Astha: [00:00:00] DPS like a way of life. You just have to adopt it.

Mila: Each person needs a unique ID. Each land person needs a unique ID.

Rafa: It's super easy. It's for free. Somebody else with her identity was opening telephone accounts.

Astha: Oracle is in so many different government systems.

Dan: You build an entire tech stack on big tech products, and then you put a union jack on the top of it, and you wave it intensely in the hope that nobody will look at what it's sitting on.

Alix: This is Vaporstate. A new series from us here at "Computer Says Maybe."

Alix: Hey there. Welcome to "Computer Says Maybe". This is your host Alex Dunn, and I have just gotten home from Sundance and introducing this episode, which is broken into two parts, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what happened at Sundance, and the second part is part three of the Vaporstate, where we are gonna dig into the bromance between Tony Blair and Larry Ellison, uh, where basically.

The Tony Blair Institute and Oracle are kind of, I don't know, roving around the [00:01:00] world selling Oracle technology to governments for a good price. And then, you know, as time passes, those contracts get bigger and bigger. We have the land and expand strategy and pretty soon it's hard for a government to end those contracts with Oracle.

And it's not just Oracle. You see it in loads of countries with a lot of these big tech providers. There's this gold rush to try and solve digital problems of governments in ways that require probably permanent contracts, and just over time getting more and more control over all the digital aspects of government.

And this is just a really wonderful. Clear example of that process happening. And it's also interesting 'cause it's an ex prime minister of the UK that is banding about with the tech oligarch to make it happen. Okay, so before we get to that, I wanna briefly talk about Sundance. If you're not interested in this.

Fast forward five minutes. A couple weeks ago I met Valerie Beach, the director of Ghost in the Machine, a movie about [00:02:00] the histories of ai. And how it's basically a direct descendant of eugenics thinking and academia. I was interviewed for the film and really loved what she's trying to do. She put together a panel with Sundance on ai, starting out with like a more political set of questions.

It evolved over time to be a little bit more and aine conversation about ai. But, uh, Valerie and Sundance, thought I'd be a great moderator, invited me up to do it. Sundance paid my way and we did a couple weeks of prep. Um, and then I watched the other film that was gonna be represented in the panel. I ended up with a little bit more hard hitting questions than I was expecting.

I asked for guidance on how to navigate that because I knew that tone. Was gonna be an issue 'cause both films were premiering and you don't wanna, you know, be the spoil sport who asked a bunch of mean questions to a film. I shared my questions, which I'll put in show notes. I didn't think any of them were overly, um, negative or [00:03:00] overtly negative at all actually.

Anyway, so I did the panel prep with all the directors. Um, got to meet a couple of Oscar award winners, which was cool over Zoom. And then nothing happened. Couple days passes, I'm about to travel and then Sundance says they don't want me to be moderator on the panel anymore. And that was what happened. Um, so that was my beginning of Sundance, getting booted as moderator of a panel that I was very excited about.

But then I got to go to the ghost in the machine premier and it was really lovely. Um, and my main takeaway was. But even though there's a big narrative uphill battle, because most documentary filmmakers who have big budgets, they are gonna be obsessed with access journalism as the primary tactic for them telling the story of ai and that that is just gonna be really hard to deal with.

So the reason that these types of films are gonna get made where, you know, there's. All of the work being done for the tech industry to kind of maintain this environment of fear, um, suspension of disbelief about artificial general intelligence. [00:04:00] This sense that these guys are gonna make all these decisions that are really consequential, and so we have to listen to them.

We, of course, they, they, they're the people we need to listen to and not quite realizing that we're essentially. Allowing all of the public to be dragged along by these salesmen rather than actually meaningfully with clear-eyed analysis and real thinking. Figure out, you know, what, what's happening? What should we expect?

How should we think about these technologies? Those are always gonna be well-funded, and that narrative is always going to be better distributed, and it's always going to sit alongside power in a way that's very challenging to counter. I will say though, watching Valerie Beach's film Ghost in the Machine, both the film itself and how she approached it.

She met with 40 experts, all of whom are, you know, super eloquent throughout the film, have these deep knowledges and histories and of work in this area. And not only did she stitch them together in I think, a really accessible way in the film, she also brought a lot of us to Sundance. So I got to hang out with lots of other people who were wonderful and I learned a lot from them.

And you know, made friends and [00:05:00] networked with people that are thinking about these things in similar ways and with complimentary expertise. And I think that's the way it's leaning in with curiosity, combining that with community, um, and just continuing to with integrity, tell the story of what's actually happening while ignoring all of the noise and all of the things that industry wants you to be saying because their PR teams are advancing these stories.

And trying to boost up, um, their CEOs as these like godlike figures who are gonna bring about some artificial general intelligence, which is like not a thing. So it was a, it was a bit of an ordeal. I had a good time. I'm glad I went. But I also learned a lot about the fight ahead because tech CEOs are so effective at sucking up oxygen in the room.

So I'll stop there and we'll get into the Vapor State. Um, we're, instead of interviewing Tony Blair or trying to interview Tony Blair and Larry Ellison, we just talked to the journalists who spent a long time investigating them, which I feel like is a much better approach. So let's get into [00:06:00] it with part three of the Vapor State.

Dan: Hi. I am Daniel Howden and I'm one of the founders and the director at Lighthouse. We set up six years ago with a goal to build an investigations team that any newsroom or freelance journalist in the world might like to work with when they're trying to tackle big systems level stories. So we are. The investigation backroom behind a lot of work that you might see in magazines and even from content creators that you like and follow.

If you're looking. A system in a new way, um, that you think isn't present in the public discourse and isn't getting the attention it should then think about reaching out to us. If you are inside an organization that isn't doing the things that it should, [00:07:00] then you can think about leaking to us in confidence.

If you're a journalist or someone who's adjacent to journalism, um, and is thinking about how to build a team in order to respond to something which is urgent and in the public interest, then again, think about, uh, reaching out to us. We'd, um, be happy to have a chat.

Astha: Hi, my name is Patricia Shaman DeSilva, and I'm an investigative reporter at Lighthouse.

I work across a few of our newsrooms, one of which is the Tech and AI Accountability Newsroom, which is where this investigation was born out of. And I also co-host Backlight with my colleague Tessa Pang and Backlight, which I will shamelessly plug here is Lighthouse's monthly podcast where we basically go behind the scenes of investigations and try to have interesting conversations about the future of journalism.

So check it out.

Dan: Since leaving office, um, Blair has been involved in such a flurry of different kind of initiatives, foundations, paid [00:08:00] consultancies that range from like shilling for petro states in the stands through to helping Elon Musk to sell starlink into African states. And I kind of left it there.

TBI was this incoherent thing and Blair was always launching new acronyms. One of the weirdest things about TBI, so the simplest description of what is TBI, it's a giant think tank, but okay, that doesn't tell you what it is. Legally. Legally, it has a whole host of different entities that sit in a stack in relationship to each other.

Even now after months of reporting on this, we still don't have a completely clear picture on this. And partly that's because TBI doesn't feel the need to answer basic questions about itself. So when we went to the write of reply stage, because everything we published, obviously we go in detail through all of the findings with the subject, uh, of the piece and give [00:09:00] them the right to reply.

They wouldn't even confirm like basic things about their own. Corporate structure. They are governed by UK Charity Law, but they do also have potentially for-profit entities that sit in relationship to that. I think the first time that it came into focus was a few days after the elections in the uk.

There started to be headlines coming outta this Future of Britain conference. So we have a new labor government, supposedly with this huge majority. Blair is headlining this conference and he was there confidently telling people that AI could cut government costs by X number of billion pounds and that it could cut one in five jobs in the entire of the uk.

Civil service trained unquestioningly as a good thing and the only way forward. And then the question comes up like, what is this based on? You take a look at that and you see that TBI had taken a government dataset, a US government dataset of civil service [00:10:00] tasks, and it had then fed that into chat GPT and asked it which of these tasks that it understood was what government did, could be done by ai.

Then it took the results of this and presented it as a piece of empirical research. That would drive conclusions leading to predictions that one fifth of the civil service needed to lose their jobs. It's at that point, you really start to wonder what Blair is, is this wild-eyed cell otting parody of sincerity that won't stop saying things like silver bullet.

Game changer and delivery unit and has these kind of wild eyes. That was like a starting point for us to like think about how was it that TBI had become influential enough that it was standing on a platform at a major conference in the early days of a new government and setting out this absolutely baseless agenda where you basically asked [00:11:00] Chad GPT to tell you what the AI could do, how many jobs AI could replace in the British government.

Astha: One of the things that we started to look into is where this Funny Vale Institute was, was working and really quickly it was like they're everywhere from Indonesia to Timor left to across the Caribbean, to several African countries. They're basically everywhere. Like every month there's a new office that they're opening.

We got together a team at Lighthouse. This was also part of like a broader coalition of journalists that we were working with, this group of Latin American journalists clip and we. Just started assigning tasks like, this person's gonna look at this region and this person's gonna look here, and what are their financial statements and what can we find first on a more of like open source basis online, and then later became kind of.

How do we begin to approach people inside TBI and how do we divide that up? And that was a second part of the work. And like the biggest part, which was trying to find people to speak to us. Each of us went off on [00:12:00] LinkedIn and basically just sent a message saying, hi, we're journalists. We're working on this issue.

We'd like to speak to you on and off record basis. The majority of those. Messages. Initially, we got no answer to. It often required a bit of pinging, let's say, of going back a second or third time, and then people responded to us. But when we first, I mean, at least in my experience, when I first got people on the phone, they were very worried about.

Speaking about their work at the Tony Blair Institute because of the NDAs that they had signed and they were open about that. So it took months and several conversations to get people comfortable enough to share things, even just off the record. So we're not even talking about being able to use quotes in a piece, but just to get background information that took a really long time.

And then. Months later, there were people who basically I think understood the public interest of at least lending a quote anonymously for a piece, and that was very helpful and made it so that we [00:13:00] could structure the story. Then slowly, more and more people started talking and, and then even after this first publication came out with the new statesman.

It became much easier, like at the end of the day, we weren't so much reaching out to people on LinkedIn. We, people were contacting us. They were like reaching out to us on Signal and, and WhatsApp also, because so much has happened since that people feel particularly aggrieved that they work there in the first place.

Dan: So the way that we ended up having a lot of these conversations with TBI insiders was like to ask them. What happened when Ellison's money started to flood into the institute from 2021 onwards, and what we kept getting told was that an organization that had been about broader development practice and like technocratic delivery units suddenly had became about tech.

Tech and more tech. It quickly went from a situation in which they'd be asking governments about their needs and then trying to shape custom responses to that, to going [00:14:00] to them and giving them Oracle products. And in order to get to that stage, TBI people were having joint retreats with Oracle product people.

They were getting education sessions. They were heading out to Austin and Texas to Oracle headquarters to basically like have product intros and then they're having regular check-ins with people who do sales for Oracle. And you end up with a situation which the two organizations are like massively enmeshed and people began to understand their own work to be that of tech sales as much as it was development.

Astha: One of the early seeds of of Larry Ellison money comes from this tech for development program that is launched around 2020 and it's like backed up by Oracle Money. And the whole point is that they're gonna be supporting countries, as they say, to build digital infrastructure. And the first leg of that is that they go into Rwanda and Senegal and Ghana and they launched this kind of like.

[00:15:00] Oracle health management system. So it's all about like electronic health records and vaccine delivery and so on. And I think at that point, speaking to the people inside the organization that still felt like relatively harmless, let's say, but then come 2021 and when there's like even more. This injection of money from Larry Ellison is when people start talking about the organization becoming essentially this like tech sales operation for Oracle.

So suddenly the main mission in a lot of these countries, in a lot of these African countries where they've launched already this Oracle health management system, but not even like they start expanding becomes, you know, you have to go in and make presentations to ministers on behalf of Oracle. There is like TBI people calling up a minister and saying, Hey, we have an Oracle team coming up.

You know, next week can we book a meeting in your calendar? We got people telling us also that Oracle was also like booking meetings in TBI people's calendar to scope out new opportunities in the countries that they were working on. So there's like [00:16:00] a several pronged approach. Um, and through the reporting there were a few.

Countries where, where we saw this happening like more concretely in action. So one of them was Rwanda. Rwanda is one of the countries where TBI has been working for about 15 years. Um, and Oracle is in so many different government systems in, in Rwanda, let's say. So one of them is. One of this ministry, this revenue authority, has been using Oracle systems for a while, and recently they actually put out a tender where they said, we are now looking to migrate away from this system because it's become too expensive.

Uh, the cost for support in licensing is basically unbearable. And obviously that goes to one of the key issues of all of this, which is what TBI people were telling us, which is okay, you can initially, you know, be offering this oracle. Program at a preferential price, which is what you do, right? Like the typical land and expand tech approach, which is we're gonna give you this preferential price and then later we're gonna change the terms.

So it becomes more, let's say, profitable or [00:17:00] beneficial for us. And that's what happened with this Oracle system. They were coming in, they were offering this either for free or at a nicer price, but later on it became quite expensive. A lot of people inside TVI said, well, you know. This was problematic for us because you're locking people into these systems.

It becomes very hard to then migrate out of it. And that's what happened in Rwanda that we saw through this tender. But still in Rwanda, Oracle has talked about they're gonna build a data center there. At least that's what they were saying in 2024. There's a lot of still like, uh, government ministries that are using Oracle databases.

So it's still happening. It's still a very close relationship. But this is a bit of an example of how. They get a hold of, of governments. And I think to that point, something that's interested is when we were speaking to people inside TVI, they said that when they were trying to, let's say, push or present Oracle in some of these countries, if the government, for instance, you know, suggested a competes in company, said, well, well maybe shouldn't we go with, let's say company X.

TBI would [00:18:00] shut that down. They'd be like, we're not working on this projects. Or in another instance, there was a group of people who sort of suggested, well, maybe we could suggest an open software or something more locally led or government led. And again, that was like really heavily shut down. It's mostly about serving this just of this big tech instead of looking for a solution that will work sustainably in a way.

And I mean there's a couple of other examples also in Kenya, which is somewhere where Oracle and TVI have been working for years together. It's also placed where recently Oracle announced that they're gonna open a data center and they credited TBI for helping that deal go through on LinkedIn. But what people told us who worked, you know, in the Kenya operations at TBI was that from like 2021 onwards.

So when the Larry Ellison injection of money comes in, a massive part of their work was basically just doing introductions between government officials and Oracle. So it would be that often there were meetings in Kenya between Oracle and TBI, but also like [00:19:00] TBI people, again, were just calling up ministers and trying to fit Oracle solutions.

Let's say at one point, one of the sources said that. The people in government were so saturated that they, they sarcastically called Larry Ellison, uncle Larry, because they were, they were tired because, you know, they, they kept being pitched through TBI, Oracle, on and on. And again, Oracle is a system that is being used in Kenya at the Ministry of Treasury at so many different ministry levels as well.

The issue of being locked in and, and of high costs is something that's, that's come up a lot as well.

Alix: Before we move on, let's hear more about so-called Uncle Larry and his lifetime of influence over politicians and the private sector.

Dan: As soon as you look into TBI, the first thing you find is that it's essentially almost entirely bankrolled by Larry Ellison. Ellison is this character who has kind of gone outta [00:20:00] focus for the public, and that wasn't always the case. If you went back to the early two thousands and the nineties, Ellison was very much in focus then.

He was this Playboy figure from Silicon Valley, great rival of Bill Gates and is the CEO at that stage, and the founder of Oracle and the builder of a business software empire. The Ellison, that era wasn't particularly political, but coming forward now, Ellison is hugely embedded in Trump land, and Trump talks about the Ellison as being the CEO of everything.

And this guy who's turned 8 82 and had been kind of seen as an also ran in the billionaire stakes, climbed back up to number two, richest man in the world. During this year and his family with very much his leadership, has been on a massive acquisition spree across the US media landscape. [00:21:00] It essentially owns the vast majority of the legacy media that's and news broadcast across the us.

And while all of that is happening, Ellison also emerges as the key character, arguably in the acquisition of TikTok in the us. So we're still waiting to see terms and confirmation of this deal. So Ellison is this character who has come back very much into the public eye, and a small part of what he's doing was essentially the purchase of a former British Prime Minister, and even this purchase propelled Tony Blair's Institute for Global Change into being the biggest think tank in the uk.

And a think tank that has an incredibly AI accelerationist agenda. If Elon Musk had provided $300 million over this course of three years for Tony Blair to run an institute that was going to advise the government this closely, there would be protests in the street. So the only [00:22:00] reason that there aren't protests in the street of this degree of Ellison influence over a TBI is because Larry Ellison isn't colored in as a character in the imagination of the British public.

Alix: What was the sense like, is Tony Blair engaged in this activity, or is it that Basically like that thing that happens when an organization gets money from a particular source and then you start sort of bending towards the priorities of that source of funding without necessarily being explicitly like told.

Dan: There is this kind of Blair Derangement syndrome. Um, it's suffered from people who lived through the nineties and the UK and to the worst extent where they're still convinced of the sincerity of this guy. And you still hear this a lot from TBI. There was a regular journey that people went on where what he's selling this kind of distressed asset of UK centrist government who knows about delivery units.

It's still being bought by people and they came in with that in mind. There is a broader culture there that there is no conflict of interest between [00:23:00] Blair, between centrism and big tech, and it's a kind of enduring thing that's going on here. It's ideological and it's much more visible. It's kind of more visible day by day that this is.

Actually a pretty extreme agenda and it ties governments, UK government, the Randan government, Kenya government, and many other places. TBI works in 44 countries. It ties them to a highly unstable and ideological agenda on digital public infrastructure, and it's one that Blair believes in. But I also spoke to people who advised Blair on actual technological issues like how gen AI works and what the blockchain is, and.

While being kind to guys in their seventies, he's not a details guy on this aspect of the tech. This is kind of unmoored tech evangelism from people who, as a substitute for a deeper understanding, just like keep on saying these words, like game changer to the point where they're [00:24:00] completely meaningless.

Alix: It's interesting on the details front, because as an institute, not only are they advising specific governments on how to make choices about technology, they're also. Making policy, which you mentioned earlier, Daniel, about like research they'd produce that then kind of backs up their claims in their advising.

Um, has the, the, the policy piece, is it as unmoored as some of the kind of narrative framings that is so simplistic and superficial and not actually detailed? Like has the policy work gotten worse as they've tried to push this? Unclear probably. Unrealistic agenda or have they, is there like a part of the organization that works on policy and they're like in some ways in conflict with other parts of the organization that are like pitching this stuff

Dan: when it comes to like the detail on the policy making.

I think the politics is crude and the policy prescriptions aren't so much poorly thought through as they're based on such a [00:25:00] narrow idea of what consultation means and what technology could do. That narrow path is the easiest. Kind of vector for large tech companies to follow and to achieve sales. So the example that keeps coming up for me is digital IDs in the uk.

This is an idea that goes back to the time that Blair was in power. It was an obsession of his and just before Labor Party conference, which is the moment that we put this story that we did out, TPI launches a report. They launched it on the Wednesday, a time for digital id, and it touts digital IDs. As a way to stop people getting into small boats to cross the English channel because, um, some thousands of people.

Who can no longer, um, hitch rides on the channel tunnel in order to come claim asylum in the UK or try to reunite with their family, et cetera, has led to a phenomenon of people taking small boats and crossing the channel. And this has upended the whole of British politics, even though it has. [00:26:00] Absolutely no relationship to the overall migration figures.

So suddenly digital IDs, which is a project which could potentially cost anywhere between 10 and 20 billion pounds is being put forward. And three days later on the platform as a surprise initiative and digital ID cards are going to stop the box and, um, shore up the political center for the Labor party.

So even if there is. Serious policy thinking underneath it. The politics that sits on top of it is so opportunistic and poorly thought through, ends up being quite hard to take it seriously. That digital ID scheme has now kind of retreated into the background, but what it also shows you is how. Strange things can become when you have such a fast moving revolving door between government and a handful of very specific think tanks and policy shops.

So it's really hard to tell who is in TBI and being paid for by [00:27:00] Ellison. 'cause it's worth remembering that Ellison also has. A huge history with digital ID projects, and he's been pushing them for 25 years. In the wake of September 11 attacks in New York, Allison called for the US government back then to make a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized, and he offered to create software to.

Do it for free land and expand. And then TBIs new proposal is almost certain if it was to be pushed through, would benefit Oracle. Oracle already has 710 millions worth deal for shared services platform with the Home Office, with the Department for Work and Pensions, ministry of Justice. It also has live contracts with the NHS.

So the digitalized ID scheme is potentially a way to draw all of these together into a situation where suddenly. Like a large part of the UK's digital public infrastructure would be built on top of Oracle. And yet these are the same guys who are gonna talk to you about sovereign ai [00:28:00] and their version of sovereign AI is you basically build an entire tech stack on big tech products, and then you put a union jack on the top of it and you wave it intensely in the hope that nobody will look at what it's sitting on.

Alix: One of my favorite examples of sovereign AI was when ish Sun X said they wanted their own cloud compute for universities and research, um, and then they couldn't compete to get the chips, and so they ended up making a hundred million pound contract to Google Cloud. That was, that was their solution. Um, I'm sure there's a little flag.

I dunno, I'd love to zoom in on the UK a little bit. I mean, obviously the US is an absolute shit show where like the presumption is that we can tire an entire economy to like building energy draining water consuming infrastructure for stuff that doesn't really work in the hopes that eventually these businesses will find a business model.

Um, but the UK feels particularly. Desperate in terms of a growth agenda. Um, and is kind of seeing like is listening to these pitches, not just [00:29:00] saying This is gonna make me look good or we want to be corrupt, but is also just like grasping it like anything it can find. But do you wanna talk a little bit Daniel about like the UK specifically, like how this current UK government perceives private tech actors as part of their political vision?

Um, and then I'd love to like. Go deeper on maybe the NHS as a kind of the land and expand, um, both for Oracle, but also Palantir and others. So starting with the Starmer tech plan, like do you wanna talk a little bit about what you all have seen in this work about how this administration is posturing itself towards privatization of digital public infrastructure?

Dan: Because the government prior to Staler was so spectacularly awful. It was one of these things where you assumed it just couldn't get any worse. But if you talk to people in civil society, tech experts, independent experts on tech, which the UK has, even though it uses them a lot less than it could, [00:30:00] they will tell you that this government has been significantly worse than the previous government.

You have a UK government, which came into office saying that it was all about growth and that it had a growth agenda and two budgets later has. Been kind of found out as having absolutely no coherent growth agenda whatsoever. It doesn't seem to have the political nouse to manage, um, the broad coalition that makes up the Labor Party and the center of British politics.

So it's really vulnerable. To the tech agenda in an incredibly kind of incredulous way. And I think to see an individual who kind of has gone on that journey, the Britain's first technology minister under this government, Peter Kyle, is a good place to look. Kyle comes into office, he's initially nervous as we understand it about taking on the tech brief because he doesn't.

Basically know anything about it. And he [00:31:00] is advised by Blair that it's fine. TBI is gonna provide him with all of the policy papers and positions that he needs. He's gonna get all of the backup that he needs. And he quickly emerges as this character who is incredibly open and amenable to US tech companies.

And he gives this by now famous quote, where he says that government needs to show some humility. To tech companies and he brings along much of the rest of the government who it turned out didn't really have any depth of ideas or thinking around how to address tech policy other than not wanting to look like the past.

So many politicians seem to get caught in this trap. So you have a British government that has this massive growth problem. And then the other thing that big Tech wants in the uk, the treasure that's there, that's poorly understood even, even now in at senior levels in government, is the [00:32:00] NHS data. I think it's pretty well understood that by now AI models have consumed, uh, through one means or another, pretty much all of the data that was easy to access that's out there.

So major training data sets by now are in short supply and maybe the biggest one, uh, the most valuable ones, certainly that's the remains, is NHS data. You've got population level patient records going all the way back to 1948. The experts that have looked about and looked at this are all convinced that there really are some extraordinary discoveries to be made if this data could be used in the right way.

And the question there is, how does the UK benefit from this? Now, the Larry Ellison way to do this, and thanks to the fact that Blair sat on a stage in Dubai and interviewed him, we know that the two guys think in the same way about this, is that you integrate all of that data, preferably on an Oracle.

Platform and then you let the AI model loose. They talk about [00:33:00] it in the most simplistic way that this is suddenly going to lead to cures for cancer and many of the other kind of favorite bold claims that are made about what AI is gonna do next. What's completely absent from that is any idea of what the UK would get in return for that.

There are really sophisticated projects and sophisticated thinking about how to create a more controlled space for research projects to take place that would use this data in a way where it remained in the UK and there would limits placed on how they would access the data and how they would process it.

And conservative estimates are like the value of that for big pharma companies and for big tech companies run into the billions of pounds per year. So this could be one of the ways in which healthcare provision gets paid for in the future. AI models get developed, cutting edge health research takes place.

But what TBI is pushing to a great extent is instead is like a reckless way to think about and look at this [00:34:00] data. And when they talk about health and ai, most often what they're talking about is firing people. Replacing them with Ag agentic, ai, super health centers, and in the words of one guy who spoke to us from inside TBI, their vision for future health systems is basically a vision of preventative healthcare, which it obviously skews massively.

Towards the people with the resources to actually use personalized medicine and pursue very specific kinds of lifestyles. So you have preventative healthcare. On the one hand, you have genetic sequencing and specific therapies based on individual sequencing for the super rich. And then for everybody else, you have an AI agent that replaces your relationship with a doctor.

And this is gonna be the future of the national health system. The NHS for us is like an area for further reporting and it's one of the many places where investigative journalism has a role to play in trying to [00:35:00] elevate quite obscure processes like national data libraries, which like almost no people in the UK have any idea what those are and could mean a whole bunch of different things.

It could we a means for big tech to access and plunder NHS data. It could also be an incredible way to raise revenue for. The National Health Service and protect data and enable research programs. So we've gotta kind of explain the stakes of these and increase scrutiny, like shine a light on those places while there's still time to do so.

Alix: Okay. Let's pause on the UK for a second because TBI has its sticky little fingers in 44 countries around the world. And here's Beatrice to tell us more about what's been happening in Rwanda. And this from A TBI source who was willing to go on the record?

Astha: We had one source who was happy to be named. His name is Marvin, and he basically worked as a data analyst at T B'S Africa advisory team.

And his [00:36:00] focus was this COVID vaccine delivery program. And what he describes kind of echoes what a lot of people were telling us, which is when he tried to raise concerns. Let's say, you know, they were trying to pilot this kind of vaccine, you know, drones carrying vaccine program and he said, you know, when he tried to raise concerns about power supply and cybersecurity issues, you know, he was just dismissed by senior colleagues in his perspective.

And again, that echoes what a lot of people told us. The way that TBI was pushing this technology and AI solutions on countries that had many other issues that were. More fundamentals who contend with, you know, they had real fragilities, let's say unemployment or power supply and all sorts of other things.

It in a way, and now this is what I would say, it's quite absurd. What he told us was, these countries have issues around hunger and poverty and mass unemployment, and what we're trying to commit them towards is fancy projects like drones and, and ai, the purpose. For a lot of people inside TBI, the people who were more [00:37:00] critical and who spoke to us, they felt like none of this was about uplifting African government.

Really, it's about. Tying people into whatever new technology or new toy or new AI solution was coming in and not considering, again, like the context that they were working in. And I think it's also worth mentioning because we're talking about how, you know, GI has a lot of influence in the uk, but also in so many of these African countries.

Like I spoke to a country director who said. TBI staff was the people that ministers were calling on a Sunday evening. Like they become very much trusted advisors. So for them to come in and let's say, give these presentations and say, Hey, we've noticed these gaps. You need this digital infrastructure, and we have Oracle here to offer this solution.

Like it really works because like I said, they become a trusted voice.

Dan: One of the many signs that the UK is in a kind [00:38:00] of profound crisis is that its establishment, its most prestigious institutions. Its former. Its former leaders. Are really quite affordable at the moment in a way that doesn't say something good about future prospects. For the uk $300 million bought Ellison.

Very, very significant influence over the UK's largest think tank and bought him a spokesman who is the most prominent prime minister of the last 30, 40 years in the uk, but he is also shopping at a slightly higher price range for Oxford. In Oxford, he has purchased a giant piece of real estate, or rather his least part of something called the Oxford Science Park.

The Oxford Science Park was a real estate play from Malin College. Some of your listeners will know that Oxford is made up of these different colleges. Lin is one of the more conservative ones. It's the one where. Quite a significant number of the editors of the Economist come from [00:39:00] really good ideas like Brexit, arguably were born in modeling college and they, they bought up a bunch of real estate, which for next to nothing during the nineties, and that real estate now is worth billions of dollars.

Um, originally to the Singapore. So wealth fund, and then the biggest customer since then has been Ellison, who is making something called the Ellison Institute of Technology. Ellison Institute of Technology was sold to the UK as it's gonna be this engine of turning its life sciences research. Into startups and it's gonna put capital next to learning, and then there's gonna be an explosion of life sciences industry in the UK that pulled in some very, very serious people.

And it all looked like it was, it was moving along. Ellison in pr. Stunt bought one of the oldest pubs in Oxford as well to save it from being closed down. Ellison has always had this habit of proclaiming lofty [00:40:00] goals and giving pledges. He's gonna invest 10 billion, 20 billion and then losing interest or deciding he wants to repurpose it.

I think it's difficult to psychoanalyze people who are, are in their eighties, but he's. I mean, this is like classic Silicon Valley behavior, um, mercurial behavior, like you said, a lofty thing. You then lose interest in it. You move on to the next thing, and then everyone else lives left behind, like picking up their pieces.

But Allison can fundamentally like arrive in Oxford by a massive chunk of it. Get endorsement from everybody there. Build a a business relationship with one of the oldest colleges and get the ex Prime Minister of Britain to back this whole scheme. And it's interesting to see the EIT and TBI, even though they're completely separate entities are talked about as though they're the same thing.

The Financial Times writing about this. After Ellison scaled back, his pledges just said, refer to it casually as people would transfer from [00:41:00] EIT to TBI. Though TBI is like you, I don't know the reserve team of EIT, you have some worrying indications there about the power of one guy in comparison with the entire history and tradition, um, of, of, of state.

Alix: Yeah. It's also a country. I think that's particularly. Susceptible to people that can like affiliate with institution like people. It means so much if you're in that club, um, and associated with those people. Like it means more than maybe any other country I've ever understood. Its politics is, it's like that feels like that, that's what matters in the UK is if you have connections and if you have institutional affiliations that have prestige,

Dan: I'm still not a hundred percent sure that EIT isn't.

Actually just the dedication of a gigantic amount of the UK life sciences industry to keeping Ellison himself alive.

Alix: It's like it's always about that. It's basically men's inability to grapple with mortality is [00:42:00] like drives a good half of our problems, I think as a society.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, personalized medicine is like part of the story here and pushing a personalized medicine is, is just such a dramatically wrong route to go down with public health.

That's one of the, the policy problems, um, that come up from this. The idea that a handful of the mapping out stuff which is going to be useful for billionaires in their eighties in the short term, but it has not gonna have any practical population level effects and diverting. All of life science budgets into that is a huge fail.

Alix: Okay. We've left information in the show notes on how you can reach out to Lighthouse if you feel like you have a story which isn't being covered, but maybe needs to be. They're a good place to go if you've got a scoop. Next up is the final part of the Vapor State with ote, Kapor and AmBak. We're gonna kind of look back on this series and then look forward to what's [00:43:00] happening next with digital Public infrastructure.

This next episode will also kick off a collaboration we have going with AI Now and Opti Institute, where we've interviewed 12 experts in the run up to the AI Summit in India. The aim of these interviews is to get clearer on what words actually mean, not generally speaking, but at the summit, a lot of times big important concepts get flattened into these.

Kind of tokenistic terms and they're really important concepts that we wanted to spend time with the experts who best understand them and go deeper into what they mean. Experts include Tim, neat, Gabriel, Meredith Whitaker, and Naomi Klein. Um, but also a ton of other equally amazing people. Um, and we're gonna be dropping these interviews on YouTube in February and then make these into three special episodes for our main podcast feed.

So if you're here and subscribe, you're good. Um, you'll see them as they come through. We also just released an interview with Jeff Stern exclusively on our YouTube channel about his new book, the Warhead, the Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare. [00:44:00] So if you are wondering how a calculator company reshaped modern warfare, that's one to check out.

I didn't know how much this calculator company basically probably led up to what is happening in Venezuela. If you're interested in that, uh, subscribe to our channel and check it out. Thanks to Daniel and Beatrice for joining and producers Georgie Avu and Sarah Miles for putting this all together, and we will see you next [00:45:00] week.