Dex Hunter-Torricke

People say, oh, well, obviously, this is all just dystopian nonsense.

You're not going to have these mega corporations ruling things.

It's like, we already had that.

I was obsessed with changing the world from a very early age.

I was a very weird kid.

And part of it was just I was growing up in the UK in the 80s and 90s.

And my dad was the...

He was a person who was a refugee as a kid.

He was four years old when he was a refugee during the Second World War.

He'd grown up in a refugee camp in India, and he'd come to the UK in the late 50s, total outsider, probably a few pounds in his pocket.

Society was deeply racist.

And his life was just terrible.

I didn't learn about it until many years later, actually, near the end of his life, when I was 30 years old and I was working in Silicon Valley at that point.

My mom, she was an immigrant from Malaysia, came to the UK in the 70s to be a nurse in Britain's National Health Service.

And growing up, we had absolutely nothing.

There was no money.

I grew up mostly in the Southeast of England in this town, Tunbridge, and it was sufficiently provincial at the time that when me and my sister walked down the street, people would literally stop and stare because they'd never seen people who weren't white.

Kids would come up to you on the playground, they'd say, can I feel your hair, mate?

I always remembered kids would ask, do you speak Chinese or Japanese?

And I thought, I was born in Hammersmith.