Interview with Alec Ross

Zachary Karabell (0:01)

What could go right? In a world where we are daily beset with news of what is going wrong, as well as a commentariat and a pundocracy, and all of us that are focused relentlessly on all the risks and perils that beset us, at least taking some time to ask the question of what might go right seems important in a world where there is so little attention to it. That doesn't mean looking through the future with Pollyannish views and rose-tinted lenses. It means simply taking the time to think about, are we missing something that is going on dynamically and positively that could create change for the better? I have spent a large portion of my adult life thinking about how in a world of noise, where the adage of it bleeds, it leads seems to dominate. How do you speak with passionate intensity about not just being calm in the face of risks, but looking for problems in the face of conviction that things are about to go terribly wrong? How do you do that in a way that garners attention and galvanizes energy? That is an immense challenge. We're trying to solve problems seems to be a cooler thing and trying to address fears and dangers is a hotter thing. And in a world of noise, the heat and the noise always dominates. So what we're going to try to do in these conversations is talk to a series of really compelling people who are not in any way inattentive to the risk, but are thinking every day about what can we do to change them, what can we do to have things go right. I'm speaking today with Alec Ross, who's one of the more innovative, thoughtful, insightful thinkers about the world we're in and the worlds that we are creating. Alec was Senior Advisor for Innovation to Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State during her first term. He also worked on the digital side of Obama's 2008 campaign for President. And he is the recent author of The Industries of the Future, which is a tour de force guide of how technology is shaping health care and the military and the financial industry and even parenting in the world we are in.

So Alec, you worked in the State Department, worked on digital diplomacy for Secretary Hillary Clinton for four years. How did you get into that? I mean, where did that come from? How does one develop the background to get into something that no one had ever done before?

Alec Ross (2:30)

Sure. So I was a technology entrepreneur. So I worked for eight years, trying to figure out how to maximize the potential of technology to help low-income people improve their lives and enter the economic mainstream. So I'd been working in the technology field previously, and then helped lead technology and innovation policy for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. That worked, and it worked bluntly at Hillary Clinton's expense, so she recruited me to come in and work on innovation policy sort of at her elbow at the State Department.

Zachary Karabell (3:02)

And how was that mandate defined? What did innovation and digital diplomacy mean from your vantage point?

Alec Ross (3:09)

Well, it was completely undefined. Her proposition to me essentially was, look, come in, make up your own title, you've got 195 country chessboard, and let's see what good we can do in the world together. So look, I was not the IT guy at the State Department. I was not, for example, the person who came up with the genius idea to put a server in her basement. That wasn't me.

Zachary Karabell (3:36)

Good to know.

Alec Ross (3:37)

Yeah, my job really was to focus on solving specific foreign policy challenges, like creating an anonymous encrypted text messaging program to be able to identify cartel members in northern Mexico, or trying to figure out how we could wipe out the capability of the Syrian Intelligence Service to do surgical political assassinations based on knowing where people are, based on the GPS on their mobile phone. So my focus was really at the intersection of national security and communications technology.

Zachary Karabell (4:14)

And when you think about digital disruption, right? How would we define disruption? It's a word that we use all the time and has become part of the patois of talking about change in technology. But how would you define it?

Alec Ross (4:28)

I guess I define, having not thought about this at all, I guess I define disruption as taking the way something had been done for a long time and changing it.

And that can be good or ill. It's a value neutral definition. And disruption, while for many people it has a negative connotation. And if you are from Silicon Valley, it has an inherently positive connotation. It could go either way. But in general, I see disruption as anything that changes business as usual.