In this episode of Are You Human podcast I hosted the brilliant @Guido Palazzo, Business Ethics Professor at University of Lausanne. We talk about business ethics, corruption, corporate espionage and unethical practices, Italian mafia practices and their use of innovative tools and technology.

We scratch the surface of corporate scandals like, Enron, Theranos or Facebook-Cambridge Analytica ones, digging into what makes human behaviour – well intentioned people turn bad or / and become indifferent. We also touch on longtermism, biohacking and why defeating death may not be a good thing for the sake of humanity’s progress. This episode will definitely be one of your favourites. It certainly is for me.

Please do yourself a favour and follow Guido Palazzo if you aren’t yet. He’s soon launching a book “Dark Patterns” where he covers his fascinating research. – https://www.linkedin.com/in/guidopalazzo-

If you haven’t subscribed yet – do it now. Feedback is more than welcome.

Enjoy!

Transcript

But the mafia today is something else.

The mafia today means that Padrone, from a

family in the south, sends their children to

Bocconi in Milano to study finance.

Because it’s finance where they have to be.

Or you create a company that is recycling waste.

Because they know that this

is a super profitable business.

If you just take the waste and instead

of recycling it, you dump it somewhere.

Companies pay a lot of money for the recycling.

So you turn this into business.

So they are entrepreneurs.

They build these companies.

They manage the flow of the money to

Switzerland through Swiss banks or banks in London.

Hello.

This is your host, Camila Hankiewicz.

And together with my guests, we discuss how tech

is changing the way we live and work. Ready?

Guido, the more I was reading about your research

and the work you are doing around mafia and

other organised crime and the legal organisations, the more

I couldn’t wait to speak with you.

It’s a pleasure.

It’s a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you for having me, Camila.

So let’s start with the most daunting question.

Why did you get involved in crime?

With crime?

Well, I studied management and philosophy.

And then I discovered this interface between

these two, which is business ethics.

And this was in the late ninety S.

And my research that I then developed when

I was a PhD student, was about the

impact of globalization on governance, on democracy.

And one of the things that was clearly visible in

that period, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was

that there was a gap opening of governance.

So companies were going global, but

governments were remaining nationally bound.

So you suddenly had all kinds of human

right violations in the supply chains of american

european companies like Nike and Levi’s, as the

first ones who moved the production elsewhere.

So my first entry point into the

dark side of business, so to speak,

was human rights violations and supply chains.

And from there I moved into

other topics that are connected.

And you just wanted to discover

part of your italian roots.

You are not connected, I hope.

But yes, it’s a very interesting behavioral phenomenon.

How those organizations.

Why do some organizations choose to commit not maybe

ethically, ethically and legally okay activities, and some others

are trying to fight those or are trying to

stand for something which is positive.

At that time, I don’t think that

this was all done by intention.

I guess the companies of themselves were surprised

by having those problems because we had this

mindset of a company being responsible for what

it does itself within its legal limits.

And that was before outsourcing was invented.

And outsourcing is a result of globalization.

So when globalization made it possible.

So the fall of the Berlin wall

made it possible to outsource activities into

places where labor costs were lower.

I guess no one thought about the side effect, which

was that there were also compromises to be made on

the rights of workers, on the conditions in factories.

And even if they knew about this, they

probably didn’t think that they were responsible.

The first reaction of Nike when they were attacked in

the early 90s was to say, well, yeah, we are

sorry about these working conditions, but this is not Nike.

We are just outsourcing something to someone else.

So please contact that company and not us.

They didn’t want to take responsibility.

Yes, they didn’t want to take responsibility.

And we have come a long way since then.

So today it is taken for granted, at least,

that we can hold the big brands responsible for

whatever happens up and down their supply chains.

So this has become a normal moral discourse? It did.

But I’ve watched your TED talks.

I think it was like ten

years ago from Essec business school.

It was amazing lecture.

But like you say, it depends on if the party

has interest in revealing it or hiding it, right?

So for example, it’s still happening

in companies which are utilized.

I’m in an AI field, and the big

guys, I don’t want to name them, but

they are creating new type of sweatshops, right?

Like they are finding those poorly paid workers.

To moderate responses. Yes.

I mean, sometimes I show my students the very

first slides that I constructed when I was starting

to be a professor in Lozan in 2003.

And I showed them these slides and the

content of these first sessions I was teaching.

And it’s the same stuff I could teach today.

And that’s sometimes a bit frustrating.

The same problems, partly in the same

industries, but as you mentioned, also in

new industries come up again and again.

And when the companies are caught, they’re

often surprised because again, they didn’t think

about this, they just outsourced.

They saw the cost advantage and they

didn’t think about the side effects.

And there’s an amazingly flat learning curve among

companies when it comes to human rights.

It’s also about distributed responsibility. Right?

Like, it’s not me, it’s them.

Or my boss may know about that,

but it’s not within my remedy.

Yes, it’s collective irresponsibility, because you can

always shift the blame to someone else.

You can say, well, it’s the consumers or

it’s the supplier who is cheating on me.

I gave them my code of conduct.

Yeah, maybe you gave them the code of conduct.

But you at the same time pressured them for the

cheapest price, so that they have to make a choice

either to follow, to comply with the code of conduct,

or to comply with a procurement expectation.

But the more actors are involved in such

networks of decision making, the more difficult is

to pinpoint the ones who are responsible.

Because everyone is a bit responsible.

And if everyone is a bit responsible,

in the end, no one is responsible.

Yeah, completely agree.

And we’ve seen this across different

areas, like politics as well. Yes.

So, as you know, I’m proud of

my past, that I lived in Italy.

I’ve visited.

I lived in Napoli, actually, Benevento

and Napoli for some bit.

So I’ve seen almost all Italy.

I’ve seen Sicilia, I’ve seen Calabria, Messina, all

those kind of areas which are known for

other things than food as well, and Hospitality.

It was a coincidence.

It was before I started reading about your research.

But only yesterday morning I seen

the information about Adio Pizza.

I’ve never heard of this organization before.

And it was like, shocking.

Then I saw your lecture and

you were talking about Adio Pizza.

And it was shocking to me that

90% of Sicilians, sicilian entrepreneurs were like,

they had to pay protection money.

And it was just ingrained in the culture, right?

It was like for 150 years, from what you were saying.

And those seven students decided to challenge that.

And it was just so incredible how this small group

of people, like you said, they didn’t have anything to

lose, so they decided to play by the same rules.

But the opposite.

Yes, change it.

Next to crimes done by organizations, there is

criminal organizations, and Tilly is hit by this.

Since, as you said, more than

150 years by the mafia organizations.

And for many Italians, this has become

a kind of objective, natural law.

So you cannot get rid of this. It’s like this.

We have to live with it.

And the story that you referred to, the story of

Adio Pitsa, is a story of seven young people who

refused to accept this, who refused to assume that paying

protection money to the mafia, as shop owners or companies

in Sicily, and not only in Sicily, are doing that.

This is a natural law, and you cannot escape this.

So they created an initiative against it, Adio Pizzo.

So, farewell, protection money.

Pizzo is the protection money.

And they took a big risk, because until then,

whoever had resisted the protection money would see his

or her shop burned down or killed.

So there have been entrepreneurs who have

been killed, who refused to pay.

And these seven young students

then knew about these risks.

So they developed a clever strategy.

They convinced I guess, more than a hundred shops downtown

Palermo to commit to not paying the pizza anymore.

And then they convinced a few thousand customers to

go and shop, especially in those shops, because the

first thing the mafia does is it isolates you.

This is also happening with all

these judges who have been killed.

You’re isolated, and when you’re isolated,

it’s easier to kill you.

So these shops that did not pay the

pits in the past, they were often isolated,

so no customers were going there anymore.

Police were not protecting them, so

why would they do this?

But this move of these seven young people was very

clever, because the mafia cannot at the same time threaten

100 or more shop owners in the same area.

So it overwhelmed the protection

possibilities of the mafia.

And that’s how they made it work.

And they created a community of people who

could reinforce each other’s motivation and conviction that

they were doing the right thing.

And that’s why it worked.

So it’s an amazing success story and it

shows something that the mafia judge Falcone once

said, that the mafia is a social phenomenon.

It has been created by humans

and it will disappear one day.

So it’s not natural.

And this story also shows one element that

is fascinating for me in my research.

It’s this link between the

normal business and the mafia.

Because we always naively believe

mafia is something else.

It’s not connected to my world.

But you find mafia in any kind of supply chain?

Yes, like you said, they have

infiltrated lots of different industries, right?

Like you don’t realize that in Napoli, for example, where

I was there, I saw what you were saying.

I saw burned kiosks or gelaterias in

the middle of the touristy areas.

Because it’s not for the loss, financial

loss, more than show the others.

Do not try to do anything,

because you will be punished.

They infiltrated different industries, from food, from

more like scalable business of finance.

Of course, you mentioned as well, renewable energies.

That’s just crazy.

Like we said, people will not care.

Like normal consumers will still

buy the mozzarella, right?

If it tastes good, you may not know what’s in

there, but they will keep doing it until someone decides

to change their narrative and speaks to their values, right?

Yes.

And that’s the point of how these

seven young people made the change happen.

They peeled to deep values of Sicily

and they reinterpreted these values for these

shop owners, such as the value dignity.

Dignity certainly meant that you do not engage

in these interactions, as you would never do

this in another country, like Germany or Switzerland.

You would just not do.

And dignity is a key value of Sicily.

You don’t want to lose your dignity.

And to use the dignity value as a leverage

to reinforce this engagement against the mafia was one

of the key success elements of these young people.

And this goes beyond the security and dignity and

helping newcomers to feel more free to do something,

to do business, to provide for their families.

But it’s also about the social

change and hope for new generations.

So I know that Adio pizza were also.

I don’t know if they are still doing it,

but they were educating from the very beginning, right?

They were going to schools, they were trying to change.

Show the kids that there is another way.

Like, you don’t need to agree to this.

And I know, like when I was in Salvador, in know,

they have a big problem with crime, and there are lots

of kids living in favela, so they don’t know any better.

But luckily there is this movement,

Olodum, which started as a musical.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. No.

Okay, so it started as a

musical drumming band or organization.

And even Michael Jackson portrayed them

in one of his clips.

They don’t care about us.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of if you

know it, it’s a long, long time ago.

But the great thing was that it

was through very simple social gathering and

doing music and doing something creative together.

It spread to more than just music.

It was also about the social movements,

showing kids that you can do better.

There are different opportunities.

So lots of those kids could actually, if not fight

against the crime, then at least do something else.

Because there are two elements and

what you explained that are important.

It’s this combination of community creation

and storytelling that makes change happen.

The same for your pizza.

It’s also the same for any

kind of big change, climate change.

Or think about the slow food movement in Italy, which

brings back these connections to the roots of your local

food, your local memory, your local artisan craft.

So it’s always bringing people together who believe

in a new vision of something so that

they are not alone in doing something differently

than the others and walking together.

That’s super important.

Then it can grow. Yeah.

And you mentioned that crime organizations, mafias, in

many aspects, running their business same or very

similarly to the legally created organizations.

And we all have those almost like romantized

visions, versions of what mafia is like.

Padron, the Godfather, breaking Bad, Ozark. What else?

There was some.

Yeah, narcos, of course.

And you see the coolness in a way, watching it.

It’s very entertaining.

And they show you some aspects of making

business, but I’m sure, like, you know, since

you’ve studied so much of it, what are

the main differences and what are the main

similarities between those two types of organizations?

Well, partly, almost say it’s

funny, but it’s not funny.

But the mafia also watched these movies and

tried to copy, and they call Netflix.

No, you have to change it. It’s not correct.

Entirely correct.

So the mafia’s own symbolic world, partly, then,

has been innovated by just watching these movies.

But the mafia today is something else.

The mafia today means that Padrone, from a

family in the south, sends their children to

bocconi in Milano to study finance, because it’s

finance where they have to be.

Or you create a company that is recycling waste, because

they know that this is a super profitable business.

If you just take the waste and instead

of recycling it, you dump it somewhere.

And companies pay a lot of money for the

recycling, so you turn this into a business.

So they are entrepreneurs.

They build these companies, they manage the

flow of the money to Switzerland, to

swiss banks or banks in London.

So it’s a very different world of the mafia today.

It’s no longer this business of drugs and protection money

that it was at the time of the godfather.

It still is also that business,

but especially the protection money.

It’s more symbolic.

It’s not how they make money, it’s how they get rooted

in their context, to be protected and to get obedience.

But it’s not about the money.

The money they make with toxic waste and

they make it on the financial markets.

Yeah.

And I know that you travel across and you

advise lots of different organizations across the world.

Do you see any differences between how those organizations are

formed and how do they are run across different, let’s

say, maybe cultures, well organized crime are only investigated in

Italy because you have to know that culture well before

you enter into dealing with it.

I would never dare to work on russian

mafia because I know nothing about Russia.

So it’s too dangerous.

But a lot of aspects are very similar.

They all are very well

connected to the financial markets.

They all buy real estate in the

same countries, they all invest in art.

So all these money laundering mechanisms, it’s always

the same, whether you are a mexican drug

cartel or an italian mafia organization.

Yeah, and I remember you gave this

example of the chinese mafia operating on

italian grounds, faking italian luxury products.

And even the fact that they are building

those factories next to the original factories is,

like, mind blowing how those mechanisms work.

Well, it’s a gray zone.

It’s not that we cannot imagine this

as a big factory somewhere near Florence.

So this is a little place called Prato

next to Florence, where you have about 5000

factories, chinese factories with about 50,000 workers.

And most of these factories, to

a certain degree are not legal.

But a factory can just be

one room with five sewing machines.

You don’t have to have a lot

of equipment and you can hide this.

So when you walk through Prato, you don’t see factories, you

see houses, you see a lot of chinese signs in one

quarter, but you don’t see a lot of factory buildings.

And the ones that you see are probably the

ones that are, by and large, legally embedded already.

So it’s a system where it’s the

biggest fast fashion hub in Europe.

But they also, as you mentioned, start to work for

the important luxury brands, to sue bags for them or

other stuff because they are good in what they do.

Partly they’re good artisans and it’s all in

this gray zone between legal and illegal.

But is it?

I guess it is, since they are doing it.

But it’s not very scalable. Right?

Like you have to create the same

mechanism, the same practices and distribute them.

So in a way you distribute the

risk, but it’s maybe harder to manage.

But still they do it.

So it means it brings profit.

Well, it is easy to manage because if you

are in fast fashion, for instance, you want to

have your orders delivered as fast as possible.

And now imagine you can, instead of shipping that from

China or Vietnam to Europe, you can have that done

for a similar price in the middle of Europe, where

you just give the order and a few days later

it’s on a truck and it’s there.

So they are super flexible, they are cheap

and they can deliver whatever you want and

they can, if necessary, work day and night.

So it’s a huge advantage to

be in Europe for fast fashion.

And that’s why they’re successful. I guess. It’s crazy.

It’s like they’re just in time taken to another level.

In a way.

It is, yes, it’s just in time.

But I want to highlight one thing.

First of all, it’s not sweatshops.

So it’s not that we can see there being

people abused and exploited because it’s Chinese who are

there because they want one day to open their

own little factory with five sewing machines.

So they go through a phase

where they work for someone else.

Of course, they’re not insured most of

the time they work day and night.

So they don’t make that much money.

They have party to pay back for the

traveling and the illegal entrance into the country.

So it’s a burdensome way.

But it’s not that they’re chained to a machine.

And slaves, they want to do the same later

on on their own, and then again, hire five

Chinese who come in and do the same.

So it’s not a sweat job.

And it’s also not a kind of chinese illegal

system in an otherwise well functioning italian context.

I mean, they depend on lawyers, fiduciaries, owners of

buildings who abuse them, who make them pay too

much, or who help them to evade tax.

So it’s an entire system in which many people

are involved and where it’s not so clear who

is the bad guy, who is the good guy.

Maybe that’s why it is so stable.

Yes.

Actually, talking about this, we all know

that bad guys do bad things.

But you said, it’s more interesting to understand why

good guys decide to do the bad things.

And I seen this movie, it

was in German, das experiment.

There was an english version as well.

It was about the Stanford experiment in prison. Right.

In 71.

I think lots of things which initially were

supposed to be good turned into something toxic.

Can you talk about that?

Well, it seems to be my destiny to move

into all these dark sides of business after the

human rights violations and the organized crime.

The third pillar of my research is on,

as you said, good people doing bad things.

So people who are just leaders in organizations and suddenly

get caught in a big scandal, and then we have

this tendency to argue, well, they are bad people.

That’s why they do these bad things.

But it’s not so easy, because in a lot of

situations, it’s people like you and me doing it.

And then the question is, why?

Why are you and I potentially willing and

able to do criminal things in organizations?

And the answer is not because you are a bad person

or I am a bad person, but because there might be

psychological factors that push you and me to the dark side.

And the experiment that you mentioned, this Hollywood movie

based on, the real experiment of Philip Zimbardowe, took

young students and he put them in randomly assigned

roles of prisoners and prison guards and wanted to

observe them for two weeks of what would they

do if they are getting a uniform, others are

sitting in a prison cell, and what would happen?

And they had to stop.

After seven days, because it was out

of control, the prisoners mentally collapsed, and

the prison guards became ever more sadistical.

And this Hollywood movie is a Hollywood version

of this, I guess even someone dies in

the movie, but in the reality, no.

Yeah, I watched the German, the

DAs experiment with Moritz Bliptoy.

So what you see is a very simple

thing that Zimbardo derives from his experiment.

It’s that context can be stronger

than your morality, your reason.

So it’s the pressure of context that might transform people’s

behavior in a way that they do bad things and

might not even understand that what they do is wrong.

And this is what I investigate

when I look into corporate scandals.

So what are these forces that distort the perception of people

in a way that they engage in horrible things and might

not even think that what they do is wrong?

And I cannot understand that being in technology.

And I understand how much you can if

you use technology, right, you can see lots

of things, you can predict lots of things.

And we still keep seeing those examples

like Theranos, or even Facebook with Cambridge

Analytica, and they are still fine, right?

Like they just did their senate hearing, they

did perfect pr and they are still fine.

People are still giving money. No.

Advertisers have maybe little

stopped engagements with Facebook.

And it’s crazy.

I know the founder of Theranos, she’s starting something

new, and there are vcs giving money to her.

I know that, like you said, it’s difficult to when

you are inside the organization and there are lots of

factors playing on, keeping you silent with also NDAs and

some potentially high and hard legal repercussions.

But aren’t there any ways or something which you’ve

seen which worked or works which you can use

from the outside, maybe technology just to see and

spot early any anomalies, any dark, let’s say, patterns.

First of all, I guess Elizabeth Holmes, the

therana’s founder, I will have to wait a

little bit before she can found something, because

she’s in prison for eleven years now.

At least one of the cases where someone was

punished, there are not so many, because in most

organizations, the managers who design these systems, in which

then their followers, their employees do the wrong things,

they get away with it.

They’re not putting into prison.

And it’s a company that’s paying the fine.

So it’s very easy to just continue

because you have no risk yourself and

you underestimate these dark sides in yourself.

So you will always look at these candles from outside.

If you are managing another company and think, well,

it’s bad what happens there, but I am not

like this, so I will not do these things.

Whether you can measure this from outside, I guess

we will see some exciting developments in the next

years about early warning signals for these things.

It has, for instance, been shown in a recent scientific

research project that if you go to Glassdoor to this

website where employees can leave comments anonymously about their companies,

and if you go back in the comments left there

on companies that later on had a scandal, you see

in the use of words a change over time that

signaled that something is going in the wrong direction.

So there’s more frustration voice, there is

more talk about aggressive toxic culture incentives.

So you see things in the words and the

words make it predictable of what’s going on there.

Someone else has published a paper in which

they analyzed the language in the research of

dieteric staple, which is a dutch psychologist who

falsified data in 50 of his papers.

He was a famous psychologist and all his data

was crap and he destroyed his career with that.

And what this paper that analyzes his papers shows

is that the language he uses changes as well.

So you can see from the wording in his articles

that he moves into illegal practices slowly over time.

So this is just one example language where you can

figure out that something is going the wrong direction.

There are other signals that we might observe

if people think they are above the rules.

When the lawyer of Elon Musk says, elon

Musk sends rockets into space, he is not

afraid of the regulator that says something about

his behavior towards the rule of law.

Similar phrases can be found about the Uber founder Kalanik,

or further back in time, the Enron top manager.

So you can see from the wording of top managers

that they believe that rules are not for them.

Their fathers, they can bend them.

They wouldn’t see it as bending.

They would say they create a new world.

Enron would say we are a new economy

and the rules are for the old economy.

Trevor Kalanik would say the rules are for this

old taxi business, but we are disrupting it.

So we come with an entirely new game.

And in this new game there are different rules.

So we are not breaking rules.

We are recreating the system in

which then other rules will count.

So this is the hubris of leaders.

And if you have this kind of discourse, it makes

it very easy to people inside of the organization to

believe that they have the right to break rules.

Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that

you can detect, you can spot those

shady movements or shady behavior through language.

And I’m wondering how technology, because it’s difficult

for a person to go through those comments,

feedback books and do it manually.

But how technology can do it at scale.

And right now, with the whole development of algorithms

and models around human language, I guess it opens

a new opportunity to detect those, to maybe find

the patterns and do something about it in time. Yes.

Scholars who analyzed these changes of wordings that

made scandals predictable on glastor, they used AI.

They didn’t do this manually.

So this is from technology side. It’s very easy.

The question is data privacy.

So I’m sure that if you would follow the

emails of employees in a company, you could also

use that to see red flags appearing.

But then you have to interfere with people’s privacy, and

that’s probably a trade off we don’t want to make. Yes.

So what do you think about the regulations

and the aspect of ethical technology like AI?

Have you read any research?

Have you read any interesting materials?

When you look into the big scandals of the

last 20 years, what you always find is one

key element is a failure of regulation.

So failure of regulation in the sense that we

live in a world in which the dominating narrative

is neoliberalism, which basically assumes that regulation is bad

because it destroys the efficiency of markets.

So since the Reagan government in the

USA, they have systematically dismantled regulation.

Just think about their Boeing story, where up

to 97% the Boeing crashes, the seven three

seven max that was badly designed and crashed.

Up to 97% of the new airplane was certified by

Boeing engineers who were working dispatched to the FAA.

The regulator and the regulator didn’t have the

money to hire their own people, so it

was outsourced to Boeing people to regulate themselves.

Volkswagen, the same.

They did their own diesel emission tests and

just delivered the data to the authorities.

This is what we see.

And then you can add the revolving doors so

that the person who does the regulation then moves

into the company in a highly paid job and

knows exactly how to go around these regulations.

So it’s not working.

And if you take this now into the context

of new technologies, you will see the same happening

and even worse, because there we are, moving into

a space where probably most of us do not

even know what we need to regulate.

We don’t have the experience.

We do not know what is possible.

We are running behind what’s happening.

So while in old industries, you know exactly what you

have to regulate so that the car has low emissions

or the airplane doesn’t crash, we don’t know what and

how to regulate AI, it’s just emerging as a discussion.

And then the same thing happens.

The ones who have no interest in regulation.

So the owners of these AI technologies they divert attention

and talk about nonsense like we have to pay attention

that AI doesn’t rule the world one day.

That’s not the problem.

That’s science fiction.

The problem is them abusing technology

that has to be regulated.

If you try to regulate this in a context

where deregulation is the ideology and regulation is perceived

as bad, and all these regulators have no clue

of what this industry is about, that’s a challenge.

Yes, it’s terrifying.

And I guess one of the biggest challenges is

that, like you said, it’s a new field.

But also there is so much of data and

people who are trying to regulate it, they don’t

even understand where to start, how to handle it.

And I guess crime organizations who produce goods which

are illegal, I guess one of the steps to

at least hope to regulate them and spot them

would be to track the whole supply chain, right?

So again, with the new technologies such as blockchain,

maybe there is some hope for doing that.

The goods and the compartments are

not coming from thin air, right?

They have to be bought somehow.

So if we can spot the movement of those

goods, maybe there is some positive outcome of it.

I think it will be very helpful

to track the entire paths of products

across the supply chains with blockchain.

Whether it helps you to understand the

production conditions behind that, I’m not so

sure, because that’s an entire different discussion.

So I might then understand.

This comes from factory XYZ.

But what’s going on in that factory still remains something

that has to be either audited or the factory has

to be incentivized to treat people with dignity.

And that is not visible in the blockchain.

It’s just visible how things move, which is maybe better

for other kind of problems, like the waste problem.

So as soon as you can trace the toxic

waste, the mafia can no longer just dump it

somewhere, because you can trace where it comes from.

That is possible from a technological perspective.

Today, there’s just no intention to do so, because

no one wants to know where it ends.

And are you familiar of any

technology that mafia is using? I don’t know.

To track competition, to understand.

Maybe some kind of get some insights from what kind

of types of business is performing best for them.

Because if they run as a normal organization.

Normal.

And they have educated children who go back

to family run business, then definitely they should

look into utilizing those tools which can help

them get the overall picture.

Well, mafia organizations, they are always ahead when

it comes to innovation, because they know much

better to move quickly than others can do.

Bound by regulation and whatever.

So they’re very strong in crypto currency because crypto is

a beautiful tool that you can use to shift money

between people in a way that it becomes untraceable.

If you then succeed in hiding the entry spot of

that money, then you can wash money with crypto in

a very easy way and no one can find you.

So that is just one example.

The entire toxic waste business came up when there

was an earthquake in south Italy and suddenly there

was a construction business that would bring them money.

So they went into construction, and once they

had construction, they had holes in the ground

and trucks they could move into waste recycling.

So you see, whenever they have an opportunity, they’re

very quickly understanding what they can do with it.

And so I would expect the same for

new technologies as we see in crypto already.

Like you said, like the crypto and the black market

and the dark web, they are all infiltrated by mafia.

So how can the good guys fight Mafia with technology?

Well, what you have seen recently is that police forces

across Europe have arrested a lot of people who were

in networks that were organized on the dark net.

So once you have an access to these networks, then

you have all the data suddenly, and you see the

communication of people and you can trace it easily.

You just need this one access point to enter

into the communication that is done on the darknet.

So there’s a risk for the mafia that

whatever they try to hide might be exposed.

And when it is exposed, there’s a lot that is exposed.

So a lot of people get arrested, a

lot of businesses are dismantled, and that’s what

they have to live with, with this risk.

But it’s a race between the police forces that

are limited in what they can do and a

mafia that is unlimited in what they can do.

So it’s a bit more difficult for

the good guys to fight this fight.

Yeah, but I guess if they unite with

other forces, maybe that’s an important point.

It has to be internationally connected.

As long as the Swiss or the Germans or the

French think mafia is the problem of the Italians, they

will not succeed in Europe to fight the mafia, because

it’s not the problem of the Italians.

The money might be in Switzerland.

The killer moves to a pizzeria in Germany.

We have seen these cases and hide there.

So if police forces are not equipped with technology and

with expertise to fight the mafia, he can be free.

You can hide some mafias outside the

country so you can organize transnationally.

But the italian police cannot act transnationally.

They have to weave these

networks with other police forces.

So that’s a big challenge.

Well, yes.

So there is a good side of seeing the movement, right.

And understanding what each person and where

are they and what they are doing.

But also it brings us to the other side again.

For example, China and the surveillance

and the social score system.

Why do you think citizens,

like normal people, allow it?

Why don’t they unite and try to overrule it?

We don’t have to go to China to discuss this question.

We can ask ourselves, why do I allow Uber to store

data about me as a customer so that the next Uber

driver knows exactly what kind of person I am?

If you are someone who is drunken and

vomits into the Uber car, you don’t get

an Uber driver anymore because they know it.

Or we can ask, why do we accept that Amazon tracks

its workers with wrist bands so that they know exactly how

fast they move, whether they move the right way, whether they

stand somewhere for 5 seconds to make a break.

So it’s total surveillance in our companies already.

In some companies it’s emerging the same for managers.

At Amazon, you are tracked in real time, how you

perform, and if you don’t perform, you get fired.

So every week there is

these discussions about in teams.

So why didn’t you perform better last week?

So we don’t have to go to China.

We don’t have the integrated system where someone from

above looks at all the data, but we have

it fragmented about our social media, about working in

such companies, using uber or whatever it is.

It’s a fragmented world of control.

But it’s just a question of time

until these sources might get connected.

And then you have the same that you have in China.

So the question is, why do we accept that?

And I guess maybe, like what you said, someone, some

organizations, some people are trying to put the light on

the big picture of China and how bad they are.

So the things they are doing in their organizations,

like with surveillance of employees, don’t seem so bad.

And it’s easier for people to

accept it, although they should not.

These are small things, so that’s

what makes it so dangerous.

I don’t use Amazon, but if I would use Amazon, Amazon

knows from what I buy exactly what I should buy next.

That’s a big advantage.

So there’s surveillance from Amazon, but it’s,

I would say in a benign way.

So I like the fact that they propose a book

to me or a music or whatever it is, because

I know I will like it when I read it.

I never heard about this book. I buy it.

It’s great because they know me.

So maybe one of the reasons why we accept

this is that it seems so good to us.

It helps us in so many ways. Convenient.

And then it’s convenient, and then

step by step we accept it.

We might have stumbled over the first cameras on

a public space, but now we have them everywhere.

So we get used to it.

We don’t ask questions anymore because what we perceive as

normal has shifted to something else in slow steps.

And that’s again the same that happens in big scandals.

People making slow compromises on the rules.

And then in these small steps, they move

towards the dark side of the force.

Surveillance does the same for us.

So it’s not never full blown in your face.

We would probably then refuse it.

But if it comes in small steps, in small

doses with a lot of advantages, we accept it.

Okay, the happier story I just saw on your LinkedIn when

I was surveilling you, I was spying on your work.

You posted and commented on this article where

the scientists are trying to understand the language

of whales through use of AI.

I guess in a way it’s amazing

that technology can give us option to

give voice to those who previously couldn’t.

And it may not be only the animals,

but also people who lost their senses. Right?

Like there are many cases where there is a big success

towards regaining some of the ability to speak or see.

What do you think about this?

Maybe let’s talk about the whale example.

But what do you think about the whole idea

of AI or new technology bringing voice of people?

Things which are maybe different, but they

can still bring to the table.

I think what we need to keep in mind

is that whenever information technology changes, the entire societies

change in all their dimensions, be it their values,

how they’re organized, what people think as normal.

Everything changes.

Everything changed when the Greek invented the Alphabet

and suddenly could write as they spoke.

Then the book print gave voice to people

like you and me, normal people and AI.

And the Internet is the

third information technology revolution.

And again, it will change everything for us.

And change always means we lose something.

We win something.

So we are no longer able, as the

Greek or the ancient Romans were able to

memorize tons of information by heart.

Their brain was trained to do so.

We don’t need this anymore. Why would we?

So our brain is liberated to do something else.

So we could start to think abstractly.

Now with this new information technology, new

opportunities come and we will lose again

something what that will be.

I mean, we are at the beginning of this

so it’s very difficult to say, but we can

dream a bit about what we can win.

What we win, for instance, is what you

just mentioned, maybe the ability, among others, to

bring new voices into the discussion.

If we just imagine we could use AI to

give voices to animals or to understand their needs,

to hear their concerns, to translate what they think

into our language and our language into theirs, that

would change our entire perspective of the world.

It would be a revolution of agency.

So we would suddenly no longer consider nature as

a kind of commodity, a resource we use, but

as full with agents, with their own needs and

interests, and maybe their own symbolic world.

So this is one of the things that

I find exciting about these new technologies.

Apart from the surveillance stuff we just discussed.

They are dark sides.

They are bright sides.

In any case, it’s a disruptive

moment, and that’s very exciting.

Maybe not so much for elderly people like me,

but for the young generations, it’s super exciting.

No, of course.

Or maybe, and I really feel

there’s a big movement of biohacking.

And I don’t know if you’ve been

following any of those crazy people.

Consider it crazy until it’s done.

Brian Johnson from the blueprint protocol,

have you heard of him? No.

Yeah, so he was one of the also entrepreneurs.

He created, I think, Braintree, which was

sold to PayPal, 800 million valuation. Sold it.

And now he’s 47 or something like that.

And he put all his money into regaining youth.

So he has like, team of researchers and

doctors, lots of different machines at his home.

This guy.

This guy, yes, exactly.

And I always thought that it’s a horrible life.

It is a horrible life, but in a

way, like, you need those kind of.

You don’t want to be them, but you don’t want

to be him, but you want him to come up

with something which you can maybe instill in your lifetime,

get inject, I don’t know, and regain the youth.

People will pay for that.

There’s certainly a market.

What concerns me about all these new thoughts is that

it all fits into this new ideology called long terminism,

which means that entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk

and others, they believe that we have to design the

world in a way that one day the human brain

and the machine will fuse into something new.

So we will change into what Harare called homo deos.

We will be a God, eternal life.

And to do this, we need to invest in two technologies.

One is the brain machine interface.

That’s what they do.

And the other thing is rockets to leave this planet.

Because if you think with this far vision, in

a few hundred million years, this planet will be

gone, the sun will no longer warmer. So we have to move.

So we have to invest in these

two technologies, which sounds so fascinating.

But the dark side of this is that the conclusion

they draw is, let us not invest our efforts and

energy into solving the problems of today’s urgent.

These few million that live today, screw them.

We will be trillions in the future.

And that is what we have to focus on.

And this is what makes this theory so frightening.

And it’s the new kid in town,

in the camp of ideologies, and it

dominates the thinking in Silicon Valley today.

And the entrepreneur that you just mentioned who

tries to live forever, that’s part of this.

True.

But wouldn’t you want to live forever? No.

There’s this story of swift, the inventor of Gulliver.

He has also a story about people living forever.

And it’s a nightmare.

Sad story.

I saw this.

I guess it’s based on some book.

Forgive me my ignorance, but Sandman, there is a Netflix

series and there is his friend, he’s an Englishman.

So Sandman basically is a death.

And he grants the wish to

this Englishman of living forever.

And they meet every century.

So you see this person, this Englishman, every

few episodes, how population, how their life changes.

And the death is asking him, are you still enjoying it?

Aren’t you bored?

And the Englishman is always saying,

no, look how much new things.

It’s so much exciting.

So I don’t know.

Right now, let’s focus on living

our life happily and healthy.

Because when you don’t have health,

it’s like nothing else matters, right?

And there’s this important argument in philosophy that says

that a lot of, maybe everything we do, all

our innovative power comes from the fear of death.

True.

Memento mori.

What if we don’t have that anymore?

So will our innovation stop?

Swift comes to such a conclusion in his novel.

So people just are bored to death.

One could almost say they’re just bored.

There’s nothing happening anymore, no progress.

It’s just life is like a slow river.

It’s nothing special.

So that’s why I think it’s maybe

not so desirable to live forever. Yeah.

I’m wondering, will it be this way?

Will it be like people will procrastinate forever

because they will have the manana domani, like

Italians will take it to extreme?

No, of course not.

Not the love.

I love the whole Italy.

Or will it be the other way that

people will feel okay, now we are dreaming.

But will it be?

Maybe people will try to feel like they know they

have much more time so they can try something new.

If they fail, they will still do it again. I guess.

Maybe part of this population will be the

money lifestyle, and the part of population will

be the other way, like it’s now.

I guess it’s ingrained in our human nature. Maybe.

I don’t know, maybe that, but maybe not.

Because all these monuments that have been built

by emperors and popes and whoever built big

memorials and cathedrals, they built this to be

here forever, to leave something behind.

But if I’m not going anywhere because I’m staying

myself, I don’t need to leave anything behind.

So people will see me.

They don’t need a substitute of me.

So maybe that’s the point that they made.

Maybe if the fear of death is gone,

innovation is gone as well, because we just

procrastinate as long as we can.

There’s always time.

Yeah, okay, but we are talking about not dying biologically,

but still, if a bus hits you, you still die. Maybe not.

Because if I can upload my

brain into a machine, that’s something.

Yeah, that’s this dream of long terminism, of

musk and Zuckerberg and all the others.

It’s to disconnect the body from the brain,

which, of course, is nonsense because the whole

body is part of the brain.

But that’s the dream.

If my brain gets uploaded in the

machine, I don’t need that body anymore.

So in this sense, it’s a continuation of

this hostility of the enlightenment of Decatur and

others against the body, the flesh.

Just have to focus on the spirit.

Everything else is bad.

Get rid of this complex body

and load it into the machine.

And your thinking continues.

So you are living forever.

I don’t think I want that.

But that’s the idea of Homo Deos.

No, I don’t like this vision.

No, I like to experience life with my body.

Okay, you said once that fear only

drives behavior when the threat is immediate.

So lots of people also mentioned, or they

advocate for creating crisis, a sense of crisis.

Otherwise, people don’t do anything about that.

But do we always have to put cris, or

is there a way for the storytelling to play

part, but to frame it nicely and maybe more

positively than we are all going to die tomorrow?

Well, a few decades ago, a few sociologists, Anthony Giddens

and Urish Beck, they coined a term for our time,

and they called our time the reflexive modernity.

Reflexive modernity means we are the first time in human

history where people can think about how they think.

We couldn’t do this before.

So when there was a crisis, I don’t

know, in the roman empire or on the

eastern island, people didn’t understand what was going

wrong, so they couldn’t figure it out.

They couldn’t find solutions because they couldn’t

think about the system as such.

They couldn’t go into a kind of

helicopter view on their own society.

They didn’t have the ability. We do have that.

So we know exactly what’s going wrong, right?

We have climate change, we have the biocide, we

have everything analyzed, so we know what we are

supposed to do, we know the solutions.

That’s the first time in history.

So I don’t think that we have to wait

for the catastrophe as others had to, because they

just didn’t know what else to do.

We can be more optimistic.

And as you mentioned, one way out of this is to craft

a story of the future where we want to go together.

And that’s what I meant with my statement about fear.

If you tell people we are

doomed, you might create fear.

But that fear doesn’t trigger behavior.

And if that fear is even

abstract, faraway fear, future generations.

So why would I care?

Because there’s still time, never still have time.

I can do something tomorrow, not today.

So let me live my life today, and maybe tomorrow

I change, or the day after tomorrow, but not now.

So fear is not a good motivator, neither in

the long run nor in the short run.

In the short run, it blocks me.

In the long run, it makes me postpone stuff.

So what we need is a positive story of

where we want to go, a new narrative, and

that is, I hope, something we can do consciously.

As societies, we had to wait for that to randomly happen

in the past, and now we can do it consciously.

And that’s something that gives me hope.

On that positive note, what would you

advise to people, young professionals, entrepreneurs, who

try to change the status quo?

Maybe build a company utilizing technology to change the

status quo, and challenge maybe unethical practices do better,

make the world a better place, as they say?

Well, climate scientists have, like my colleague Julius

Steinberger and Lousan, they have analyzed exactly what

we need to change in the developed world

to stop the co2 emissions.

And there are two major drivers

there, leverage that we can use.

One is mobility and one is food.

So eating less meat and not flying anymore, if we

achieve that as individuals, we do already a lot to

make the change happen on the other side I would

warn against loading everything on the individual because that’s what

the big fossil companies want us to do.

They want you and me to feel guilty and then

shrug our shoulders and say, well, what can I do?

Not much.

So no one is doing anything.

The real change must happen because we force the

dirty businesses to be less dirty or to disappear.

So that is the real change.

We need to organize, not you and me.

Calculating our co2 footprint, that’s also important.

But that’s not what saves the planet.

The planet will be saved if these

industries get under control, and they’re not.

Right now.

Yes, there is a lot to think about and lots to do.

Widow estato grande Piacher.

Thank you so much.

And yes, I’m a big fan of your work.

And thank you.

I will keep spying on you.

Thank you.

That’s why I’m on LinkedIn, so that you can.

Yes, I know.

And you’re doing amazing, like the things you publish.

I will do the link for others to follow you.

But yeah, thank you. Amazing.

Oh, and I forgot to ask.

How is Inferno doing?

How is your book?

Well, the big mountain I had to cross was

that I needed an agent because I want to

publish this in one of the big publishing houses

in New York, like Penguin or Simon Schuster.

And they don’t speak with authors.

So you need an agent who

then contacts Penguin or whoever.

And I found this agent during the summer

and now I’m writing the proposal that the

agent will use to convince the publisher.

So that’s why I’m working on this proposal.

But the title Inferno is gone already. I thought so.

Because the agent said if you want to sell.

People don’t understand. I know.

Ignorant.

I will call one of the sub

chapters Inferno and tell the story.

But the book will not be called Inferno anymore.

Okay, I understood something with crisis and ethical.

The title we use now is dark pattern.

Dark pattern? Yeah.

Catchy still.

Catchy up. Good. Still.

Okay, so fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed that you will

be kept updated on LinkedIn. Ciao.