High Agency

Mo Dhaliwal 00:13

Platforms are our most elegant invention, digital and physical spaces where strangers become collaborators, ideas find investors, and ordinary transactions compound into extraordinary networks. And unlike traditional businesses that create products, platforms orchestrate connections. Tom Goodwin in his book, Digital Darwinism, wrote that Uber is the world's largest taxi company, but owns no vehicles. Facebook is the world's most popular media owner, but creates no content, Alibaba is the most valuable retailer, but has no inventory, and Airbnb, the world's largest hotel provider, owns no real estate. Now, these references might be getting a little dated, considering how platforms have continued to explode and exist everywhere in your phone, on Wall Street, university campuses, even farmer's markets, and they all express the same law, that the more participants who join, the more valuable the platform becomes for everyone.

And in a similar vein, you could say that Web Summit doesn't sell a technology product, yet catalyzes billions in startup activity and funding. In our world, platforms aren't just businesses, they're the architecture of progress itself. So to talk about his trajectory and role in some of these platforms, we're joined by a co-founder of the Olympics of Tech, the CEO of Web Summit, Patti Cosgrave. Patti Hills from County Wicklow in Ireland, and with a background in business and entrepreneurship, he's transformed Web Summit from a small Dublin gathering into a global tech phenomenon that attracts industry leaders, investors, startups from over 170 countries. Known for his outspoken views on technology and politics, Patti has established himself as an influential figure in the global tech ecosystem. His leadership has expanded the Web Summit brand to include events across multiple continents, and he's created a platform that connects the technology community worldwide. Welcome, Patti. Thank you very much. So I want to get into what brought you to this moment a little bit, but to start off, I want to talk a little bit about why Vancouver and the timing of this recording, it's obviously going to publish a little bit later, but the timing of this recording is interesting. In Canada, we just had the king delivering a throne speech about the mandate of the current government. I listened to that this morning, remarkably boring, but also kind of interesting and living in a colony, become Dominion, become nation like Canada is a fascinating thing to behold, especially with invocations of monarchy at a moment like this, especially on the evil Web Summit. I don't think they timed it that way. And it's kind of cool talking to you. And frankly, I've got a bit of love for anybody that's Irish, frankly, because being from the Punjabi community myself, I've got an affinity for anybody that's been fucked over by the crown of England. So, you know, common cause there, even though we're just meeting for the first time. So I want to hear a little bit about what made you think of not just Canada, but like Vancouver in particular, and bring this massive event here.

Paddy CosGrave 03:16

That's a great question. Well, initially, web, you know, our event was in the United States. And when Trump got elected, visa issues started to emerge with our event in the United States. And we used to have, you know, quite a contingent that came from Iran, for example, and suddenly, Iran's a huge country, 90 million people, lots of fantastic engineers, scientists, physicists in in Iran, and suddenly, not just Iranians, but those from other countries in that region, in particular, in the kind of in the Middle East, started to have difficulty coming to our tech conference in the United States. So we initially moved north to Toronto in 2019, reached an agreement with John Tory, who's the then mayor, former CEO, I think of Rogers, really kind of visionary, I think, kind of and that was the start of us hosting events in Canada, initially to, I think, I don't have the disdain of a lot of people on social media from the United States, but it was a bit ridiculous that web summit was moving their event out of the United States.

But, you know, it really worked in Toronto. Then there was a new mayor, John Tory kind of stepped aside. And I think the new mayor had other priorities that wasn't startups and tech, a number of Canadian and US cities then bid once we came to the end of our kind of contract with Toronto. You know, I think most of that's public. And in the end, I think we chose Vancouver for a range of different reasons. One, it's a very nice, beautiful city that people like to come to. So web summit isn't a regional conference. There are people at web summit in Vancouver for more than 100 countries around the world. It's on the west coast of the United States, I think is quite helpful. It's very close to Seattle. It's not all that far from San Francisco and Los Angeles. So it's just on a geographically, it's fantastically located. The airport has got incredible connectivity to the rest of the world, including to Asia with tons of direct flights to major cities all over the world. So all of this kind of

Mo Dhaliwal 05:26

about all the soundbites for Tourism Vancouver. It's great.

Paddy CosGrave 05:28

Well, so that worked. But then the other thing is, in our first year, we've over 15,000 attendees. And when you're doing something, sometimes kind of at that scale with some of the types of people that are coming to the event, it's helpful if there's kind of alignment with the city, even better with the provincial government and the federal government. And in particular with Mayor Ken Sim and Minister Bailey of BC, they were two former entrepreneurs who, when we met with them and other cities were pitching us, I didn't meet with, I met with lots of politicians, but I met with no other politicians who'd been entrepreneurs in their kind of day job or in their previous role. And that resonated massively.

Somebody who's been working for us for a long time and just kind of diarrheaing everything onto the floor. Casey is from Vancouver, so he's a massive kind of advocate. He's worked with Webb Summit for nearly a decade that we should, we definitely should do something in Vancouver. And all these things just kind of coalesce and we decided, OK, there's some other couple of other cities in Canada offering the sun, moon, and the stars. But actually, maybe Vancouver works better as a destination for people to come to than unnamed other cities in Canada.

Mo Dhaliwal 06:45

Yeah, no fair enough. I mean, like, TED happens in Vancouver now, and very much for the same reasons, right? You look around, it's a beautiful place, but it's starting to become, we hope anyways, a bit of an epicenter of great thinking, great innovation.

I wasn't actually aware of the political reasons for the shift in the Web Summit. That's interesting. forecast this morning... forecast this morning... forecast this morning...

Paddy CosGrave 07:05

So, oh, yeah, I mean, there's lots of attendees here from around the world who I think wouldn't have got into the United States. If you look at conference attendees into Vegas in the last number of months, it's just like falling off a cliff because international delegates are increasingly anxious about traveling to the United States.

And maybe some of them are not anxious, but they're like, oh, geez, it just seems like there's uncertainty about getting into the United States or getting a visa. And there's horror stories of people going to conferences. It was a French academic whose phone, he had a text message to a friend describing Trump as an idiot, I think, or an imbecile. And he was deported, which is pretty extreme. So extreme, it then tends to just ripple through the world's media. And everybody else is like, I don't really know. And so I think Canada is benefiting from that. We've tons of Americans coming here. And I think tons of people here to meet Americans in Canada, which is kind of fun.

Mo Dhaliwal 08:06

Yeah, it's actually pretty remarkable how their rhetoric has changed the culture entirely. I had a flight to California a number of months ago, and I had friends and family who were otherwise reasonable people being like, oh, be careful. And it's sound as if they had been there before. It's going to be fine. It's not a thing. But yeah, it's pretty amazing how that rhetoric has trickled down.

But there's a lot kind of happening, actually, with the culture of politics and technology. You look at, this is going to be cliche almost to mention, but Elon Musk could be, I think, a case study in just watching somebody's brand. Because I think, what, five, six years ago, was almost universally lauded as somebody who was doing good for the benefit of the humanity, benefit of the planet. And it really been interesting to see how not just, I think, his stars kind of, I don't want to say fallen, but just the attitudes around him have changed so much culturally, as with, I think, tech at that scale in general. Like, who was he, the ex-Finance Minister from Greece from way back when? Yanis Varoufakis. Yanis Varoufakis has this great talk he gives, where he talks about this notion of techno-feudalism, right? That in technology, especially, and at these events, we like to talk about how much innovation and capital creation is happening by people coming together. But he's got an almost dismissive view about it, and kind of dark, where he says, actually, our version of capitalism is now kind of taking place in the front yard of techno-feudalism, which is kind of owning this whole space, right?

What's your perspective on that? Like, how does this sort of impact your feelings on Web Summit and what you guys are trying to do?

Paddy CosGrave 09:40

Well, firstly, the reputation of the leading figures within tech, so these kind of tech billionaires, has always been incredibly negative in the eyes of the average person. If you look at kind of polling numbers of very notable figures in business, I think you could argue correctly, most normal people perceive billionaires as dangerous people who do not have the interests of their society at heart for, we can go into the reasons, but generally they are not perceived as good people.

And that is the case in polling for many, many, many, many years. I think what's happened with Elon Musk is amongst elite opinion, it's become divided because he's put his chips in one political party, the Republican party and Donald Trump, as opposed to both or possibly the other one, but most billionaires are completely reviled by the average person, certainly in the United States. And I think it's a very thin line between more of them being shot and no more of them being shot, I think. Anyway, but that's the United States, maybe it's kind of an extreme case.

Just to come back to your question, just remind me of your question, just at the end.

Mo Dhaliwal 11:12

just how this notion of like technical feudalism and capitalism and technology the intersection of it like is that is that a point of tension for you guys or do you feel like for what web summit is doing that it's no I mean you want it

Paddy CosGrave 11:24

We discuss it at Web Summit and for years, and have platformed speakers from, you could say, right across the political spectrum. I've invited Janice Farafakas many times to speak at Web Summit, but it hasn't worked out.

We've had some fantastic academics who've talked in particular about tech companies and their ability to circumvent paying almost any taxes in the world and the impact that that has on our world. And it's not just evading taxes in the West. You've got, Ireland is a notable example of a country with double tax treaties in place with countries in Africa like Ghana, who there should be taxes paid in Ghana to help fund very basic provision of healthcare and education and those taxes essentially don't get paid. They're circumvented by these, I think quite scandalous tax treaties that allow companies to profit shift without paying taxes out of Ghana, route it through Ireland and then it ends up in a sinkhole country could be Bermuda or somewhere like that. And I think these are particularly corrosive and dangerous policies for the future kind of the West. They're great for short-term profit maximization and all the other topics that Janice Farafakas and many of the writers touch on I think have an important place at a tech conference like Web Summit part of the reason being that it is a gathering of startups. It's not about creating a platform to lionize the existing sort of status quo companies, the mega companies of the current moment. It's about providing a space and a platform for companies that are trying to disrupt the status quo, which is something a little bit different and as a consequence I think we're quite comfortable platforming speakers and topics that are antagonistic to the interests of the existing sort of mega monopolies that dominate tech today.

Mo Dhaliwal 13:37

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the line of speakers is incredibly diverse. Personally, just because I'm a fan and I've met a number of occasions, really happy to see Dr. Cornel West on the panel.

Would be fantastic to have a black revolutionary academic speaking on tech panels about ethics and society and what it means to our culture and what collective liberation looks like in a place like that. Speaking of collective liberation, let's talk about Ireland a little bit. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you had a rural sort of upbringing or like the place you came from? Yeah, I grew up on a farm. On a farm, OK. So I mean, does it feel like a pretty far cry from where you started to where you are now?

Paddy CosGrave 14:18

Um, yeah, I mean, in certain ways, my dad was very into computers. So before I was born, there were already, you know, very early PCs, um, Apple one, Apple two, Apple SC, um, and the early and then mid 1980s probably had the internet before almost anyone else early gaming consoles that my dad imported from, I guess, Japan, um, and lots of computer magazines like Apple user later renamed to kind of Mac user, still have all the magazines from the eighties at home.

So I grew up in a very rural, um, setting, but you know, I, I don't know. I was, there were just a lot of, it's a lot of tech lying around the house. And one of our neighbors was kind of the PC guy. My dad was the Apple guy and, um, both houses were very into gaming as well. And that provided maybe some window into a world that you mightn't ordinarily associate with farming and, you know, I'm sure kind of had some, some influence on me, you know, by the time I got to university, I was just interested in building, you know, I guess today you might call them apps, but, uh, just building software and was involved kind of building really crap software for years and years. And I dunno, it's not that I ever wanted to build a business. I just kind of wanted to maybe help create some cool little things that did interesting things. And, uh, most of those kind of didn't work out, but they were instructive when it came to organizing conferences. Yeah. Well, I mean,

Mo Dhaliwal 15:55

you know, as I was kind of researching you and studying your life and thinking about what to talk about today, the themes that were emerging was this idea of platforms for sure, but then also kind of platforming and it seems like even from your sort of, you know, earliest experiences in school, university, you know, civic engagement, that you were pretty early on in, you know, relying on or leveraging technology, not for its own sake, but to actually build civic engagement to create some sort of political movements, you know, how did you, like, where'd that interest start? Because, I mean, yeah, I would...

Paddy CosGrave 16:33

In my first week in university, I went to a debate. And in Trinity College in Dublin, there's now, I guess it's nearly 350-year-old debating society called the Philosophical Society that sits at the kind of heart of campus activity. You see where most universities, interesting academics, thinkers, public intellectuals will come. Debate, often, students or speak to students. And so this debating society was a core part of the student existence or experience within Trinity. I decided I want to get involved, got very involved, became the head of that society, and so had some exposure to thinking about, OK, how do you put together an interesting debate or series of talks with people who are provocative? And they need to be provocative when your audience are 19, 20, and 21-year-olds, because if it's not a provocative and properly interesting debate, why would a 20-year-old give up their evening? They have so many other options when you're 20 years of age, and they're not mandated to go to it because of work saying, oh, we should go to this conference.

Is that Phil Speaks? Yeah, so Phil Speaks was then a program I set up to teach public speaking to high schools in Ireland that didn't necessarily have access to public speaking programs or debate programs that oftentimes were more limited to private schools that had more resources to teach kids skills outside of the national syllabus. So that was a program I set up about 20 years ago that still exists to try and broaden opportunities for teenagers to learn public speaking and debating.

But yeah, it just, to me, I think a lot of conferences, I don't get a lot of the content. It's just so, it's so dull. It's just CEOs talking about the latest feature of product that they've launched, which they try to dress up in engaging language and storytelling, but ultimately it's all as dull as ditch water.

And I think oftentimes just making things a little bit more provocative is better. You'll notice that at web summit, certainly in Lisbon, there's just like stages that can fit 10,000 people, outside stages, so our second and third and fourth biggest stages that fit three and 4,000 people. And you can't persuade that many people to sit down and listen to just another product announcement or tell us about your latest funding round. That's just, I mean, that's essentially just a spoken WordPress release, which I don't think is something people are prepared to pay money to sit through. So where possible, we try to at least create something that's a little bit more engaging and provocative. And maybe that has some roots in doing that in university where I saw no issue at the time. I mean, some of these guys ended up in Guantanamo Bay, but I was like, oh, why don't we just hear out some jihadists? I mean, they wanna kill people, apparently, for the furtherance of an Islamic state in Europe or all of Europe, okay? Let's just bring them to the university and see if they have any kind of compelling, coherent ideas.

Paddy CosGrave 20:02

That might seem like a bit nuts to do, but I do the same with kind of, I don't know what you call it, like, well, the nation of Islam, some of the leaders in the United States came to speak, and then you could pick every kind of intriguing religious organization, those at the forefront of psychedelic research in the mid-2000s when it wasn't sexy. I just met Michael Pollan yesterday in California, and Alexander Shulgin, somebody he would have known who was sort of the godfather of psychedelics.

I brought to Trinity when I was an undergraduate 20 years ago to speak, because I think if you're a 19 or 20-year-old student, well, this is kind of interesting stuff, and maybe that has influenced some of the thinking behind website.

Mo Dhaliwal 20:50

I mean, it seems like a lot of it, actually, like as I'm hearing you speak, because you kind of express like a fluency and comfort with political conversations and with tension, right? From an early period.

And I feel like the, you know, some of the worst of tech and some of the worst of conferences is when they try to do this thing where they're quote unquote, apolitical, which is ridiculous to me, right? It's like having, you know, a herd of elephants in the room and you're just pretending that they don't exist. Because to a large extent, a lot of the decisions we make are influences most of us political actually. So we should be talking about that. Yeah. I think.

Paddy CosGrave 21:20

I think the most dangerous think tanks are those that pretend to be or assure the reader of their about section or assure a listener at a conference that we're just, we're apolitical. We're just into good ideas. And then you kind of look at their funders and you're like, okay.

Mo Dhaliwal 21:39

We're unbiased and it's the data and the research, yeah.

Paddy CosGrave 21:42

Yeah and we're so thankful to Charles Koch for just giving us these millions.

Mo Dhaliwal 21:48

Um, I mean, yeah, I didn't realize that, um, you know, the nature and the controversial nature of the types of speakers, um, you had, uh, invited in early on, um, has there been anybody that's been kind of like on your target of who you would like to see?

Like, I'm not sure how much of the programming you're, you're doing hands on a web some of these days, but is there

Paddy CosGrave 22:07

there's an amazing team that you know are you know very talented with great background in oftentimes they're journalists not always sometimes former academics so the you know the guy used to teach political philosophy in Trinity College Dublin you know is on our team he's very good when it comes to kind of policy and academic sort of speakers yeah there's lots of speakers you know for years I really wanted to get Noam Chomsky and I think one of his last public talks that he gave was at web summit two and a half years ago with Gary Marcus interviewing him kind of conversation between them really about AI and how it was all just a lot of fakery which was which is interesting as provocative I mean that it was absolutely packed they wanted to hear from one of the true intellectual goats of our lifetimes Noam Chomsky and that was his take was that it's yeah he's fairly kind of scathing that the current systems and approaches would solve a lot of the problems that at that point kept seeming to emerge and seemed to continue to like you know hallucinations you know a lot of AI systems now are just really really really good at bullshitting they were good at bullshitting two years ago now they're just like fantastic they're just so good it's like this must be true but the same hallucinations and limitations that existed two and a half years ago it's like we still seem unable to solve some of these really what seemed like real trivial kind of problems and so Gary Marcus who actually lives in Vancouver he was a professor in NYU of cognitive science will be speaking on the opening night you know I think as a skeptical voice in AI which I think is important because we're force fed not force fed but it's in a you cannot sorry escape the sort of main lining of positive AI hype and so I think it's refreshing to hear from somebody who's a scholar saying okay hold on a second here's why

Mo Dhaliwal 24:22

Mm-hmm.

Paddy CosGrave 24:23

There's a range of issues, a range of shortcomings in all these systems, and actually, as I think you will say, tonight, these can't be solved by the existing approaches. As a consequence, we're not even close to anything approximating AGI.

Mo Dhaliwal 24:39

No, I mean, I've had the honor of sort of intersecting with somebody working on consciousness in AI here, Suzanne Gildert, in Urbanic Systems. And it's interesting hearing that perspective because there's these weird suspicions that the everyday user has, like, oh, is it becoming alive? Is it becoming conscious? Because we're all raised on the same 80s, 90s sci-fi movies.

But her perspective is very much that, that this is one area of research, one area of mathematics and theory that is a dead end for consciousness. But can do lots of fancy tricks, and the tricks will get ever fancier. So her work is kind of in the opposite direction, which is exploring quantum mechanics to understand where potentially consciousness and awareness is actually channeled from. Fascinating. But, you know, I think she's like a pretty lone voice out here, right? And there's lots of, you know, and 99 percent of everybody else is. You know, I think that's.

Paddy CosGrave 25:31

It's just interesting to find these voices that are in the hinterland of popular discourse because if you're just consuming the same narrative or stories or ideas as everyone else, I don't think you have much chance of thinking not independently but more originally than most other people.

Mo Dhaliwal 25:55

Do you see any part of this sort of like AI tsunami coming? Like I imagine you guys have your fingers quite on the pulse of what's happening with technology and research in a number of places.

But the way it kind of blew up in that fall of 2022, maybe a little bit earlier than that, but you know, mostly then in the consumer sort of climate.

Paddy CosGrave 26:10

I remember in 2018 I did an interview with Bloomberg and they were asking about AI and I said, oh, you know, China's just going to win. You know, the only debate to be had is, you know, which Chinese company that doesn't yet exist is going to dominate AI in the future.

And they were like, sorry, what? China does AI? And I was like, no, not really yet. But if you look at high quality citations in AI, kind of machine learning is measured by I think it's actual Springer. The number of citations pumped out, high quality citations by Chinese academics is just like growing exponentially and it's flat in the West. And they're now outputting, this is 2018, interesting novel, often novel research at a rate far far exceeding that of the United States or Europe. And so probabilistically in the future, more of that research will be commercialized. So utilized by entrepreneurs or startups, tech companies. And as a consequence, it's not a given, it's not like the outcome is one or zero, but, you know, the likelihood is that China in the future will just basically dominate AI. And I think my feeling is that is already happening, that will accelerate.

And if there's to be much money made in AI, I don't know, I feel like there's compelling debates on both sides that, you know, the AI will be very much open sourced and heavily kind of commodified and there won't be a huge amount of money to be made in it. You don't think so? I don't think so. I think it's very difficult.

Mo Dhaliwal 27:59

That's shattering the dreams of many, many a startup founder, I think.

Paddy CosGrave 28:02

I think it's very difficult to make money out of a non-proprietary field of mathematics. If you're selling the shovels and the spades, maybe, or the spades and the buckets, or possibly, for some time. But I think it becomes just heavily commodified over time.

So you're talking about the chips? Yeah, so you're selling... Yeah, exactly. And so chips, consultancy, helping companies implement AI in some meaningful way in the internal or externally. I think those people will make some money, but I don't really know if AI companies themselves will make a whole lot of money.

Mo Dhaliwal 28:42

Well, I mean the comment on China is pretty fascinating because I think sometimes I dismiss those comments because I wonder if there's just some amount of bias and xenophobia on the west and China is kind of used as a bogeyman in so many other scenarios. But then I was reading this thing recently that I was just talking about how Apple alone was investing something like 55 billion into engineering in China and the ripple effects and sort of the exponential change that's created in engineering talent and science and research that, you know, frankly, I guess on some level, the Chinese government is able to encourage that sort of investment and that even with, you know, fairly innovation focused, progressive American administrations, they have put together a budget.

I think it was the Biden administration that was like 50 billion or something over four or five years rather than just the annual 55 billion spend that Apple alone has in a place like China.

Paddy CosGrave 29:38

Yeah, I don't think I, you know, I'm not, I wouldn't be long in the United States. I'm definitely I was worried for a while that Trump was genuinely distracted from his mission, that he wanted to help the United States economy. And I was like, this wasn't supposed to be why Trump got into the White House. Trump's job is just to make really, really, really rich people even richer, the 0.1%. That's all you're supposed to do.

That's why all these people got behind him. And then I was like, what is Trump doing? Like he looks like he wants to help the United States. Yeah, that's good. And then I saw the recent tax bill and I was like, okay, he's back. He's, he's delivering. Everything's just kind of pantomime in theater and, and, and distraction. But for a hot minute, I was like, jeepers, creepers. This guy, this guy, Trump might not be just a Trojan horse for billionaires. He's something more than that. But no, he's just just there to enrich the billionaire class in the United States.

Mo Dhaliwal 30:42

I think we do need to touch on that for a second because I mean Trump is a massive influence and I mean, hey, Web Summit's happening in Vancouver, you know, tangentially because of what's happening in the U.S. But, you know, there's been this vacillation, I think, especially in tech circles where there's two extremes, right? Either he's just an absolute buffoon just tripping through, you know, his administration and is only capable of, you know, one-liners on media and Fox News and that's it. That's all he's got going on. And then there's the other side that believe there's like some grand master plan and there's like some real, like, you know, deep thought and architecture of some redefining of the American economy that's going to suddenly just explode for the, you know, the lower middle class. You know, where do you land on that spectrum from what you're seeing?

Paddy CosGrave 31:30

I think the, you know, you've got the United States is a one party system with two sort of subsidiaries, both of whom represent the interests of the super rich, you know, occasionally they're very marginal differences between them, but they both have to spend a lot of money and the super rich they actually represent have to indirectly spend a lot of money, propagandizing the mass, the great mass of voters in the United States into thinking that these, this one party system is representative of their interests. It's not, it's a coin operated system.

The United States has something I think you would call procedural democracy. People, it's correct that you have a right to put a piece of paper in a ballot box or to vote electronically, but that's it. You have no right to have your policy preferences represented by politicians in Washington. It's unless you pay money, your views don't matter. So procedurally the United States is a democracy, but that's it. It's not not a meaningful democracy in the true sense of of the word.

And Trump, I think he's just doing what he's supposed to do, which is, you know, make the the richest in people in America even richer than what happens to everybody else, I think is a pretty secondary concern.

Mo Dhaliwal 33:12

Yeah, I think people are coming alive, hopefully, to the idea that elections are a four-year psy-op to feel good about your access to social power, which might not exist. So if you're not long in the US, what are you excited about?

What are you long on? What is the place where... Oh, just China.

Paddy CosGrave 33:29

Like, you know, I met an amazing group of Irish engineers, about 20, 21, 22, there's about 10 of them all living in a hacker house in San Francisco, they're coming up to the conference and they decided to, you know, spend their summer in San Francisco because they wanted to be as close to the future as possible, but to me they're about 8,000 miles off. They need to go to Shenzhen in China or some other major Chinese city if they want a window into the future. I think the future is overwhelmingly going to be shaped by Chinese innovation. I don't think the US does much innovation anymore. You know, a couple of companies does not equate to an innovative economy and, you know, I wear the direction of Europe. I don't really know, I'm not so certain, but I am quite certain that the future, at least the rest of this century, belongs overwhelmingly, not entirely, but overwhelmingly to China and the innovation that will emerge at increasing rates from China.

Is that where you're headed next? Personally, I'm going back to Ireland. I've been away from my family for a week, so that's where I'm heading next, but yeah, I'll be in China in a few months. I'd like to go there. It's just an absolutely kind of amazing place, and for anyone in the West to sort of blinker themselves and try to reduce China to some Disney narrative is an act of myopia or idiocy that I find difficult to comprehend. I think any responsible and thoughtful person in the West, at this point, has to begin to ask themselves, how is China dominating in almost every single high-tech field when they were a laggard 20 years ago? You've got a think tank, a super sort of pro-US think tank in China called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and they track, I think it's like 65 or 67 high-tech fields. They've been doing so for quite some time, and you can see that 20 years ago, the United States had a lead in almost every one of these high-tech fields, and now China has a lead in almost every single one of these high-tech fields, with the exception of about seven, but it'll probably be the complete set within a matter of a year or two, and I think if you're serious about like trying to understand the world and you're interested in innovation, you at the very least have to be open to learning how is China achieving these things, and is there anything that we could learn in the West, whether that's Canada or the United States or Europe, and at the moment I think too many people are unwilling to, I don't know the reasons, to like seriously consider the policies that at least are working in China, and until we're prepared to do that I just don't think, I don't think the West can kind of re-energize itself or move kind of innovation up several notches to begin to match China's output.

Mo Dhaliwal 36:56

I mean not to put more work on your plate, but I mean could a web summit be that bridge like I feel like you got

Paddy CosGrave 37:02

I'd love to love to do an event in China and hopefully lots of people will come but I think certainly in the case of the United States most US companies not all but some might find it difficult to participate for for different reasons we used to have an event in Hong Kong that we ran until just before the the pandemic and we weren't able to go back there until 2024 but at that point we were launching new conferences in the Middle East and Latin America and we decided to just kind of stick with that trajectory and maybe in 26 or 27 we might do something in in China

Mo Dhaliwal 37:35

What else are you seeing in the world? Gartar's been growing? That's a big question. But I feel like you've got such an interesting pulse of having these tentacles on different continents and countries.

Paddy CosGrave 37:46

Well, I think, you know, I think the most interesting thing is, and it'll go down as one of the great strategic failures in the West, the US thought that they could freeze China in time by some pithy export restrictions on semiconductor components and restrictions on the supply chain related to semiconductors. But now China is rapidly emerging with sort of like full spectrum dominance across every component within that supply chain from rare earths all the way up the kind of value chain. And I think that'll become increasingly apparent within the West over the next year.

I think one of the most interesting companies, but I've been saying this for about seven years is Comac, which is the Chinese rival to Boeing and Airbus and other companies. And they are building planes to compete with Boeing and Airbus, and they will eventually do it at a fraction of the cost, greater fuel efficiency and more tech. You're already seeing that with their fighter jets, which have surpassed the capabilities of the latest American fighter jets. And this will bleed into their civil aviation fleet slowly. And I think it's a longer time horizon, but by 2035, maybe 10 years from now, I presume China will, as they are doing in the auto industry, begin to upend a century of dominance by Western manufacturers in aerospace.

Mo Dhaliwal 39:29

I mean, I wasn't even, I think, fully alive to how much of an echo chamber I've sort of been in media-wise until the reason why I happened upon what's happening in China with aerospace and engineering, kind of a dark reason, but it was actually the Pakistan-India conflict and started reading articles and seeing headlines that, like, Pakistani fighter jets were doing these advancement, I'm like, Pakistani fighter jets, what are you talking about?

When I looked into it and actually saw the supply agreements they have with China and the type of equipment and what they're working with, you know, kind of dark, but also kind of like a fascinating window into the future because that isn't something that...

Paddy CosGrave 40:04

Yeah, they just straight up shot down a bunch of Indian fighters with no losses with jets that are like a fraction of the price that India was paying.

Mo Dhaliwal 40:15

It was a very economical little war, yeah.

Paddy CosGrave 40:17

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's good that they've paused and stopped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mo Dhaliwal 40:21

Look, we've talked about Web Summit a lot, rightfully, like the openings tonight. Where does this sort of head next for Patty Klossgrave? Are you going to do this until the day you die? Do you have a plan for what you want to do next?

Paddy CosGrave 40:36

It's a privilege, I think, to, you know, I think if you're a journalist, I think it's a hard in the current environment, but very privileged existence in that you get to continue to educate yourself by meeting and learning from really talented people across so many different areas or industries or geographies. And in my case, I'm a ticket salesman and I, well, my team persuades really interesting people to come to our events and I get to interact with a fraction of those people and it's an amazing window sometimes into the future.

And for me, that's a very, it's just an amazing job. It's an amazing job in some ways, but like also like human travel sometimes, you know, can be tough, change in time zones can be tough, we've done multiple events in many distant parts of the world and that takes kind of takes us toll. Selling tickets is in the most glamorous job at the end of the day, you know, we sell tickets. That's I am a ticket salesman. That is my job. It's not the not necessarily the greatest job in the world, but the perk is oftentimes getting to meet and interact with, you know, actually inspiring or thoughtful or dissenting voices that I might otherwise never have the opportunity to be to be exposed to. So yeah, I can imagine it.

Mo Dhaliwal 42:05

That would be perpetually interesting, right? Yeah.

Paddy CosGrave 42:09

is but then you know a lot of the certainly the tech bro patter the sort of PR sanitized total bullshittery of tech like just like pains my ears when and when I hear it and I love meeting entrepreneurs imagine you hear a lot of it yeah I love meeting entrepreneurs before they've raised money I love meeting bootstrapped entrepreneurs because they don't that they don't tend to be sort of coached within an inch of their life and totally sanitized to just speak in weird media trained sound bites yeah media trained sound bites and so finding bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are just like yeah say whatever I want or finding entrepreneurs before they are sort of like neutered by their brains are kind of switched off by PR people that's kind of thrilling but man it just it hurts me to listen to these sort of trained hamsters just talking at you you're like this is garbage like please can we just talk talk talk like real people so yeah that's an insight

Mo Dhaliwal 43:16

Well, thankfully, I feel like you've escaped some of that media training somehow. Because on some level, Web Summit is a technology company. Like, there's a platform that you build all this out of. But you're continuing to, I think, say what you think, good or bad. Sometimes get into some trouble for it and deal with it. But I think that's kind of refreshing.

And I think that would be something that we could probably use a lot more of. I mean, when our agency Skyrocket started, we worked entirely with super early stage startups for that authenticity, the passion, everything else, and then you get into the startup speak. And everything is just buzzwords and models and that sort of sanitized language. We kind of fell out of it for that reason. And I think just recently kind of fell in love with it again of being there for the passion, the commitment, the interesting breakthroughs that you're after. So it's been fun kind of finding that again.

Great. And how's the tennis court?

Paddy CosGrave 44:10

we're going. Fine. I just like to play tennis as a sort of, I think, as a man, as you get into your 40s, you come face to face with your sort of, you know, your ego, basically, and you desperately want to impress other people. So you go and play silly sports to try and show people that you're great. At least I think that's is it working?

I think I don't know. I just kind of like, I don't know, I just kind of, I don't know, I enjoy it. It's like something kind of different. And I think in life, well, certainly for me, I just like, I don't know, I think by the time you get a little bit older, you begin to optimize your life so that you don't suffer so much. And you don't get you don't fail so much. You don't lose so much. Because a lot of life for most people, for me included is just like, you take a lot of a lot of losses that you don't really, you don't really share with the world. Like, there's a lot of shitness that happens in life. And then I don't know, I like, I like things have worked out well with web summit. And I like tennis because I end up just losing an awful lot. And I think I was like, losing that in my life that I was, you know, I was like, Oh, I'll avoid taking this risk. I don't want to end up with more like egg in my face yet again and lose that again. And then I like kind of went back to tennis. And I was like, Oh, I just got like, absolutely destroyed by two 19 year olds. And I can hear them like literally laughing at the old man on the other side of the court. And I kind of like, I found it kind of humiliating or humble in a humbling, I think, you know, like people talk, Oh, I'm so humble. It's like, I don't think if you haven't been humbled, I don't know if you're humble. And in tennis, I now found myself getting like, repeatedly humbled, massively humbled. And I, it's okay, you know, I kind of, it's hard sometimes, like, I really like, I get back in a car after just being crushed. And I'm just like, man, it's like, I'm genuinely upset and humiliated. And I think it's a good medicine to take, you know, I think in business in life, sometimes, if you get a little bit of success, it can really distort your mind mass, you know, massively, like, you know, the more successful you are, the more your brain rots. Yeah, like genuinely, I think it just rots. And I don't know, I find tennis some type of weird antidote where I come face to face with my own, like total limited ability, and are regularly just like humiliated, but just like beaten badly by people who are, you know, just much better.

Mo Dhaliwal 46:56

Humility as medicine, I think is a great note to end on. Patty, I know you're busy. You're kicking off this massive conference in Vancouver for the first time. So thank you so much for taking the time out and chatting with us.

People can obviously find you online. You're prevalent. You're everywhere. But thanks again. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you. All right. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency. Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.

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