AI, Social Media & The Future of Humanity | James Poulter (Former LEGO Innovation Officer) & Shekhar Natarajan

**James Poulter** (0:00)
Brands recognize that in a world of AI slop, and in a world of mass-generated content, you need to reach audiences through the lens of other humans that people connect with.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:15)
I'm really scared about basically, like, you know, I'm not scared as much about like, deepfake as much as I'm, you know, scared about fraud.

**James Poulter** (0:29)
I think we are going to see in the next three years the biggest transformation of the software industry we've ever seen.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:39)
So, there's going to be such big unemployment problems that we are creating for ourselves.

**James Poulter** (0:48)
I think this is the biggest crisis we have to deal with, is the crisis of meaning, right?

**Shekhar Natarajan** (1:19)
Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow, Today with Shekhar Natarajan. It's my honor to actually have the next guest, JP Poulter, former Innovation Officer for LEGO, author, AI ethicist, and a guy who knows a lot about AI, and an amazing soul. So I'm incredibly honored to have him on the show.
Looking forward to having a deep dialogue with you, JP. I know this has been long-term coming for us. We've been talking about it for a while. Without any delay, I would love to jump right into getting to know JP, who he is, what he's done, your world views. I've enjoyed every discussion I had with you.
So let's get started. So, JP, if people were to ask who you are, how would you describe yourself?

**James Poulter** (2:22)
I mean, I spent most of my career and most of my waking hours at the moment, living at the intersection of technology and communications, and particularly the way that technology shapes the way that we communicate. And then conversely, the way that we communicate is shaping the technology that we have around us. And that's led us to this moment in the world of AI.
Professionally, I spent most of my time speaking, writing, creating content, and consulting with companies and organizations of all different kinds to try and help them navigate this moment that we're living in, which is characterized by massive change. And most of that is catalyzed by what's happening in artificial intelligence, both in terms of the frontier models, as well as also just the everyday consumer adoption of these tools that we've all learned to live with or are learning to live alongside. And so that's where I spend most of my time.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (3:20)
Very good. So that's your professional life. So let's go back to the beginning.

**James Poulter** (3:25)
Yes.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (3:25)
Like who's JP? Like where are you from? What is your upbringing? Like what did you do? The transition of your life.
I would love to get to know you more as a person.

**James Poulter** (3:38)
I grew up in Southwest London, in Kingston upon Thames, which is a leafy suburban part of the city in which we find ourselves, which I've actually recently returned to, living there with my wife and our two kids.
I grew up in a very modest middle-class family to parents, one of whom was an entrepreneur and business leader and still is to this day. My father and my mother, who was mostly a housewife and worked at school and helped bring me and my brother up.
I was shaped a lot by the men in my family. In particular, my grandfather, Reg, who was a BBC cameraman for his entire career. He worked on the earliest seasons of some of the most popular BBC televisions shows of the 70s and 80s, Only Fools and Horses, Top of the Pops, Doctor Who, the early seasons of that, and many, many others. You can find him on IMDB, Reginald Poulter. Unfortunately, no longer with us, but was a great man and being around the world of media and television and radio in the early days. I remember on many occasions when we would stay at my grandparents' house who lived a couple of miles away from us and still do. My grandmother, who's 96, currently in hospital, but doing okay. We would be put to bed listening to cassette tapes for those listening who don't know what those were. These are like these little plastic things you put into machines to listen to radio shows. Mostly, they were tapes of things like Monty Python and The Goon Show and some of these early radio comedies from BBC Radio 4 and The Home Service originally. That just fascinated me that you could turn on this machine and voices would come out of it and they would make you laugh. I've always been interested in stand-up comedy and in radio and the ability for voices in conversation to delight us and entertain us, sometimes without visuals.