Mariana Mazzucato Thinks We Need More Moonshots

like it definitely. You know when I think about it, when I'm like here and like listening to a lot of the conversations, it's just so obviously like connected to a lot of the themes we talk about, because so much of our discussions have to do with something related to you know, innovation or technology or implementation of policy and how it spans both the public and private sectors. Yeah.

and what's not working and so forth. They all have such similar challenges, so many things have been like repeated, you know, one time after another that like they all can sort of speak the same language and all have the same issues.

of innovation, how these things actually get deployed. So, Professor Matzakato, thank you so much for coming on ODL. Finally, finally, are completely our fault for not having made it happen sooner. But what do you just started? Like, what are you doing here? What brings you to this particular conference a what attracts you here?

that we've just set up. It's called the Global Council for a Common Good Economy anyway, And besides that, I'm also here to speak at the Bloomberg City Labs event about this new public sector Capability index that we've been developing with them, as a partner, which is really about reinvesting inside the civil service so that they can really tackle those wicked complex problems instead of you know, hiring Deloitte during COVID and giving them one point five million

a day to do test and trace, which they fail at in the UK.

even being able to fail? For example? Right, so a venture capitalists are was bragging about all the failures that they had in order to get a success, you know, whereas as soon as a civil servant or a minister fails or prime minister fails. Front page of the papers, So they're very interested in the kind of narrative change, but also well the cultural change, but especially the theoretical underpinning.

Would then say, a finance ministry or an economics ministry that needs to then a company rethinking government, because otherwise, if you continue to have the old economic models where we judge things by cost benefit analysis and at present value, all these really static metrics, we would have never even bothered going to the moon. Okay, first of all, in the nineteen sixties, had we thought of it as a cost benefit calculation and so what should replace that? Right?

Are we focused too much on sectors? To what degree is industrial strategy actually helping to create a more inclusive, sustainable, innovation driven, you know, economy, or is it just another wave of handouts and subsidies to particular sectors and then we end up socializing risks and privatizing rewards. And also, I mean I used to joke that the US government has always had an industrial strategy, but you know, pretended

not to. And they've always talked to the Jefferson talk but acted the Hamilton talk or the Hamiltonian kind of more proactive government strategy. But by pretending that wasn't there,

they kept a lot of things under the radar. And the joke bit is just that finally people understood what the hell was talking about because of the musical before the musical came out Hamilton anyway, So I think that's really important to recognize that industrial strategy has always been there, except that in certain phases, including now in some countries, it's not really strategy in terms of being driven by public purpose, which as you said, is the title in

this Institute for Renovation of Public Purpose that I direct. It's been just kind of vertical strategies focused on sectors, technologies, types of firms, right, the whole focus on small, medium enterprises. So what I've been trying to do is to say,

stop focusing on sectors, technologies and firms. Focus on big problems, right, as bold as going to the moon and back at a short amount of time, the mission idea, the missions that then require sexual support. But you're not getting support because you are a particular sector. You're getting support if

you're willing. So moving away from picking winners to picking the willing, if you're willing to work with government around these very difficult challenges, which could be as I don't want to say simple, but as concrete as making sure that every child in a country has healthy, tasty, sustainable school lunch, right, not just school lunch. That was the Reagan thing where he said ketchup is a vegetable, So

we can reduce the cost. We all had T shirts of Reagan and ketchup which was the vegetable is what the T shirt said. So having moonshots, even on something as simple as the cafeteria, that then requires innovation across many different areas. It requires government to wake up and not just have that be done. For example, from the Department of Education, you know, Department of Agriculture, Health, Education, Finance would work together on a moonshot of healthy, tasty,

sustainable school lunch. So that interministerial coordination which we saw during COVID, right, so we had the war room, the situation room, you know, the military, education, health, and so on together because we had these really difficult challenges. But as soon as COVID stops, we go back to very siloed ways of thinking.

They're like, really pay attention to the degree to where school lunch policy shifts with administration, Like this is like the really they really think? What is state capacity? We've been using this term for years on the podcast and we're like during COVID, we're like, no, it took a took, you know, a long time to stand up testing facilities for since and people's like, oh, well, lot lack state capacity, But what is it? What's the definition?

of do you well put it this way? Capacity is you know a number of people working in your administration, the budget that's been allocated, perhaps also the training you know that the civil service actually has. But capabilities are what you actually then do with it. Are you agile? Are you flexible? Are you able to pivot during COVID and actually start working in this more again inter ministerial way.

Do you know how to work with others, right, you know, do you set up good partnerships or they problematic partnerships? And also you were talking before about what you're learning here, which is fantastic about how mayors can learn from each other. Right, have you invested in your ability to learn to adapt? And so I think that Ladder, you know this, this concept of dynamic capabilities is a much more complex area

to be investing in. And the only reason you would do it is if you actually have a theory about government that is more than what traditional economists think about government, which is at best, well, at worst, get out of the way, at best, fix the market failure. So as soon as you say, actually, it's about shaping and co creating a different type of economy and society that works for people in planet, then the question is what does

that mean for the capabilities that you need. If you're just fixing, then you just need a lot of bandages. And that's in fact what we get. We get very reactive kind of filling the gap kind of.

to have a learning by doing dynamics. So those kind of administrative routines I even see this on my university, where as soon as you get a lot of turnover, even those kind of basic routines aren't there. But capability. So these three areas, capacity, routines and capabilities are equally important, but the capabilities are really what I find are lacking.

And it goes back, as I was mentioning before, to the underlying economic dogma that has underpinned the way that we think about policy government at different levels that by design, not by coincidence, is reactive.

test and trace during COVID was a core task. And so I think it really stems from i'd say the eighties when we you know, the kind of Reagan Thatcher years. If you want, it always goes back to yeah, but actually in the UK, for example, it even increased more during the Labor government. So it's not it's not you know, one party, but it did begin i'd say in the eighties with this kind of downsizing of governments, which then

ironically cost them more. Because as soon as you start downsizing without really strategically thinking what you need and what you don't need, of course you should trim the fat. There's no reason to have, you know, a bloated government structure.

But when it's done for ideological reasons and not strategic reasons, then you know, ironically, then you end up not having those capabilities that you need as soon as you have a flood or you know, Brexit or COVID, And so I think then what happens with the consultants is it's not their fault that they're invited in. I do think it's very problematic what they end up doing once they're in.

So there's huge conflicts of interest. Well, the biggest conflict of interest being that they have no incentive really to make government better later because they wouldn't have no contracts. It'd be like having a therapist your whole life, that therapist, which they're very.

companies that come on. So that should just be illegal, right and again you know, getting the right kind of regulation that makes sure that we don't have these kind of scams. So what we also argued was, you know, the first thing is start investing back inside government so you don't need so much consulting. But also when you do bring in the consultants, make sure the contract's actually in bed learning within them and that you are also

bringing in the right people. You know, if you have an oncology strategy, of course you should get the top doctors and consultants and cancer to advise. So the other huge problem is that these consultants when they're coming in, they often actually don't know very much and they end up really bothering the poor public servants that end up emailing oh would you mind telling me what you think about or sending me your you know, plan that we

can study. It's like, why are you even working with government if you don't have within the consulting companies that deep expertise, which you know, I'm not saying this just because I'm an academic, but I don't think academics are used enough. You know, if you have a research center that's been thinking about climate change for the last forty years, use them. Don't ask McKenzie as Australia did to design your climate strategy, which ended up, by the way, being terrible.

So there is a bit of why is it that governments A don't invest in their own capacity capabilities, and B when they do go out there and look for the advisors and consultants are kind of getting the ones that simply kind of provide a rubber stack right that makes them feel more secure. They haven't even done the homework to make sure they are getting the top people in the world to help advise them on doing.

So recently in New York City it was I don't know, I think scandal is too strong a word, but there are a lot of headlines about how much the city had paid consultants for working on redesigning the trash collection system in the city. And on the one hand, it's a trash collection core city function, why do you have to bring in a consultant. On the other hand, reimagining the trash collection system is like, that's a one time so maintaining it, implementing it, servicing it, okay, that's like

a permanent government function. But the actual like, okay, we have to do a redesign. That is that necessarily something that like we need to have in house in government that capacity, because do you want to permanently have that muscle because that's a one shot thing, doesn't it? Like to me, that makes sense? Is the time to bring in.

all those skills. It definitely needs the skills to know who to work with outside of government, but it also needs to even under stand that kind of outside landscape to even think about what might we need, how might we start developing a strategy that reimagines, say the trash collection process. So that's why you talk about missions. So when you know NASA wanted to go to the moon and back at a short amount of time, they didn't

say we're going to do it all by ourselves. And they also didn't say we're just going to do it with the aerospace sector, right, They said, we're going to have to work with so many different private sector people. They ended up working with something like four hundred thousand people in the private sector. They said, we have a lot of problems, but we don't know the solutions, but we're going to set very clearly a direction for working with the private sector in a problem oriented way. So

the first thing they did was change procurement. Procurement, you know, government purchasing is often like thirty percent of a government's budget. It's a very important part of their budget, whether it's Barbados, a small island state, or the US a very large government, procurement is there. How were we using it? So they realized they had the wrong type of procurement. It was

just again minimizing costs. It was cost plus procurement. They changed it to outcomes into procurement and they started to ask themselves, what are the outcomes that we need. We need to figure out how are the astronauts going to go to the bathroom? Right, which, by the way, was just a problem again with Artemis the toilet, Oh is a problem up in space? What are they going to eat? What are they going to wear? How will we communicate

with them? And it was the solutions to those problems that happened within mainly not only private sector institutions, with NASA's also kind of leading investment, but especially leading kind of thought process of what the problems were that ended up getting US camera phones, foil blankets, home insulation software, so many different innovations across many different sectors, aerospace, nutrition, materials, electronics.

That itself is what we're talking about, right, So, whether it's going to the moon, whether it's trash collection, whether it's school meals, whether it's getting prepared for the next pandemic, which unfortunately the science tells us will happen. How were we even thinking within government in a problem oriented way,

a solutions oriented way. And this, by the way, is why the City Lab conference is so wonderful and bloom Berg's Government Innovation Team is so important for so many cities, is because they then share their experiences of solving problems and then they ask and we're trying to help them do this with this public sector Capability index. What did we learn along the way that we were missing? Where were the bottlenecks? What can we do better? But especially

in terms of that flexibility, adaptability, willingness to experiment. Right, remember what Kennedy said, We're doing it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Yet all the words and policy papers are about making things easier. Facilitating. I'm Italian fatchia or in Spain fascia. Right, So if you're facilitating someone, it's not going to be a good contract. If you're de risking someone, it's not going to be a good contract.

If you're simply enabling, facilitating fixing, it's going to be a very bad public private relationship.

did my best, I hired McKenzie. What more can I do if it goes wrong?

climate strategy. And it's absolutely about diffusing that responsibility. But also because of the culture we have again within government, where if they do make mistakes, unlike in the entrepreneurial ecosystems and you know, VC and so on. We don't accept that. But it's also in the private sector, right, So we also talk in the book about the consultification

of management basically and there as well. You know, if you're going to be doing amergere or downsize and we're a massive share buyback scheme, isn't it great if you have you know, McKenzie told us to do it. So also just not taking on I mean it's kind of cowardly, right, like you're not kind of owning your decisions. I do think it's different in government. I think that you know, changing that culture, having more gov labs like they have

in Chile. Everything sounds better than Spanish and Spanish I always say that in Italian every time we have it's public sector reform, it's just cuts, but it sounds nice. It's literally just cuts. And so that idea that what we need is kind of a laboratory within government but

also between governments, I think is really important. By the way, the head of procurement in NASA, Ernest Brackett, in the sixties with the Apollo program, not only did he help change the procurement policy of NASA, but he also said, we got to watch out. There's too many consultants in

these corridors. And his exact quote was, if this continues, we will get captured by brochuremanship, which is kind of endearing because they don't have powerpoints at the time, right, So now the idea that you're ruling by a PowerPoint and that's basically all they know how to do at the time. It was kind of shiny bushures. But he didn't say we don't want to work with the private sector, right, He said, we won't know how to work with the private sector. We won't know how to write the terms

of reference if our own brains are becoming weak. So investing within in order to work also outside with others. So it's not working with others, it's working smartly with them.

going to play a role. Private sector played a significant role through various technologies of procurement, but there is an overall mission. Well, how are you thinking about AI? Should governments first decide like what is our mission for this? What missions could it theoretically enable? Like does this feel different than other endeavors? We obviously know a lot of public sector money is going to wind its way up in AI and already has a lot of it already has,

But how are you does this fit? Is this different? Talk to us about how you think about this particular moment of extreme sort of technological ambition.

was led by government. So if you look at even DARPA, which as you know, was the lead investor in the Internet, it came from problems mainly in the military industrial complex that then required ultimately what we're calling artificial intelligence today. But again in the entrepreneurial state. I talked about how everything in our smartphones that make them smart, not stupid Internet GPS, touch being series and so on, we're a

government finance. What's very scary today, what makes today different with AI is that that's not really necessarily going to be true much longer. Why because these massive economic rents and I call them rents not profits, so excess profits and excess of what these companies actually did, because we privatized all the rewards from this massive social and collectively

created value in this area. They have so much money, right, trillions, not billions, trillions, The salaries they are paying to the top researchers in universities, both public and private universities, and to people who used to work in the NASAs, the darpas, the Kaffos in Chile, they are going now to work in these companies, and that hemorrhaging of talent of top research expertise. I don't think people are talking about this enough.

It literally is the biggest change, right because otherwise just you know the fact that we've had, you know, big technological changes, general purpose technology is completely affecting you know, how we reduce, how we distribute, and you know, from the rise of electrification so on.

Just the other thing is just coming back to your question,

which I don't think I answered properly. Yes, of course government should be thinking because of its at least a democratically elected govern This is different for dictatorships what we would expect from them, but we would expect governments to make sure that any big change, large kind of opportunities around technological change are done in ways that are again good for people in planet right, But that requires not only that capacity that, as I mentioned, is being decimated,

but also a certain type of regulation which is making sure we even understand the process of, for example, how algorithms are currently being designed, and whether we have a situation like Shshana Zoobuff in her great book Surveillance Capitalism, she says, you think you're searching Google for free, they're searching you for free. That could have been avoided right

through the design of the algorithms. And given that the algorithms, initially at least were publicly financed, there is this issue of how do we in a predistributive way instead of kind of exposts with redistribution or regulation or market fixing. Think about innovation collaborations that have some of these really important ethical concerns thought about upfront. And an example of this would be during COVID, where you know, the vaccines were not the mission. The mission was to allow these

vaccines to be produced and available globally. Given it was a global health pandemic, we were all better off if the world was vaccinated. And yet only one of the vaccines, the one that was the collaboration between Oxford University and Astrosenica, had that kind of conditionality about what good looks like at the start in terms of how they collaborated. So

it was the publicly financed researchers. Oxford is a state school that put that as a condition with their relationship with astra Zenica, that they would share the knowledge, that they would join the patent pool keep costing price as well. So more of that.

they're using it. Of course they're pushing the frontier. Of course they're doing research, but that idea of also making sure that companies are not earning in excess, right, So why did the public person not benefit in those early days? Why are they evading so much tax? I mean literally in so many countries paying almost no tax. You know, also labor exploitation in the case of Amazon. You know,

you don't hear it from me. You hear it from all sorts of different investigations, even during COVID by the way that they wouldn't even put the ambulances apparently outside the warehouse. I don't I've read that. I'm not sure if it's true, But anyway, the point is that they're you know, what does a good company look like? And how does that then affect the returns that they're earning? And what is a just return versus these excess returns that now are being used to you know, hire in You.

can't expect them to understand all that stuff. It's more about having the right controls in place that prevent the altgoth from running amok. And so my question is with AI, where we have a lot of experts, highly paid experts and engineers in the private sector developing all this new stuff, versus a shrinking body of government officials, like, what should our expectation be about how much they understand this technology?

cap on the innovation just by overregulating it. This is where, by the way, I disagree with the abundance theorem, which makes it sound like, you know, there's all these opportunities out there, and it was regulation and too much planning and too many conditions that kind of hurt that, which I think actually corporate governance and shareholder value maximization as really actually stifled the opportunities that we have today, so they don't have to of course understand the algorithms, but

they do need to do exactly as you said, like we do with climate right where there's climate disclosures, we need to know what it is that we want to be disclosed. In fact, we have a project that we just did that we just finished with, do you know Tim Moriley. Yeah, So it was Tim and myself with a grant from the Amitior Foundation, a project we called Algorithmic Rents and how to reduce these rents and how

we're designing algorithms also through disclosures. So we thought about what would be the equivalent of AI related disclosures that could do exactly as you said, be almost the equivalent of what banks now have to do, but also companies have to do around g kind of metrics. And so I mean the project is still you know, underway, and what we want is actually to find kind of a coalition of AI companies that would be willing to think

about this with us. But that assumes, right that there's also enough of the science as there has been with climate change, which said this is an urgent problem and unless we fix it now, we're going to reach a tipping point where there's no coming back. That's really when

things started to change around the climate disclosures. We haven't for some reason, reached that yet, even though there's such a link also by the way, by the way, between AI and climate, like in terms of these data centers guzzling you know, like for every you know, chat, GPT search you do, apparently it's it's like using a bottle of water, like the small plastic bottles of water, Like

that's literally how much we're using. And yet you know, we're not making that kind of systemic understanding of you know, AI problems and how they are connected to climate and water problems and so on. And that requires again government not just having an indicator like GDP to think about, but a dashboard. Right when you're driving your car, if you had one number, you know, how much gas you have or how fast you're going, you would crash it.

So what does a dashboard look like? You know? For government, that would allow it to make sure it's on track to making sure that also with the evolution of technology, it's thinking about these kind of more systemic features and not just thinking about it as innovation policy.

actually really affect how governments were operating. Similarly with the Internet, you'll remember when Robert Solo was saying, you know, there's computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics. I think we're still very early in the phase with AI in terms of it having a really meaningful impact on improving Again, coming back to the point about problems, right, because ultimately

should be helping us solve problems? Which problems is AI really helping us to solve in a systemic way that can scale that there's learning between governments. We're definitely using AI. Is it actually helping us solve some of the biggest problems of our time again? Health problems, climate problems? Surely there's some of that, But until we manage this process, until we govern it both ethically but also in a way that is with government instead of kind of you know,

sidetracking government in order to extract these mega rents. Then we're going to have a huge problem.

Open AI publish a big industrial policy document, which again I think is kind of unusual to previous technological developments. And yet governments seem kind of slow. I don't want to generalize too much, but many governments seem kind of slow to get in and really start shaping what they want to do with AI.

you know, it's an incredible entrepreneur of computer systems. He was one of the co founders of Inphasis in India, and Eric Schmidt at one of these dialogues we have in Bilajo, this beautiful villa in Lake Como run by the Brockefeller Foundation, and we had kind of Eric Schmidt on the one hand saying, you know, in the future, all we're going to really need is an app, a

health app, and that's going to be fine. And Nandan Nilkani, who really is one of the biggest innovators around computing, was like, what, like, let me tell you in India, without a proper health system, no matter how many apps you have, we will continue to have misery. And so

it's not one or the other. But what you need is more people like Nandan who think about what is the relationship between you know, the power of AI and the structure of a health system and who's thinking about that and if we do have at the same time, not just austerity, but this you know kind of dumbing down of what we think government is for. So even the health systems we have are not kind of you know,

fit for purpose. Then I don't see any sort of future of AI kind of helping us with health problems. And by the way, just look at I mean, like fifty five percent of the global food system right now is at risk because of how we're treating the global hydrological cycle. You know, biodiversity loss also in the Amazon is affecting droughts and floods in other parts of the world. That's a huge problem. To what degree are we really using AI to you know, fix that problem. Not much.

So it's also about where we're putting kind of the emphasis, and for that, I think we do need these moonshots government led working with the private sector and again using the power of AI well regulated to solve very concrete problems.

click on something, data's created. She said, why aren't we in the city using that data to improve our decisions and understanding of our public transport and public housing challenges? And so she ended up hiring computer hackers into the city government. It made it a really cool place to work.

And I think that again kind of insourcing back in those kind of you know, cool hackers that currently are working in these companies, but to come and work with the city administration that says, we want you to come in fail but help you know, like don't worry about failings. Are you not fail, but you know, take risks to help us though, kind of really target our big challenges around housing, transport and so on, inequality in terms of access.

But there's also just like politics, right, winning elections and the fact that you know, as you mentioned, failures become a scandal and they're on the paper, and maybe like politicians lose their jobs, then someone comes in when you just in your own personal work, when you like think about this stuff, like how much do you have to calculate the reality that one big job of politicians is to win reelection and that a loss of election has the potential to just take the government in ninety or

one hundred and eighty degree turn from whatever the previous administration at any level in any country does, And how much do you like think about that reality when you're thinking about strengthening government.

they had thought about this. I mean, it's not a coincidence that DARPA, for example, people come in for five years, so it's not the four year electoral cycle. They're actually told come in and do take risks. That's how you'll be evaluated, you know, not by just if you're succeeding all the time that means you're not taking those risks, but also the impact that your successes have, and so that kind of cultural shift, but also the fact that

people are coming in kind of on se conment. You know, they're not there to be a civil service civil servant their whole life. So we started studying Well, for some areas, I think that's fine, especially around innovation. Right, you want to coming back to the idea that we want to bring in and crowd in the top talent into government, you know, having like a five year period that you're going to help as a civil servant paid by the government, not as a consultant, you know, working with not at

the civil service. I do think there's lots of kind of room for that. So that idea that because we value the private sector, there has been for example, think of Harvard Business School where they have this case study methodology of businesses. We've never really done that with government entities because we don't value basically government as a value creators, just seen as a redistributor, a fixer, a facilitator and

enabler of the private sector. And that's of course where then we expect creativity and value to be created, which is not right. And so one of the things that we do in the Institute, which is actually a department, so we train up civil servants around the world also you know through our own MPa Masters and public administration, but also through applied learning programs, was to start developing

these cases. You know, what do we know about the BBC, You know, how is it different from other public broadcasters. How do they measure what they call public value. What is public value? So even having you know, comparison learning between say a public bank, the BBC, a government digital agency, on what it means to crowd in or crowd out their private sector, what it means to shape markets not

fix them. What does it mean to have a culture of experimentation versus this huge risk averseness that, as we said before, is a cause for the consultification. So I think a lot about that, but it's not you know, there's so much instability obviously also in the private sector, So there is a bit of a myth that it's all unstable in the public sector because of electoral turnover. We can't shape these bureaucracies to be creative bureaucracies, resilient bureaucracies.

They don't have to be vertical and so inertial. But the other point, I think that's sort of stemming. I think in your question, tell me if this is not related is literally winning the election? What are we learning globally? You know, why is it that Biden, whose economic policies were actually quite successful in the red states at least starting to be quite successful, Well, why in those states

did he not win? And I think there's something going on in a lot of countries, definitely also in Italy in the UK where people who have been let's just use the concept left behind on terms of the economic benefits at least in the past. Even when new economic policies work, that's not enough if people don't feel valued, if they don't have their dignity back, if they continue to feel condescended upon. So one of the really cool things I've been working on with city governments but even councils.

So my neighborhood in London is called Camden, It's about two hundred and fifty thousand people. I worked with the council on mission oriented procurement for adult social care across ten housing estates what you call projects in the US, and we brought the careers and the careys to the

table to design that policy. So working with people really valuing their lived experience to help its design policies that are meaningful and will improve their lives, I think it's just so important firstly to get those policies to be designed right, but also to give people again dignity and self worth. And I've seen it also, you know, because we have so much inequality in the UK, unfortunately we have food banks, which is barbaric if you think about it.

In the twenty first century, food banks, like you know, we should not have that. People should have food, you know, on the table, enough and healthy food. We don't have that. So transforming food banks into food cooperatives, green food cooperatives, where the people benefiting from the what was a food bank are now also in the place of governing, of having real deliberation, of thinking together. I can tell you the people I saw working in the food banks who

are also receiving the food. The facial expression, the dignity, just even how people are standing is completely different from a system where.

its own tools. For example, public bank right so BNDS, which is one of the largest public banks in the world. It can either just again give money out to say the agrobusiness industry or save the steel industry when it's going bust, or because there's an ecological transition, it can think about how these sectors themselves need to change in order also to access the loans that the bank is giving. Germany, by the way, did that when they had the end

Givende policy. They're public bank, the KfW. The way, they provided support to the steel sector, which in the US and the UK and so many countries steel is under pressure. The loans to the steel sector were conditional that the sector lower the material content of production, which they did in their own way. Had government told them how to do it, You kill innovation, but strong direction, conditional loans, and they ended up now having the greenest steel in

the world. It might not be competitive yet, and that's a scale issue that has also to do with regulation. But you know, repurpose, reuse, recycle technology in steel only happened because the public bank that was mission aligned. So I'm very interested in procurement. Public loans stayed on enterprises, digital, public infrastructure examples where they're not just things that are there,

but they're used to really transform and help development. Sweden is also really interesting because they had a high level challenge. Missions are somewhere between the challenge like the space race and the sector like aerospace, right, so the Moon mission required lots of different sectors, but it was very concrete.

Was the challenge of say, climate change or all the sustainable development goals, those are kind of very broad, so transforming them into missions and their challenge was I think they said they wanted a fossil free welfare state, and that's why then they said, well what are the missions. We were working with them on this and so we were kind of stimulating some of this thought through Venova. Their Innovation Agency, what are the missions that will help

us achieve that? And that's where then the Healthy, Tasty, Sustainable school Meals policy came from. We worked with them on that also in Brazil. We just actually put out a report about this with the World Food Program. But what was interesting again was that then that required government to work in a different way again interminousterely catalyzing bottom up experimentation, local manufacturing, but through also the redesign of the tools themselves. The UK, which I don't think is

a very good example right now. I mean there's lots of instability. There's also been fourteen years of austerity. Some things that were really interesting, and this is why I look more at the organizational kind of examples is Government Digital Services GDS, which basically began by government back in the early two thousand saying why does everyone have to go to say Google to download a white paper, Why

don't we have our own kind of digital platform. They did what most governments do, outsourced it to a company called Circo, which is not a very innovative company at all, gets lots of government contracts. They failed miserably, and then people from the iPlayer team and the BBC said we'll do it, So they went over to the Cabinet Office set up Government Digital Services, came up with this incredible digital platform called gov dot UK, which won an International

Design Award. But what was interesting to me from that example was that the first thing they did was look out the window and said, with arrows pointing out the window, those are not clients and customers. Let's stop talking about people as clients and customers. Their users with human rights and how they will access their driver's license, their paths for their voter registration has to enhance their like their souls,

and I make them want to die. You see the kind Looach movies where you know, people literally want to die when they're accessing their welfare payments because of just the complications around it. And so making you know, having kind of like a user friendly government digital platform that changes the experience of a citizen with those rights that they have through the technology just requires a very different kind of mind shift. And it became the coolest place

to work. So if you were taught you know, software engineer or even you know whatever, these hackers that add the cola wanted to hire. That's where they wanted to work. To the point that lots of private companies were having a hard time finding the top talent because they all wanted to work in and gidah. So again, those are the examples I think we need to look for, not like which is the government. This thing everything perfectly.

That obviously any major mission is going to have to have significant private sector involvement and innovation, even if it's somehow publicly led, but that there's no chance of going anywhere if there's you know, the public sector doesn't have the internal muscle of who to talk to or to talk to at.

a vast bureaucracy with lots of different silos. And also, I think like getting back to that expertise point does mean that you do develop that muscle internally within the organization rather than just like, Okay, we're going to hire McKenzie to figure out how we're going to do something. Instead you say, well, we want to do X, let's all get together and figure out how to do it.

AI itself creates its own potential pitfalls. I mean, the industry, as you mentioned, is obsessed with the pitfalls of its own making, right, Yeah, and so there is almost no way that AI can just be a tool in the service of some other mission because almost everyone who knows something about AI sees potential for extreme exacerbation of inequality, potentially AI robots that will be misaligned and want to

kill us all when they have sufficient capabilities. Yeah, right, and so like on the one hand, like, yes, as the technology, it might fit into some of these other big missions, But on the other hand, it sort of feels like it has there has to be some like AI specific goal of like where do we want this technology to go or how do we how do we curb it or whatever it is. It seems very distinct.

kind of mean what they say. They two are they two are concerned.

But because we're all doing the same thing without actually fixing how medical bills work and who pays for what in the US, like, it's just going to be bots fighting bots. No one's going to benefit from that.