Beyond the Blueprint: Atif Ansar Unpacks the Human Side of Infrastructure

Welcome to the Nomad Futures Podcast, where ideas shape the future and the visionaries redefine what's possible. Join us as we dive deep into the evolution of technology, society and human potential. Spotlining the voices, driving change and reimagining our world. Connect with us and join us at media.nomadfutures.org. The future is a story we write together. Let's kick it off. Here are your hosts, Phil and the Beal. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Nomad Futures. This is your co-host, my beloved Moot, calling it from Scottsdale, Arizona. This is your co-host, Philip Coblin's calling it from Montclair, New Jersey. A tea fan site calling London. But you've thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Before we get started, could you make any deduction about yourself at a high level of who are tea fans and what are you doing these days? Absolutely, I'd be glad you're here with you today. So I met two hats. I am an academic at Oxford University, where you've seen the background, the resplendent university. It's the best university in the world. Cambridge came in second, well done to them. And I've been in Oxford in various roles since 2006. I did my deep and my PhD there and then continued my research on infrastructure and mega projects. And in the process of my colleagues, we've been one of the world's largest data sets of its kind, tracking outcomes of big projects. What people hope to cheat, find investment decision and what they get at full commercial operation. As you can imagine, it's quite a lot of variance of cost over a hundred times over hands out. Really common across the industry, across the world. So it's not a specific problem to one sector, one geography there. There's a human problems. And a lot of my work with my colleagues is based around human biases, both psychological and political biases that go into estimation and then execution of these projects. In 2018, one of my executive education students in the course I was giving found my ideas very interesting. So he grabbed me after the course and said, look at them as a business idea here. We should grab, you know, we should have a coffee and that coffee proceeded to become the drinks became stronger and stronger and four side was born my company. So we are in a technology for the construction of big projects with a particular emphasis on the data center industry. The technology is very generalizable, but the data industry just pulled us in because of the commendus growth in asset formation in the industry and the huge time imperative. So we focus on the time dimension and we help people see on the corners, tech rest before they rise and ultimately accelerate the street market of building new data centers. Brilliant. So from an educator to an entrepreneur or a technologist. Let's peel this onion just a bit. Where did you grow up? So I was born in South Korea to Pakistani parents, the Canadian Pakistan and then did my undergraduate degree in Georgetown in Washington DC and my first job in DCs. You know, well, bit of a muttler. So you've got a little bit of the American flavor and touch to it. Now, while you were growing up, was there a moment or experience that if you were to look back in time, defined what you were going to be or the career that you were going to pursue? You know, in packs of the very interesting place because it's a big country. There's very dynamic place, a very young place, a colorful place. It also has a lot of poverty and you see sort of a bit of everything, both the opportunity as well as the poverty. And I was always struck by how you could improve welfare of a country like Pakistan by improving the infrastructure that was available. So it was always really fascinated by the infrastructure dimension. In my teenage years, I'd gone to a Boris school in Pakistan, but to my family were living in Mongla, which is an area where Pakistan bit were the two large dams, the World Bank at Finance, back in the 60s and according to a water treaty that we have with India. The dams became better than obsession bizarrely. And I have in my academic work written extensively about dams. In fact, one of my papers with colleagues on the cost of construction of dams is the most tight paper in economics on dams, believe it or not, more than extra roofless or if she wanted a bell-priced in the clone. That became a pioneer like the enduring interest. And I've used dams again and again as an archetype of mega projects. Apart from because they're so big, they're so vivid. And their cost curve is also very interesting because almost all the money is spent up from. They don't have any feedstock costs. So you can from an economist perspective, very surgically zero in on that tap ex and modulate it in a very abstract way. So for a variety of reasons, being in Mongla and going cycling as a teenager with my younger brother, and then attempting to build a little dam myself, my mother's garden, which is a completely unsuccessful experiment. So figure this interest in mega projects that I think has stayed with me ever since. You know what's incredible is rare to find someone with your clear pedigree. I mean, the kind of intellectual element being applied to construction, which you think of as a fairly kind of tradesperson type of archetype. Was there any like background in your family's history and industries that they had been in that were in the construction fields in building projects, anything along those lines? Or was it simply that honing in on just the wonder of dams in general and that kind of seed to where you got to today? No, unfortunately no construction. I come from a family of poets and politicians. So I would have guessed poets. I would have guessed poets from the other part of the town. Maybe politicians from the pocket square, but my father's bit of a visionary, right? And he used that I involved in the 60s in Pakistani demographic movement. There is a student, not as an active. So he had these ideas around building the nations of a very young age. I was very exposed to the ideas of how you build countries and infrastructure is important. You had us all the kids, we knew these stuff around like this is how you do it. Like he was a massive band of Roosevelt because the authority was literally the first bill Roosevelt had signed upon becoming president in 1933. So that there was a disfacination with thinking being and with that commonly baked construction project. Now, who that is a fascinating thing by construction is really touches lives in very bright. Of course, the people who build the projects and there's a heroic element to it and romance that goes along with construction. You see that in the data cent industry as well as a feeling of that pioneering spirit of people building this new project, pioneering the industry. But also at the end of it is the beneficiaries, which is a society in our welfare depends on having access to water and electricity and nowadays life ice absolutely. So at this juncture, I mean, so you're talking about downs, I would have lean more towards the engineering element of it, whether it be civil, electrical, mechanical, structural. However, you took a different part and that's economics and public policy and potentially system designs and so and so forth. How did you end up making that decision that one was better than another or that was going to be your pathway to getting back into the sector? Really good point. I was really always quite numeric. It really interested me. It was things that fascinated me. I studied economics even in my intervals in high school. And so when I got to Georgetown, you know, economics was one of my majors along with philosophy and politics. So it's just I was always coming at these things with an economist mindset. Nothing maybe was novel because people were so taken in by the concrete and the sea and the sheer volume and physical, you know, sublime, the kind of mind and oxygen, Ben Fiber calls these the aesthetic sublime of makeup projects because of their sheer stand. They are so attractive to human beings, but for the all they create. And for some reason, I was less attracted to kind of the mechanics is this value, but you say is this might be very impressive, but is this moving humanity forwards about it? I imagine that it didn't hurt that when you attempted to build one and your mother's garden, it failed spectacularly. So better, better focus on the data than on the hammers. The what's always fascinating to me is and we talk about this a lot because one of the missions of our foundation is to try to kind of help aid the education system and kind of catching up with what our industry needs are. And large part, some of those problems are that there aren't enough people because of the kind of how young our industry is teaching what it is we do. So I'm always fascinated by people that were in the teaching sphere and then you know, have come into the kind of entrepreneurial and building a business. So I guess before we get to what brought you into the entrepreneurial world, what made you decide to go from an econ and political science major into kind of academics? Was that always desire even with a passion for dams? Very good question, Ben. So my first job right on college was at the Royal Bank in Washington, DC. And I was the near fight in the team in an infrastructure unit and we were financing infrastructure in emerging markets, India, China, Pakistan, South Africa, things like that. And my job was often to put together the but just the procurement plans, the GAT charts, things of that nature. And this hard work, and I learned a lot, and then you would eventually accompany my boss and other team members on what the Warren Bank calls mission, and these are delegations of Warren Bank lending officers, basically going to check up on the projects of their finance. Ultimately, the Warren Bank lend money to state government, and the sovereign borrowers implement the projects, so they are the implementing agencies, and the work-based supervision missions kind of check up and make sure the money's being spent appropriately, and they start leaking. And in the supervision mission, I couldn't help but get the very strong sense that these projects were not going right, but. And despite all the munging and smoothing, the dramatic smoothing that was taking place, I'd always asked my boss in pertin questions like, "Hey, this is not going so." Well, like, you know, what's going on? And she jokingly slapped my race and be like, "Young man, don't ask these important questions." I guess, when I have your career, but I persisted, and I remember, very distinctly sitting on the steps of the NIGA Memorial and talking to the other friendly miners of the Warren Bank, and she had a degree from MIT, and like, Holly, wouldn't be this amazing, we could somehow combine the entire western portfolio of Warren Bank and look at the initial investment we promised to make, and what the overall costs ended up being, and what the difference was. And she should have struck her shoulders and went, "Who would give you that data?" And I just got into my head that was probably my PhD. So I went to Oxford to do that as a PhD, and when I first published my paper, looking at many of the Warren Bank finance towns, Holly sent me an email saying, "You fucking did it." (laughing) "Damn you, I did, you did it." Right. That's amazing. I had this idea of phenomenons, and frankly, I had the PhD to the Warren Bank as like an MBA is to the investment bank. So my original intention was, "I'll do a PhD, I'll study the snorling in my throat, "deeply, and I'll go back and be useful back to the Warren Bank "and try and help them improve their productivity, "because you'll become the one slapping hands." No, and I hate that, and also one in Carton better performance, because one of the key lessons I led the Warren Bank was developing countries down, have good quality infrastructure, not because of lack of capital, which was my original hypothesis. They don't have infrastructure because they need more capability to go back to your point around skill than education. And that's what I learned to my PhD, and hence my interest in becoming an educator. It's actually because money's cheap, skin is expensive. That's a regul, that's what we're trying to accomplish. - Oh, I'm just a really good person. - That's doing. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, the curiosity element, you've been academic, you are an entrepreneur now. How do you stay curious, and where do you go when you need to recharge intellectually? What does a thief do? - Excellent. - I listen to a lot of books. So I take long walks and listen to a lot of books that I read, read a lot of, because I listen more than read. Partly to put in my sex, and you learn really unusual things from different places, right now I'm reading a book called "Romance of the Day" by a sheep world. And I picked up one of his books called "Clarin the Sun", which is about an artificial intelligence robot. It's an artificial brain. And I'm curious about AI. And that book was sort of a, basically reading his entire corpus about set of novels he's written, he's in the belly-oriented now in literature. And you learn really interesting things by reading, you know, is an obvious statement that to me, but I think books contain time, the knowledge. And I think reading widely, so that will be one of my key messages to any viewer, at any stage in their minds, is to read voraciously. And I think second, which is how we met as one of the leaders, go to conferences. So this was a piece of advice given to you by a professor of mine, Elaine Rominelli, George Chan. And I've gone to see her, I was in my junior year at George Chan, feeling a bit lost about why. And I went to see her. And she's like, "What are you interested in?" And he's like, "I'm a mention construction." And she's setting up read-trained journals, and go to trade shelves, and meet people, talk to them, and ask them lots of questions about what they do. One of the questions she's a business supervisor, she said, "Ask to put hard, they make money." It's a great way to learn under the rule. So I think often my top three puts a call is, read widely, and potentially outside your domain, read your trade journals, the journals of your industry, and go to conferences, meet people, and ask and quiz them about how they do what they do. The age-old question that I've always had, which I think you are perfectly situated to answer, is whether listening to a book counts as reading a book. So, you know, that there's always been now, that there's so many available, and all these kind of book reading podcasts is up. Does it count? Is it the same thing? Do you qualify the same when you listen to a book as reading a book? 'Cause it seems redundant to read something that you've already listened to. But, everybody's different, right? It's about whatever you do. Another PhD in your future, trying to start. But the listening to a book is the new reading. But if you need somebody, comes up to you and says, "I just read Tostoevsky," and you've only listened to it. Do you say, "I've read it," or do you say, "I've heard it?" I think ran into positivity. (laughing) All right, I think you are well situated to be the final answer on this thing, so I'm gonna take that. You can now listen to books. You don't have to just read them. Or you can just, "I've read it." (laughing) So, on that note, what's something you're currently learning, exploring, or thinking about? So, I think I'm thinking a lot about what it means to be greater than one profession, and any profession. The way to the day is interesting, because the narrative of the first, or the novel is, "How do you become a great butler?" Because it's been a rated byber. And he's an English butler, I work with one of the great loads of the time, broken a piece, treating things like that. But that's kind of like the artichoke is really, "How does one become great to anything?" And it turns out that requires huge mental focus and these notions again of a issue were around dignity. So, how do you bring dignity to managing projects, for example? And turns out, these are very hard problems, because often people fall into profession, and becomes kind of a means to an end, rather than a true calling of what they're trying to. So, I'm interested in really in questions of what does it mean to be an elite profession? - So, you bring a very interesting point. Every 99.99% of the people that are in the data infrastructure space have fallen into sector, purely by an accident. I mean, all of us are here, fallen into this space, called "e-b-on-accident". So, the challenge on Han really becomes, how do we scale up and scale up as we move forward? And how do we actually create a culture of people doing the right thing for the right reasons versus the spinning band-aids? And that could be from capital losses to faking the carbon neutrality or carbon and sustainability initiatives. - Absolutely. And I think that is what separates greatness. Like, greatness is real, whereas other people role play, like not great professions role play, and the minute the going gets tough, they drop the facade and reveal like their private facade. And so, in a way, I'm interested in these questions. And I'm interested because, for example, building data centers is incredibly hard work, there's lots really hard work in people in the industry. But equally, there's also examples of lots of very badly-run projects. So, how do we reduce the incidence of real poor management and improve a much more, much greater consultant outcomes driven by profoundly, but ethical is when as high-quality professional conduct. - I think there's something really powerful about, like looking outside of your bubble, not focusing on just the project that you're working on, but understanding what makes great projects work and what makes poor projects fail, and then taking that kind of 30,000 and then 20,000 and then 10,000-foot view, understanding why decisions are made, understanding how to both extract data 'cause every one of those things has data points that if you had the ability to analyze that data and broad enough sets, there is so much predictability in how these things go that you would have been able to predict that a project would have gone awry, but when you're in it, which feels like you're reacting as opposed to actually understanding why different things happen. So, I think that level of analysis is sometimes lost on people that are so focused on not admitting that there's an issue when there clearly is, and not really having the infrastructure to be able to actually analyze the various data sense that you wouldn't otherwise see. I noticed you're wearing what I can only imagine is an oraring, and I'm wearing as well, right? So, Ed Wichita-Biel is wearing as well, apparently he's married to his oraring. So, you know, (laughing) right, so I used to wear it on the same finger and then my wife was like, I don't want people to think that that's the wedding ring. (laughing) So, even in our daily lives, just the idea that I am looking at an app that is telling me, maybe it's time for you to stretch your legs a bit, maybe you didn't get as well asleep last night as you might have otherwise gotten, maybe there's something that is predicating a 0.5 increase in your body temperature, that is, you're predicting, and then if you apply that across industries, across these gigantic projects, it just seems so valuable. I think there's a fear that AI is gonna replace a significant portion of our workforce, But if you. you put that aside and that very well may be true. The increase in productivity, the increase in understanding the dynamics of all these things so that you can avoid catastrophes and issues of the past. It's just a fascinating kind of worldview as to how data becomes as Nabil calls it, the new oil. - But I, you absolutely spot someone. One thing my research has shown again and again is not great performance is characterized by drift by this reactive mindset. Psychologists have very nice terms in a lot of these biases, like the ostrich effect. So not great professional when faced by risk, put their head on an innocent, right? Greatness on the other hand, as a professional person in the projectile re-environment is about being proactive. So we call for side-for-side for a reason. It's about being able to see around the corners and be able to visualize what that future might look like and often involves devising yourself with data. So, from nine out of 10 innocent projects while number time, the average over on a 34%. A poor project manager is trying to convince themselves that those statistics aren't brighter than. A great project manager on the other hand is going to say, this statistics are real. I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to take proactive counter-duated moves. Line exposing myself to greater accountability, reporting, proactively issues that may cause delay up and down the chain, rather than pretend that it don't exist. So, in a way, you're absolutely right that being stopped the reactive doom loop is a sign of rat flag and equally people that are using data to then be able to say, "Okay, I didn't sleep so well last night. I'm still going to power through the day, but maybe I'll take it a little easier my workout." And that can make those very choice decisions think is very much part of the damsa of what separates real great professionals from those that could do a bit more upskinning. I think this could be used as a commercial for aura 'cause I think what I'm friend here is saying is that unless you have an aura ring, you're not great. (laughing) I'm kidding, I want to put it in a cruelty, I'm clearly not the next time. (laughing) It's the circle of aura, or the aura. That's the circle. That's the aura. (laughing) - The aura, the aura. - Exactly. I have a question which is one that I think is just fascinating in terms of roles. When I was, I think I have never been in graduate classrooms, but I imagine that in general, the professor is someone that has just a significant amount of lived experience obviously, understanding of the subject matter and as a consequence, teaching the students. What is, when you were approached by one of your students after the class to get involved in a commercial endeavor, is there initially some like, oh, this guy can't know what he's talking about, it's just a student of mine, how could there be anything here? And is there a wall that needs to come down and do they chip away at it through logic? Or was there an immediate like, oh, this is a brilliant application of what I taught you? Just make sure you realize that I taught you that. - So don't show in as this amazing, I make it MIT and vote a book called the Reflective Practitioner back in the 80s. And he's got this very nice model around what makes people, exos, what makes people greater their jobs, right? And what makes when a reflective practitioner laugh? And his idea is that you need to be an expert at theories, you need to understand the scholarship really well. And you need to be an expert at practice. So once you have the combination of the two, expertise at the academic work and expertise at the practice, you can become a masterbender. And we call masterbildizer as a general intern, the way drawings in practice did. And I think that's sort of the idea. So one of the key things I've tried myself because I teach at a business school is not just to be a two-etitian because that makes you a quite a boring person. And a lot of the times theory alone does not work in the role. So I personally like this combination and I had been doing quite a lot of that. So I had a pretty steady consulting practice even in my far more active teaching years than also. Just to make sure that I wasn't just theorizing, but I was very much in the fray, delivering projects, putting on hardhands, turning up the sides, doing reviews, meeting the project team, so on and so forth. So I think with my co-founder as well, it's a matter of the accents, right? So my accent was a little bit on the series of things, a little bit less on the practice of things. His accent was more on the practice of things he'd built nearly a million swear to meet the property on the role. But I think it was a meeting of minds in that sense of being able to balance both academic rigor but also kind of practical notes for delivering things. And did you know it right away? Like once you had that initial coffee before the drinks started getting stronger, did you know right away that there was something there? Yeah, absolutely. I think the drinks certainly lubricated liquidity. I quit. I moved into the yard. And it's not for me or it's for you. Right. So Brendan Monolle's, "No but story began with, I finished my dinner, it went a better night at the end." So going back to the whole entrepreneurial piece, do you grew up in a family of politicians and poets, where do you get that entrepreneurial fuel or the desire to take that risk? I think everybody, again, Pakistani culture, he's very entrepreneurial. So again, I'm going back to my dad. You know, he'd build, take a risk and building property in Macstar, and it was very entrepreneurial. So I've an example of the families like everybody had launched businesses. And even my sister, Ben and her finger businesses, from a subway franchise to a gym. It was like a symbiotic relationship. That when people have downstairs and send them up with a gym up, it's self-fulfilling. It makes sense. It makes sense. But if you're on models, that also equally, I think that's one thing that technology's done. It's really open people's mind of entrepreneurship. So even in the early 2000s, I arrived in Georgia in 1999. Height of the first kind of table. And I think that's where you couldn't help but feel the pull to learn entrepreneurship. And I think that's where the sea both in my family history, but also in the broader zeitgeys shape my thinking. So I think even though I took perhaps the very neighborhood of going into academia, I think there was always a pirate inside me. And just meet at the right moment to come out. Then it's some lubrication. (laughing) It's like a take. We could take this a metaphor to dangerous places. When you were at the World Bank, you traveled to all these places. And how much of that kind of exposure to other cultures? Do you think informed the way you see businesses operate in different regions? And what did that kind of tell you about how there is no one size fits all? Or do you think there is a one size fits all? Approach to how projects are done, say in Asia versus Europe versus North America or South America, et cetera. The travel, particularly in that structure, perfection setting was hugely eye-opening for me. And I'm then so much from so many people just looking at. And I think the time I spent in China in the mid 2000s was costumational. You know, China haven't opened up. The World Bank did finance any projects in China until 1988. So the first core of projects was in 1988, almost 10 years after the opening, you know, under the Trump age. And by mid 2000s, China was a very big borough. China is borrowing money from the World Bank for a long time now. It then fell in the largest borough, like Lenders or donors. Now, so it was really a transformation, partner because the projects get done so quicky. And one of my colleagues, and one of my Chinese colleagues said to me, he's like, hey, you guys do very linear projects in the West. We do projects not linear. And you see everything's about. So things happen. People descend upon project sites like Upshi Furies. And a lot of these projects get done by half the time, not even quicker. It wouldn't necessarily fit our regulation around safety, labor protection, all of that. But purely for my human cultural endeavor, besperted, there's a lot to learn, you know, from these various cultures. And I think it just sort of kind of created in my mind some ideas around blueprints, around what good performance looks like. One thing I also discovered is that good performance is actually simple. Usually people who are really good at what they do make very few, they don't make like a lot of things. So you wouldn't see like an amazing samurai doing a wheel-meat. It's a very clean motion. And you see that across any profession is people who are really good at what they do, are quite calm, quite collected, and make few very impactful moves. And I began to see that across cultures as well, that despite differences, they is a commonality to what the tremendous progress looks like. I think people generally suggest that the projects in China that could done more quickly get done as a consequence of a political system that doesn't fit our model of a political system, the concept that there is a cultural approach to how they do things and an ethos that might be able to be applied to projects that we do here without having to have a substantial change and overall kind of political structure is also a fascinating one. Because there's no doubt that from a technical advancement perspective from the sheer infrastructure perspective, the scale of projects, whether it's high speed trains or bridges or any of those things, it's really difficult to believe that we will be able to catch up when it takes us, I mean, you'll see this when you come to New York, it takes us decades to retrofit an airport. And even then, it's not particularly impressive, but some of the highest traveled places on the planet. What people are trying to have is deep purpose around building down nations, and I believe propel tremendous action. And a completely different, I spent an hour time in Israel because my team is in Israel. You see a very similar bite, completely different political system, completely different contexts, but a gown of this tremendous desire, kind of in the intrinsic motivation to build the nation. And that propels, or faster delivery, because people are motivated to, and the very intentional, very purposeful to get these things done. And where you don't have that, it just becomes, again, and it takes over when they isn't intention, the purposefulness. And it feels like there's an element of what the flip side of that purposefulness is some sort of like self-aggrand aisement where it's for the good. I'm not making a political statement here, but you know, there is an entirely cultural ethos when everyone has a stake in for the good of society as opposed to the good of an individual business or an individual proprietor. Absolutely. Oh, it's about building that culture all the own. Alright, so let's do a quick blinding, Ron. One book or think of who changed the way you see the world. It has to be Michelle Demontane and his essays. Alright, one failure you're grateful for. What failure I'm grateful for. Interesting. You know what I was applying for the one bag, I was applying a bunch of investment backing jobs and I'm quite glad I didn't get it because I think I've had a father, bomb or emulaging light because of that. One thing about you, people often get wrong. They think I'm an extrovert. Well, are we all see the say inside my little box? I'm extroverted my little glass case of emotion. If you had a billboard seen by millions, what would it say? I think it goes along with what we're saying. It'll be a gates code around, quote around. A mind stretched a new point never returns to the original. So stretch your mind. What would that 18 year old, a thief be most surprised to learn about your life today? Then I can ski like a professional brilliant. A thief, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. This has been lovely. What would your message be to the younger generation that do not know about the data infrastructure space as to why they should potentially consider early on in their lives as a future or a career of choice? I think this notion around data or AI being a hype. It's not hype. It's here to stay. There's seven billion pictures uploaded on the internet every single day, videos, everything else beside content is like this is form of human communication. So you don't have to think twice. Join the sector. When I went to statistic 10 years ago from Damandrical, it was now an oracle. And back then he was the Facebook and he mentioned that to me that anyone be another seven billion reporters were being uploaded to Facebook. That's when I realized how much data center demand is going to be required to simply store and handle all of that data. So you don't even think twice. Tell me this is going to share civilization for the next 300 years. Well, there's some beginning of time as we call it. Beginning of time. We're literally just begun. Really? Well, thank you again. Thank you for joining us today and can't wait to welcome you in New York City. Welcome to America. Thanks for coming out to get an intellectual booster shot when you come to town. So I can't wait for it. Thanks, Navi have thanks for this. This is a lot of fun. Thank you for joining us on the Nomad Futures Podcast. Remember, technology, markets and challenges will continue to evolve. But those who adopt and prepare are the ones who will thrive and brace the change. Stay curious and let's build a future worth moving towards. The journey has just begun and we're glad you're here with us. Visit us anytime at media.nomadfutures.org. Stay connected and be apart the movement. Until next time, keep exploring.