Latest / Giant Ideas / Former Meta President & Deputy PM, Nick Clegg: Is Social Media Driving Us Apart?

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Former Meta President & Deputy PM, Nick Clegg: Is Social Media Driving Us Apart? · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if conflict and hatred and strife were invented by the reshare button.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just like patently not true.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've had civil war, world wars, revolutions, and conflict, unfortunately, from the dawn of time.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Today on the podcast, we're joined by Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister and the former president at Meta.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: He's had a front row seat to two of the biggest power structures globally: Westminster and Silicon Valley.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're going to talk about his new book, How to Save the Internet, and whether in fact it's the internet that needs saving or us from the internet.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to talk about whether social media has been a profoundly disturbing influence on the world or something more positive.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about how to regulate AI, whether it can be a force for good or bad, and what Nick sees as the big challenges to fix the relationship between the government, big tech, and society.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Nick, welcome to Giant Ideas.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's very good to be here.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for coming.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: Before we get into the kind of big discussion topics about society and tech and big business, I want to ask you personally about technology and the impact on your life.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I say this as someone whose whole career has been built on tech.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: I did a photo app, which was not possible without the advent of the iPhone and social media.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: That was my big break.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I benefited from it massively.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: But if I just look at my own kind of home life, am I happier with a phone that I'm always on and social media?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Probably I'd be a better dad, maybe a better husband if I wasn't always on my phone and if I was kind of, you know, had more uh hobbies that I could just get on with.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so on a personal level, sometimes I do wonder, even as someone who's benefited so much from this and whose day job is to go back technology to others, is it actually good for our happiness?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm just curious your very personal reflections on that.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think I think happiness is a super difficult benchmark.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um I wouldn't say it's a cut and dry um judgment on if that's the basis.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, go happiness, schmappiness, how on earth how done you define that.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: But no, no, I listen, I I I'm I suspect I'm I supp we're very similar.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean I've worked in tech for for many years now, but I'm not I I wouldn't say I'm a sort of massive sort of tech sort of geek.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I wouldn't call myself a sort of massive early adopter, pretty conventional use of AI at the moment, um very intense use, like lots of people of messaging apps, spend far too much time reading the news online, don't actually use social media apps that much.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um but to your point, and I'm not sure this categorises as happiness, but um there's certain things that I know bring me happiness that I sort of accidentally forego, and I definitely think spending too much time on the phone phone is so reading is a classic novel.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I've always been a pretty voracious reader, particularly fiction.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember in my sort of the sort of crazy years when I was in very, very high pressure environments in politics and government, I would find reading just even a few pages of a novel in the evening was just such a tonic.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, and I I I just too often now find myself uh looking at my screen instead and then dozing off and then not really it it so I think the whole, you know, the phone in the phone next to the bed, I think, is my biting.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, I've now resolved as of this moment, as of this evening.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna I'm gonna put the phone somewhere else.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, definitely definitely it's it's it's those, it's the displacement, it's the displacement issue.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, yeah, you need to be disciplined, and of course it's always you've got kids, yeah.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's you know, my kids are now well two are adults, one's a teen, but you know, it's it's always difficult to push you pull me with the kids get to get off your phone, and you don't want to make it a you know, don't want to make it a flash point because that's negative.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And no, it's not straightforward.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not straightforward at all.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: And for your kids, have you have you found the classic thing of needing to try and drag them away from screens, whether it's phones or computer games?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not been not too bad, actually.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Partly I've got three boys who just basically football obsessed.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, okay, I mean, how many times can you watch a messy goal on YouTube?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And is it really harmful if you watch it a hundred times rather than 99 times?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: I may be I may be completely deluded, and maybe they're doing all sorts of nefarious things online, but I get the impression they've always been, they've always had pretty plain vanilla online taste.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: But do I sort of feel as a dad some sort of can you just kick off your phone, mate?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and yeah, I mean who doesn't?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: We had Alain de Bottom on the show, and he came up with this very pithy one-liner, which was that the secret to a modern marriage is to be more interesting than your partner's smartphone, which I found depressingly true.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: But unfortunately, there might be quite a high bar sometimes, yeah.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean, maybe if you're broadened out beyond our kind of personal lives, just to the impact of technology on society, I want to talk to you about your book and the fractured internet and AI, but maybe just start with social media.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, you have this huge role at Meta.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um I sort of, every time I hear you speak and write, I basically find myself agreeing kind of with with your point of view.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think of similar worldviews.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: But the one area I kind of disagree with is social media.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I say that as someone who's built a social media app, sold it to Microsoft.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but to me, and I think you have a contrarian view, because I think most people, even in tech, and maybe particularly in tech, would say social media has, you know, um had negative impacts on mental health, teenagers, um, has driven polarization.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you, as I understand, have quite a different view, which is that that's not necessarily causation.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and for anyone who really wants to get into this, uh sorry to sorry to sound like a walking publicist for my for my own book, but I I do try and go over this in very considerable detail in the book, and in quite painstaking detail, because I kind of no one's gonna believe my subjective view, they're gonna say, oh, well, you're just a page shill for a you know big tech company and so on.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I do try and marshal the evidence, the academic empirical evidence.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think even if you are a sort of rabid, sort of anti-big tech, anti-social media person, if you're exposed to the evidence, yeah, um, it is just generally uh at its most mild, much, much more mixed than a lot of the kind of I think increasingly caricatured assertions about um the link between social media consumption and human behaviour, or or actually evidence confounds it completely.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it slightly depends on what sort of harm you're looking at.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think on on kids, for instance, it is self-evidently the case.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think that you know social media use can be very negative for some kids and so on.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just much, much harder to prove that that is a societal level phenomenon, it's a massive phenomenon.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, for particular individuals, and there is some evidence, again, empirical evidence that it passive scrolling, particularly not exclusively by teen girls, uh is really not is not great at all.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but on polarisation, um the oddly there, I think the the the evidence is is more unambiguously against the stereotypical assertion.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you if you look at some of the big studies that have been done in Stamford, they did a huge longitudinal study looking at, I think it was what was it, nine countries over 40 years, about and they measure what's called effective um polarization.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's how you sort of view and treat someone who you know with whom you don't agree and so on.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um they really it it just you really do have to search almost in vain for a causal link.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Most effective polarization, which has been measurable in the United States, erupted before social media even um became a thing.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um effective polarization is often highest amongst segments of the population, the old, those without a college education, as the Americans put it, um, who don't use social media.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also an interesting technical reason why the sources of political polarisation at least seem to be more associated with technologies like um like cable news or a highly partisan tabloid newspaper than social media, or rather, so I'll be specific here, or rather social media of old.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think social media is mutating very, very fast from a kind of human thing into more of a sort of pipeline of algorithmically recommended, often synthetically generated content.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is this is is for anyone who's listening to this who uses Facebook, you will know that when people say you have friends on Facebook, they're often actually not really friends, they're that annoying person who you work next to in the office ten years ago, you kept talking on social media, it's your ex-girlfriend, it's your ex-boyfriend, it's the mum of your daughter's football team.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's what the sociologists call weak, so it's your mad uncle, it's weak sociological links.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And because who you are friends with is the principal signal by which the ranking algorithm chooses what you see before you see anything else, it follows that actually, in terms of ideological and political content, you're actually seeing what is being prioritized by the system is the is the political views of your mad uncle or that person you haven't seen in ten years.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually very mixed, much more mixed than if you read the Daily Mail every day or only watch Fox News.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the Berkman-Klein Institute, for instance, at Harvard University, have done some really interesting work.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I think it was around the 2020 election, maybe it was before, and they found this flywheel of Trump on Twitter and cable news being the thing that really, really created these sort of bubble effects.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I I I don't I don't think on polarization is as and also the only other thing I would say is I've always been a bit struck by the willingness of people to make what are in effect sort of techno-determinist assertions, which are completely ahistorical.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's as if conflict and hatred and strife were invented by the reshare button.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just like patently not true.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: We've had civil war, world wars, revolutions, and conflict, unfortunately, from the dawn of time.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I just always I always find it so odd when people sort of say, oh, nasty things have happened because uh I'm spending all my time glue.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm afraid awful things have happened throughout our whole history.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I I found both empirically and with a with the through the lens of history, I particularly think the assertions around the effect of social media on on kind of animosity, if I can social, ideological animosity, I it for me it's never really stacked up.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean there are a whole bunch of other collateral effects, absolutely doesn't mean that these companies haven't made some egregious mistakes, doesn't mean that there aren't very negative things which can happen by people who are using social media and of course ghastly content.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't absolutely I don't want to sort of flip the other way.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: But and the reason I feel so strongly about this is um uh as a sort of ex-politician and lawmaker, I mean, just you just get very bad policy when it's driven by basically newspaper headlines who remember a lot of this debate is driven in part by vested interests in the publishing industry.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: As with AI.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, who quite understandably loathe and fear these companies because they've messed up their advertising model and they worry that they they're attracting eyeballs and people aren't buying their papers.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got a very, very you've got a sort of gatekeeping vested interest that is the prison through which so much of this debate happens.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in the world I previously occupied in politics, that's particularly pronounced because politicians have, of course, worked out that the easiest way to get favorable coverage on page two or three of the Telegraph of the Time or whatever, is to just say, I've issued a press release saying I'm going to, you know, clip Silicon Valley's wings.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, hooray.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and so I guess I just I just it's it's not that I'm I I don't have any monopoly of wisdom.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I just do think on some of these issues we have we have in we have sort of slightly wallowed in assertion rather than evidence, and uh on occasion, sort of a sort of techno moral panic or a moral panic about technology, which again, as I explained in the book, is not new.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you you you see this repeatedly, whether it's the bicycle, the car, the internet, the phone, the television.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm fifty, I'm almost 59.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: I remember vividly when I was young my when when ads started on terrestrial television, um, we have I had kids in the class who whose parents would send them out of the room because they thought, you know, the the the the ads for crispy pancakes or something would sort of get into their neural pathways and they use exactly the same language as they now do about online.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: My my mum wouldn't allow me and my brothers and my sister to watch.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was we used to, oh god, we used to have endless, but we were so annoyed.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: She she she had this thing that we were not allowed to watch more than 30 minutes television.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow 30 minutes was a sort of You'd go crazy after that.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, yeah, I don't know, something really loopy was gonna happen.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: So we had the same with computer games.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: They were sort of seen as really genuinely very bad for your soul.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, but you remember in the 80s, like screaming headlines.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you use this computer game, little Jimmy, your your otherwise beatifically angelic little son, will become an axe murderer.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's absurd.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm with you.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I think also on on the incumbents, I think is a is a really big problem, actually.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think I I was talking to someone in the UK government fairly high up and and I was saying, why are you not doing more to make the UK very friendly to AI?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, look, we'd love to do more, but all of the incumbent media companies who are so afraid of their business models being destroyed by AI are so aggressive against it.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: But look what and look what happened.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Was it two years ago?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was I'm not sure if you were there, but I was one of the hordes of people who were uh in in the pouring rain outside Milton Keynes in these marquees when the government convened this um Bletchley Park Safety Summit.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I honestly I think Oliver Down and Rishi Sunat, I think they they meant well.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: But when you actually ask yourself, why we why have you assembled the whole world to talk about an existential risk that is either remote or certainly perhaps unlikely and certainly not imminent?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's because every single newspaper had screaming headlines of robots with flaming red eyes saying they're going to eliminate humanity by next Tuesday.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So so I I guess it's maybe rather old-fashioned, certainly unfashionable, I accept that.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: But to say, look, come on, we just got to be more disciplined and look at the evidence and not just get because it's so emotive.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's talk about the evidence.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, it's easy to throw studies around.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I did look at some quite interesting studies.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was actually TikTok and X, recent studies, which, and it was very simple.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: They would just sign people up uh to the platforms, and then regardless almost of which political affiliation they said they identified with, I think there was one study in Germany.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: They were all of them consistently bombarded with far-right German political content.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: That was on on TikTok, I think.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: X, obviously under Musk, is a very different company to what it was before.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I wonder if your your views on this have changed now that we have Musk running X, who who quite clearly to me at least is deliberately fomenting polarization.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, absolutely, I should I should be super clear.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not speak I don't I don't actually use X, I don't use TikTok, I didn't work for those companies.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I I totally accept that my the when I start speaking sweepingly about social media, I'm actually talking about the social media I know a lot more about.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and and I'd say, and so absolutely, I think uh I mean X as far as I can make it's just become a total sort of cesspit.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah the thing I would say is twofold.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, um I don't want to understate the significance of the TikTokification of all social media, and it's very, very it is a very profound thing.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I went to Silicon Valley in uh autumn of 2018, one of the reasons I went was I was again rather unfashionably because it was not exactly a an obvious or reputationally obvious thing to do, but but but uh I I I genuinely retained this view that the the the kind of platform function where these social media apps served in effect as a platform for human beings, and because it's an ad-based model for free, yeah, to express themselves without hindrance, to communicate with family and friends and so on and so forth.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I thought that I I loved this idea that was a technology, sure it has its flaws and so on, but it was an extraordinarily enabling technology, and as a sort of old-fashioned liberal, this idea that it empowers you to, you know, on a on a on a scale which is you know quite unprecedented.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it was in it was about human content.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was about enabling humans to to generate content, you know, communicate with each other and so on.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is now that is now like a dim and distant memory.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, now I don't know what the latest, I think when I left the company, I think 50% or maybe more of content on Instagram, I may be misremembering the statistic, it was nothing to do it was nothing to do with your friends or family, and it was completely unconnected from your social life.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was just stuff that was sort of fired at you by a recommendation engine, content that was sort of plucked from the furthest recesses of the internet, and of course, increasingly content that is also synthetic and it's not you know, so so I think that I think oddly enough, the the social media that I often have in my head is social, whereas increasingly TikTok, YouTube, Instagram in particular, they're all basically becoming pipelines for recommended short form video entertainment content.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite quite different.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Ha having said that, in the old world, uh because I was so curious exactly in the point you made, uh I helped um it was endless, sort of it was a bit of a tricky thing to get through, but finally persuaded the lawyers and others to um uh um construct with I think it was 11 universities across the United States the by far the largest um um and and academically entirely rigorous study of the interaction of social media and uh and voting behavior and political behaviour during the 2020 US presidential election.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um I I actually don't think anything's been repeated on that scale since.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you had huge control groups.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you had like 250 people who would volunteer to use Facebook through the 2020 presidential election with no algorithmic ranking at all, so just a chronological feed.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Another 250,000 who wouldn't use Facebook at all.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Another quarter million who had no c capacity to reshare, so no virality.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the academics haven't yet published all the papers, but they've published the bulk of them in peer-reviewed papers and so on, um, magazines and publications.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think it's and I'm sure I'm simplifying it a little, but in effect it showed how little uh effect there appeared to be between your consumption of social media and some of your political attitudes.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean none and the rest of it.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I just again and again that may have changed now because social media has changed so much it's become less social.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I just I kind of think I kind of think we and of course remember put politics and ideology and news, I mean I I think it constituted, or at least when I last looked, constituted like three percent of the side.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is low, isn't it?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's sub five percent.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's low, but yes, a low number out of a squillions is still you know.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you set aside impact for a minute and just sort of put that to one side, uh what about intention?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: So when I was hiring people coming out of Apple and Twitter and and and Instagram back in the day, pre them being acquired by Meta, the the people working on social were saying to me, you know, it was known within those companies that divisive stuff, stuff that made people angry, did make them engage more, spend more time, and that was kind of encouraged.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: Did you have to stamp any of that culture out when you were at Meta?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's complicated, as they say, because of course, any I mean, why do you have blaring headlines which instill rage or guilt or fear or envy on every newspaper and that because it gives it it elicits a visceral reaction?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's I mean it's it's hardly rocket science to assert that an emotional reaction is more engaging to us, sort of anthropologically and psychologically.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: So sure, stuff online, much like stuff in print, if it's if it's if it has an emotive impact, is going to engage you more.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think what has happened, certainly in the times I was in the company, I think the rules which drew a line between emotive content and sort of willfully harmful content, inciting.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, I think there were 21 categories of content that I sort of presided over, they were called the community standards from IP fraud to hate speech to incitement to violence and so on and so forth.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think that became increasingly well uh policed.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and also what I I think I also discovered is if you if you uh overdo it, well maybe X is proving otherwise, but this idea that you if you just give people bilge, you mean nasty bilge, that it's a sensible for your business model is not correct.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: It really isn't.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: A because actually after a while people just go, oh, screw it, I just don't like this stuff.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and secondly, and very importantly, because the people who pay you lunch don't like it.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you're if you're an ad business, the commercial incentive is actually oddly enough to do the reverse of what's often alleged, which is I think one of the flaws of the whole Professor Zuboff surveillance capitalism paradigm is no, if you're if you're selling soap powder or b or car.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or plastic ducks, you want your ad next to sort of plain vanilla Disney type content.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Aspirational stuff.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So your the commercial incentive is always slightly pointed in a different direction.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that that that that human reflex that you refer to, which is that we just we just are just our eyeballs go to stuff that elicits Yeah, that of course that's the but that's the case in life.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is at a it is at a level of velocity, it is amplified like everything, it's accelerated, it's personalized to a far greater degree in the social media age.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's any tweak, there's no algorithmic tweak that can stop the human tendency to respond to emotive content.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot that can and has been done.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it's been uh altered recently as the mood swing has changed dramatically in the US.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but yeah, I th I th so I think a better balance was struck over time.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about that mood swing.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: From the outside looking in, it seemed like with Sheryl Sandberg and yourself, uh, Mark Zuckerberg had had people who were sort of moderating influences there ultimately, it seemed from the outside to make technology a force for good, to try and confront head-on a lot of the issues we've been talking about.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, very noticeably, you know, after you left, almost immediately after you left Meta, um, Zuckerberg seemed to take the a completely different direction of, you know, just let it rip.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, not just him, but but clearly across uh Silicon Valley, much more of a focus on free speech, throwing away all moderation.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um we had uh someone from Andreessen Horowitz who created their American dynamism practice, Catherine Boyle.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, she said basically, you know, people on the internet tell the truth.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's that's really it's not they're kind of saying one thing online which they don't really mean and it's really extreme, and offline they're they're sort of all placid.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, that that that kind of those points of view are real, they've been suppressed, and now this is what people really think, and we should let it rip.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: What's your take, not just on on meta, but maybe we've broaden it out on the industry about that flip to a very different model?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I think um it's pretty difficult to understand uh all of that without um dwelling on the magnitude of what happened in basically 2020 in the US.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And 2020 is like the crucible of a lot of the changes that you had this extraordinary coincidence of the pandemic lockdown, uh, which was way more um contested in the US than it was here.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Here I get the impression I was living over there at the time, I get impressions if you say to the Brits, hey, we're gonna pay you stay home and drink tepid tea and watch daytime television, everyone goes fine.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was fascinating.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: People really almost wanted to be told what to do.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's it is actually genuinely very interesting.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's it concerned you as a liberal?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it it has actually, and I also think economically, I mean if you look at the terrible problems we've now got here as a country, this is a slight sort of slight um departure, but it's I think it is interesting.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I can I can see why the government, the UK government at the time did this furlough scheme.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: But actually with hindsight, it was probably a big error because what they did in the US is they basically threw money at people because the furlough scheme threw money at jobs, and it and it and it fostered this totally false illusion that you could just pick up your job where you left it at the end of the pandemic.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in the US, you've had a huge amount of actually quite creative and often socially upward um labour mobility and dynamism as people have come out of, and they've said, well, it's a fresh start, but a press restart.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of business creation, yeah, yeah.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas here I just think you know, we're still limping sort of post-COVID.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that's but in the US, it was very I cannot exaggerate you how different it was there.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just wearing the mask immediately became a political and cultural thing, and the red states wouldn't do it, and you went to Florida and Texas, you didn't wear a mask, and you're proud not to, and and and the you know, of course, this demonization of Fauci by the right, yeah, and then you had the George Floyd moment and all the race um tensions, and you had Trump saying he was going to send in the troops, and should the social media companies have allowed that or not allowed that?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: In that instance, we did.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then oh, and then there was the election, and there was the like would it was the election could how could it be held during the pandemic?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: People like Mark Zuckerberg, actually, in this case, totally innocently gave a whole bunch of his own money to help election administrators.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: The right immediately said, You're you're bending the rules to help the Democrats.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then you had this thing about Hunter Biden and his laptop.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: What a weird story.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: He leaves this laptop in a computer repair shop and it's got all this filth on it, and that can't be right, and then X-band it altogether, and that's a great that spawned a great conspiracy theory.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Facebook, we didn't, we didn't remove it, but it was sort of demoted.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot tell you how much all of plus more has just created just scrambled the political brain in and the and the sort of political class in the US and certainly radicalized a number of people in Silicon Valley.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that then umbilically led to the um the the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, driven by this rage against the kind of excessive woke karate of the West Coast and a belief that there was a conspiracy theory and that they, you know, I've got I've had to give evidence in sort of congressional committees, absolutely, you know, with this assertion that big tech was somehow uh, you know, playing fast and loose with the truth, all to benefit the left.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it it just I it really and and the upshot of it, and it's very important for non-Americans to understand this, whether you like it or not, is that close to half the country did think by the time of the last election that Silicon Valley was was was was actively censoring their worldview.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: So so much though I find the whole stampede of all the tech bros to Mara Lago and the White House pretty unedifying, uh, and personally I don't think it's my personal view, it's part one of the reasons why I moved on.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't actually think it's very smart business either.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because what are they gonna do when there's a Democrat president?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna turn around.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: So now we agree with everything that you believe.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, you can't have this ridiculous whiplash every time there's a change of political uh mood in the in the country in in or uh a political incumbent in white in the White House.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: You don't think that's good.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Can I just ask you about that?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: You don't think that's good business?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not good business because you certainly not when certainly not when you're that size and you're that established and you have societal level prevalence.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to me, of course, you of course you have to box and cox a bit.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, certainly with content moderation, it's not an exact science.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a fixed line.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: What people think is acceptably the acceptable line between content moderation and free expression isn't fixed, it's not defined anywhere.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it and it does move.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh but but but the reason I don't think it's good business is I think in the end it's much better for businesses not to be so snarled up with politics that they're constantly chopping and changing depending on who's won the election.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: You've got you've got to sort of plot your own course a bit.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: It just seems to me that's smart business in the long run.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but just to your point about the uh the the shift, um you know, I so I think one can one can criticize and mock and all the rest of it, the the the this rather sort of unedifying spectacle, um, and you can certainly we can certainly have a debate about whether they've overdone it and all the rest of it, um, and speculate about how they're going to play things in the future if the political mood changes again.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the one bit I wouldn't denigrate as a non-American is there just was, I mean, there just there just was a big, big societal shift.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and when you have half the population of your of your host country or domestic market saying, I I just don't, I don't feel I'm being represented by these, then then you have to shift.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you you know, you can't you can't I mean oddly enough, people like me, you know, the sort of what you could loosely call, I don't know, centrist or progressive folk, we might like to oh no no, why don't you keep the rules as they are?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like, well, hang on a minute, if if if that if that if that's actively considered to be inimical to the interests of half the public, yeah, what right do you have to say that your rules should prevail over their sentiments?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I I d I d it doesn't surprise me that they had to shift on the context.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, as you know, the US just has this um often I think slightly um slightly sort of pompous view that their First Amendment view of free expression is is absolutely unique in the world and everybody else is a sort of Soviet censor.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um but they but you know, notwithstanding that there is this passionately held view about the First Amendment and its role in in safeguarding free expression.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: The penion will swing again.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want it to swing back again or are you are you happy with where it is?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I no no no no it will swing again.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: It it swung so violently from one one direction to the other.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it will shift driven by events.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: I actually think what it'll make mainly shift to and what it will mainly driven by won't actually be the old debates around should that post be allowed or not allowed, which is the sort of environment I inhabited.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's is that AI you are falling in love with, or your your daughter's falling in love with, or is giving you that business that market recommendation, or is it or is telling you you should book that holiday?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, is that I I think I think we're gonna see a whole slew of controversies, ethical, moral, societal, legal um uh misgivings um around our highly personalized dependency on AI entities where where the entity is the company speaking directly to us.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's very important this.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: It means there'll be no section 20, or at least I don't think there should be any section 230 protection.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because the platforms previously, in that lovely CPA-tinted world I described earlier, where it was all about humans producing human content, the platforms could not unreasonably say, Well, we can't be held responsible for what humans post on our on our platform.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: They won't be able to say that in future because you know it's their AI slot.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like And do you think they will try to get around that by saying Sure they'll try and get around of it, but I I I I think there's going to be an almighty backlash.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I think we're I think we're seeing now the the seeds are being sown for quite a pitchfork rebellion against the well for a whole bunch of reasons, partly for the reasons I said earlier.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: I just think the level of intrusive power which will be represented by this highly personalized and of course, particularly for vulnerable adults and kids, real vulnerabilities and how people interact with these AI entities, but also as I think many well everybody would listening to this podcast will know, the fundamental physics of generative AI is itself so centralizing.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: It it it it it it you know, if you if you if you were worried enough about too much power being aggregated in the in the hands of a small coterie of people on the West Coast and tech leaders in China, you ain't seeing nothing yet, just because it's so bloody expensive to build this stuff in the first place, which is why you've only got, you know, just these what is it, half a dozen men running all of this.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: So and the wealth that they're gonna get is gonna be is gonna I mean when we speak to these guys, you know, they say you're gonna have off the record, they say you have to tax us at 90%.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, because the wealth of communication that the central media guys will be.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole and they're all and I always say this to people, and I mean this honestly with genuine affection about a lot of these people.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I admire a lot of them.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: They are amazing business builders, they're ferociously competitive, they're it they're ingenious um business people, but they're not philosopher kings.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're not labour markets.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, well some of them certainly do.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: I I just always say to people, just don't listen to Tech Bro X about his predictions about what's going to happen in the labour market because he doesn't know.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Don't listen to X when he says, Oh, well, I think the solution to all of this is uh you know universal basic income, which is very convenient to say in Silicon Valley.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll earn all the money and I'll work harder.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: All the rest of you, why don't you write poetry and and hang out in the vegetable package?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's so condescending.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's just condescending drivel.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think it's you shouldn't listen to the technology, they're technologists, they're engineers, they're they're highly driven, competitive men, locked in an absolute existential battle with each other.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're producing, they're generating great things, but they're builders and engineers.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just always would encourage politicians and regulators and the press and the public to treat them like that.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Give them respect, enormous amount of respect for a lot of what they build.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: But they're not they cannot and must not be regarded as somehow guides for how society should be organized.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: You really riled them up the other the other week, didn't you?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Me?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Andrew Ross Orkin quoted you saying something about how, you know, they should um uh basically they shouldn't feel so sorry for themselves.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Did he?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think something about that.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, did was he riled up?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, well, he was uh he quoted it, and then a whole bunch of them were very riled up and said, you know, we um yeah, I'm not sure they had a choice words for me.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, I yes, I I think what I was saying, which I'm happy to repeat, which is one of the things I I loved my time in Silicon Valley.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: I make dear friends there.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was just there again the other day.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's been the most wonderful chapter of my life, really.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but like anything, like in Westminster and like when I spent 10 years in Brussels, there are negative aspects, and I think I just highlighted something I always found so grating and still do, is like some of the richest people on the planet living in these gated communities in the sort of you know spotlessly sunny part of California, whining that somehow they're victims of people being beastly to them.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the lack of self-knowledge, it's just pathetic.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Just get a grip, yeah.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, let's close off part one by just talking a little bit about how to save the internet, um, which is which is your new book.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so we talked about you know social media and you've expressed, I think, a very balanced view there.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: But you are really worried now about the future of the internet.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: What are you so worried about?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I thought what my motivation of writing the book was because there is an as there's lots to worry about, but there's one aspect which I just don't feel gets commented on enough because it's a sort of classic um you know slow, slow-boiling frog problem.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those things that's incrementally getting worse, but there's no dramatic moment.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, there were I'll come to that.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: There were a couple of near misses recently which would have, I think, brought all of this to people's attention, but it's just the fragmentation of the open internet.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And as again, I think many people on listening to this podcast will know, the internet grew by accident, not by design.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was a sort of organic layer upon layer, innovation upon innovation.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was not there was no blueprint, there was no UN summit, thankfully, deciding there shall be an internet.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's slightly put, to use a blue Peter phrase or an old one, it's slightly in the back end, it's slightly put together by kind of sticky back plastic.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a much more fragile thing, and I think, but but of course it has at its heart something which uh people may disagree with, but I think is a wonderful thing.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: It has this, it it demolishes geography, it just it it doesn't recognize borders, it has this extraordinary emancipating openness about it, um, certainly outside China.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think that is now colliding, if you like, the sort of globalizing power of these techno these technologies of the internet itself, turbocharged in the AI age, is colliding with the de-globalization of politics everywhere, whether it's Modi or Brexit or Trump or Erdogan or Putin.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't, it politics everywhere, perhaps one is the reaction to the other, is all about is all about building barriers, and so now everyone's regulating things differently.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um you've got this overarching geostrategic and geotechnological conflict between the US and China.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: You've got India almost as a swing vote in the middle, and I always think India is actually the really the bellwether techno technology um ecosystem to watch.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: If they go in a kind of China direction, then the kind of US European Atlanticist-led internet is going to be a thing of the past.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not great then that Trump is trying to fight with them so much.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not great.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a I mean it's it's idiotic.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if I if I it's just it's beyond it's it's it's beyond sort of mockery that the that the US should so willfully um mishandle Modi.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, not that he's an angel, certainly not, but but and sort of drive him into the hands of Xi Jinping.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, China uh sorry, India is big enough and has reserves of of of technological and engineering excellence excellence.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: They they could they could if they wanted to, I hope they won't, but they could sort of try and do a version of the Chinese internet, yeah, hermetically sealing it off.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: And to my earlier point about miss near misses, uh about three, four years ago, I spent a lot of time in Delhi talking to ministers at the time, trying, not just me, of course, many others, um, as it turned out successfully, persuading them not to pass a law with a very technical name, it was called hard data localization, but really would, I my view, have been the first domino to fall in the in the profound fragmentation of the and bulkanization of the internet because the law would have required that all data about in Indians should be physically kept in in India, and and the US and the EU came very, very close to um not being able to maintain the legal basis upon which data is uh conveyed every millisecond of the day across the Atlantic.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was just two or three years ago.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we've had we've we've you know we've had some near-misses where the kind of seamless data flows, which which are the arteries of the internet, which we don't ever think about, we take for granted, could could have been um i interrupted.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: So in a nutshell, I I think it is just more and more likely that that fundamental conflict of geography demolishing technology and geography reasserting politics will play out.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's my uh view and assertion that over time um to avoid the uh internet just becoming fragmented, much more friction in everything we do online, much more difficult to, you know, much more difficult to seamlessly um communicate and convey information from one side of the globe to the other.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: If we want to retain that openness, it requires an active act of leadership by the what I call the three main techno-democracies of uh the US, India, and Europe in that sort of order of descending importance.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the sort of last third of my book is sort of sketching out what that might look like.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: Great, great place to leave it for part one, Nick.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.