Valley don't let their kids have mobile devices? I mean, how interesting is that? You know, how interesting. I've heard so many of these people

who work on these tech products say, basically we're using all the techniques you use to entice gamblers. Yes. That's what's your phone. So, yeah, maybe we need to learn how to turn stuff off, switch off, off actually have a conversation.

And yes, that is one of the things that we recommend. The problem is people are so impatient, so they don't want to, that's just painful for them. They won't even wait two seconds. If a page doesn't load on the web in two seconds, they're gone. So one of the things we have to figure out is how to cultivate patients. There are lots of these things, but the societal impact is quite profound. Actually, there's a section, if I could be really boring.

There's one page, page 228. We made a list of all the things that have profoundly changed. So this is about the whole landscape, not just technology. Technology feeds this. But it used to be, the good used to be we the people. Now it's me the people. We used to like thoughtful, clear, measured responses. Now it's Twitter at speed, it's jargon, it's emojis, it's compressed information.

We used to like to study. Now it's all hacks and shortcuts. We used to like saving, now we like spending. We used to dress up. Now we dress down. There's a whole swing. It's almost like, you know, when Alice in Wonderland drinks and she goes through that looking glass and she's ended up on the other side of reality, technology has done this. And I think we should be aware of this list of what it's doing to us, which is, you know, much more profound than, just put your phone down a little bit. Okay, yeah, but we have to learn how are we going to deal with a world where, you know, free speech has been replaced by political correctness. These are super profound societal changes. And do you think this technology is encouraging a narcissistic behavior in people? Sure, absolutely. The rise of the selfie is only possible because of the camera.

And that sense is, that's we the people. No, me the people is a person with the selfie stick. And so, yeah, technology that's part of being atomized. We're not connected anymore. It's me and only me. And how do I look? There's a question I've always wanted. Whenever I speak to you, I can't believe I forgot to ask that question.

You know when you go on Google and you go, you know what? I need some new trainers. And Google's an advert for trainers comes up. Are they really listening? Or is that slight paranoia? Well, like I said, it's now in the public domain. The Google and MasterCard have a relationship and some kind of information sharing is what's implied.

But I think what Francis means is your phone literally picking up what you say and then processing it in that way? Well, the answer is it's perfectly capable of doing so. And many other Internet things, devices in your home and in your life are doing it as well. So, for example, the Amazon Echo, it's already been subpoenaed in a murder trial as a witness. And, of course, the two of you guys are like, whoa. And by the way, it's a very good witness. It's a highly reliable witness.

Well, absolutely, because it's not, you know, it doesn't distort. Yeah, it doesn't distort the memory in any shape or form. And I have to say the story I love was the guy who thought he was being really clever and left his mobile phone at somebody else's house, drove to his house, set the thing on fire and then, you know, petrol and gasoline everywhere and thought he was in the clear because he just wanted to get the insurance money and he forgot he had a pacemaker and the pacemaker was broadcasting not only his location, but what was happening to his heartbeat as he was setting his house on fire. So this thing is you are constantly emitting data. Back to my point,

you may not even know how you're emitting it. In Sweden, companies have recently introduced microchipping the employees in the thumb. And amazingly, A lot of the employees in some of these companies are like, I'd love to do that because I don't want to have to pay for my coffee. I just want to wave my hand and I'm done. It's like magic. Yes, but guess what? Now you're like on the grid and everything you do is on the grid.

So the answer is you should assume that any Internet of Things device that is in your world is perfectly capable of broadcasting not only your voice but your physical movement within the space. Vacuum cleaners, automated vacuum cleaners are broadcasting the dimensions of the room and the human use of that space. It seems in this family, they come in to watch television at 4.45. So if you want to advertise spaghetti to these people, 4 o'clock might be a good time to hit that little reminder for them. So, yeah, this is the point. I mean, again, with social media, the bottom line is if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

This is why I love doing the show. We talk about all kinds of stuff on here about men and women, feminism, everything. But fundamentally, what I love is when we do an interview, and I kind of go, okay, there's some things I need to do differently in my life. You know, like we had Diana Fleischman on, among other things, she was talking about veganism. And she was saying that actually it's very difficult to be vegan, therefore if you want to reduce the quantity of suffering that you cause

and the number of deaths, you've got to start eating the biggest possible animal. Does that make sense? Because there's like a year's worth of meat and a cow. And if you eat chicken, you're going to basically be killing another creature every couple of days. So I pretty much don't eat chicken now after that conversation. I eat, you know, beef and whales and whatever. You're such a good person constantly. I am, mate.

That's me. I'm woke as hell. I'm so woke I can't sleep. And that's why I love about this. It's fascinating. It's terrifying. I think it is absolutely terrifying what you're talking about. It's also very encouraging that there's.

going to be this ability to resolve all these problems to fix the cancer or whatever else but I mean I just think we've got to be really careful I also think you know there's an element there there is a part of me that's going yeah but we're still we still have that need for personal contact we still there's going to be some kind of pushback against all of this there's going to be some kind of feeling like you know what actually no we want to get together we want to be physically in the same like look at us people will listen to an hour's interview I mean, we talk about, you know, this kind of bite size, everything is now shorter, attention spans, but actually there's a massive pushback against that now.

There are people, we've interviewed some people who do YouTube videos, they don't even show their face. It's just a guy talking for 40 minutes. Yeah. And he's not even like doing kind of comedy, like a little bit of set up punchline. It's just a guy talking for 40 minutes. I love it. And that guy's got a million subscribers.

And I totally agree. I think there's a market for these things. But this idea that we're automatically jumping to that end, I don't know. One of the really tricky parts of the book, your guys are going to laugh. We actually talked about one kind of robotics and automation called Teledildonics. Yes. And, oh, yes. It's worse than you think.

Extending your penis remotely, is that? Basically. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, people are having sex using devices where someone you've never met on the other side of the world is controlling what happens. Like, we are moving both directions simultaneously. I know, I'm like, oh, my God. I was amazed the publisher let us put it in there.

But it's a real phenomena, like a real phenomenon. Elon Musk actually, no, he's losing the plot. But at any rate, at one point, not so long ago, he said he was in some kind of artificial intelligence product that he'd been introduced to, and obviously it's something nobody else has seen yet. And he basically said, the thing I experienced was something to do with love, not sex, but love. And so you don't know, is he talking about some kind of a sex doll, or is he talking about an interface with a computer?

I don't know. But what he said was it was so much better than the real thing that it's terrifying and it's going to be the end of humanity. And I have to see, this is a thing. we really have to think about what are our basic human needs and how do they get met. Remember that film with Joaquin Phoenix, I think it was, where he falls in love with his artificial intelligence who had Scarlett Johansson's voice, I think it was. Right, but he literally begins to fall in love because the AI knows the answers and knows him so well.

And at the very end, he's completely shocked that someone who knows him so well can just abandon him because you feel the involvement. And so again, we're back to political philosophy. How do we handle this? Because we're vulnerable. Human beings are vulnerable. So the sex realm. I mean, it's quite, this is what Diana Flazeman told us. There's quite a big difference between men and women in terms of kind of sexual preference. Yeah, right. No, that's sexist. I know. Somebody help me at this paper. So she's talking about the fact that men basically, they have less disgust when it comes to the sexual domain. So that means men, as we all know,

tend to be more adventurous and more kind of, right? So if you're a man in this new, brave new world, and there's stuff that you want to do sexually... Right. Why would I meet a real woman and have to like negotiate stuff? Yeah, yeah. Take around to dinner. You know, right.

But not even dinner, but like I can do what I want as opposed to what we both agreed to do, right? And all this other stuff. And yeah, why would you meet a real woman in that situation? I mean, theoretically, at least, that's kind of where this is headed. No, I know, and although this seems like like a narrow thing we're sidelining into, this is so fundamental. So you say the human condition. There's a writer who I think is really interesting, like a California guru called David Data,

and he writes about, he writes about sex and what makes sex really good. And he says there are really three kinds of relationships. There's the one where one person is saying, I want, and that's what you just described, I want. And they're all about imposing what they want. They just need another person to do it. Then there's the, I want, but I know you do too, so let's negotiate. And it's transactional, even if it's elegantly transactional.

It's still, I'll take you at dinner if, da, da, da, da, da, da, you know. But love, love is, I choose to love, and it's unconditional. And my interest in loving you is for your individuation. as a human being. How do we get more of that when we're in this environment? That's a really interesting question. And in this book, we kind of, we dance a little around it, but we kind of say really good leadership has love.

That just sounds so corny as to be ridiculous. But in the context of what we're saying, you begin to understand love, the care for the well-being of other human beings now is a fundamental issue for all of us. You have to think about what's happening to people with a heartfelt perspective. But doesn't it also come down to gratification and instant gratification? Because if you go onto a computer game, you can be a black belt martial artist in four different disciplines just by switching it on. But the reality is in life, if you want to be that, that takes, what, 15, 20 years, constant discipline, eating right.

And the same with love. Love is incredibly hard. It means going and meeting lots of different people. involves rejection and then you know it involves compromise maybe for you maybe for you yeah yeah i did i did i did i did i did yeah i did but it's it's surely yeah it's because life less it's it's fucking hard and well and not only that but again virtual reality world it's really interesting because now there've been computer games where you have people who are winning who don't fit what that model is.

So you could have a 50-year-old African-American woman emerges as the champion in a virtual reality world where in a physical world, she wouldn't win that fight, but she can win it online. And in virtual reality. And the other thing is, you know about the marshmallow test? No. No.

So I think it was Harvard University. I can't remember. But anyway, the marshmallow test was they took little kids, five, six years old, and left them alone in a room and said, if you don't touch the marshmallow, will give you three. And they left them for 20 minutes.

And the ones who weren't able to wait 20 minutes and ate the marshmallow versus the ones who waited. The ones who waited had much better human skills, an easier life. They had higher achievement levels. The people, people who can't wait, their achievement levels are not good, their empathy and capacity for connections not good. We need better performance on the marshmallow test as a race.

Humanity needs to do better at the marshmallow test. And the problem is all the technology is pushing us in the other direction. So how do we make choices that balance it out? Because otherwise we may end up in a, you know, you said as a dystopian, we could end up in a dystopian place. but I don't see that we have to, but we could. Well, on the subject of impatience, our time, I'm afraid, is up. So coming back, as always, to our final question, what is something that we're not talking about? We've talked about all kinds of interesting things today.

What is something that we are not talking about that we ought to be talking about? Oh, well, gosh, so I should ask me at this beginning because then I want to thought about it. I don't know. I still think all of the stuff we've talked about just, now we're not talking about. We're not talking. I think, look, in my world, in financial markets and stuff, really everybody is just preparing for catastrophe all the time.

And I don't think we're talking enough about what about if all of this technology, all this stuff works, and we end up in a world where we can solve any food shortages. I already know technology that can do this. So I think we're there. How do we deal in a world that doesn't have any scarcity? It has ubiquity. That's a really interesting question.

And I think we're moving towards a ubiquity world more than a scarcity world, but with all the problems that we've talked about. So to me, that's the interesting thing we're not talking about. A ubiquitous world, not a scarce one. All right. Well, if you've still not left the internet after that, Not destroyed all your mobile devices in one big house fire. Follow Piper, Dr. Piper M.

On Twitter at Dr. Piper M. By her book, The Leadership Lab, which is coming out on October 4th. October 4th in the UK and the 28th in the US. 28th of October in the US. Get the book. It's going to be fantastic. And as always, follow us at TriggerPod on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. Obviously, subscribe to this YouTube channel if you're watching it

and click that bell button right now. next to subscribe button, which make sure that you get the videos as they come out and you get notified. Anything else, Francis? Yeah, don't smoke weed whilst you're watching this episode. You know, I feel like I need to smoke some weed just to calm down after the mind-blowing of this episode. Listen, Pippa, it's been so great to have you. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been absolutely pleasure. Brilliant. All right. See you next week, guys. Thank you. Bye.