Dr. Vivienne Ming: Set aside that dream that you'll be a social media star like Elon Musk and shoot your car into space. What a waste of resources. Think I need to do the right thing. Will I be ready to do it? Andrew White: Hello. You're listening to Leadership 2050, a podcast from Oxford University's phi Business School. I'm your host Andrew White. In this series, you'll meet visionary leaders from the business community who are confronting the existential challenges humanity faces, and finding solutions. Find out what shape their vision and motivation, how they lead and why, and how they think leaders need to respond to the challenges of the 21st century. Andrew White: In this episode, I'm talking to theoretical neuroscientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Dr. Vivienne Ming. Vivienne calls herself a professional math scientist, who's dedicated to solving some of the world's most pressing problems. After a career founding companies and non-profits, she set up Socos Labs, which she calls a philanthropic laboratory. Socos is an incubator for projects and start-ups that will make a positive difference in the world. I began by asking her how she got to the place she is in now. Dr. Vivienne Ming: Anyone that knows anything about my life knows that I have a rather strange career path professionally. It started studying psychology and computational neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University. And then I had a joint appointment at Stanford in Berkeley. While I was there, at a place called the Redwood Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, my wife and I started collaborating. She studies education. I study machine learning, artificial intelligence and how it relates to the brain. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And we thought, "Wow, what if we could do something in education? What if we could mash up what we are doing?" And just to give it a sense of moment, this was before Coursera, before Khan Academy. There really wasn't much of an ed-tech industry back at this time. So these two women went out pitching this crazy scheme of using artificial intelligence in education. Being more scientist, even today, than well honed business women, we published some papers. I was really proud. We could listen to student talk to each other, either literally off of microphones with little kids or chat rooms with university students, and actually predict how they'd perform in the class. And our goal was why wait for that to happen? Whether they do well or do poorly, they could always do better. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So we built this system. And the way venture capitalists responded was, "You can read students minds." That's as much as they understood AI then, or today or anything else. Nobody seems to really have a good handle on it. "Here's $2 million if you do financial fraud detection. And by the way, if you take the money, you're fired, because I have a guy that I want to be the CEO." So the number of times we went into a room, there was all men and tried to pitch our start-up idea. Dr. Vivienne Ming: Over the years, across six different companies I've started, I've raised a fair sum of money, there's never been a women with voting rights in the room deciding whether my company got funded ever. So that was my first experience. But I got hooked, even with all the frustrations, even with the fact that I never really cared whether my company made money, the speed with which the start-up world moved compared to academia, the idea that you could see a problem, and within a few months, build a solution and put it out in the world. It was just addictive. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So I started another education company and then a labour force company. And then I was the chief scientist at another. And all of that led me to this point where I realised, one, I've had a lot of good fortune in my life, at least during the second half of it, and what I truly love doing is solving problems. I never really cared about whether I was making the national science foundation happy or my investors. I hope I never made them unhappy, but was never a great interest of mine. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So I finally found myself in this space where I could do anything I wanted. And the thing I wanted to do was simultaneously, I will freely admit, scratch my intellectual itch for solving problems, but do it in a way that ranges from, "Dr. Ming, our daughter has 500 seizures a day, please save her life," all the way out to, "Dr. Ming, our country doesn't know how AI will affect or should affect our labour policy over the next 50 years. What are we supposed to do?" And it's absurd to me that anyone is coming to me for help, but if they are, then I'm guessing nothing else works. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And so we step up and we do this. And I still, every now and then, spin out a little start-up. So I have a company that we've just started in doing public health, super sexy, but if you want to actually save lives anywhere in the world, overwhelmingly, that's where you do it. I have another couple of companies doing neuro technologies work, looking at Alzheimer's, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury. I love doing things where I know someone's life is better on the other side because the first half of my life wasn't so great. And I know what it's like to not know where your next meal is coming from or to have really given up entirely. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And maybe that gives me a different perspective on what it means to be a CEO or be someone who's in a position to make a difference, is to realise what a universal it is to be willing to make a sacrifice. How universally good it is to be willing to make a sacrifice, even if nothing is coming back to you. That it is the single biggest impact you could have on the world is not the billions you could make, not that I have anything against being a billionaire, or the social media coverage you can get. But it's a quiet moment all by yourself that no one will ever hear about, where you could have done one thing or another, and you chose to make a sacrifice. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And I've learned that every time I make that choice, my life gets better. And so nowadays, I'm just kind of addicted. I lean in. Andrew White: That's fantastic. What a wonderful story. And forgive me, I don't think I could ever summarise or paraphrase something like that, or even understand it, but I'm going to try a little bit. So here you are. You are a scientist. And something about you in academia is not working, or it's not working for you. So you step out into the world of start-ups. You find that there's something not quite right about that because you're going in as a woman, and you're just finding this wall of men. You're even told, "We love your idea. We love your work. But if we invest in you, we're going to kick you out," which is not a nice position to be in. Andrew White: But where I hear you really making a contribution is offering science to problems, and to people perhaps, that are ignored by the system or not seen by the system. And also with AI. So many people have concerns about it. They have concerns about the fact it's a black box. They can't see into it, and is it a problem for the world? But you seem to be saying, "No, this is actually something that can solve our problems. If we bring science to those problems, there's something about service and there's something about transformation there." Dr. Vivienne Ming: I mean, you've certainly noted the one thing. Like, I believe that the deepest philosophical point of how I move through the world is as a scientist. Richard Feynman used to teach the physics 101 class at Caltech. And somewhat famously, he taught it based on a single question, if for some reason, civilization was to end and you could pass one single idea into the future to restart civilization in the future, what would it be? And his argument, which I think is a reasonable one for a theoretical physicist is the atomic theory of matter. Dr. Vivienne Ming: But for me, it is the scientific method, the philosophy of science. And in fact, it's the second part in particular. The first part being, the world is understandable. It's measurable. But the second part is, but you have to try and prove yourself wrong. You can never trust those measurements unless you question yourself. And I loved being an academic scientist. And I really enjoyed being an entrepreneur as well. I wouldn't keep stupidly starting companies if I didn't. Dr. Vivienne Ming: But my job as I see it in all of those roles and in my philanthropic work is why am I wrong about this? That's my starting question. Why is everybody wrong is a reasonable starting question for everything. But boy, do not leave yourself at out of that process. One of the reasons many of the problems we work on persist is because people are unwilling to challenge their own assumptions. And sometimes, it leads you in directions that maybe philosophically or politically aren't what you'd hope they'd be. But if the goal is to solve a problem, what do we do about maximising human capacity, when we know, for example, household instability is one of the biggest causal factors in young kids growing up with limited life opportunities, economic opportunities, cognitive, beyond? And the answer to that is incredibly complicated. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And some of it takes a page from what we might see as more conservative thought, and others are much more liberal, and you just have to be comfortable with really challenging your assumptions and beliefs about how do you make a difference if the thing you truly care about is solving a problem. And I will say, that's one of the nice things about my approach is I don't really have any vested interest other than solving the problem. There's nothing else there. I'm never going to make any money off of it. I admit I have some intellectual ego, but I'm actually pretty militant about trying to squash that down, because it only makes things worse. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So you take those stakes on off the table, and what you're left with is whatever it takes to make a positive difference in this space. And being a scientist is a huge aid in that. Not because I know more things or because I know how to do a particular statistical analysis, it is that core idea, the world is understandable. Never give up on believing that you can understand and measure a thing. And you only ultimately fail if you refuse to question yourself. Andrew White: So if I turned up today in Socos labs and I wandered around and talked to some of your staff, what would I find you working on at the moment? Dr. Vivienne Ming: So, gosh, we've got a few different projects. I am sort of always working on diabetes, and my son was diagnosed with type one diabetes years ago. One of the more notorious projects I ever worked on was hacking all of his medical equipment and breaking all sorts of US federal laws, and then building what turned out to be the first ever AI to treat diabetes. And ever since then, I've been working and working on how to make it better. And so we're actually just about to finish up a new version of that project. Dr. Vivienne Ming: My family and I get to benefit from it, but I can't give it away. It is unambiguously medical advice. So what we do is we give it away to non-profits and companies. Here's how to build it. No strings attached, no patents, just go make use of this information. So we have a new version of that coming out. We have a big project I mentioned in public health, all of that started internally here at Socos labs, looking at if we listen to you talk, if I watch you move around using your phone, two things that could sound incredibly invasive and scary using artificial intelligence, but what we're actually looking at is measuring people's levels of stress throughout the day. And we're looking at chronic stress in particular, building models of people that can, for example, predict suicidal thought and people experiencing depression, can predict postpartum depression weeks before the actual delivery date. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I once worked on a project where we did this for manic depression, and we could see evidence of manic episodes three to four weeks before they emerged in a particular class of bipolar. So in this case, we're really trying to bring it all together. And our goal is, why wait till you're my age to discover that you have ischemic heart disease that's been exacerbated by a lifetime of chronic stress, when we can clearly see through, not just our models, but really pacing us together with a broad range of scientific research, we can clearly see the ties between chronic stress and ischemic heart disease, type two diabetes, a major depression and a variety of other issues. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So again, if you want to make a lot of money in the health space, come up with a pill that treats people that have had a heart attack. They'll pay anything for that pill. Better yet, come up with a pill that treats people that have erectile dysfunction. But if you actually want to save lives, come up with something that prevents people from ever needing that pill. And that's what we're really invested in right now, is building systems that help people identify and remove this stress, but also tie into really tangible health outcomes so that we can actually use that information to recommend screenings and even changes in insurance coverage necessary to improve long term health outcomes. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So that's another big health related thing, but you can contrast that against another project that we're doing in entrepreneurship. I wanted to know all those people like me that go out and start a company. And like me, get told no. Turns out once you make some money for someone, then the venture capitalists come knock on your door. And then if you're a jerk like me, you can say, "No, you missed your chance." But how many people could have created jobs? How many people could have started a company that created patents that had a big exit, but they never really had the chance, or their chances were removed. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And so we started this project called the Inclusion Impact Index, looking at how economic inclusion in every major metro in North America affects job creation, patent creation, and funding and exit rates within the space of high growth start-ups. So we've gotten some companies like Crunchbase to donate data to us. We pull data from the Patent Bureau, the Census Bureau, data from Mexico and Canada. We pull all this together and we look at both all entrepreneurs in real time, as well as women, LGBTQ entrepreneurs, we're building new systems to look at different ethnic groups. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And it's fascinating being able to collect data on 500,000 start-ups over the last two years and tens, hundreds of thousands of not just entrepreneurs, but everyone who was there before the company got founded, everyone who made a difference, and say, "Wow, did you know that female entrepreneurs created 20 million jobs over the last 10 years?" But we actually believe there were 14 million more left on the table that didn't happen because principally, women go into entrepreneurship at a 10th rate of men. But even that varies a lot. Cities like Montreal, San Diego and Houston, women go in at a 20th rate of men. Even though their outcomes are actually sometimes better than their male peers. Boy, if you could just lift that number a tiny bit. Dr. Vivienne Ming: Because I'm a nerd, we do a lot of econometric modelling and counterfactuals there, but we mashed it up with a lot of artificial intelligence. And that's the through line of a lot of my work is, the truth is if you came and did a tour of Socos Labs, it'd be boring, you see a lot of people in front of computers, writing code. We get opportunities to collect data on these sorts of problems. And then I am promiscuous. I don't care what field of research it comes from, economics, neuroscience, psychology, sociology. If someone has a good, we want to steal it and put it into one of our models and see what's happened. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So I think actually there's a big future. This is just for the wonky nerds out there. There is a big future in mashing up classic economic modelling with machine learning, particularly looking at natural experiments, like difference-in-differences models and looking at discontinuity regression. And again, you'd have to be a nerd to know what I'm talking about. But these are the classic things that allow economists to say, "Hey, that was a good or a bad policy." Dr. Vivienne Ming: But by using machine learning, we can actually generalise those and bring them out into the world. And our goal with the Inclusion Impact Index is to say, "Hey, mayor of New York or Seattle or someday London, Tel Aviv, here are three policies we strongly recommend that would increase job creation." It just happens to be through black entrepreneurs, or clear entrepreneurs or better when entrepreneurs or whoever might not be as included in your economy yet as possible, here are recommendations that would increase that inclusion and a prediction about the change that it would make. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So that gives you a sense of some of the things that we're working on here and get my brain crackling. And some of them really still come back to my son can tend to REM sleep. God, when I got that message, I didn't even know what does that mean? How is he alive? I would've predicted that that would kill him. But no one else could help. And so problems like that enter my world as well. And we do everything we can to advise people on how to move forward on it. Andrew White: So I was struck by something you said about the suppression of the ego. And when you suppress the ego, you see more clearly. And it's almost a classic Buddhist idea from one point of view. But what I think you've explained so eloquently is that it liberates you from the, let's say, the functions of academia, that you're an economist or you're in business, or you're in this science or that science. You just said, "Don't care about that. Chuckle that out. I'll go into whatever science I want to." Andrew White: You've then looked at the business model of healthcare, where you describe you make more money solving the problem at the end stage with a pill than actually predicting. And when I put all this together, I see you as a leader with this deep sense of purpose, and that deep sense of purpose is about people, and it's about liberating potential, be that solving healthcare problems much, much earlier so they don't become as problematic, or people who are just not getting access to the resources, but have extraordinary potential in them from the marginalised communities that you spoke about. And when they get that resource, they're able to do so much, not just for themselves, but for the others because they create jobs and they have impact through the entrepreneurial businesses they have. Andrew White: So whilst most of us are stuck in our silos, you are not. So tell me about what happened to you in life that shaped you, that formed you, the things that really gave you this worldview, this approach, in order to lead in the way that you do. Dr. Vivienne Ming: The story I'm about to tell is, I suppose, a recipe for a certain kind of success in life. Yet it is one I would not wish on my worst enemy. But nonetheless, it certainly makes me who I am today. So when I was a little kid, I was supposed to win a Nobel Prize. Now I don't mean that in the sense that my parents were somehow cool or slave drivers academically. My father was brilliant, but grew up a sharecropper in nowhere, Kansas. And he had astonishing opportunities that never materialised. This is like a classic story, in fact, of a brilliant, like the smartest person I've ever met. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And he got full scholarships to every university. MIT is the one he always talked about, and he didn't go. He and his parents chose not to go. Because what was the point? So to a degree that I understand much more later in life, that was then on me. I was a clever kid when I was young. I'm sure he saw a lot of himself in me, but unlike him I grew up the child of a doctor in Coastal California. I had every opportunity. And the more I tried to be that person, the worse everything got. By secondary school, boy, if it wasn't for standardised exams, I would've entirely flunked out of school. And by the time I got up to university, I did. And then I ended up homeless for years. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I just gave up. I was supposed to be this world changing genius and I wasn't. So what's the point of anything. And in 1995, I had a gun, because it's America, and a very long night. I'd literally been crossing off days on a calendar until the end. And I had a very long night with that gun. It's not that I wanted to die. It wasn't a cry for help. It just, what's the point? I've never done anything worthwhile. I've boohooed for the poor doctor's kid, but I'd never been particularly happy with myself. So just a sort of euthanasia, I guess. So I looked for a reason to be alive. A reason not to do this to my parents, who had never really given up on me. But unfortunately, that wasn't enough either. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And the reason I came up with, which now in retrospect, having studied this stuff, I see as the classic psychological definition of a purpose. But the reason I came up with is live a life that makes other people's lives better. I'd ruined my life. And every time I had made a decision that was driven by what is this mean for me, my life got worse. So what if my decisions were, what does this mean for other people? And it would be wonderful if that suddenly magically changed my life. But the real story of something like homelessness is, wow, I dug a deep hole, and it took a long time to climb out of that. Dr. Vivienne Ming: In the late '90s, my dream was maybe being a clerk at a bookstore. The idea that I could just read books for the rest of my life and make enough money to pay my rent and not be a burden on my parents. That was the dream. But somehow, I found myself with the opportunity to go back to university. And when I went back, I did my whole undergrad in a single year. I got perfect grades in every course. I had kind of success academically that I had never, never dreamed of before. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And every time my ego crept in, things got wobbly. And so I've learned this very hard lesson over a long 10 year period of time, this interesting period of time. The part of a life story most people would ignore, but I think is so crucial. Everything externally for me got better. I started my grad school career. I had papers in nature. Professors listened to what I had to say as a student. But I still hated myself. And I was still disappointed in everything I did. One professor called me into his class, told me at the end of the course, "You got a perfect grade, highest grade in the class. Will you be my TA next year? Oh, and by the way, I have a friend who's running this project on machine perception, lie detection. And I hope you don't mind, but I recommended you to work there." That was my introduction to artificial intelligence, changed the rest of my career. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I don't think I've ever left a meeting feeling more down on myself. Because in that introduction to programming course, I didn't win a Nobel Prize. So whenever it's about me, it's bad. And I learned this very hard lesson. I know that's an extreme, but it was my trap. And so I needed an extreme solution to that. It's not about me. It's not about my happiness. Am I making a difference in other people's lives? And here is the paradox. I mean, I've already said, every time I make those choices, my life gets better. But here's where it truly becomes a paradox. You can't live my life and then wonder, "Well, what does research say about this? What does my own research say about this?" Dr. Vivienne Ming: It turns out that's pretty much a universal. Construct strength of purpose, as is defined in psychology, is a big predictor of life outcomes. Wealth, academic achievement, social network, the number of friends you have, your happiness levels, more particularly what's called the eudaimonic happiness, a sense of a job well done. It's as though I had learned this lesson that life is a big race, but it's the people that stop and help the other racers that actually end up winning. And it shouldn't work. It doesn't make sense. And yet empirically, we see it again and again and again. And it's a fairly simple lesson. It's one I wish didn't take me 20 years to learn, but it's certainly what that experience taught me. Andrew White: It's an amazing story. And as you were describing it, it was interesting. Because if I'm honest, I could feel my own prejudices. Because if I'd met you 20 years ago, I guess you were sleeping on the street, and I would've made some assumptions about you. And those assumptions are completely wrong. And that's the story, not just in your story, but in what you are manifesting through your work is our assumptions, our prejudices, our biases are problematic for us, they're problematic for those people in power because we embody them into systems and into ways of working. Andrew White: So if I could pivot from your story to the future, this podcast is really about what type of leadership we need between now and 2050 to avert the climate crisis, to avert, I think the human, the societal crisis that we're seeing bubbling in various countries around the world, and in a sense, to get technology to work for good. And I think you've explained that latter so well. So could you just say more about the type of leadership that you see as needed? Dr. Vivienne Ming: Yeah. You know, I should be clear. I spend every day, because I enjoy what I do, what I get to do, I spend every day building AI systems. I shouldn't let it go unsaid that these can do real harm. They can be abused or negligently do harm. But I believe that you can build these things as tools, understanding that they can help to make people better. And I talk about AI, but we could be talking about technology at large or the business world or any of this. We have a choice. And those choices are hard choices. But we repeatedly have these choices presented to us where we can choose something which helps other people, or we can choose something which helps us. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And the world is not filled with an enormous number of villains. There might be some people I would freely admit that I do not admire, but most of us are just human. And being human means we make mistakes. Being human means we're really bad at dealing with uncertainty. We're bad at seeing even the second order, much less later effects of our choices. And you put all that together at scale, and yeah, it seems pretty bleak. But there's this moment of a choice, a moment where I can see that when a VC says, "What if you did financial fraud detection? We'll make a billion dollars." Or I say as much as I'd love to have a billion dollars, what I'd really love is for my kids to go up in a world where other people's kids have the same opportunities they do. Selfishly, I want that. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I think my kids' lives would be so much better with that than if I had a billion dollars. But in the moment, our brains are not good at making those sorts of choices. Those sorts of choices are terrifying. And I was asked once to give a talk, a big talk, the biggest audience I've ever had, 30,000 people, and they want me to give a talk about courage. And I thought, "Geez, pick the one thing I've never studied." And so I tried to piece together what in my research did speak and to the issues of courage, particularly in moments of leadership, which we all have. When choices like this come, everybody's a leader because your choices affect everything that flows downstream from that moment. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And what I came to the conclusion is, there's an idea that some people have it or they don't. Some people are risk [inaudible 00:30:50] or they're not. They're courageous or they're frightened. Courage is something you practise. And if that moment to make the right choice, you have not practised for it, practised when it was easy practised when the stakes are low. I know that this is probably the selfish thing for me to just drop this piece of trash on the ground instead of finding a bin for it. But I mean, it's just a one single piece of trash. What is it really going to hurt? Or one bottle of water? What does one extra plastic bottle actually mean to the world? But it's practising in moments like that, that get you ready for when you need to do something that actually is going to hurt, when you need to make a choice which is truly terrifying. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I've got a start-up idea, and that direction is $10 billion, and maybe a world that's not so wonderful. But in that direction, my children's children's children won't be set for life, but that's a better world. And it's so hard to even see in the moment of that. Our egos get so tied up in these choices that most of us don't even have the perspective to be able to even see that a choice is happening. So practise it. Practise it early. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And now I'll speak to some of my research. The thing I see in my work, and I'll specifically reference one analysis we did of 500,000 employees at a big company, the single biggest predictor of productivity inside the organisation is actually when employees took actions for which they would never receive a direct benefit. They made other people better, even though it wasn't part of their job. It was a consistent, significant predictor of untracked productivity within the organisation. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And we pair that with a tonne of other research, and I'll bring back the term I used earlier, when you have a sorts of purpose, something that's bigger than you, something that'll take more than a lifetime to complete, if for you that's spiritual, that's great. For me, I'm a pretty grounded humanist. I simply find purpose on the idea that there's genuinely a better future, and that future is actually achievable, but it requires all of us. Everybody needs a shot. Some kid in a favela in Rio trapped in their brain isn't a dumb little AI that treats diabetes, it's the cure. It's the end of diabetes. And the overwhelming likelihood is that kid will never grow up to have a chance to bring that cure into the world. Dr. Vivienne Ming: And realistically, we're talking about 90% to 99% of the global population. What would the world look like, if what we might call the creative economy, maybe 1% of the global population just doubled from one to two? Wouldn't that be amazing? Twice as many people with a chance to do something about climate change, a chance to do something about poverty. It's a bootstrap effect. So this is really what I'm looking at. If you want to be an amazing leader, set aside that dream that you'll be a social media star like Elon Musk and shoot your car into space. What a waste of resources. Dr. Vivienne Ming: Set aside the idea that there'll be some foundation named after you for generations. Think about when that moment comes, that I need to do the right thing. Will I be ready to do it? And I'll end on this. We did a big war gaming exercise with a large consulting company. And we presented people with choices like that. And we even gave them the scenarios ahead of time. They read about them. They walked into the room saying this is so dumb. You'd have to be a comic book super villain to make this terrible, wrong choice. Dr. Vivienne Ming: But then we added low level stakes, just some reputational stakes into the game. Everybody chose the very thing they said was wrong. Everyone. Because I think they'd spent their whole life being told that their job was maximise returns. It was all about their immediate career outcomes. And when they had real stakes in the game, the very choices they said were morally wrong, became the only choice they felt they had open to them. So it's sacrifice and the practise of sacrifice with the idea, again, this has to be a leap of faith, it comes back to you. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I'm not saying throw yourself on the train tracks and give away your life, though boy, I wish I lived in a world where more people were actually capable of that sort of choice. But I mean, it's a title of a book I'm working on. Small sacrifices. Preparing for those moments where even if no one ever finds out about it, you do the right thing, because in the long run, it comes back. Andrew White: These are deeply spiritual ideas. Not framed in terms of religion and organised religion, but there's something deeply spiritual about them in terms of the language you're using. In some ways, certainly in the scientific world, we threw out former religion. Do you think we're re-finding something? Do you see a broader movement of re-finding something, not in its religious form, but in a deeply spiritual form? Dr. Vivienne Ming: The thing I will resist is the idea that we should do a thing, even a notionally good thing, because an authority figure said so, or because something I can't speak to, some story I've been told tells me I should. I am, in the end, a hard number scientist, but it doesn't change the fact that there's still a leap of faith at the heart of this. This idea that someone like me is saying, "No, no, no. Trust me. When you look at the numbers, when it compounds over decades, when we look at the shift societally, things you may never experience, it actually, what you do and your choices truly matter." Dr. Vivienne Ming: But in that moment, I mean, what is the difference between doing it because your mom said so, or because, in your heart of heart and reading up on the research literature, you believe it so. In the long run, I do believe there's a difference to that. But in the moment, it is a leap of faith. It is certainly the case, no one person in this world will solve climate change. And it actually worries me when I get messages, "Dr. Ming, what are we going to do about climate change?" What I hear is a bit of a form of please save us, kind of a learned helplessness. But no, you need to be able to take that leap of faith, knowing that the choice you make may only matter if other people are making that same choice. Dr. Vivienne Ming: But if you wait, if you say, "Gosh, I'll make a difference. I'll stop driving so much once other people stop driving so much," now you kind of sound like the negotiations between the US and China. That's not going to go anywhere. Somewhere, someone has to make this choice. And guess what? If you make it, actually, you do get the better world at the other end. And you don't have to wait for Pearly Gates. It turns out we get to live in that world and our kids do and everyone after us. Dr. Vivienne Ming: So yeah, I'm confronted with the person I was when I was young, one who sees existential dread in a great many things. But the person I have learned to become now in this latter part of my life, which is, you still have to choose. You still have to take action in the world. And the most wonderful thing when you live a life like mine is you learn it doesn't matter how absurd a notion it is, your child was diagnosed with type one diabetes, you're not a doctor and you're going to build a treatment, that's absurd, but I did it. And the idea that things are impossible and cannot be achieved is a fair fear. You have to act anyways. Andrew White: Vivienne, that's been wonderful. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I think you've made such a good contribution to the whole theme that I'm pursuing and what I'm trying to bring out. I've ended all of these podcasts with seven quickfire questions. So I'm going to do the same with you. So the first of those is, which leader from history inspires you most? Dr. Vivienne Ming: George Washington, for one single act, stepping away from being the President of the United States when he didn't have to. He could've done it for the rest of his life. Everyone would've supported him. He laid a foundation which said, "For no reason that benefits me, I'm going to step away because I think it's the right thing to do." But the truth is, the heroes that I admire are the ones that took actions and I've never heard of them. That's the thing that's the most impressive. Andrew White: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That comes through very strongly in the things you've been talking about. So again, this question as well, when you look at today, which leader most inspires you, your answer comes with that same caveat. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I'm going to cheat by going back a couple of years and picking someone from the opposite political end for me, John McCain, the former US Senator who passed away several years ago. And again, it is one specific act. I would've disagreed with him politically on many, many things, but when he was running for president against Barack Obama, a woman, a supporter of his in the audience up and said something about president Obama being a Muslim, and he said, "No. He is a good man. He loves this country." And I bet it cost him votes. I'm sure it cost him votes. But he said the right thing, even though it came with a price. I have endless admiration for that moment in his life. Andrew White: And then the book, what book is the one that stands out, that's had the most impact on you? Dr. Vivienne Ming: I am a science fiction nerd. I love sci-fi and fantasy. I read a huge amount. And the sci-fi in particular, I do what I do today because of the sci-fi I read when I was younger. I just turned out I'm better at actually building it than writing it. Otherwise, I'd write science fiction. Neal Stephenson has some famous novels, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but there's one called The Diamond Age, about building an AI to optimise a young girl's life outcomes. And one of those girls was a princess, the other was a middle class kid, and the final one was living on the streets. And it was the idea of what could technology do to effect a life to maximise a life outcome, given all these different starting points. And even if I didn't agree with all those conclusions, it just sparked in me I want to do that. Andrew White: And the next question, the characteristic that you look for in those that you promote, or that those that you give responsibility to the people you bring into your organisation. Dr. Vivienne Ming: I have one job question, pitch me a math-science project. We sit down for an hour together and we try and figure out how to make it work. And if I think we have better ideas together than I would've had by myself, you got the job. Andrew White: I think there's a lot to be learned for improving the normal job interview technique. And that's a really good idea to how to do that. So the younger generation, what inspires you about them? Do you see a shift happening? Dr. Vivienne Ming: Gosh! Every generation of young kids comes with, I think, a great deal of optimism. So when I look at my own kids who are 10 and 14, I see kids that believe that the world could be better. How do we preserve that while also giving them a real world with which to engage, not TikTok, something where they feel like they get an internal reward for making a real world change rather than a set of likes? But that belief that there is a better world is something I really love in my kids and their friends. Andrew White: And what makes you hopeful about the future? Dr. Vivienne Ming: Yeah. What makes me hopeful is every piece of my research, every single finding that says you can make often a small change in someone's life and they can transform and blossom into a completely different person than where they started. It's amazing to know that a small thing to you might mean the world to someone else. And that keeps me going. Andrew White: And finally, where do you go for inspiration and renewal? Dr. Vivienne Ming: I play Dungeons & Dragons with my kids. I read science fiction and fantasy novels for enjoyment. I even write a little bit of them. But the brutal nerdy truth is, I read science. I read a few hundred papers and economics, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, every week. The story of how the world is changing is the most fascinating story there is. Andrew White: My thanks to Dr. Vivienne Ming. My name is Andrew White, and you've been listening to Leadership 2050, a podcast from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. If you enjoyed this episode, please help others find us by taking a moment to give us a rating and review. You can find all our past episodes wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to hear more from Saïd Business School exploring the theme of transformative business leadership, please visit oxfordanswers.org. Andrew White: Leadership 2050 is produced by Eve Streeter. Original music is by [Seiberg 00:45:00]. Our executive producer is David McGuire for [Stabl Productions 00:45:04]. In the next episode, I'll be talking to Audette Excel, the founder of one of the world's first businesses that has put purpose at the heart of its operation. Until then, many thanks for listening.