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Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. I'm os Valoshin. Today we're bringing you two conversations that I had last week at an event hosted by quilt dot Ai. And it was a pretty cool experience for me because the conversations took place on stage at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Back in eighteen twenty one, they dissected a mummy on the exact stage where I was speaking. Fifteen scientists attached the Institution of one Nobel Prizes, and not less than ten chemical elements were discovered here, including sodium and potassium. So I was in ridiculously good company, and I was there to interview two contemporary visionaries. The first is Ali Islami. He is a distinguished research scientist at Google's Deep Mind who built the prototype for is an ai search. Would be fair to say his work has changed the front page of the Internet.
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Speaker 2: I see my role as being one of a surfer, where I have to be leaning just enough into the future to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into.
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Speaker 3: Like the this.
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Speaker 1: The second conversation I had was with Sad Masni, CEO of Mobi Group. He created the first privately owned radio and TV stations in Afghanistan and built media networks in Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, and India, and he continues to harness platform technologies like radio, TV and WhatsApp to drive culture in fascinating and powerful ways.
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Speaker 4: Initially was a bunch of students tutoring girls on WhatsApp. Now we have a WhatsApp AI chatbot and we have turned fifty thousand kids that use it. It's a bridge between a time when we have education and a time hopefully we'll have education for girls.
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Speaker 1: I hope you'll enjoy both conversations. So you might not know Ali's name, but you likely know his work because Ali, you built the prototype at DeepMind that became AI search at Google.
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Speaker 4: Right.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you've used Google Search, you will have seen something called AI mode where you can kind of have a conversation with AI about the thing you're searching for. That started off about two years ago I think now where we had Gemini, which was our LLM, and you may not remember, but back then these ais they weren't really connected to the Internet, so you could ask them questions, but you couldn't ask them about local restaurants or recent news. So, yeah, we built this prototype that we called neural Google, as in like, how can we make Google like a neural network? And we connected Gemini to Google Search and that has now been rolled out and many people have used it. Yeah, so I was involved in kind of creating that.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's kind of amazing because also for anyone here who's ever been turned down from a job, you were turned down for your first job at Google, and you went on to basically redesign the core product, right, Yeah, I.
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Speaker 2: Forgot about that. That was a long long time ago. Yeah. So I I fell in love with computing when I was a teenager, like playing video games like so many other people, and learned how to code when I was in my teens and went on to actually study AI during my undergrad which was super uncommon back then. So in two thousand and five, I did an undergrad in AI, and yeah, I applied to work at Google, and due to my nationality I'm from Iran, I was told that, you know, there were some restrictions Terranians working at Google. That didn't work out, so I went on worked at a games company. Then I worked at Then I did a PhD, worked at Microsoft, and in twenty fourteen fifteen joined Google again. Thankfully the rules had changed or they didn't realize. I don't know what happened.
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Speaker 1: But one of the things, I mean, growing up in Iran, this is a conference about AI and creativity. I mean, it wasn't AI, but in your bedroom you were you know, you were building websites for powerboat owners in Florida. In a sense, you were using technology to travel the world and to create alternative worlds for yourself as a child.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that was one of the things that I found super attractive as a teenager. You know, I was in Iran on my computer and through the internet. It felt really like I was flying around right. I could be in any conversation anywhere in the world. I made friends with people from all across the world. There was a guy I became friends with, Trevor. He actually messaged me just last week out of the blue, and him and I we would make websites, we would get find clients, and I never met him. I still haven't met him. This is like more than twenty years on now, and it felt like a superpower and writing software even back then, I could feel like it was a superpower because I didn't have to get permission from anyone. You didn't need material resources even as a child. Basically, as long as your brain could work, you could do whatever you wanted, and that's how everything kicked off.
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Speaker 1: You mentioned that you sort of started your career or your study of AI when it was very unpopular field. There was the kind of long AI winter where nobody really believed it would happen. And I think you referenced you didn't believe in your lifetime that you may never see AI be able to distinguish between a cat and a dog in your lifetime. Safe to say it can now, But with your doubts about whether the field would actually take off, what made you want to pursue it before it was the hottest thing in the world.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think there was definitely a bit of luck involved. So during those early years I learned how to code fairly proficiently, and by the time I came to go to university to study I loved technology and computer science enough to know I wanted to be in that field. But it felt like I wouldn't be learning much new things if I just went on to study computer science. So I looked around and I thought to myself, Okay, what could I study, which is like computer science but is beyond computer science and artificial intelligence felt really interesting because it had computer science, but it also had philosophy, It had theory of mind, it had a bit of neuroscience, and I thought that that might be a fun thing to spend, you know, a couple of years thinking about. But the analogy I make is back then it felt like studying teleportation feels to us today. It's like cool idea in theory, but we've never seen anything like teleportation. Probably it's not going to happen, but yeah, sure, if you want to go and study that, go ahead. So that's what AI felt like when I started, and even and even when I did my PhD, I genuinely didn't think that I would have a career in this field. It felt like an intellectual curiosity.
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Speaker 3: So what changed.
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Speaker 2: Well, actually, during my PhD there was this kind of sequence of scientific breakthroughs that people at the time called deep learning. We don't use that word so much anymore, but deep learning, which is basically a statistical technique, came to the fore and people started realizing that this thing has legs, and very gradually, but at the same time very rapidly, people who were in the know kind of for the first time in fifty sixty years, started thinking, oh, hang on a second, it feels like we've cracked how we might be able to make progress in this field. And that was when I kind of switched from oh, this is kind of a fun thing to do, but realistically, I'm going to go and do startup, So are going to work in a bank or something, to oh, hang on, I happen to be within the group of like three hundred and four hundred people in the world who know what this thing is about and what its potential is. And so yeah, towards the end of my pH she was pretty clear that this is going to be big, and so I decided to stay. I did a post TALC and then going school.
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Speaker 1: I mean, do you it's interesting you mentioned like twenty years ago it would have been like, say, I'm going to study teleportation. And curiously, if you agree with my kind of hypothesis in my introductory remarks about this idea that if the Royal Institution founders could see what's happening today, their minds would be completely blown. And yet there's this cultural feeling of despair or darkness.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I mean I am The topic of my PhD was computer vision specifically, so it's how do we get computers to see the meaning in images? Right, That's one way of defining it. So when I look at the scene, I can understand that I'm in a circle the room and there's people. I understand the context. Even ten years ago, if you were to show this photo to a computer, the most I could say is that this pixel has read. This pixel is black. But otherwise it was basically mis drive. It was a mystery to the computer itself. And yeah, as I mentioned to you earlier, I as an expert in the field, I genuinely didn't think that we would make meaningful progress on this problem in my lifetime. I felt so out of reach because we had no clue how to proceed. And even to me, if you had, if you were to show me what we can do today ten years ago, I ninety nine percent would not have believed.
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Speaker 1: You would have said, this is like impossible. So you, I mean, you sit in many ways at the cold face of the future. What are you seeing your when you're working in deep mind, when you're interacting with AI, when you're building it. What are you seeing the rest of us should know?
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Speaker 2: Right, Well, Well, one thing that's really changed is ten years ago, when we were doing research, it really felt like it was separate from the real world. So, you know, when friends or family would ask me, what are you working on? What do you see that we should know about? I would be describing something that, you know, wordly abstract. It was abstract, it was in the lab, and you know, maybe I could point to research paper that they could go and read and so on. One thing that's changed is that the research that happens in AI today gets turned into products very very rapidly. So the kind of the stuff that you use when you go to Google or Open AI or Anthropic or whoever else is actually very very close to the frontier of what's possible anywhere in the world. So in that sense, pretty much what you're experiencing is what we're experiencing.
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Speaker 1: Having said that, except you know how to interrogate in a way that we don't, right.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, perhaps, And also I spend a lot of time actually using this stuff. Most people might be using it to the extent that it helps their personaliz their careers, But it's my job to interrogate it, as you were saying.
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Speaker 1: And I think that's an important point because when we talked before this, you mentioned that for the last couple of years you viewed yourself as a builder, and now you've described the feeling as of surfing.
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Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I mean, I think the surfing has been around for a long time actually, So what I mean by surfing is that the sea is tumultuous and there's waves of innovation that come. And I see my role as being one of a surfer, where I have to be leaning just enough into the future to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into the abyss, and so so much of the job is to keep track of what's going on and to push just a little bit. And going back to your earlier question, I think you know, most people in the audience, I'm sure, have used chat bots and image generators and so on, and that's something that we're familiar with. Earlier we heard about agentic commerce and agentic kind of chat experiences. I think one thing that perhaps is less familiar for wider audience is these people still use the word agentic for them, but it's a slightly different concept where an AI is actually in control of a full computer, and it acts on your behalf with your credentials, possibly for hours or days on a task that you set it.
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Speaker 1: So it's the open flow revolution exactly.
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Speaker 2: So open claw really kicked this off. Anthropic now has claud code, open Ai has OPENINGI codecs, Google has anti gravity. So these cysts stems tend to start from a perspective of hey, this is an AI that writes code for you, but it's pretty clear that this is going to go on to do much more than just coding, and will soon do all kinds of information work for you, like analyzing your finances, sending emails, organizing your calendar, creating documents, making spreadsheets, writing code, shopping, etc. Etc. And obviously there's people who are involved in building that technology, but there's also an element of rewiring yourself to figure out how to use that technology in a way that makes you effective of whatever your job is. Now, as AI researchers, we sit in this mind bending space of using the technology that I just described to build the technology that I described. So we use those systems to build those and that gets a bit kind of meta. But that's the thing that kind of where I'm experiencing right now.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you built something which now has emergent capabilities that you're trying to understand, So you don't understand all the capabilities of the thing that you build, which is mind bending.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: That characteristic has been around for a long time, though, so I would say for the past ten fifteen years, perhaps more. We're kind of used to building things that we don't fully understand. But it's not as scary as I think most people think it to be because as humans, I think we're very comfortable with interacting with other humans, and we don't fully understand other humans, right, So society works through systems of trust, through communication and so on, and it's the same with these AI systems. We don't fully know what they can or cannot do. We understand the mechanics of it, but we don't know the capabilities. But one thing that is new is this idea of self improvement. So in the past, yes, we humans build systems that did cool things, but we didn't really fully understand what they were. But now we're in a realm where we build systems and those systems can continue to work on themselves. They can continue to change their capabilities. In fact, we want them to continuously change their capabilities, so as researchers, our jobs become slightly more like social scientists almost or like or anthropologists, where you're kind of measuring and steering the evolution of complex system or a society.
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Speaker 1: You've described your own work as creative, I think, and I know you're also an artist. What can we learn from your creative process in terms of how you build and interact with AI systems. What can we extrapolate from that about the future of human creativity? Right?
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Speaker 2: Okay, I mean future of human creativity is super So I can only share my own personal experience. I have been really struck by how much my job has changed in the.
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Speaker 1: Past couple of years.
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Speaker 2: Careers obviously normally change as you get more senior, but I'm talking about something different. The nature of the job has profoundly changed, I would say at least three or four times in the past three or four years, and the time span between the changes has only decreased. So, you know, there was the year before deep learning. Then there was the time between deep learning and chat GPT that was about ten years than between chat GPT and maybe two years ago that was like two or three years. Then there was a year when you know, the tech was becoming much more public. Then just since the beginning of this year with open claw, that's been two or three months ago, and now the capabilities keep going up and up each one of these moments. As a practitioner, as a researcher, I basically had to completely set aside my previous tool set and pick up a new tool set in order to continue my job. So imagine if I was a carpenter or an artist, without exaggeration, it would be like, you know, putting away all of your brushes and then moving to photography right as a medium, That's happened three or four times, and I think that there is no indication that that's going to stop. I think as I fully expect my job to transform again in those ways. I suspect many other professions will feel this too, with a bit of a time delay. So we're super aggressively using these ais to redefine our own jobs in AI, and I suspect other professions will feel the same.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think many people feel like if I'm not up to date and using the later suite of AI tools, I'm ineviator being left behind, which is kind of a bad feeling. Obviously, you're at Deep Mind, which is basically building the future, but you're also in a race with Claude, with Anthropic and with open AI, And so how does that kind of three way race? What kind of X factors that add to your work?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, one thing is when when you're in a competitive environment and you're trying to be at the forefront, you end up working with very immature technologies. So one key characteristic of my experience of these things is that I'm constantly working with broken tools. Like, none of these things work as well as I would want, and it's partly my job to make them better. I think for everyone else there's probably a luxury of being slightly further behind and therefore using more mature versions of these tools. And to a large extent, my role in this transformation is to help things progress fast and in the right direction. But for many people in this room, I think these are ultimately just tools meant to serve a purpose which often has you know, social value, or commercial value, or human value. So I think there should definitely be less anxiety than say I have, because you know, at the end of the day, it's just a tool that's going to serve whatever customer base or client base you already have. But yeah, the competition is pretty intense, and there is that intensity I think traditionally has always gotten a little bit simplified as it comes into the world because there's one hundred things going on right now. Nobody knows which one's going to be the right way to go. But eventually, gradually we will find out what the winning patterns are and then they will kind of percolate through society in a much more manageable way, I imagine.
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Speaker 1: And where do you fall on debate about you know, is there something innately human about being able to make a very moving film or is that just an next frontier to cross the AI?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I caught the end of that previous conversation. I think it's super valid. I agree that the AI systems that we have today are not capable of kind of creating those emotional connections that I say with a kind of commercial or products or pragmatic lens. So right now we have AI artifacts, you know, literally like Gemini three or you know, mid Journey or whatever, and I agree that these things are not plugged in to the real world and are not enough to make that emotional connection. But if I put on my scientist hat up, I don't see any fundamental blocker to a future system understanding the complexities of human emotion and the zeitgeist, as an earlier speaker mentioned, in order to make those emotional moments happen. I think that can be done. I don't see any reason why it's different to solving a mathematical problem, or writing a piece of poetry that mimics a certain style, or reading a book and kind of getting the gist of that book. I think it's doable. There's on this topic. There's there's a there's a fantastic article that I always recommend is written by a guy Aaron Hertzman, who works at Adobe, and it's an article called can Computers Create Art? And he he concludes that ultimately the point of art is social is like two entities kind of communicating something within each other, and we just haven't set up computers to do social acts yet. They're kind of doing interesting visual acts, but they're not social acts. If they get embedded in society to the extend that they're doing that, I think at that point we will start feeling like they're doing kind of emotional work.
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Speaker 1: Ali ISLAMI thank you when we come back a conversation about the power of technology and media to change culture even under fire. We talk a lot on this show about protecting your data, especially in the age of AI, and how scary it can be when it's breached. I want to tell you today about NordVPN, which really covers all the bases when it comes to privacy. I travel a lot, and I use Wi Fi when I'm flying all the time, and NordVPN makes me confident in no matter where I am in the world or the sky for that matter, my private details like bank information, passwords, and online identity is safe. And it's also possible to switch on virtual location, which allows you to save money by buying flights and hotels, or subscriptions or even streaming soccer or football as I like to call it from other countries at a cheaper price. And NordVPN doesn't slow you down. It has super fast internet speed, no buffering or lagging while streaming. It is premium cybersecurity for the price of one cup of coffee per month. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN dot com slash tech stuff. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two year plan and there's no risk with Nord's thirty day money back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box so started, Thank you, Thank you for being here today. Ali is obviously building technology which is driving creative industries. You I think that anybody I'd ever met in my life have harnessed technology to drive culture. You're the author of a book called Radio Free Afghanistan. But you've had this remarkable journey of both using radio, television and most recently WhatsApp to intervene in culture. But start at the beginning and your return to Afghanistan after leaving as a boy in two thousand and two and why radio.
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Speaker 3: We went back.
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Speaker 4: Because the country had been taken over by the Americans and the Allies and we thought there was an opportunity to set up a media business. And we started off with a radio station because at the time most people didn't have electricity, They certainly didn't have television sets, and radio was sort of It's probably perhaps the safest media platform because you need batteries. Everyone has a radio set. It's easy to operate, it's cheap to operate, and we felt it's a simple business we can do on a part time basis continue to reside in Australia and.
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Speaker 3: That wasn't the case.
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Speaker 4: And that allowed us them to build TV stations and other platforms and then move beyond Afghanistan to the rest of the Middle East, Central Asia, then eventually Africa.
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Speaker 1: What was the moment when you realized the radio station would require you to roofs Afghanistan full time and become kind of the center of your life.
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Speaker 4: Well, I think because we had music which people were not really accustomed to after five years of the Taliban, and it was literally people showing up at our door to kill us. And we had this very simple office and a residential dwelling with no security. And during the trials we had this thing that let's do this for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. It spread, the news spread very quickly, and all of a sudden I got a call that you have to show up in Carbles.
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Speaker 3: I had to fly back.
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Speaker 4: Immediately to meet the president, well to meet everyone, I mean to get extra security. And there were times actually I had to call people into the building and to explain to them what the intention of the radio station was and why we had music, and why music was important.
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Speaker 3: It was actually to calm people down.
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Speaker 4: And really that was sort of a it was a real eye opener in terms of people's reaction to anything new.
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Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because radio obviously feels like the oldest and most boring communication technology there is.
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Speaker 3: I mean, it's been around for we call it the cockroach of the media business. It never dies.
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Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean I think it's it's but it's fun because and then of course we learned very very quickly in terms of you know, how mady can be an agent of social change, how it can facilitate social change. But along the way, you're always going to have people opposed to it for whatever reason. And you know, we've gone you know, not just Afghanistan. We had a very you know, successful television network for Iran by satellite.
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Speaker 3: We went to Ethiopia.
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Speaker 4: We've done similar things in Iraq and Pakistan and India and along the way. And you know, we have this mutual friend, Tom Freston, who was one of the co founders of MTV, and he had a similar experience in the United States with MTV when he launched. So you're always going to have to detractors, but it's part of what you do.
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Speaker 1: Was there a moment with the radio station where you realized this is snowball that becomes so much bigger and more powerful than I ever could have imagined.
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Speaker 3: Well, you don't really think about it because it's yeah.
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Speaker 4: I usually quote my brother used to say that, you know, I'll always bite more than you can chew than chew like crazy. So for us, the twenty odd years that we set up these businesses, we were always too busy to reflect. It was only when I wrote the book that I had, you know, I had the opportunity to reflect on what we what we did.
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Speaker 3: And of course this was after the fall of the government, and then you know, you ask yourself was it for nought? Was it? Was it worthwhile?
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Speaker 4: But nonetheless it had the sort of desired impact that in terms of shaking this very young country, reconnecting it to the rest of the world, you know, helping develop music culture and so forth.
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Speaker 3: But it's it never stops.
00:28:46
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that that was it worth it or did it work?
00:28:49
Speaker 3: Question?
00:28:49
Speaker 1: But before that, I mean, you and I collaborated on a podcast called Afghan Star about the music game show that changed the country, which John Legend hosted. Talk about that television program and what it meant and why so many people risk their lives to appear on it and to work on it.
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Speaker 4: Well, I mean, of course, because the country had no music for five or six years, we felt, let's have a reality talent show and we called it the Afghan Star and it became very quickly the most successful program on our network in the country as a matter of fact, and people voted using texting basically early in the early days and eventually what's happened so forth, But it really because all of a sudden everyone felt that they could become a superstar. So we used to have perhaps some of the least talented people show up in the studios wanting to perform. This whole idea of role models, of heroes of superstars was sort of aarlien to people in Afghanistan in two thousand and two or two thousand and three, and this program achieved that.
00:29:58
Speaker 1: But us about this see in herat Airport. I mean, tell that story from beginning to end. Well, I'm twentieth ready off for Afghanistan.
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Speaker 4: Is that what it is, okay, So we had so it was an it was a show that we used to you know, going around this country and and identify, you know, young talented Afghans and they would the judges would go, the musicians would go, the production people would go, and and this very well known cleric who had a huge following was Adam and that this was not going to happen in the city of Herad, which borders Iran on the on the western side of the country, And they went from from one venue to another, and the mob would follow these people and they were all the contestants, the contestants, the judges, the production people, and they were petrified. So eventually they managed to to shoot the episode at the airport behind the gates. Nonetheless, they did what they needed to do, but it showed that and at that time we had lots of threats and and even attempted attacks against the performers as well as the judges. So they're always constantly in hiding. But that's one of the many, many experiences that our people had to deal with.
00:31:15
Speaker 1: How many seasons did that show run for.
00:31:18
Speaker 4: It ran from two thousand and five till two thousand and twenty.
00:31:25
Speaker 1: I think you told me once that you were always too nervous to watch it.
00:31:28
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, I mean it was always because every time they had the eventually we did it in house, which was easier, but we used to do it than rent a studio or do it in a hotel, and there would be always a group of people protesting, and there was always a lot of security.
00:31:49
Speaker 1: Why, I mean, why did you and your team take the risk?
00:31:55
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I mean, I don't know. I think that's ultimate.
00:32:00
Speaker 4: You have to ask what the what your consumers, what the audience demands. It was a popular program, you know, and and and you know, we talk about the Iran in terms of the support of the government, and we talk about Afghanistans for the Taliban usually, you know, and certainly in Afghanistan eighty five ninety percent of the population supported music entertainment programs. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to have entertainment. But the ten percent of fifteen percent they have guns, They're powerful, they're determined. So there's always this sort of tug of war between the conservative elements and you know, the ordinary public.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this big question of does culture change society, right and it looked for a long time. When you brought radio and television to Afghanistania, there's extraordinary engagement that in a sense you and the people of Afghanistan had given birth to a new Afghanistan. And then, of course the Taliban returned, and you mentioned questioning after that what in fact you achieved. But I mean, as you look at it today, is it a fire that you kindled. There's embers now, but that will rise again. Or the guns and politics in the end have the power to quash culture.
00:33:23
Speaker 4: Well, I think when I wrote the book, because I thought that that's it, that's the end.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: But you know, we continue.
00:33:32
Speaker 4: Obviously we have our programming is restricted in the sense that we can't have music and we can't have soap operas.
00:33:40
Speaker 3: But the country has changed.
00:33:43
Speaker 4: The majority of Afghanis were not born when the Taliban were in power in the nineteen nineties. The median ages eighteen and people use VPNs or people have satellite technology. You can't, you know, the genie's out of the bottle, and I think you can't. I mean technology allow people now to get what they want.
00:34:03
Speaker 1: Talk about deciding to continue with your operations after the Taliban returned what is the reality for your female journalists and anchors in Afghanistan today?
00:34:15
Speaker 3: Well, they continue.
00:34:16
Speaker 4: I mean we as a matter of fact, we have more female employees in our newsroom today than we did in twenty twenty one. They have to work where surgical masks to you know, to appear on television, but they could. They're on the field, they're gon't ask questions, they have TV programs, you know, they continue doing the good work that they did before the fall of the government. What's interesting is that this new Afghanistan is also changing the Taliban. The Taliban have returned to a new, changed Afghanistan and they have to adjust. And you have to remember that Taliban fighters are also quite young. They're in their early twenties. They use WhatsApp, they use technology, they're on Facebook. The sort of content they consume maybe different. But now in the cities in charge, the new Afghanistan is also changing them. But I think it was important for us to remain in the country because I think it's very difficult to report on facts, it's very difficult to continue to champion with its women's rights or human rights from the outside. And I think there's also this this I think I realized after two decades that you have to you have to evolve from within. I think imposing changes from the outside there's always going to be a short term remedy. And I think a country needs to evolve from within. And I think it's upon you know, people like us and other Afghans to change the country from within, I think, and that change is going to be sustainable ultimately.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: You won a major award in December of this year for two educational programs that you've led, one using radio in Gaza for the children's education there and another using WhatsApp and AI driven WhatsApp courses for education Afghanistan.
00:36:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we thought, well, we've got all these TV networks. We've got six or seven TV networks, we've got two radio networks, you know, twenty or thirty online platforms. We thought, why not use the inventory that we have to design education programs. As a matter of fact, it was in London I had lunch with Malala and she said, you know.
00:36:30
Speaker 3: We'd work with you.
00:36:32
Speaker 4: So we created this pilot and we had had some experience during COVID and we failed because it was difficult to design television education programs. So we brought in a bunch of experts and we've created these courses which sit across all the platforms online, on TV, on radio. It's called synth which means class. Initially we did biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics and we've got the subjects, but we're focused on the ten million students, in particular six million kids from the age from grades seven to twelve. And you have to remember girls cannot go to school, so and these programs have been unitsf calls it perhaps the most successful education program.
00:37:20
Speaker 3: That they have globally.
00:37:22
Speaker 4: But we do it at scale, so five million kids watch these programs on a weekly basis, and we've done based an inline assessment of these kids with NYU in seven provinces, eighteen hundred households, two and a half thousand kids, and the difference in terms of kids who watch the programs and kids who don't watch the programs range from forty percent to one hundred and thirty percent. If they get reminders and if they get tutored on WhatsApp, it's a two hundred percent improvement.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: So it's about a person tuting on WhatsApp or AI and WhatsApp.
00:37:55
Speaker 4: Well, initially it was a bunch of students tutoring girl on WhatsApp. But now we have a WhatsApp WhatsApp Ai chatbot. It's a chatbot AI chatbot that sits within WhatsApp because it's easier, and we have turned fifty thousand kids that use it, two hundred fifty thousand kids that use it, but tens of millions of queries and messages going back and forth. But the difference is between failing and learning. So it's it's it's not a solution, it's not you know, it goes certainly the other school, but it's it's a bridge between you know, a time when we have education and a time when hopefully we'll have education for girls. But at least in the in the entrum they're learning, which I think is very important for us as Afghans and and and you know, of course we were sort of one of the pioneers to use television and radio in the way that we use it today. We also took that know how for Gaza and Palaeside, but because people don't have access to mobile phones and television, we're using a radio program and we built in psychosocial programming and so forth. Messaging as well as educating these younger kids. And of course the reach is much, you know, it's more like one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy thousand kids on a weekly basis, but the impact has been significant. So it's it's a template that we can potentially take to other places around the world in terms of educating kids.
00:39:31
Speaker 1: So just to close final question for you, I mean, how have you taken all these platform technologies radio, television, WhatsApp and harness them to drive culture? And you know what can all of us here today learn from that?
00:39:46
Speaker 4: Well, I mean essentially, we're a content company and you have to create good content, right whether it's education programs or soap operas or reality TV, and you have to be platform agnostics. So we will use whether that we have at our disposal in terms of delivering.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: What we develop.
00:40:05
Speaker 4: And we have good creative people and we've succeeded in Ethiopia and South Asia, in the Middle East and of course Afghana sun which is our home country, which is important to us.
00:40:18
Speaker 3: So thank you, thanks us.
00:40:34
Speaker 1: For text stuff. I'm os Valosian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. He was executive produced by me Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Intertley makes this episode, and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate and review the podcast wherever you listen.
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. I'm os Valoshin. Today we're bringing you two conversations that I had last week at an event hosted by quilt dot Ai. And it was a pretty cool experience for me because the conversations took place on stage at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Back in eighteen twenty one, they dissected a mummy on the exact stage where I was speaking. Fifteen scientists attached the Institution of one Nobel Prizes, and not less than ten chemical elements were discovered here, including sodium and potassium. So I was in ridiculously good company, and I was there to interview two contemporary visionaries. The first is Ali Islami. He is a distinguished research scientist at Google's Deep Mind who built the prototype for is an ai search. Would be fair to say his work has changed the front page of the Internet.
00:01:06
Speaker 2: I see my role as being one of a surfer, where I have to be leaning just enough into the future to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into.
00:01:16
Speaker 3: Like the this.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: The second conversation I had was with Sad Masni, CEO of Mobi Group. He created the first privately owned radio and TV stations in Afghanistan and built media networks in Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, and India, and he continues to harness platform technologies like radio, TV and WhatsApp to drive culture in fascinating and powerful ways.
00:01:39
Speaker 4: Initially was a bunch of students tutoring girls on WhatsApp. Now we have a WhatsApp AI chatbot and we have turned fifty thousand kids that use it. It's a bridge between a time when we have education and a time hopefully we'll have education for girls.
00:01:55
Speaker 1: I hope you'll enjoy both conversations. So you might not know Ali's name, but you likely know his work because Ali, you built the prototype at DeepMind that became AI search at Google.
00:02:11
Speaker 4: Right.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you've used Google Search, you will have seen something called AI mode where you can kind of have a conversation with AI about the thing you're searching for. That started off about two years ago I think now where we had Gemini, which was our LLM, and you may not remember, but back then these ais they weren't really connected to the Internet, so you could ask them questions, but you couldn't ask them about local restaurants or recent news. So, yeah, we built this prototype that we called neural Google, as in like, how can we make Google like a neural network? And we connected Gemini to Google Search and that has now been rolled out and many people have used it. Yeah, so I was involved in kind of creating that.
00:02:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's kind of amazing because also for anyone here who's ever been turned down from a job, you were turned down for your first job at Google, and you went on to basically redesign the core product, right, Yeah, I.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: Forgot about that. That was a long long time ago. Yeah. So I I fell in love with computing when I was a teenager, like playing video games like so many other people, and learned how to code when I was in my teens and went on to actually study AI during my undergrad which was super uncommon back then. So in two thousand and five, I did an undergrad in AI, and yeah, I applied to work at Google, and due to my nationality I'm from Iran, I was told that, you know, there were some restrictions Terranians working at Google. That didn't work out, so I went on worked at a games company. Then I worked at Then I did a PhD, worked at Microsoft, and in twenty fourteen fifteen joined Google again. Thankfully the rules had changed or they didn't realize. I don't know what happened.
00:04:00
Speaker 1: But one of the things, I mean, growing up in Iran, this is a conference about AI and creativity. I mean, it wasn't AI, but in your bedroom you were you know, you were building websites for powerboat owners in Florida. In a sense, you were using technology to travel the world and to create alternative worlds for yourself as a child.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that was one of the things that I found super attractive as a teenager. You know, I was in Iran on my computer and through the internet. It felt really like I was flying around right. I could be in any conversation anywhere in the world. I made friends with people from all across the world. There was a guy I became friends with, Trevor. He actually messaged me just last week out of the blue, and him and I we would make websites, we would get find clients, and I never met him. I still haven't met him. This is like more than twenty years on now, and it felt like a superpower and writing software even back then, I could feel like it was a superpower because I didn't have to get permission from anyone. You didn't need material resources even as a child. Basically, as long as your brain could work, you could do whatever you wanted, and that's how everything kicked off.
00:05:15
Speaker 1: You mentioned that you sort of started your career or your study of AI when it was very unpopular field. There was the kind of long AI winter where nobody really believed it would happen. And I think you referenced you didn't believe in your lifetime that you may never see AI be able to distinguish between a cat and a dog in your lifetime. Safe to say it can now, But with your doubts about whether the field would actually take off, what made you want to pursue it before it was the hottest thing in the world.
00:05:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think there was definitely a bit of luck involved. So during those early years I learned how to code fairly proficiently, and by the time I came to go to university to study I loved technology and computer science enough to know I wanted to be in that field. But it felt like I wouldn't be learning much new things if I just went on to study computer science. So I looked around and I thought to myself, Okay, what could I study, which is like computer science but is beyond computer science and artificial intelligence felt really interesting because it had computer science, but it also had philosophy, It had theory of mind, it had a bit of neuroscience, and I thought that that might be a fun thing to spend, you know, a couple of years thinking about. But the analogy I make is back then it felt like studying teleportation feels to us today. It's like cool idea in theory, but we've never seen anything like teleportation. Probably it's not going to happen, but yeah, sure, if you want to go and study that, go ahead. So that's what AI felt like when I started, and even and even when I did my PhD, I genuinely didn't think that I would have a career in this field. It felt like an intellectual curiosity.
00:07:09
Speaker 3: So what changed.
00:07:10
Speaker 2: Well, actually, during my PhD there was this kind of sequence of scientific breakthroughs that people at the time called deep learning. We don't use that word so much anymore, but deep learning, which is basically a statistical technique, came to the fore and people started realizing that this thing has legs, and very gradually, but at the same time very rapidly, people who were in the know kind of for the first time in fifty sixty years, started thinking, oh, hang on a second, it feels like we've cracked how we might be able to make progress in this field. And that was when I kind of switched from oh, this is kind of a fun thing to do, but realistically, I'm going to go and do startup, So are going to work in a bank or something, to oh, hang on, I happen to be within the group of like three hundred and four hundred people in the world who know what this thing is about and what its potential is. And so yeah, towards the end of my pH she was pretty clear that this is going to be big, and so I decided to stay. I did a post TALC and then going school.
00:08:21
Speaker 1: I mean, do you it's interesting you mentioned like twenty years ago it would have been like, say, I'm going to study teleportation. And curiously, if you agree with my kind of hypothesis in my introductory remarks about this idea that if the Royal Institution founders could see what's happening today, their minds would be completely blown. And yet there's this cultural feeling of despair or darkness.
00:08:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I mean I am The topic of my PhD was computer vision specifically, so it's how do we get computers to see the meaning in images? Right, That's one way of defining it. So when I look at the scene, I can understand that I'm in a circle the room and there's people. I understand the context. Even ten years ago, if you were to show this photo to a computer, the most I could say is that this pixel has read. This pixel is black. But otherwise it was basically mis drive. It was a mystery to the computer itself. And yeah, as I mentioned to you earlier, I as an expert in the field, I genuinely didn't think that we would make meaningful progress on this problem in my lifetime. I felt so out of reach because we had no clue how to proceed. And even to me, if you had, if you were to show me what we can do today ten years ago, I ninety nine percent would not have believed.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: You would have said, this is like impossible. So you, I mean, you sit in many ways at the cold face of the future. What are you seeing your when you're working in deep mind, when you're interacting with AI, when you're building it. What are you seeing the rest of us should know?
00:09:59
Speaker 2: Right, Well, Well, one thing that's really changed is ten years ago, when we were doing research, it really felt like it was separate from the real world. So, you know, when friends or family would ask me, what are you working on? What do you see that we should know about? I would be describing something that, you know, wordly abstract. It was abstract, it was in the lab, and you know, maybe I could point to research paper that they could go and read and so on. One thing that's changed is that the research that happens in AI today gets turned into products very very rapidly. So the kind of the stuff that you use when you go to Google or Open AI or Anthropic or whoever else is actually very very close to the frontier of what's possible anywhere in the world. So in that sense, pretty much what you're experiencing is what we're experiencing.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: Having said that, except you know how to interrogate in a way that we don't, right.
00:11:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, perhaps, And also I spend a lot of time actually using this stuff. Most people might be using it to the extent that it helps their personaliz their careers, But it's my job to interrogate it, as you were saying.
00:11:14
Speaker 1: And I think that's an important point because when we talked before this, you mentioned that for the last couple of years you viewed yourself as a builder, and now you've described the feeling as of surfing.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I mean, I think the surfing has been around for a long time actually, So what I mean by surfing is that the sea is tumultuous and there's waves of innovation that come. And I see my role as being one of a surfer, where I have to be leaning just enough into the future to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into the abyss, and so so much of the job is to keep track of what's going on and to push just a little bit. And going back to your earlier question, I think you know, most people in the audience, I'm sure, have used chat bots and image generators and so on, and that's something that we're familiar with. Earlier we heard about agentic commerce and agentic kind of chat experiences. I think one thing that perhaps is less familiar for wider audience is these people still use the word agentic for them, but it's a slightly different concept where an AI is actually in control of a full computer, and it acts on your behalf with your credentials, possibly for hours or days on a task that you set it.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: So it's the open flow revolution exactly.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: So open claw really kicked this off. Anthropic now has claud code, open Ai has OPENINGI codecs, Google has anti gravity. So these cysts stems tend to start from a perspective of hey, this is an AI that writes code for you, but it's pretty clear that this is going to go on to do much more than just coding, and will soon do all kinds of information work for you, like analyzing your finances, sending emails, organizing your calendar, creating documents, making spreadsheets, writing code, shopping, etc. Etc. And obviously there's people who are involved in building that technology, but there's also an element of rewiring yourself to figure out how to use that technology in a way that makes you effective of whatever your job is. Now, as AI researchers, we sit in this mind bending space of using the technology that I just described to build the technology that I described. So we use those systems to build those and that gets a bit kind of meta. But that's the thing that kind of where I'm experiencing right now.
00:14:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you built something which now has emergent capabilities that you're trying to understand, So you don't understand all the capabilities of the thing that you build, which is mind bending.
00:14:21
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:14:23
Speaker 2: That characteristic has been around for a long time, though, so I would say for the past ten fifteen years, perhaps more. We're kind of used to building things that we don't fully understand. But it's not as scary as I think most people think it to be because as humans, I think we're very comfortable with interacting with other humans, and we don't fully understand other humans, right, So society works through systems of trust, through communication and so on, and it's the same with these AI systems. We don't fully know what they can or cannot do. We understand the mechanics of it, but we don't know the capabilities. But one thing that is new is this idea of self improvement. So in the past, yes, we humans build systems that did cool things, but we didn't really fully understand what they were. But now we're in a realm where we build systems and those systems can continue to work on themselves. They can continue to change their capabilities. In fact, we want them to continuously change their capabilities, so as researchers, our jobs become slightly more like social scientists almost or like or anthropologists, where you're kind of measuring and steering the evolution of complex system or a society.
00:15:40
Speaker 1: You've described your own work as creative, I think, and I know you're also an artist. What can we learn from your creative process in terms of how you build and interact with AI systems. What can we extrapolate from that about the future of human creativity? Right?
00:15:57
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean future of human creativity is super So I can only share my own personal experience. I have been really struck by how much my job has changed in the.
00:16:11
Speaker 1: Past couple of years.
00:16:14
Speaker 2: Careers obviously normally change as you get more senior, but I'm talking about something different. The nature of the job has profoundly changed, I would say at least three or four times in the past three or four years, and the time span between the changes has only decreased. So, you know, there was the year before deep learning. Then there was the time between deep learning and chat GPT that was about ten years than between chat GPT and maybe two years ago that was like two or three years. Then there was a year when you know, the tech was becoming much more public. Then just since the beginning of this year with open claw, that's been two or three months ago, and now the capabilities keep going up and up each one of these moments. As a practitioner, as a researcher, I basically had to completely set aside my previous tool set and pick up a new tool set in order to continue my job. So imagine if I was a carpenter or an artist, without exaggeration, it would be like, you know, putting away all of your brushes and then moving to photography right as a medium, That's happened three or four times, and I think that there is no indication that that's going to stop. I think as I fully expect my job to transform again in those ways. I suspect many other professions will feel this too, with a bit of a time delay. So we're super aggressively using these ais to redefine our own jobs in AI, and I suspect other professions will feel the same.
00:17:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think many people feel like if I'm not up to date and using the later suite of AI tools, I'm ineviator being left behind, which is kind of a bad feeling. Obviously, you're at Deep Mind, which is basically building the future, but you're also in a race with Claude, with Anthropic and with open AI, And so how does that kind of three way race? What kind of X factors that add to your work?
00:18:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, one thing is when when you're in a competitive environment and you're trying to be at the forefront, you end up working with very immature technologies. So one key characteristic of my experience of these things is that I'm constantly working with broken tools. Like, none of these things work as well as I would want, and it's partly my job to make them better. I think for everyone else there's probably a luxury of being slightly further behind and therefore using more mature versions of these tools. And to a large extent, my role in this transformation is to help things progress fast and in the right direction. But for many people in this room, I think these are ultimately just tools meant to serve a purpose which often has you know, social value, or commercial value, or human value. So I think there should definitely be less anxiety than say I have, because you know, at the end of the day, it's just a tool that's going to serve whatever customer base or client base you already have. But yeah, the competition is pretty intense, and there is that intensity I think traditionally has always gotten a little bit simplified as it comes into the world because there's one hundred things going on right now. Nobody knows which one's going to be the right way to go. But eventually, gradually we will find out what the winning patterns are and then they will kind of percolate through society in a much more manageable way, I imagine.
00:20:05
Speaker 1: And where do you fall on debate about you know, is there something innately human about being able to make a very moving film or is that just an next frontier to cross the AI?
00:20:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I caught the end of that previous conversation. I think it's super valid. I agree that the AI systems that we have today are not capable of kind of creating those emotional connections that I say with a kind of commercial or products or pragmatic lens. So right now we have AI artifacts, you know, literally like Gemini three or you know, mid Journey or whatever, and I agree that these things are not plugged in to the real world and are not enough to make that emotional connection. But if I put on my scientist hat up, I don't see any fundamental blocker to a future system understanding the complexities of human emotion and the zeitgeist, as an earlier speaker mentioned, in order to make those emotional moments happen. I think that can be done. I don't see any reason why it's different to solving a mathematical problem, or writing a piece of poetry that mimics a certain style, or reading a book and kind of getting the gist of that book. I think it's doable. There's on this topic. There's there's a there's a fantastic article that I always recommend is written by a guy Aaron Hertzman, who works at Adobe, and it's an article called can Computers Create Art? And he he concludes that ultimately the point of art is social is like two entities kind of communicating something within each other, and we just haven't set up computers to do social acts yet. They're kind of doing interesting visual acts, but they're not social acts. If they get embedded in society to the extend that they're doing that, I think at that point we will start feeling like they're doing kind of emotional work.
00:22:19
Speaker 1: Ali ISLAMI thank you when we come back a conversation about the power of technology and media to change culture even under fire. We talk a lot on this show about protecting your data, especially in the age of AI, and how scary it can be when it's breached. I want to tell you today about NordVPN, which really covers all the bases when it comes to privacy. I travel a lot, and I use Wi Fi when I'm flying all the time, and NordVPN makes me confident in no matter where I am in the world or the sky for that matter, my private details like bank information, passwords, and online identity is safe. And it's also possible to switch on virtual location, which allows you to save money by buying flights and hotels, or subscriptions or even streaming soccer or football as I like to call it from other countries at a cheaper price. And NordVPN doesn't slow you down. It has super fast internet speed, no buffering or lagging while streaming. It is premium cybersecurity for the price of one cup of coffee per month. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN dot com slash tech stuff. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two year plan and there's no risk with Nord's thirty day money back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box so started, Thank you, Thank you for being here today. Ali is obviously building technology which is driving creative industries. You I think that anybody I'd ever met in my life have harnessed technology to drive culture. You're the author of a book called Radio Free Afghanistan. But you've had this remarkable journey of both using radio, television and most recently WhatsApp to intervene in culture. But start at the beginning and your return to Afghanistan after leaving as a boy in two thousand and two and why radio.
00:24:37
Speaker 3: We went back.
00:24:38
Speaker 4: Because the country had been taken over by the Americans and the Allies and we thought there was an opportunity to set up a media business. And we started off with a radio station because at the time most people didn't have electricity, They certainly didn't have television sets, and radio was sort of It's probably perhaps the safest media platform because you need batteries. Everyone has a radio set. It's easy to operate, it's cheap to operate, and we felt it's a simple business we can do on a part time basis continue to reside in Australia and.
00:25:17
Speaker 3: That wasn't the case.
00:25:18
Speaker 4: And that allowed us them to build TV stations and other platforms and then move beyond Afghanistan to the rest of the Middle East, Central Asia, then eventually Africa.
00:25:30
Speaker 1: What was the moment when you realized the radio station would require you to roofs Afghanistan full time and become kind of the center of your life.
00:25:39
Speaker 4: Well, I think because we had music which people were not really accustomed to after five years of the Taliban, and it was literally people showing up at our door to kill us. And we had this very simple office and a residential dwelling with no security. And during the trials we had this thing that let's do this for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. It spread, the news spread very quickly, and all of a sudden I got a call that you have to show up in Carbles.
00:26:13
Speaker 3: I had to fly back.
00:26:14
Speaker 4: Immediately to meet the president, well to meet everyone, I mean to get extra security. And there were times actually I had to call people into the building and to explain to them what the intention of the radio station was and why we had music, and why music was important.
00:26:30
Speaker 3: It was actually to calm people down.
00:26:34
Speaker 4: And really that was sort of a it was a real eye opener in terms of people's reaction to anything new.
00:26:44
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because radio obviously feels like the oldest and most boring communication technology there is.
00:26:50
Speaker 3: I mean, it's been around for we call it the cockroach of the media business. It never dies.
00:26:56
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean I think it's it's but it's fun because and then of course we learned very very quickly in terms of you know, how mady can be an agent of social change, how it can facilitate social change. But along the way, you're always going to have people opposed to it for whatever reason. And you know, we've gone you know, not just Afghanistan. We had a very you know, successful television network for Iran by satellite.
00:27:26
Speaker 3: We went to Ethiopia.
00:27:27
Speaker 4: We've done similar things in Iraq and Pakistan and India and along the way. And you know, we have this mutual friend, Tom Freston, who was one of the co founders of MTV, and he had a similar experience in the United States with MTV when he launched. So you're always going to have to detractors, but it's part of what you do.
00:27:49
Speaker 1: Was there a moment with the radio station where you realized this is snowball that becomes so much bigger and more powerful than I ever could have imagined.
00:27:57
Speaker 3: Well, you don't really think about it because it's yeah.
00:28:00
Speaker 4: I usually quote my brother used to say that, you know, I'll always bite more than you can chew than chew like crazy. So for us, the twenty odd years that we set up these businesses, we were always too busy to reflect. It was only when I wrote the book that I had, you know, I had the opportunity to reflect on what we what we did.
00:28:20
Speaker 3: And of course this was after the fall of the government, and then you know, you ask yourself was it for nought? Was it? Was it worthwhile?
00:28:27
Speaker 4: But nonetheless it had the sort of desired impact that in terms of shaking this very young country, reconnecting it to the rest of the world, you know, helping develop music culture and so forth.
00:28:43
Speaker 3: But it's it never stops.
00:28:46
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that that was it worth it or did it work?
00:28:49
Speaker 3: Question?
00:28:49
Speaker 1: But before that, I mean, you and I collaborated on a podcast called Afghan Star about the music game show that changed the country, which John Legend hosted. Talk about that television program and what it meant and why so many people risk their lives to appear on it and to work on it.
00:29:07
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, of course, because the country had no music for five or six years, we felt, let's have a reality talent show and we called it the Afghan Star and it became very quickly the most successful program on our network in the country as a matter of fact, and people voted using texting basically early in the early days and eventually what's happened so forth, But it really because all of a sudden everyone felt that they could become a superstar. So we used to have perhaps some of the least talented people show up in the studios wanting to perform. This whole idea of role models, of heroes of superstars was sort of aarlien to people in Afghanistan in two thousand and two or two thousand and three, and this program achieved that.
00:29:58
Speaker 1: But us about this see in herat Airport. I mean, tell that story from beginning to end. Well, I'm twentieth ready off for Afghanistan.
00:30:06
Speaker 4: Is that what it is, okay, So we had so it was an it was a show that we used to you know, going around this country and and identify, you know, young talented Afghans and they would the judges would go, the musicians would go, the production people would go, and and this very well known cleric who had a huge following was Adam and that this was not going to happen in the city of Herad, which borders Iran on the on the western side of the country, And they went from from one venue to another, and the mob would follow these people and they were all the contestants, the contestants, the judges, the production people, and they were petrified. So eventually they managed to to shoot the episode at the airport behind the gates. Nonetheless, they did what they needed to do, but it showed that and at that time we had lots of threats and and even attempted attacks against the performers as well as the judges. So they're always constantly in hiding. But that's one of the many, many experiences that our people had to deal with.
00:31:15
Speaker 1: How many seasons did that show run for.
00:31:18
Speaker 4: It ran from two thousand and five till two thousand and twenty.
00:31:25
Speaker 1: I think you told me once that you were always too nervous to watch it.
00:31:28
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, I mean it was always because every time they had the eventually we did it in house, which was easier, but we used to do it than rent a studio or do it in a hotel, and there would be always a group of people protesting, and there was always a lot of security.
00:31:49
Speaker 1: Why, I mean, why did you and your team take the risk?
00:31:55
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I mean, I don't know. I think that's ultimate.
00:32:00
Speaker 4: You have to ask what the what your consumers, what the audience demands. It was a popular program, you know, and and and you know, we talk about the Iran in terms of the support of the government, and we talk about Afghanistans for the Taliban usually, you know, and certainly in Afghanistan eighty five ninety percent of the population supported music entertainment programs. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to have entertainment. But the ten percent of fifteen percent they have guns, They're powerful, they're determined. So there's always this sort of tug of war between the conservative elements and you know, the ordinary public.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this big question of does culture change society, right and it looked for a long time. When you brought radio and television to Afghanistania, there's extraordinary engagement that in a sense you and the people of Afghanistan had given birth to a new Afghanistan. And then, of course the Taliban returned, and you mentioned questioning after that what in fact you achieved. But I mean, as you look at it today, is it a fire that you kindled. There's embers now, but that will rise again. Or the guns and politics in the end have the power to quash culture.
00:33:23
Speaker 4: Well, I think when I wrote the book, because I thought that that's it, that's the end.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: But you know, we continue.
00:33:32
Speaker 4: Obviously we have our programming is restricted in the sense that we can't have music and we can't have soap operas.
00:33:40
Speaker 3: But the country has changed.
00:33:43
Speaker 4: The majority of Afghanis were not born when the Taliban were in power in the nineteen nineties. The median ages eighteen and people use VPNs or people have satellite technology. You can't, you know, the genie's out of the bottle, and I think you can't. I mean technology allow people now to get what they want.
00:34:03
Speaker 1: Talk about deciding to continue with your operations after the Taliban returned what is the reality for your female journalists and anchors in Afghanistan today?
00:34:15
Speaker 3: Well, they continue.
00:34:16
Speaker 4: I mean we as a matter of fact, we have more female employees in our newsroom today than we did in twenty twenty one. They have to work where surgical masks to you know, to appear on television, but they could. They're on the field, they're gon't ask questions, they have TV programs, you know, they continue doing the good work that they did before the fall of the government. What's interesting is that this new Afghanistan is also changing the Taliban. The Taliban have returned to a new, changed Afghanistan and they have to adjust. And you have to remember that Taliban fighters are also quite young. They're in their early twenties. They use WhatsApp, they use technology, they're on Facebook. The sort of content they consume maybe different. But now in the cities in charge, the new Afghanistan is also changing them. But I think it was important for us to remain in the country because I think it's very difficult to report on facts, it's very difficult to continue to champion with its women's rights or human rights from the outside. And I think there's also this this I think I realized after two decades that you have to you have to evolve from within. I think imposing changes from the outside there's always going to be a short term remedy. And I think a country needs to evolve from within. And I think it's upon you know, people like us and other Afghans to change the country from within, I think, and that change is going to be sustainable ultimately.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: You won a major award in December of this year for two educational programs that you've led, one using radio in Gaza for the children's education there and another using WhatsApp and AI driven WhatsApp courses for education Afghanistan.
00:36:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we thought, well, we've got all these TV networks. We've got six or seven TV networks, we've got two radio networks, you know, twenty or thirty online platforms. We thought, why not use the inventory that we have to design education programs. As a matter of fact, it was in London I had lunch with Malala and she said, you know.
00:36:30
Speaker 3: We'd work with you.
00:36:32
Speaker 4: So we created this pilot and we had had some experience during COVID and we failed because it was difficult to design television education programs. So we brought in a bunch of experts and we've created these courses which sit across all the platforms online, on TV, on radio. It's called synth which means class. Initially we did biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics and we've got the subjects, but we're focused on the ten million students, in particular six million kids from the age from grades seven to twelve. And you have to remember girls cannot go to school, so and these programs have been unitsf calls it perhaps the most successful education program.
00:37:20
Speaker 3: That they have globally.
00:37:22
Speaker 4: But we do it at scale, so five million kids watch these programs on a weekly basis, and we've done based an inline assessment of these kids with NYU in seven provinces, eighteen hundred households, two and a half thousand kids, and the difference in terms of kids who watch the programs and kids who don't watch the programs range from forty percent to one hundred and thirty percent. If they get reminders and if they get tutored on WhatsApp, it's a two hundred percent improvement.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: So it's about a person tuting on WhatsApp or AI and WhatsApp.
00:37:55
Speaker 4: Well, initially it was a bunch of students tutoring girl on WhatsApp. But now we have a WhatsApp WhatsApp Ai chatbot. It's a chatbot AI chatbot that sits within WhatsApp because it's easier, and we have turned fifty thousand kids that use it, two hundred fifty thousand kids that use it, but tens of millions of queries and messages going back and forth. But the difference is between failing and learning. So it's it's it's not a solution, it's not you know, it goes certainly the other school, but it's it's a bridge between you know, a time when we have education and a time when hopefully we'll have education for girls. But at least in the in the entrum they're learning, which I think is very important for us as Afghans and and and you know, of course we were sort of one of the pioneers to use television and radio in the way that we use it today. We also took that know how for Gaza and Palaeside, but because people don't have access to mobile phones and television, we're using a radio program and we built in psychosocial programming and so forth. Messaging as well as educating these younger kids. And of course the reach is much, you know, it's more like one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy thousand kids on a weekly basis, but the impact has been significant. So it's it's a template that we can potentially take to other places around the world in terms of educating kids.
00:39:31
Speaker 1: So just to close final question for you, I mean, how have you taken all these platform technologies radio, television, WhatsApp and harness them to drive culture? And you know what can all of us here today learn from that?
00:39:46
Speaker 4: Well, I mean essentially, we're a content company and you have to create good content, right whether it's education programs or soap operas or reality TV, and you have to be platform agnostics. So we will use whether that we have at our disposal in terms of delivering.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: What we develop.
00:40:05
Speaker 4: And we have good creative people and we've succeeded in Ethiopia and South Asia, in the Middle East and of course Afghana sun which is our home country, which is important to us.
00:40:18
Speaker 3: So thank you, thanks us.
00:40:34
Speaker 1: For text stuff. I'm os Valosian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. He was executive produced by me Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Intertley makes this episode, and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate and review the podcast wherever you listen.
