Julia Garayo Willemyns is a startup founder and co-director of the think tank UK Day One, which focuses on advancing UK policy for long-term growth and progress.
Julia shares her thoughts on overlooked policies that could significantly benefit the UK, such as addressing lead poisoning in old housing stocks to improve public health, intelligence, and productivity.
Julia also advocates for prioritizing AI as part of the UK's industrial strategy. She emphasizes the need for strategic investments in AI talent, infrastructure, and safety, noting that while ethics and risk are critical, the nation should also consider AI's potential to enhance economic security and global competitiveness. The conversation explores the nuances of UK policy approaches to sustainability, talent development, and AI.
The narrative explores the dynamics of entrepreneurship across different cultural landscapes, reflecting on factors such as mentorship, venture capital, and societal attitudes towards failure. The conversation delves into the advantages of for-profit versus non-profit models and the philosophical trends shifting towards virtue ethics and human flourishing. Throughout, the discussion is underpinned by personal experiences, pragmatic policy recommendations, and a call for the UK to leverage its strengths for sustained global competitiveness.
We play over rated / under rated on:
Universal Basic Income (UBI), Net Zero, Carbon Taxes, alternative proteins, digital democracy, self-driving cars, nuclear power, museums and capitalism.
Julia encourages listeners to embrace curiosity, adaptability, and a proactive approach to growth.
On AI and economic strategy:
“I don’t think the UK is taking AI seriously enough as a core part of its industrial strategy. We should be focusing not just on AI ethics, but on economic security and national competitiveness. AI has the potential to change everything, and we need to be thinking about the bigger picture.”
On talent misallocation in the UK:
“One of the biggest problems the UK has is a misallocation of talent. I know incredibly intelligent people who end up in banking or consulting instead of tackling fundamental problems that could improve our quality of life. It’s a national issue that we need to address.”
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Video above or on Youtube.
Contents
00:17 Underrated UK Policies: Focus on Lead Poisoning
05:47 Comparing Lead Poisoning and Air Pollution
07:00 Overrated Policies and Regulatory Challenges
08:38 AI and the UK's Strategic Position
13:34 Talent Attraction and Immigration
25:29 Challenges in UK Startup Culture
33:08 Profit vs. Non-Profit in Climate Solutions
35:37 Evolving Political and Economic Views
41:11 Global Perspectives and City Comparisons
48:03 Underrated or Overrated: Policy Ideas
01:00:30 Current and Future Projects
01:01:07 Life and Career Advice
Podcast links:
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
All links: https://pod.link/1562738506
Transcript (mostly AI enabled, so mistakes are possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Julia Garayo Willemyns. Julia is a startup founder and is the co director of the UK day one think tank, which is dedicated to supercharging UK progress. Welcome.
Julia: Thanks for having me.
Ben: What is the most underrated policy that the UK could enact today?
Julia: Yeah, so I think there are things that are underrated depending on, on, on who you talk to. So traditionally it was planning it seemed like a pretty esoteric thing and now government gets that and people in our circles get that. I think when it comes to the areas that we've done work on, one of the most… One of the areas that have the least amount of attention that I think could actually increase long term progress and growth incredibly is like around prevention health and specifically it's like levels of lead.
So the U. K. has one of the oldest housing stock in the world and there's Lots of reasons to think that there's lots of lead, both in our pipes, but also in our paint, in our housing like in the actual walls of our housing and lead has been shown to decrease IQ, cause a ton of problems when it comes to cardiovascular health, increased rates of criminality, of disruption in education and, We don't really do anything about this, and especially because we don't understand what levels of lead poisoning are in our population.
And that's because we don't test it. We have this passive surveillance system. And I think we were working with people at the LEAP, so the Lead Elimination Project, and they typically do a lot of work overseas. So in developing countries where you also have rates of lead poisoning. And when we started doing this writing up this policy idea, we were shocked to see what the estimated levels of loss of GDP are in the UK.
The data is a bit shoddy because we don't actually know how much lead poisoning exists. We're like doing out of sample stuff to estimate things, but it's anywhere between 1. 9 to 4. 4 percent of our GDP. We could have that much more GDP if we didn't have the rates of lead poisoning that we do nowadays.
So it seems like it's like a relatively easy thing that you can like a relatively easy intervention that you can do. Just test for lead and if there is lead in houses take the lead out Repaint the walls. There's tons of ways that you can reduce the effects of lead. But the thing is, most people it's not very, it's not a very visible thing.
People don't really, unless you're, like, your levels of lead are super high, you don't really look sick. It's more of what could have been. And people don't tend to want to engage with issues that aren't super visible politically. Yeah, so I think that's that's the thing. No one's really talking about it.
There's like maybe a couple people talking about it in the UK And I think it could make a huge difference when it comes to our population's IQ
Ben: Sure, I can see that lead is underrated. Is it? More of a, we need to sample for lead, which is currently already embedded in paint and buildings rather than forward looking, because I think in the UK, most of the paints are now lead free or low lead, if I recall correctly.
But actually in a lot of other countries, particularly poorer nations, that might not be true. And so is the policy really about sampling and testing for current buildings in that, or is there also a forward looking component that we need to up regulatory standards?
Julia: Yeah, I think it's a lot about the current levels.
Even even if you're, like you have an old house and you're painting with new paint that doesn't have lead, to some extent, then you insulate yourself from the lead that's behind it, and that's Pretty good, but if you have if you start refurbishing the house or if the paint starts cracking and like kids put stuff in their mouth, that's like when you have really high risks of lead poisoning.
And it's a case of even the smallest amounts have an effect on people. So even if you're getting like a little bit, like poisoned a little bit, like there's some loss there. It's not if you reach a certain level of lead poisoning, then problems arise.
Ben: Okay. That makes sense. And. Do you have an estimate for how much a sort of policy would cost or something?
Are we talking a couple of hundred million pounds, that type of thing, as opposed to billions and billions?
Julia: It would definitely be on the millions end and it depends on what, like which interventions you've put in place. There's one intervention that we suggest, which is like just mandatory testing.
The U. S. does this. Most states in the U. S. do this. And then some nations, like France, do opt in testing where basically you test children to see if they have elevated blood, lead levels. And then you go and you try to do sort of an investigation to figure out where is this coming from so we can, take away this this source of lead.
And that can be quite expensive. That's in the millions. And part of the reason there is the sort of way we test for lead is quite expensive.
You're typically taking like, Blood samples and then sending it to labs and that adds up quite quickly What's really exciting is there's this program called Eclipse that's happening in the UK right now, which aims to Reduce the cost of lead testing.
They've figured out this new system I'm like, I'm not like I'm not sure I actually don't understand the, this very specific parts of, like how the system works, but it's effectively, it's like a take home test where you can have very low, very small amounts of blood so you can do it yourself and it's cheaper to administer which could make the policy cost a lot less.
So that's on the sort of testing end. The other recommendation we make is to do more rigorous testing for houses at point of sale point of sale, but also at like when they actually start the, when they're actually building new housing and there it's it's regulation.
It's not something that costs the government money upfront, but there's obviously some form of like lot like productivity loss or like some cost down the line that comes from that kind of intervention because you're adding more friction to the market. And that's hard. To measure and yeah but I think it would still be in the like millions.
Yeah.
Ben: But that's not billions. And it seems to me similar to challenges around air pollution, but I guess lead is perhaps a little bit more tractable, but I hear from air pollution so these are micro particles. So you've got lung and all of those types of issues as well as potentially some other issues with brain and the like but would you rate a lead policy as higher because of its kind of tractability or would you look at air pollution as well, particularly in cities?
I'm guessing London is a big one, but all of the major cities in the UK.
Yeah, I think the tractability point is like important. There are interventions that have worked elsewhere that you can copy over. So I think that's helpful as well. You can see what happened, what the U.
Julia: S. did and like where it's worked, where it hasn't worked. And there are some places where it's worked quite well. And I guess you don't really have the sort of you still, it's I think easier to make those interventions than it is to, regulate like big companies to stop air pollution.
I also, it probably you would have less productivity loss with the like housing market. Or the other thing, the other source that I didn't mention is pipes, like in water. Yeah. Like we don't even test our water for lead very sufficiently or in the proper way and that's public, relatively it's public goods, it's easier to go in and change the lead pipe the pipes yeah.
Ben: Okay. If that's the most underrated policy, what's the one policy or law that you would get rid of that you think is really, Overrated or is stifling at the moment.
Julia: I mean like lots of the planning regulations like lots of people talk about this if environmental reviews can sometimes be counterproductive because they end up like Yeah, like the way that they think about risk is like as low as possible when it's they don't think about the knock on effects of not having the thing built in the first place or not having the technology built in the first place.
So a good example of this is nuclear. So sometimes if you're optimizing for as low risk as possible, then you're not thinking about environmentally what it would mean to have a nuclear power plant in five years versus being reliant on gas or in some places coal and oil. So the, in the UK you don't have to consider that.
Like the secondary effects of having the thing. So I think our entire regulatory framework is something that I would Like at least reconsider so the other countries don't necessarily have this like as low as possible risk
Ben: Yeah, it's balancing it. It's a kind of almost special interest problem If you're always going to defend the birds just looking at the bird's thing and obviously in isolation You would want to protect the birds But if you're offsetting with the birds with the health of your nation on the second order thing That becomes a lot harder.
I could see that. All right, so putting those two things together and then things Is there a policy you would particularly really want to enact in the UK? So we have led we have planning. Is there anything else that you'd want to? That you'd want to do
Julia: Yeah, I think I don't think the UK is taking AI seriously enough.
So we're just about to publish a paper on how do you increase the UK's position globally? like on the tortoise index or all these sort of other, measures of You Sort of relative strategic position internationally to do with AI. And I think that to some extent, the last government got it.
Lots of people in this current government I get it, but I don't think that it's a central part of the industrial strategy right now. And I, it's more they're thinking more about like, how can we use AI to improve public services? Which is fantastic. Like it is an opportunity in that sense.
But I wish that safety, but also that like economic security and national security concerns were more at the forefront of the discussion. And that's not what I'm seeing right now. Right now, it's very I think space, which is great. Good. We need to think about the ethics discussion or sort of existential risk based which is good.
We need to think about that discussion, but there isn't really a consideration of what does this mean for the UK as a nation both economically and in terms of our national security.
Ben: Okay. So we have AI risk as in, are we going to do most all, and then we have AI ethics as in, are we using biased sampling?
So it's not going well into our products, but you're suggesting that we're not thinking around AI. Opportunity enough, or is it how it's going to affect the nation? Because you could put an argument that let's roll in AI. It can supercharge so many things to do with productivity and business. So really on the opportunity innovation side, or there's just more of an assessment of how that could interact with UK business.
Where do you think we're not putting enough? A little bit of
Julia: everything, but I would say the one reason why I think in the UK it's particularly acute is we are like service oriented economy. That's like where we get the majority of our like big GDP such sector points. And if AI whether it be like.
upper bound of what AI would be, will likely be able to do, or even just the mid bound of what the AI could do. We're looking at a lot of jobs being automated and jobs in the service sector particularly. So I don't think that people are thinking enough about what that would mean for the UK economy.
And there, and then there's obviously the sort of national, uh, the economic security element, which is okay we've seen in the last couple of years that it makes sense to have domestic energy production and to have some capacity in our our own countries I think, It will be likely that some of capacity when it comes both to compute, but also to talent and some bets on technologies should be happening within the UK so that yeah that allows you to move on to a next sort of paradigm of the way we live and, So I think, yeah, I think that's like the primary things that we're not thinking about enough.
Ben: And how would you tackle that? I guess at the government level, businesses are tackling it within their own framework. And I think about this because AI doesn't really have its own department and maybe that would be a new institution to think about this in a new way. And it might be, Come on the sort of business departments.
We've got those centrals maybe comes under treasury. You might think it comes under science and technology but the science and technology isn't geared up to, to think about that seemingly. So would you want government to, cause they were likely to do some sort of task force and something, and they'd look at it or are you thinking new institution, new way of looking at this from ground up?
Are you trying to influence old institution and what actually then practically would you say, so we want to pay more attention to this. Let's give you a little budget of, I don't know. 50 million, 100 million pounds maybe more. What would you do with this? You could maybe pitch for more if you think this needs 5 billion.
Feel free to pitch to it. But what would you actually advise government to do?
Julia: So I wouldn't put it, I wouldn't make a new institution. I think, you have DCIT and there's like really good talent in DCIT. You have AC and, AC should continue existing. You should have funding for AC. And I think that what it looks like is investments coming from number 10 itself.
So things like producing like supercomputers that are available to academics and UK startups, it's things like the national data library. We have pretty good data in the UK and opportunities to have even better data. How can you organize, clean that data and then give access to UK academics and UK startups and then maybe even sell it you could have a tiered approach of how, who gets access for like, how much money or even equity for depending on the quality of data and how much of the bottleneck that is for big AI companies like.
Open AI, maybe you can even negotiate a tiny amount of equity that you then put back towards the other aims that the UK government wants to have. So that's another sort of idea that we're playing around with. I talked about compute and I think just a lot liberalizing things so that it's easier for private companies to build data centers here and then I think one of the main things that the UK should do and really lean into because it's got a comparative advantage in is talent, like attracting talent to the UK is comparatively easier.
There's some blockers, like it's very expensive to get visas in the UK depending on like where you're coming from compared to other countries. Wellcome did a really interesting study on like how expensive high skilled immigration is to the UK. But generally The US is closing itself off.
People want to come to the UK. We have good universities. I think we should lean into that and attract more talent. One of the recommendations that we make is to launch a office for talent. Which effectively would be a small task force that goes out and finds like a bunch of people Really high potential people.
So we're thinking about like maths Olympiads or physics Olympiads, like people who are like at the cutting edge, especially if they're coming from places that maybe they wouldn't have an opportunity to really thrive and giving them fellowships like similar to to like the Rhodes fellowship.
But you can call it something else and you bring them over to the UK, put them in either Imperial or Oxford and Cambridge and then you have that talent in, in, in the UK that otherwise either would go to another country or would, maybe not have the opportunities to grow in the ways that a country like the UK with its ecosystem would allow them to grow in.
Yeah, so I think talent's another way of thinking about this problem, where a government has a clear levers, where they're not necessarily, yeah, not necessarily getting involved in telling businesses what you should do, but also but providing the foundations for an ecosystem to be built in the UK.
Sort of naturally.
Ben: Great. Let's circle back on talent and perhaps some of the political economy issues around those ideas. I just wanted to finish off on that AI piece as in, it seems that you're arguing for essentially more AI enablement in whatever form, actually at the high level with, Talent or data and all of these types of things.
And I guess when I look at it, the space, there's a little piece of. Stakeholders who are concerned about we're going too fast. And so they all tend to be worried about doom. And then you've got another at the extremes. And most people, are in the middle who are saying essentially we're going too slow.
Maybe because other potential bad actors or competing actors, let's say China and Russia. Yeah. And also because it might solve a lot of problems that we have with climate technology and the like. And so we should go, just go faster. And you took a balanced approach in the sense that yes, we do need ethics and yes, we do need people looking at risk, but enablement is probably going to be better for progress and growth and those types of things.
Is that is summary of where your sort of view is, or when you think about the risks and balance of enablement go faster versus the risks versus From either side, how do you pass that balance?
Julia: Yeah, It's something that I think about quite a bit because I am to some extent convinced of the arguments on the on why we should slow down.
But I think a lot about the positive externalities of particular policies where for example, on the talent question if you bring fanta, like bringing people to a place where they have more opportunities is like good for the person, tends to be good for the world because scientific output increases.
It's like good for the nation that then receives them. Investments into supercomputing capabilities also helps like UK researchers beyond the UK. Just like a narrow framing of AI compute investments are pretty good because it's like foreign direct investments into the UK and that's generally helps the UK economy.
So I think all of the recommendations that I am, have the highest conviction on are ones that I I try to think about you're always working with probabilities, and there's a probability that AI is like it's I don't know, like fusion, and you're always at the precipice of in 20 years it's going to work, but it never works.
If that ends up being the, or the world that we end up being in will these policies still have had outsized positive impact? And I think yes. I also think that's. unlikely to be true seeing the progress that we've seen so far.
Ben: Yeah, that makes sense. How I would say it is AI, for instance, It means that on climate net zero, whatever you think the probabilities are.
So let's say we get to net zero and the chances at the moment are only 30%. If we do AI really well, that percentage could go up to 50 percent and that enormous value probably offsets some of the other things that we think just in the AI domain. And then the. There's climate, there's health, there's all sorts of other things.
Julia: And AI for science is something I'm incredibly excited about like new materials being synthesized. What does yeah, DeepMind did fantastic things with AlphaFold when it comes to, to, yeah, and what's the equivalent of that so we can figure out What our next steel is.
Like that's, that, that could have huge positive impacts on the environmental question. If we can figure out how to not do steel, like people talk about abating steel and steel making, like I think that's something that's like interesting.
Ben: Excellent. So coming back to the talent question, I guess there's a couple of elements to this and you worked on a talent startup, I think. So I guess our initial premise probably has to be that talent is broadly equally distributed across your populations.
Maybe There's a little bit nudge on the edges, but it's probably not super meaningful as I'd be interested in your reflections on that. And then if that is, is the case, you have internally, in the UK, we can see poor people don't seem to be as prevalent as you might expect.
If it's equally distributed, you've got other forms of things with that within country. And then once you go outside the country, it's like even worse. Why? If you look at a lot of the poorer nations. Do they not seem to have the same percentage of say prize winning scientists or things within business or these kind of things and you can easily get to the fact that there seems to be an opportunity deficit within that.
So I'd be interested in your reflections on that and then, I guess for the UK, how do you think we could do something, given there seems to be a little bit of reticence on a lot of, political arguments about what our state of immigration is, and we have this thing about high school and not, given that we've got internal equity challenges as well as the external.
Julia: Yeah, so just really quickly, the startup talent startup I helped set up was a philanthropic fund focused predominantly on migration and like getting really talented people to have the opportunity to, to either to go to the U S. So that was the primary focus on that end. And then also helping with labor mobility where people certain countries like Japan have like a need for labor and they've they're, they want people to come in.
But for whatever reason, there's like blockages, like maybe people don't know how to speak Japanese. So then we can fund someone to go teach them how to speak Japanese and people who want to move will move. I think so there's, yeah there's this question on where does talent come from?
How Yeah, how much should we care about people on the tail ends versus like equity concerns about people in the sort of, yeah, the other tail end of talent. I think to some extent, like my view is that like most countries don't actually target the people at the like positive tail end enough because of entrenched reasons.
So whether it be class or gender or race. And one of the recommendations that we've made is do these exams or like competitions that are like positive and then, you can also identify talent in that way and do them quite widely across the UK.
There was this like quite good paper talking about like the lost Einsteins that was published a couple of years ago. And I think that is right. There's like tons of people that were missing on the positive talent and that could Not only, personally have more of their potential be flourished, but also produce all these positive externalities for the rest of the world.
And I think that there's, it's pretty obvious to me that those people should be uplifted and enabled to do things. I think migration is a way that you can do that pretty easily because some countries have more infrastructure to help these people than others. And then the positive impacts of their work.
Typically are felt all over the world. And if you look at the economic studies, it shows that, this concept of brain drain is actually trickier than people think, because mostly, most of the time the sending countries receive a lot of positive impacts because they've sent people over.
I think this is, so I'm like pretty, pretty confident that, we should enable like people at the top end of ability, no matter where they come from and be doing more of that. In the UK as well as bringing people over and that will create positive change worldwide but also will create positive change within the UK.
I think it's more difficult when you think about what that means for people that aren't necessarily at the positive tail end. And I think that's where my views are maybe a little bit European, where I'm like, to some extent if we can allow everyone to be doing sort of their best, then we can also take care of people who like.
don't necessarily yeah, aren't necessarily at that level of like producing that much, like the productivity. I think productivity is a good word to use. But. I actually really struggle with this personally and I don't, like I'm pretty confident on what you should do with people who have a lot of potential, I'm not confident on how you deal with people that maybe aren't as productive.
Ben: Actually that's an interesting thing on UK education because, actually also on immigration, so the UK gets a lot of criticism on both sides, but actually if you ask Global immigrants where they want to go a UK is usually in fact It's been in the top three destinations for the last 20 years and that's partly to do with this infrastructure and freedoms and property language and things and stuff like that and actually if you look at the education If you look at sort of piece of scores, he's standardized scores UK particularly for the amount of money that it's spent this is doing actually pretty well in terms of OECD.
It might not seem like that in that.
Julia: And it's improved a lot in the last couple of years. There was like sustained effort and investment and like an actual improvement and people like, that's something we should be proud of. Yeah, exactly.
Ben: Exactly. It's got better. And that's part of my, it's we've got a lot of challenges, but we also have to accept when things have got better slightly, but there is evidence actually at both tail ends.
So you'll talk. 1%, 10 percent and you will say bottom 1%, 10%. That it's problematic. But we don't have super solutions for either. And it seems to be part of the problem about the fact that you want to, I guess there's a slightly more adjacent, but you want to grow the pie, but you also need to split the pie and some things when you're doing that don't seem to easily easily sit together.
Julia: Yeah, I think there's a way to, to do both, but I think people are morally or philosophically uncomfortable with the idea of differing levels of ability. And I think that, that is something that has become even more acute in the last 20, 20 years, since the And
Ben: you think that's a European thing?
Julia: I think that's a global Western thing.
Ben: Less so in the U. S. What about, so one of my first podcasts was with a a chap called Leopold Aschenbrenner, who's gone on to do lots of stuff with it, within AI, and he left Germany at the age of 15 to go to study to Columbia University, and part of that is because, and I paraphrase his view that German, Germany had a kind of a tall poppy syndrome, so that if you do sprout up there is less Less room for you.
Okay, so that's more of a personal his personal view, but that does seem to be echo. But again Hard to know but less of that culturally in the u. s. It seems
Julia: I think in the u. s Yes, there's less of that, but you do have certain like movements some people would call them woke movements where people want to rethink how they think about differences in ability.
And I mean, I've spent quite a bit of time in the U S but I'm not an American despite my strange sort of accent. I. But I I think that maybe what's happening now there is the most problematic version of both ends, where it's like, there are, there's yeah. I think, I actually, I don't have conviction to say what I was about to say.
Ben: It seems to be, it seems to be tricky. So you've a founder essentially of a think tank co founder and you helped with this mobility startup. What's made you want to be a founder? And do you think there's any challenges that you think were or are even challenges which should go away? I, so I think the obvious ones that I hear are.
Young people generally find it a little bit hard to do a startup thing. I guess that's generally true, but it seems to be more true in Europe. Actually I would say UK is a little bit easier than continental Europe. Very broad brush averages, but it's easier in the US than it is in, than it is in the UK.
And that there does still seem to be a bias against women and maybe a couple of other things, which I think still perplexes me a little bit again, because of the fact that talent should probably be equally distributed within wherever you're going to be within the startup thing. But given you've done it and then you've decided to start up within I guess think tank and policy world, as opposed to wanting to do your own AI startup and become a billionaire, solving some really hard problems.
So I'm interested in your reflections of why startup, any challenges or not, and your reflections on how it's going.
Julia: I don't think I could have done it any differently. I just think about my temperament, the way I get, I think about problems I get very obsessed with problems and I don't really love I like feeling a lot of agency.
And I also like feeling a lot of ownership. That's where, that's how I work the best is if I feel like I have a lot of ownership over what I'm building. So for me, I don't, I really I, it's almost like I, I did that classic thing coming out of a top university where you get all the pressure to be an investment banker or consultant, and I tried it for maybe two months and I just couldn't do it.
My heart wasn't and even when I was working, like when I did work for other people, it was always, it always felt like we were working on a mission together. So I think I will always be starting things or building things or trying to like, Scale solutions, like I don't think that's going to change or work for myself independently Like I also for a while thought about being an academic and in some weird way people tend to think those are like completely different categories like and lots of people talk think about how like they Selecting for academia isn't necessarily the same is very different than selecting for startups I think in some ways they're similar like you're working relatively obsessively over a problem and you are like to some extent.
So I think for me, it's like very natural. I do think it's harder to do in the UK and that's because of a lack of capital, I believe. It's also culturally a little bit. harder because you don't have as many mentors. So in the U. S. I get the sense that you are almost like, like it's very cool to start a startup.
Some people who have no business doing startups do it, who probably would be better off and happier if they didn't do it. I don't think it's like I don't think you should swing the other way where it's like everyone should do this. It's not for everyone. But yeah, like you have mentors, you have people that you've seen succeed in that path and you also have capital, like quite easy capital.
My friends in America would be able to raise like a lot of money for really honestly crappy ideas out of university. So there's that. I think that there's also An element of fear of failing in the UK that I just don't have. And maybe again, this is because I didn't fully grow up here, but a lot of my friends.
I think, tend to be quite scared of doing something wrong, of saying the wrong thing in a social situation. And I just, I don't know if I was born without that, but I just I don't have that same fear, maybe it is natural, but I also think you need to nurture it.
Ben: So at the margin, do you think that, More people in the UK should think about startups if they have some of these things, like wanting to do agency, probably being in a small team rather than part of a hierarchical big thing.
But they have a little bit of fear. Is your advice saying actually try and maybe diminish the fear and go for it? Or do you think. We have enough startup culture here in the UK.
Julia: No, I like definitely do it. I think there's one of the biggest problems the UK has, which I haven't really found a like policy solution for is a, is like misallocation of talent, like a national scale.
The amount of people that are working in investment banking or consulting that Like, I met someone the other day who, at 16 helped build a fusion reactor, and now it's in banking. And it's that's ridiculous. And I don't think the answer is start a fusion reactor startup, but it's
Ben: Although maybe it is.
Julia: Maybe it is, do the startup, but it's at least really good. Work on the fusion reactor or do the science. And the number of like incredibly intelligent people I know that are just at Jane Street, for example, when they could be working on like fundamental technical problems that could really improve our our quality of lives and push progress forward.
I think it really depresses me. And I don't know what the solution is. I can't like
go
and say you have to work on this.
Ben: I do wonder that at the margin, a lot of smart people think, okay, what I'm going to do is make a million and then give away that million to other smart people to work on problem X.
But actually, if you've got an idea on problem X, maybe you should more directly do it. Now, if you've got no inkling about problem X then maybe. Yeah. I'm also interested in why you chose essentially a nonprofit route rather than a for profit route.
Julia: Yeah I think that, so I don't really care about money that much so that's I guess important to know.
I want to have a nice life, but I don't.
Ben: You don't want to be a millionaire.
Julia: I don't feel the need, like if I end up being a millionaire, it's nice, but I'm not really like that. Yeah. For my personal life, that's not important to me. What's important to me is feeling like I'm solving problems and I love my work and intellectually, like I go to work and I'm so excited and like right now I have that.
Yeah. The only reason that, but sometimes I also don't want to have this narrative that, doing a for profit is bad and morally your people who do it only want to do it to amass a fortune. That's not the case. Like sometimes, with some problems it makes sense to have a for profit. And I likely at some point will build a for profit if the problem that I'm looking at or the opportunity that, that arises leaves me there.
But I think for the sets of problems that I'm currently interested in. Policies like a Particularly good lever. It's also I like opportunistic. I'm not a policy person by background. I guess like I, I did do like a master's in like public policy and economics, . That's really just because like I was interested in it
But I didn't, it's not like I. I went up this think tank route and then was like, I'm going to start my own think tank. I came from it from a completely different perspective, having never even really interacted with the policy ecosystem and it was just a case of seeing an opportunity.
I met people and there was, seemed like there was a gap in the ecosystem people weren't, there's no opportunity. Institute for Progress in the UK people aren't talking about some of the biggest issues that I think are constraining growth and progress in the UK And the organizations that are like explicitly center right coded, so who can be that voice for the center or for the center left it seemed like there was, and you have this opportunity because you have a new government coming in that says growth is their number one mission and yet they don't really have an organization to really champion that for them.
So you in terms it seemed like there was an opportunity in terms of the need. And then there was also just an opportunity because there was a pot of money and no one was, like, saying, I will, yeah, and I was like, this is crazy. You have it wasn't enough to run all of UK day one, but it was, like, enough to get started.
And I was like, why is no one Doing this I guess I should take the pot of money, . That's
Ben: the high agency thing, right? People ask Why not? And so then you go and do it. And I do think also I would echo your sentiment on profit versus non-profit. I was really swayed by there's a philanthropist who does a lot of work within climate, but they say actually that 80% of their climate money has gone essentially to startups and 20% for pure philanthropic.
But they're actually neutral. To which one it would be. It just so happens that the for profit motive is stronger in order to solve sustainable climate problems. Use the word sustainable there because it has to be able to work in the real world. And so you can't have funding forever and therefore startups that, and I wasn't exactly sure within that, but they, A had done it for a long time and B had been quite successful and they're very successful in that so I was quite swayed by that.
I'm interested in your creative work day. How do you as someone in this work? Do you do two or three hours of this kind of deep research thing? Are you often talking to people to do your ideas? Do you like writing like writing by longhand or on the computer? Do you like reading?
Everyone's got a different way but I'm just thinking between, For your way of thinking.
Julia: It's like absolute chaos. Right. Um, which is like how I work, and I'm happy working this way. But lots of meetings, and I try to keep one day free where I'm doing deep work, and deep work looks like me doing five tasks at once in my apartment running around, and then I have an idea, and I come back and open up that Google doc, and I get bored of that Google doc, so I do another one.
And I don't think that this is like How most people should work. Me, I should change the way I work. I'm not sure, but it's working for me so far. And then every once in a while I get, Incredibly obsessed with working on one paper, and then I'm like doing that for until it's 2 a. m. in the morning And my partner's like we should probably go to bed So I don't know if that's the answer you wanted No, I didn't.
I'm exposing myself.
Ben: What I've discovered asking a lot of people about their creative work days and a lot of highly effective creative people is there is no one answer. And in fact, there's some studies being done, particularly when they've looked at artists, that, you have great artists who put their greatest part of creative working day at different hours of the day.
So some do it between midnight and three, some do it between three and six, some do it between six and nine. Although one of the kind of meta observations is that they do all consistently work at the thing that they want to work at. So if you're a writer, you have to write. I guess if you're in policy world, you have to think about Actually, that means me to think, and also the way you work now, is there something that you think of now that is very different from, say, your 16 year old self?
Or did your 16 year old self, I guess it's the other way to ask it, really believe something, and then you'll think you know what, she was probably wrong, or the world changed, so that she might have been right, but she's no longer wrong.
Julia: I was quite left wing at 16. I think I've become maybe relatively less left wing both socially and economically.
I think when I was 16 I had I was a very big pictures person. So I had grand theories about the world. And actually, now I think most grand theories are can maybe work for a little period of time, but then the world outgrows them. And my view's far more practical now, and I'm quite pragmatic.
I'm thinking about what are like, small scale things that we can do and how can we predict like the change that they will create. Whereas when I was young I thought more in terms of systems and like maybe you have to design the perfect system where now I'm like, okay I understand chaos theory.
I don't think we've got it figured out and like maybe like what you want to do is have certain policies at work for the next 20 years and for whatever reason that you might stop working and then I'm happy to be pragmatic and sit back and say that I was like that it's wrong for this period in time.
I'm also like less likely to be able to say. Less likely to believe that because something no longer works, it was always a bad idea. Some policies worked for a good period of time, and then they no longer do, and yeah. When I was young I was, I wanted to be a writer, I was like, very romantic, and yeah.
Ben: Hence your focus on something like lead. Doable. Actually, it does have a systems impact, but is within what you were talking about, a narrow bounds as opposed to, I'm going to make it up, but solving the challenges in democratic processes, which might be a systems thing, but who knows what the right answer would be even if we have challenges in different nation states.
Julia: I struggle a lot with epistemic certainty, generally. I think it's very difficult to be 100 percent sure about anything. So I like to think about like what the impacts would be if I were, like if my bet was wrong. And how can you make sure that in all probabilities, You can still have some positive impact or at least minimize the negative impact that you may have.
And I think that's a really helpful way to think about policies in one, in a way that I don't see a lot of people thinking about policies.
Ben: Sure.
Julia: Yeah.
Ben: Okay, and then last one on this esoteric picture one would be, what's something you think then is probably true or true now, which you think most people don't think is true or haven't really thought about?
Julia: That's really difficult.
Yeah, I think, I think in our circle as a society, we are all moving towards a more utilitarian way of thinking, and that's probably good. I think it's good that you have that people think about probabilities and they think about the impacts of what they're doing. But philosophically, I think that we will at some point have a rebound and we will start thinking more about virtues and more about concepts like like human flourishing and concepts like I don't know like, courage being a thing that we care about because we will maybe, and maybe this comes back to the epistemic uncertainty I think it's good to to think about impacts, but to some extent it's very difficult to predict things.
And then maybe like common wisdom is pretty good, and then you should just come back to some of this virtue stuff. And I think that will impact the way we think about how individuals live their personal lives. So not necessarily like less language around optimizing for some things that we care about and more about who we are as people and the things that we as a society care about.
And I got the, I'm sure there's a way philosophically to align both and someone smarter than me who's now doing the BPhil at Oxford will figure it out. But maybe there's like a a ethical system that takes like Philippa Foote's The Good and then also does some Parfait like consequentialism and find something in the middle.
Ben: Yeah, I don't think they've figured it out I think Tyler Cowen says he's two thirds Utilitarian or maybe it's a little bit more than that, but to try and encompass this idea of that and I think I'm quite sympathetic to what you said as an, I think people in policy world will say even naive utilitarians think about cost benefit too much, but actually probably the average person doesn't think about it enough.
So I think that's, I think that's probably true. I think for me, as I've got older I probably now do put more weight. On freedom essentially as a value, which interestingly can cross left, right? I guess today it's maybe a bit more associated with right thinkers, but left thinkers often have it in terms of freedom of creative expression.
So I write plays and every playwright will tell you. You should be absolutely empowered to write whatever you want to write. Comedians say the same, and they can cross over both politically. But actually, as a value in itself I think it's quite important. Although, putting it in a cost benefit thing, there's a lot of second order values to freedom, which I don't think you can easily put in a utility expected value calculation, which is why it's missed out, but actually, and you can see this with revealed preferences.
So it's going back to this talent thing. Why do so many people, even with all of the problems, when you ask global immigrants, want to move to the UK and the U S and if you ask them and there's normally something to do with freedoms and yeah, you can make more money and they didn't send the money back.
Transcribed by https: otter. ai And all of those type of things. So that's probably how it's happened for me. Talking about mobility and traveling around the world, you've lived in a few places and had different influences growing up. I think you also spent a little bit of time in Paris as well and things.
I guess I'm thinking, what have you learned? From not being in London and is there anything you if you could transfer from one of these places and inject it into London? What would you do or maybe vice versa? What have you learned from? Travels and being in different places.
Julia: Yeah So I've really been in a lot of different places.
I was born in Brazil. I have Brazilian heritage I go there every year I've lived in France and In Hong Kong, in Macau in Puerto Rico, in Oxford. It was like, it's like a lot which is I think quite I I think a lot of people when they hear that, they think it's forms a bigger part of your identity than maybe I like to think it does.
I don't love maybe consider unpicking it because to me, it feels quite normal and if anything, it makes me feel Slightly out of place wherever I am, but I think that's like Perspective is good because I think the outside perspective allows you to sometimes see things a little bit more clearly.
I wouldn't change anything about London though, because I've lived in a lot of cities and London's my favorite city by far. I think it's better than New York. I think it's better than Paris and better than Rio. And I think that people that don't like London don't do it properly because it's incredibly diverse and maybe this is like my revealed preference in Pluralism and like diversity, like any sort of neighborhood has its own culture, its own food, its own kinds of people and yeah, I don't think that any other countries any other cities as diverse as London and to do it right, I guess you have to have a good raincoat and maybe spend your summers in A small rural town in Brazil, but I think I figured it out.
Ben: I definitely agree with you on London. I think it is really diverse, more diverse than New York in all of its, in all of its forms but has enough of the freedoms that you get in say the U. S. It's one of the, I guess you can do this in New York, but it is one of the only places in the world where you can just start up anything.
So a new business, tech, nonprofit, theater, and you have all of the components that you might. Creativity, finance, policy people wanting to do things yet it has a little bit of that temperance you get in Europe where you are valuing some of these other things, not just say, and again, it's a little bit of a stereotype, but just the American dream, which is seemingly leveraged to the money piece. And I always say that, because the difference in a London park, you do see this in Paris as well, but in a London park in the summer, everyone is essentially flopped out on the grass, doing nothing. Whereas in Paris, The New York Park was essentially Central Park, although you've got Park Slope.
People are more likely to be power walking, so they're like using their park for this thing, for this utility, whereas like the London utility is much more nebulous. It's also
Julia: functional, like I, maybe it's, maybe this shows that I'm quite affected emotionally by the things around me, but I find it really difficult so it's, my, my partner's from New York and we go quite a bit and spend a lot of time there and I find it very difficult to be in places where people are really suffering on the street and no one cares, like no one's doing very much about it and obviously every big city you find homeless people or people on drugs and I just really think that places like New York, San Francisco, L.
A., it's really high levels and I've lived in, like I said, in Rio. And I, when I was there, I was working for a nonprofit and I lived in the favela and even in a really impoverished place or like my, my, where my family's from, it's we don't come from a lot of money and the town they're from is like pretty poor.
But. You don't see the same level of disregard to people suffering and I don't know why that is, and I don't know why it upsets me so much that I feel like I couldn't live in a place just because of that.
Ben: Yeah, New York and San Francisco in particular have these. Seemingly have these problems which they haven't been able to entangle.
I, and I think some of it you see slightly in the weighting that you give to essentially your public goods and your public infrastructure. So if you look at London transport. It's been neutral to positive over the last 10 and 20 years. So we've had the Elizabeth line, which you could criticize that it was a little bit expensive, actually expensive and a little bit late, but it did get paid off as well, but it did get built and it's still a huge return.
And it's really and it's really working was you look in New York and I go there off and on now for the last two years. 20, 30 years, and you've had a slow and steady decline in their subway system and actually also on their buses. And how that's been made up is that essentially actually by Uber.
So transport has private has taken over over that Boston also to some to some extent as well, San Francisco. LA have none of that public infrastructure. So it's really interesting. I think that that balance and even people who are very towards the kind of free market view usually put transport as one of the things that they keep, so defense, yes, justice, yes.
And actually transport and in the theory of urban city building, it's, you get your sewage and you get your transport links, and then maybe you can deregulate other things. But if you. Don't put some planning within transport, sewage and some other utilities type stuff, then actually you can't get it built, which is one of the problems with charter cities.
Yeah. And it's always interesting in that balance.
Julia: I think transport has and that's what the sort of literature says, has these incredible secondary effects that people don't really think about, like agglomeration effects that increase productivity and London's incredibly productive I think partially because of its transportation system and the lack of investments in other parts of the country.
Like the fact that Leeds doesn't have a tram system I think it explains at least some of the sort of regional differences. And you compare it to France, for example, where you have these second, like second tier cities, so not Paris basically that are incredibly productive. And then you look at their transportation systems.
And you look at the productivity before and after they put those transportation systems in place. And the effects are like quite astonishing actually. So I think people really underrate transportation.
Ben: Yeah, and then there's an institutional issue with it. Essentially London has TfL, which is a, which is essentially looked after both subway and bus.
Whereas when you go out to the regions, there is no defining authority on either buses or things like transit. So it's interesting that actually, Some at the Metro level or basically at the city level or the urban level, it does seem to be that you want potentially some structure and that seems to be how it works in places like Belgium and France.
There's enough structure that they can put it on that level.
Julia: Yeah.
Ben: Great. Coming up maybe to the last kind of section, I thought we could do a quick fire round on underrated or overrated ideas and these, vaguely policy ideas or you can pass or just make some comment on some of the, on some of these things.
I've got a long list. We'll see how we go through.
Julia: You're going to test my epistemic uncertainty.
Ben: We'll see. You can change your minds as well. And things, maybe some of those things have changed over time. Yeah. So overrated, underrated. UBI, Universal Basic Income.
Julia: Ooh probably overrated. Changed my mind, but I think new studies have shown that it doesn't necessarily in increase the things that we want to increase.
I think that's more interesting is gosh, what's the name of the, basically pulling like extending tiered taxation so that you have also like negative taxation.
And that also has the, it gives you people the incentive to still be productive. Yeah.
Ben: Okay.
Super progressive taxation, as in into negatives rather than UBI. Yeah. I'm fond also of this idea of maybe, Rather than UBI, more of a universal basic infrastructure, like if you give people the infrastructure pieces, which they seem to lack in places, then that might, to some degree, overcome it.
And yeah, the latest evidence does seem to be a bit mixed, although proponents would just say we've not really tested it properly. Okay, underrated, overrated net zero.
Julia: Depends. I think the way that the government is doing, is thinking about net zero right now is overrated. And that's primarily the sort of 2030 like this like rigid 2030 goal of net zero.
That doesn't necessarily allow for long term investments in infrastructure that will give you like non variable sources of power. So I'm thinking things like nuclear, things like that. Potentially geothermal, like next generation geothermal could be really exciting. So other kinds of investments that take longer to get on the grid and things like improving the grid infrastructure and therefore wouldn't contribute to our 2030 goal, but actually long term would be better for the environment, but also for for the country as a whole, when it comes to our productivity, our growth and bringing down bills.
There's also a question of if you're over optimizing for net zero without thinking about, especially with this like 2030 view without thinking about how net zero affects people. I think people don't think about the politics around it. There's a lot of like green lashing happen happening in, in Europe.
And I think it's important to think about people's wellbeings. So if bills shoot up, Because you're over optimizing for net zero, no one's gonna be happy, and you might actually end up hurting the movement as a whole.
Ben: Okay, so that's good in concept, but perhaps bad as a year point estimate, or at least a year point estimate.
Yeah
Julia: to be clear I'm pro decarbonizing the grid, or and I'm pro sustainability.
Ben: That's a good follow on to overrated or underrated, then placing a carbon tax.
Julia: I'm not convinced it would necessarily work, but I'm also not. Yeah, I don't think I have a view on it.
I don't think, I think maybe slightly overrated in the sense that a lot of work and time and energy has been, has gone into that as a potential solution. Whereas I'm more excited about, technological solutions that allow us to have more abundance and also have this like environmental, positive environmental impact.
So low credence, but slight overrated.
Ben: Yeah. I'd say economists are positive, standard financial economists, political economy people think it's not easily workable in very simplistically. Okay alternative proteins, underrated or overrated?
Julia: Oh, super underrated. We did a big paper on alternative proteins.
And I think there's just so many reasons why they're great. The, if you care about animal welfare, they're great because of that. If you care about the environment they're great. It's also like quite exciting. Like I maybe I'm quite, high openness to experience, but it's like whatever with alternative proteins, maybe we can produce new kinds of proteins with new kinds of tastes and textures.
And that's quite exciting to me. So yeah, I think super super, super, super underrated. Did I say underrated or overrated at the start?
Ben: Yeah, underrated. Underrated, yeah. Okay. So if you think if you're someone concerned about animal welfare, maybe you're vegan or vegetarian, you would suggest that maybe working on an alternative protein thing is better than working on a cultural change for vegetarian veganism?
Julia: Yeah. And I think that's also, that's For health reasons I lot of people really struggle with veganism and vegetarianism I went vegan, I got really ill, Ended up in hospital, And now I eat meat. I feel like I need to eat meat to stay good. But
Ben: you would eat cell grown, lab grown meat? Yeah, like a
Julia: Drop of a hat. Yeah.
Ben: Have you tried any? I guess you can only have it, I think Singapore, you can just about get the chicken one. I think in the US you need some special license or lab, it's not.
Julia: The UK has passed legislation to liberalize it but for pet food, which is a good step.
But no, I'm excited to try it at some point.
Ben: Here in the UK, we have famously the Gregg's vegan sausage roll that most people cannot tell is not a vegan sausage roll. I know that's not really alternative, but anyway. Okay, ideas on digital democracy. Overrated, underrated.
Julia: What specifically?
Ben: So I
guess this is new democratic processes which are using technology to do that.
Julia: What's happening in Taiwan as an example.
Ben: Taiwan would be like a more, I guess it's not extreme. So Taiwan would be a live example. Yeah. I guess citizens assemblies, yeah, ideas of that. And I guess it's the idea that now that we could do Voting at scale, which 20 years ago we could not, should we be putting more effort into getting more direct or deliberative democracy ideas, or is it a waste of time because of actually maybe what we mentioned earlier, that we should be working on some other more narrow problems, then we're going to change one choice system for another choice system, which may not actually do any better.
Julia: Taiwan's, I think. done it really well and I'm quite inspired by their system. Think it's something that we should consider. I sometimes worry when you're doing policy transfers, there are all these cultural or context differences that mean that things might or might work or might not work in other countries.
But, that's why you test things. So I think I would, I think probably underrated if we're thinking about exploring it as a policy. a solution, but if we were just going to start, I guess it also depends on what exactly we're talking about.
Ben: Mildly underrated. Okay. Self driving cars
Julia: probably appropriately rated.
I Don't know how to drive. I never want to learn how to drive. I hope that they work out
Ben: Which case you really are hoping that they work out. Yeah.
Julia: Yeah.
Ben: I think they're now underrated. I think maybe they were overrated when everyone was talking about them a few years ago, but now they're actually happening and people have gone really silent, which I think is really interesting.
Maybe it's a positive thing.
Julia: I think people can tend to get like pretty used to technological advances. So like as soon as things start happening, it just becomes part of your life. So maybe that's part of it as well. Yeah,
Ben: there is this strange, maybe it's not strange, but it's just this fear.
Of things which aren't human. So you had it I guess we've talked about it a little bit, alternative proteins and these types of things, but it's when the card machine, the ATM came out, was about to come out, there was a lot of reticence. Even though the data shows it makes fewer mistakes than humans, but we we allow humans mistakes more than computers.
So even the fact that self driving cars seem to be at the moment have accidents rates, which are in line with, we're actually probably below humans, but We really have high salience for when they do get things wrong and we don't like it So you need to be even better than the average human which generally they're not very good drivers for it.
So that seems to be an issue
Julia: Yeah, I also think that it's one of those things where it feels really daunting at first, when you Think about it, and then you get used to it, like no one I guess like people were scared of TVs, they were scared of cell phones, and we can argue about some of the negative effects of all of these things that might have happened but might not have happened.
But mostly, like, when it comes to people's perceptions, it's become quite normal. And I think that'll be the case for self driving cars and alternative proteins and lots of other things.
Ben: Maybe AI as well.
Julia: Yeah.
Ben: Okay Nuclear power, but I guess particularly mini nuclear power, but you could talk about nuclear power in general underrated or overrated
Julia: super underrated So small modular reactors are the sort of the many nuclear powers that seem to be most likely to work.
Rolls Royce, which is a UK company, is like one of the companies that are trying to produce these. I think that there was like a nuclear winter of sorts where people stopped thinking about nuclear power, I think, for mostly cultural reasons, but it's actually one of the most safe safe technologies that we have for power generation.
If you look at the statistics, it's safer than even some of the other renewable energy sources and definitely much safer than gas and oil and coal and all these other sources. But I think that in the public consciousness, people have like people's perceptions have been completely messed up by things like Chernobyl getting too many, too much attention.
And that's what happened to Chernobyl was like a failure for other reasons, not just because it was a nuclear power plant. Or the Simpsons and all these like cultural references have added up to people having this like vague fear about nuclear, but when you show them the facts they're like, oh okay less people die than any other technology, so it seems like we should do it.
The only reason maybe it's not so Like clear cut is we've because we totally underrated it for years, lost a lot of our capacity to build. So now nuclear is really expensive to build. Especially in the UK, there are some countries that have been, or some companies in some countries that have been able to build at scale for much cheaper.
So France and Korea are two countries that have been able to do that. But I think part of that is like, To some extent, regulation, to some extent construction in everything is really expensive in the UK, and that's like more downstream effects more downstream sorry, and the construction cost has downstream effects.
Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. I think Rolls Royce has just won the tender to build it for Hungary. Yeah. So they're gonna have a a a thing there and it should be cheaper. Like you say, in the UK it's a little bit more troublesome. Yeah. Great. Great. Great. Museums. Do you think underrated or overrated?
Julia: Oh, so underrated. Yeah. It's what I do most weekends. I think, maybe this comes back to like public spaces, like the way we talked about parks or public goods in general. I think when it comes to creating. I think we should think more about creating spaces where people can go and feel inspired or feel like they can just exist and it's a public space that's beautiful or they can learn yeah, I think maybe in another life I would be a museum curator.
Ben: Would you make more US museums free then?
Julia: Oh, totally. Maybe this is like a weird, like to me it seems outrageous that you have to pay for the museum. But I think it's a public good that people should have access to anywhere, like any other public good. I also think it's ridiculous that in London you have private parks, for example.
That are like yeah, and maybe that, that, maybe that's know. Maybe private, I, I said that and I might take it back, I think. I think actually private parks are maybe okay.
Ben: This is your leaning about how, yeah, where we are on the free market spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe the. The last one on this one then would be the big one would be capitalism. Do you think it's underrated or overrated?
Julia: I think in some of my circles totally underrated, like completely underrated. I don't think it's like an evil thing that you need to rein in. And then in some other circles overrated.
I think it's like the best like broad brush system to have. But I I think that what we have in many instances isn't capitalism. It's like some form of special interests. And I think that's bad. And in some instances the Pure profit optimization like new shareholder version of capitalism that we have is sometimes harmful depending on what it is you're producing.
Yeah, and then there are specific cases that you can point to the hyper capitalistic model of dealing with mental health in America, I think, has been like a clear failure where people are, like, hospitals are incentivized to keep people institutionalized for longer because that means insurance companies pay them more.
So that's like a failure, a very clear failure. But then also there are, the capitalism has worked to increase people's well being for the last yeah, like a hundred, hundred years and I, come in countries like Argentina where my father grew up the non capitalistic systems have completely decimated an entire generation's wealth this is, maybe comes back to my whole view on maybe I don't want, I don't like thinking about things as grand theories anymore, yeah.
Ben: Great. Okay. So what current projects or current or future projects are you working on? Obviously they've got UK day one, which is a, as a current project, but anything you'd like to comment on that or what you're thinking about in the future?
Julia: Yeah, so we're thinking of expanding UK Day 1 was more of like an election year project and also MVP for something larger and yeah so next year we're going to be focused on creating a larger think tank that's not just election year focused and that works on growth and progress so the specific areas that we're looking at are talent, infrastructure and science and technology All things that I think are really important for growth and progress.
Ben: Great. And do you have any life advice or career advice that you'd give people people listening, maybe they're thinking about doing a startup or they're younger and they're wanting to have an impact on the world and what they should be thinking or anything else which has come to mind, which you thought you might want to share?
Julia: Yeah. It's hard because I think I'm quite like, early on in my own process. So it's, I think it's difficult to give I think it's always difficult to give advice. Even when I hear advice from people that are maybe older and have gone through their career, their advice doesn't seem like it means very much.
But maybe I'll just say what I wish I had heard four years ago five years ago. I think having high conviction that if you just work, you'll get there. hard at improving yourself and are curious and happy to like work and be agentic and grow, you will probably things will work out.
I think there's at least for me, it was like a very anxious time when I didn't know where I was going. And then I think it's okay to be opportunistic. I think lots of people think that you have to have one sort of path. But I like to think about my life as Honing all these skills and becoming good at doing all these things, and then the sort of perfect opportunity kind of will open up and you'll be like you'll have the right skills to capitalize on them, and that's not, it's not, but you can also do that wrong and be like that's not the perfect opportunity.
I think you need to be, like, your bar for thinking that a thing is the right opportunity should be pretty low. But that advice probably doesn't generalize super well. Oh.
Ben: That's fair enough. With that, thank you very much.
Julia: No, thank you.
