This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Alec Ross.

Alec Ross is a distinguished visiting professor at Bologna Business School of Lundi Bologna,

and before that, worked at the Obama administration for four years as senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

His latest book is called The Raging 2020s, Companies,

Countries, People and the Fight for Our Future. This is a pretty cool and forensic analytical

survey of what's wrong with the world at the moment, Alley, but what struck me also reading your book

that you seem almost quite angry about how things are at the moment?

Was this anger or at least frustration, the motivation for writing the book in the first place?

I don't feel like I was angry in writing it.

But what I saw was a lot of rage, hence the title, The Raging 2020s.

What I perceived was a lot of rage, you know, hence the title of the raging 2020s, what I perceived was a lot of rage in the wider world. And so what I sought to do with this was to sort of diagnose what's

at the heart of that rage, what's at the base of the rage, but hopefully beyond just the

diagnostic work also offering a little bit of light in the darkness.

Okay. Well, most people and most organization, most systems come under,

come under a tag, frankly, in your analysis. And you seem to give short drift to

the corporate world, obviously, to governments, political parties, but even to organize labor.

Let me start first maybe with corporations.

I mean, corporations have been around for quite some time.

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