The Spectator podcast

Can Britain ever build its own Silicon Valley?

Dr Mike Lynch speaks to Fraser Nelson, Editor of The Spectator, about what Darktrace’s success tells us about Britain’s ability to nurture tech companies and float them here in Britain, why America does it just so well and whether we are seeing the beginnings of tech nationalism.

Listen to the full podcast here or read the transcript below.

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Fraser: Welcome to a special edition of The Spectator podcast, I'm Fraser Nelson. A few weeks ago, a company called Darktrace, put together by computer programmers in London and Cambridge, floated on the London Stock Exchange. It was valued at over two billion pounds. It was a pretty striking example of a British tech success, and shares jumped by 44 percent on the day of flotation in stark contrast to Deliveroo, perhaps a better known name, whose shares sank by 26 percent when it floated. So, what does the Darktrace success tell us about Britain's ability to nurture tech companies and float them here in Britain rather than sending them off to America? I'm delighted to be joined by the man behind Darktrace, Mike Lynch, the founder of Invoke Insights, which is kindly sponsoring this podcast. Mike, it's great to have you here at the Spectator office. Tell me about Darktrace. What does it do and why, given that it's not making any money, is it worth more than two billion pounds?

Mike: Well, what Darktrace does is cybersecurity. So, you probably come across the fact that every day businesses and governments are under attack from around the world. And the approach that people have taken in the past is to try and build a wall to keep everyone out. It doesn't work because in the modern world, everything is open and people are in. You have employees in every day, your customers connected to your systems. And so the question was, how do you actually defend something when you assume that the bad person is already in so the wall doesn't work anymore? And once the attacker has been in, you can never clear them out. And that's actually no different to our bodies. Our bodies don't work on the basis our skin is going to keep every infection out. That's why we have the immune system which walks around making sure that everything's going on the way it should. And to do that is very, very difficult. And they use technology based on artificial intelligence. So, it's a fundamental technology that they've invented and that allows Darktrace to do things that just haven't been possible up to now. And the real test of Darktrace is that when it goes into a large company and this company may have put all the locks on all the doors and all the windows in its digital world, 75 percent of the time, they still find something really nasty lurking in there. And that's the basis you have to work on now, there's probably something inside already.

Fraser: All right. So you compare it to the immune system. Does that mean you've got algorithms that basically check if everything's working correctly? And I guess like the immune system can spot irregular behaviour perhaps faster than a human could?

Mike: Yes. The amazing thing about your immune system is that it can differentiate between you and something else, even if it hasn't seen that something else before. So, when you're in the womb, your immune system learns self. And then when something comes in, even if it's never been seen before and starts doing things that it shouldn't, the immune system can spot that and fight back. It is truly a miraculous system that we have in our bodies right now.

Fraser: You've created a company along these base. You've let it go operationally, but you're still a big shareholder in it. But can you talk about how it was set up and the extent to which this is a British success story?

Mike: Yeah, it's a completely British success story. And I'm very pleased to say. The thing to understand about Britain is we have the most amazing science and technology base. We're second to none in the world when it comes to actual science.

Fraser: Second to none, including Silicon Valley?

Mike: Yes. One of the fascinating things is if you go out to Silicon Valley, how often the head of engineering of those great companies, is a Brit, you're not actually away from friends when you're in Silicon Valley. And, you know, you look at things like the number of Nobel Prizes and citations. Our scientific history in this country is phenomenal. What we've generally not been very good at is turning that into companies with large economic impact.

Fraser:  You're saying that the problem is that he should have been in Britain where they get sucked away.

Mike: Well, that's where we are now. But it the problem actually goes back. You know, if you remember C.P. Snow's book, The New Men from the 50s, he was talking about our cultural divide in the in the U.K. And that's very much what led to this difficulty where it was okay to be J.J. Thompson and research the atom, but God help that you actually use that to make a product. Well, that led to a situation when I started out where the idea of doing a start up or being an entrepreneur was actually something that was quite frowned on at university. And that's changed. And there's been lots of government interventions and now we have a phenomenal start up scene. We have lots of good mid-sized companies, and what we've got to do now is fixed a very large part of the process, which is how do we stop those companies when they've proved the technology? They are worth about 400 million and are getting bought, usually by an American acquirer. And then the benefit of that, which is often research that was funded by the British taxpayer, accrues elsewhere. Just this week we saw Cambridge Quantum bought by Honeywell. Now the government says quantum computing may be one of the most strategic technologies out there. And yet we've just lost our key company to America.

Fraser: But when you say lost it, I mean, that they haven't abducted the staff or anything like that. It's simply a change of ownership. And I wonder, to what extent does that ownership really matter? I mean, Shazam was... They were bought for 400 million, sold to Apple. Google bought deep mine for 500 million dollars, but those companies went on to flourish. Does it really matter in a globalised world who ultimately owns the shares?

Mike: Well, that's an argument I hear often in the U.K. and it's really because people don't understand how tech works. So, if you look at DeepMind, actually it hasn't flourished. You know, there's an ongoing argument now between DeepMind and Google, which is playing out in the press. You look at something like Solexa, which is the basis of gene sequencing for Illumina. What happens in reality when these things happen? It's different to many other businesses (where I think you're right) is that the central gravity of the management moves back to Silicon Valley. Over time what you generally get left with in the U.K. might be an R&D lab, but all of the decisions are made over there. I've seen this many times. I've sold companies. A good friend of mine who ran, for example, Yahoo in Europe, used to say that they often felt that they were involved in decision making less than a receptionist in Silicon Valley. And the reason this is important for the UK is if these companies were to continue growing here, not only would they be doing the R&D, but they be doing the marketing and the sales and those are the skills now that we need to add to our science base. We need to get that virtuous circle.

Fraser: So right right now, would you say I mean, if you look at Darktrace, I think two thirds of the staff are marketing and sales. Is that an area where Britain is underdeveloped compared to America?

Mike: We just don't have the experience because by the time the companies get to being world class and billion dollar companies they are in America. So, for example, the reason we could be so successful with Darktrace is that we ran a different model, which is very suited to the UK, where from our past companies we went and got the people that really knew how to do this. And we did a little bit of a sort of Spice Girls job of putting them together with the people that had done the amazing technology. And so you could actually create that business in the UK. It's difficult in the UK because in the Valley, when you find someone who's done some amazing technology, you can hit the Rolodex and you can get great marketing director and you can get someone who knows how to do customer service and all those things. We just don't have the depth of that. You know, if you look at fundamental tech businesses...the reason we're talking about Darktrace today is that it's such a rarity for it to be listed in the FTSE 100. If we can get these businesses to stay here, then the tax receipts come here. They train a whole new generation of people who will then (the way tech works) start more businesses here. And then that's before you get to things like national security and the strategic importance of tech in the modern world.

This is a relatively new argument to me. And you can hear the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was talking recently about a new kind of Cold War of tech. But the idea is creeping in. Also you have all these government committees as well. When it comes to cybersecurity, we need British companies in the same way that if you're buying defence, you might need to have British shipbuilding. The idea is if you're in a potential conflict situation, to be 100 percent sure of your suppliers. If we regard cyber warfare as a sort of form of, I suppose, quasi military endeavour, you can see why the same argument runs there. So is what Darktrace is doing... Could you regard this as critical to Britain's national digital infrastructure?

I think it's critical as a strategic technology. You know, it's just as important as jet engines are, for example, and the strategic value we put on Rolls-Royce as a company. But it's more than that. The way tech works is it's about bargaining. Remember the Huawei conversation? Well, let's just say for the sake of argument that one of our allies had wanted us to not use something because they were in dispute with someone and we weren't really in that fight. We didn't want to agree with that. What a difficulty is, unless you have a few chips at that negotiating table and they say, well, if you don't do what we say, we're going to stop you having access to this. You've got me in a position to say, well, let's not talk like that. But remember, we have this and you need this too. And in the modern world, at this level, there are strategic technologies that if you control them, you have a voice.

Fraser: But you don't want to be controlled by the government the way Huawei is? It has its strings pulled by the Chinese.

Mike: Not I'm not I'm not defending Huawei. I'm just saying that...wouldn't it be? Well, it's not just nice, it's crucial when those conversations break out that you're talking from a position of strength to be listened to. Let's take Arm, for example, probably the most important microprocessor business on the planet. Absolutely. So, you know, this is an area where I would say Britain's outperformed Silicon Valley in something key. If that is a British controlled asset and Britain is in an ability to say where that can and cannot be used that's a very powerful position. It also means that when there are debates about, you know, what technology is going to be used, where, what we can use and what we can't use with other partners, we also have something at the table. I would argue, Darktrace is another example of that. There's another company in the U.K. which is a private Graphcore, which is making the chips that power AI. Again, you know, absolutely world leading technology. Do we want that to be owned by a Chinese company?

Fraser: But you're talking about, I guess, the rise of tech nationalism in a way - the ability of countries to say, here are our chips - in your analogy - here are our chips on the table. And do you think that's because when the Huawei thing came along, it was a relatively new concept for a lot of people? What can you mean? What do you mean? We can't use the services of this company? I remember there were some people even in the intelligence community who were quite happy with Huawei to develop some part of the infrastructure, thinking that "look we can completely monitor this, it's not a problem". And it seemed to be a relatively new idea that this or that company was not to be trusted because of its eventual ownership. Can you see the rise of that sort of thing?

Mike: Well, I think it's... I think that that's one side of the conversation. The other side is the asset. So, you know, you may well not want to use a particular technology in your systems or you may be dealing with an ally that has a political position on that. You know, the point is that there are assets that you also need to control. For example, why do we have a Navy? Because we believe that that's an asset that is important for our sovereignty and our role in the world. The point here is that, you know, we were talking about sending gunboats to Jersey a few weeks ago, perhaps slightly more symbolic.

But the reality is, you know, in the modern technology driven, interconnected world, your aircraft carrier is Arm, it's Graphcore, it's Cambridge Quantum, it's Darktrace. And if you want to be able to ultimately make your own decisions and have sovereignty over your future in a technology driven world, you have to have a fortress. Now, an important thing here is we're not talking about attacking the free market. 99% percent of the time everything can just go forward as normal. You don't need to intercede. But there are certain things that are so fundamental to the future that we do have to keep an eye on them and we need to think a little bit differently in the U.K. So an interesting one is the NHS data debate. There's a lot of issues around this privacy and things like that, which are fine. But even when we get to the point where we decide that it's better that people are allowed to do research for that data to come up with great solutions, we don't think about it strategically. So, for example, what happens if that data goes to a university? Fair enough. They publish an academic paper, one gets to use it. They make a new drug or something. Great. What if it ends up in a company, in a foreign country where we haven't even put in a control that says if you use our data to make a product, when you sell it to the NHS, we want the best price. We just need to be thinking a little bit more strategically because the world is now controlled by technology. You know who tells us that A.I. is going to control the strategic importance of nations? The US president said. The president of China has said it. Mr. Putin himself has said it, so we need to be thinking a little bit differently; when we have these amazing crown jewels, how do we actually work with them?

Fraser: We're talking about effectively the tech industrial strategy, which the government may develop. But if you're a tech company, you think, well, look, I still need to raise the money, but we're doing better at than that then we used. Before the pandemic struck, I think we've passed the 10 billion mark in this country for the amount of money that can be put in behind tech start ups more than I think France and Germany put together. So when it comes to raising cash, are we catching up? And is there also a Brexit effect? Because it was argued that after Brexit it might be a little harder for us to continue as a global hub?

Mike: I think you'll always... It's a bit like asking people who don't want lower taxes. You'll always have someone who says we need more funding. But actually, one of the great successes has been the funding for start ups and mid-sized companies. And the UK is very strong now. If you have a genuinely good technology idea, there is funding for it. In the UK, the issue comes in in fixing the last part of the pipeline, which is let's get that business (when it's proven in everything) for a few hundred million...Let's get it to be a world class British business listed in London, employing lots of people in the UK. So I've been on that whole journey through my career from when there was no funding through to getting share options. And, you know, Margaret Thatcher was very important with the concept of the entrepreneur being important. Tony Blair actually did some great things with CGT to get the ball rolling. And we've seen various interventions move things forward. We're now at that last stage. If we can just fix that last stage, we can have what the UK should have in its FTSE 100. We can have five or six world class large technology businesses here because we have the difficult bit. The bit that's irreplaceable is the science space. It's like being in a country where you've got vast oil reserves and you haven't managed to put a drill in. That's what we've got. Countries are envious of that because you can't recreate that. The university system, our cultural approach to learning.

Fraser: What are you referring to here? Are you referring to Oxford and Cambridge, I guess, in your case, because your companies grew out of Cambridge University.

Mike: It's not just Oxford and Cambridge. You know, you were sitting here in London, UCL, Imperial Edinburgh. We have a phenomenal science base. You know, you look at the vaccine, right? You know, look at what we delivered there. The issue has been how we turn that into economic impact and ultimately tax receipts back into the UK. And now, as we're saying, also strategic ability to defend our sovereignty. It's that last bit that's missing. And that's why getting the London market working is so important, because if we do that, then we have the mechanism which pulls everything through the chain. If you've got a five billion dollar publicly listed market in London and you've got a technology business there, the things that did that make a lot of money. They take that money and they invest in the next level down of companies, which means the angels make a return and you get the whole thing moving. And the bit that magical, which is the people with the great ideas and the talent, we have that.

Fraser: Right and the thing is, I can... I can't remember a time where there was not a political debate about how to create our own Silicon Valley. People have been saying this for four years, if not decades. I remember growing up in Scotland, how there was always talk about creating Silicon Glen in the 1980s, you know, huge. Europe must be absolutely plastered in places where politicians have tried to create the ecosystem that you were talking about. So are we at the stage that we're seeing any fruits of this? I mean, in other words, what of what you're talking about is going right? How much of that has been a result of government policies? There was talk under David Cameron, for example, of creating Silicon Roundabout, as always, silicon, something Silicon Roundabout around about Shoreditch in East London. Are any of these things actually bearing fruit or are the things that are going right, things that we didn't quite expect, like, for example, the abilities of universities to keep their global lead?

Mike: Well, look, the first thing I sort of take issue with... But it has been incredibly successful. So, I remember I met David Cameron when he was still in opposition and we had this conversation. It’s a bit like, you know, the Gloucestershire film industry is never going to rival Hollywood. The point was that, yes, you can do that because I said we've done it. If you look at all of the companies’ sizes, we have the technology in this country from start up to what's called "scale up". We have a phenomenal ecosystem of those companies and incredibly successful, doing amazing things, incredibly successful. We're way ahead of Europe. It's just the last bit now. We have been incredibly successful, we just need to fix the last bit. And, as I say, I'm someone who has walked along that pipeline seeing it unblocked at each stage. We can get that last bit done, then no, we are up there. We don't need to be Silicon Valley. We don't need to have 100 of these companies. But if we have ten of them, then that's incredibly important for us.

Fraser: Isn't there also something if you look at the FTSE 100 and compare that to the top 100 companies in America, and when you look at when these companies were created, it's always been the case that the average age of the British FTSE 100 companies are we older than the Americans. For reasons I've never quite understood, America just seems to be better, not just at growing tech companies, but at growing all sorts of companies, whereas we seem to be better at keeping on some of the names which we remember from childhood...Right they are still going on. If you look at some of them, some of your clients, like Rolls-Royce, for example, they're still up there.

Mike: Yeah. And I think this is where it becomes a very interesting debate. And we get back to C.P. Snow. You know, when I did my degree at Cambridge and told my colleagues I was going to try and do a start up, they I thought I was crazy. Why wasn't I going to work for a bank or become a management consultant or something like that?

Fraser: I just wanted to talk about this. This was... What was it you studied at university?

Mike: So I did natural sciences, which science background, and then engineering, and then a Ph.D. And this was in the early 80s, which the computing boom was really just about to take off. So, I had to stay up late at night to use the computer because I was so junior, I wasn't allowed near it during the day.

Fraser: But you would have been one of the first people to decide that, basically, that this was going to be... This could be a big industry in Britain. You were going to apply yourself to it.

Mike: Yes. So back then, you know, the BBC Micro came out... When the history of technology in the UK written probably that was one of the most important projects ever because almost everyone of my age into technology started on a BBC micro. You know, funnily enough, an intervention, I'm sure at the time was never thought strategic, but it turned out to be incredibly strategic. But anyway, coming back to the point, you know, you did not expect to be doing a startup or being an entrepreneur back then. And that has changed. And that's why we now have to... You know, if we go down one level, from the floated companies to the ones that I'm talking about, we have a large stable of great candidate companies to float. Now we just need to get them over that last hurdle.

Fraser: So other than Darktrace, what's coming up next? What can we expect to see...to take us…If Britain is beginning to enter a new - this last phase - if we are beginning to have more companies floating, making their home here, what could we expect? Because there are still some companies that we're not sure they're going to float here or America?

Mike: Yeah. And what we have to do (and hopefully Darktrace's success would have made that difference)... I think also it will have educated people. You know, it was amazing to me that we talk about Deliveroo. You know, that's a business that is about blokes on bikes delivering burrito's and yet it's called a tech float. You would never have the conversation in America that it was a tech business in the same way as an Arm was a tech business or Darktrace was a tech business.

Fraser: More of an Uber then. Is that in the same category? Not really a tech business.

Mike: I wouldn't particularly call Uber tech business, whereas, for example, Ocado is quite interesting because although it started just as a technology enabled version of a supermarket, they've actually created fundamental technology there to make that work really well. The point I'm making is just that... It's a little example of the virtuous circle. I think after the difference between Deliveroo and Darktrace and the way in which that's been explained by journalists, people in the UK now understand there are different types of tech businesses, there are fundamental tech businesses and there are tech enabled businesses. And that in itself is a step forward but have been very successful. We can get the benefits of all of these years of work and government policy and great things in the private sector if we can just fix this last bit.

Fraser: So what then is the solution?

Mike: Well, I think in the short term, when people are investing in technology businesses, they have to realise that they have to bring some of the ingredients, not just the money in the UK. So, you know, if you could turn up with someone who's been a marketing director, perhaps not in tech, but something related, and put that person alongside your 23 year old coding genius, you have to do that in the UK in the way that you wouldn't elsewhere. And you will get great rewards for doing that because the technology is often great. The marketing may not be there. At the other end of the scale, what we need to do is make sure that we are encouraging our businesses to float in London. There are some technical things that you want to fix. One of the strange things about technology businesses is often the shareholders don't want to sell because they actually want to ride the business up.

Fraser: Well, they want to keep control. In America there are mechanisms where they can keep control, but still a lot of the equity. And the rules don't work here in the same way.

Mike: Well, even the ones that aren't in control might not want to sell. One of the problems, if you have liquidity requirements where you have to have a certain amount of the shareholding being given up, then that's a big turnoff for tech investors who want to take... The thing we talked about earlier...They're not worried about today's valuation. They want to see the business grow and become very big. So, these kind of changes are important. And if you do them, then you just need a few successes and it becomes a virtuous circle where to be a fund manager, you have to understand these businesses because if one of them goes woosh, you're going to get left behind. And then if you understand these businesses, you get more confident in investing in them and we move forward. And I think we are perfectly capable of doing that now. But we just really have to just acknowledge one fact, which is we are entering an age where whether it's in our national interest, our sovereignty, our tax receipts, our employment basis, technology is fundamental. If we're sitting here in three or four years’ time and we don't have large tech businesses listed in FTSE100, we have a big problem.

Fraser: So, you can see then the future where government starts, I suppose, arguing a lot more about tech.

Mike: Yeah, I think we go through these little cycles where some of the administrations get enthusiastic and then it goes on the back burner. I think we're in a situation where it is prime. We would just talk about cybersecurity, of being the new Cold War, perhaps, but, you know, health care, how do we deliver our public services? I mean, one of the fascinating things is we've just seen a massive shift to online delivery of so many things.

What we've got to do is make sure that we're getting enough of those to list in London that we get critical mass. Once we get critical mass then I think the problem looks after itself because we have this stable of great companies coming along. The big test for me will be Graphcore. Graphcore makes chips, which are actually similar to the Nvidia ones. That's the company that's currently trying to buy Arm. Those chips are really important for the A.I. Revolution. That's a strategic business and we really want to see that list in London. We can get that to London then that's really useful for us.

Fraser: Well, of course, one of the things that's keeping you here in London, Mike, is that if you go to America, they want to extradite you there because of your previous company, Autonomy, which you sold to Hewlett-Packard for 17 billion. They wrote off eight billion of that. They say that they paid too much. Now, there's nothing in British law that says that anybody committed an offence. But one of your former colleagues is in America doing a five year jail sentence. They want to extradite you. But do you know what the situation is? Are you going to be extradited?

Mike: Well, the actual case that you're talking about was investigated by the SFO, didn't find any basis and handed it over to the Americans. So, the Americans rang them up and then they handed it over to them, which is something, you know, to me is an interesting question about defending our own businesses and economic interests in the UK. But then it's been a subject of a hearing which lasted around a year in the UK High Court. So, everything was examined and we're expecting the judgement on that shortly. The issue, which is surprising to people about the extradition treaty with the US... It was a treaty that was agreed by Tony Blair and it was supposed to be the same on both directions. And when the Americans saw it, they thought it was so unreasonable that they refused to ratify it. So, what we actually have is a treaty that is different in each direction. And the thing that many of the people listening to this will be very surprised to know is that your local policeman has less rights over you than an American prosecutor. So as a British citizen, you can be taken from the UK with no testing of the facts, just on the basis of what an American prosecutor writes on a piece of paper. Your UK police force couldn't do that to you. So putting aside things like the Harry Dunn situation, this is something that people do need to address. It's too late for me. I'll have to fight it out in the UK courts. But in a world where, for example, there has been lots of coverage of the fact that U.S. uses its justice system around the world to enforce its economic interests. British citizens are incredibly exposed in a way that none of them ever thought about. An important thing to understand about the US legal system is that it has a 97 percent conviction rate. So what you've now got a situation where, as a Brit, you can be whisked off to America with almost no defense to that... They have more power than your local police force, and when you get there as a 97 percent conviction rate

Fraser: So that ratio would apply in cases like yours?

Mike: Yes. And the difficulty is that one thinks that the system works the same way as it does here and it doesn't. And of course, they have elected DAs and all sorts of things out there. So it's a very different situation. And, you know, there was some interesting article in The Economist about how some of these large companies can, in effect, use the criminal system over there to enforce their interests around the world. You know banks, see that, financial services see that. And I see that. And it's really just another example of an area where in Britain we need to be a bit wiser about defending our position in the world.

Fraser: How often has it been? We have the NatWest three, but other than that... It's not a regular feature.

Mike: It is, actually. And the reason is that one of the things that people don't realize is that the normal model is that there's pretty much no defense to an extradition request. If you fight it, you...the American default is to put you in jail for two years before your trial anyway. What that means is almost no one in the UK actually fights it. So they go voluntarily so they don't appear in the figures. So actually, you often hear this stated and it's so fundamentally wrong because it's so draconian that actually people don't contest extradition because they don't want to be sat in jail for two years before they were even in a courtroom. Look it fundamentally needs changing. The Americans wouldn't accept it. We shouldn't have accepted it. We signed it and then they didn't.

Fraser: And you've had some former cabinet members write a letter in your defence. So people are trying to make...It is becoming a political issue here. But what you're seeing now is whatever the government may or may not do about extradition laws, it's too late for you in the courts.

Mike: But it's too late for me, you know, my defence is given that Hewlett-Packard decide to bring a court action in the UK then and it was a UK company under UK laws. The deal was under UK law, under UK accounting, then if there's anything that needs to be heard, it needs to be heard in the UK. But most people don't have that defence. Most people just get whisked off. Yeah, I just think people will be stunned to know that you can be taken from your home in the UK if you've never even been to America. And for a charge that, you know is some sort of extrajudicial thing taken and put in the US prison for two years with no testing of the facts by a UK court.

Fraser: So you don't end up in American prison and you stay here. What's next? Are you going to just open another company, any other things that you're looking at?

Mike: I love working with young people who have got brilliant ideas. So I've got a whole series of companies that we've got.

Fraser: What sort of stage are they?

Mike: They go right from the bench where people are trying to get things working. I've got a group of very eccentric people doing very amazing things with lasers at the moment that will be wonderful if it works. One of my colleagues who was visiting them, looking at these 24 year olds playing with lasers and saying "what could possibly go wrong" going right up to other companies like Luminance, which is changing the legal profession by using A.I. to do things there. And that's a business that's got 300 customers now and it's growing very rapidly.

Fraser: Quite often we hear that the lawyers are just ripe to get their jobs taken over by computers. Is that sort of thing you're working on?

Mike: I think it's more about getting the lawyers to work on the bits where they actually add value. You know, the idea that your lawyers are going to sit there and just trawl through 10000 documents that's already been outsourced to India anyway. And it's those kind of tasks that the AI can do really well, free up the lawyers to do the clever bits.

Fraser: Right. So can you see yourself being behind just another sort of FTSE launch?

Mike: Oh, absolutely. I think the interesting thing about this time...I think we are in an incredible time of change. I was talking to a professor at the CAS business school, and we were having a debate about when in human history has there been the most fundamental change going on. And he was arguing the 1930s and the case was, you know, suddenly someone in the village had a telephone. You looked up in the sky and there were, you know, aircraft and you had these incredible political movements arising and there was consumerism. And, you know, I think that's a pretty good case for the 1930s. For now, I would say that we get into a situation where the fundamental nature of people's lives are changing. You know, we are no longer geographically constrained. You know, my children are doing things with people on the other side of the world online. And the way we work is different. We've got AIs that can actually do a lot of the work that has always been done by humans. So, you know, you look at the industrial revolution, you replace people's muscle. You can argue there was a small revolution around the end of the 60s with computing, which was about repetitive, simple tasks like working out the payroll, but now we've got technologies that actually can address a whole series of tasks at which people do. And, you know, the concept of the nation state; as we've seen with the tax debate recently, what is a nation state now? How much sovereignty does it really have? How does it deploy that sovereignty? Those are all questions. And then you've got the overflow of information. What is truth? What is this whole idea of fake news, the idea of identity as being what sets your opinion rather than facts? So in a period of incredible change and the fundamental drivers of that change are these technologies. And that's why, you know, I think I love Britain. I think it culturally has fundamentally so much right about it that that is a model which it is worth being proud about. And it is a good model to show the world that if we want that to have the sovereignty to maintain that and do that, we have to realize that just as we would have had a Royal Navy, we now have to have tech sovereignty.

Fraser: Mike Lynch, thanks very much for joining us on The Spectator podcast.