Digital Dominance: How to Limit the Power of Big Tech (Sir Nick Clegg)

28:07And actually, most people don't give a... They hugely care about politics, but they're not thinking about the triple lock. Similarly, in news, if you're a newsy person, you assume that everyone's consuming the news all the time. That's right. And you follow people on Facebook or on WhatsApp or on Instagram who are kind of newsy people with opinions about Trump. And actually, most people, and I mean this in a positive way, I mean this as a compliment, most people live in Hartlepool, watch strictly, are intelligent about the world and care about their future and what's going on with their family, but they're not news and politics obsessives.

28:38But most of the coverage of these companies comes from people who are news and politics obsessives. Has that created problems in the public understanding, do you think? Yeah, well, of course it has. Because, again, I'm sure I won't be thanked for it, but I've always had a somewhat mixed relationship with the sort of vested interest, certainly in the British press. They're vested interests. They're not philosopher kings. They're not handing down objectivity from some mountaintop. These are industries themselves, and they have their own commercial interests, and they feel deeply aggrieved by the way in which particularly Google and Facebook over the last 10, 15 years have significantly altered their fundamental business model.

29:21When they say, let me put their argument to them because I used to work in newspapers, they say companies like Facebook have stolen their content and have got super rich by basically pilfering the stuff that they have to pay for and you distribute it for free. Yeah, and it's nonsense on stilts. I mean, it's almost an inversion of the truth. It's a very polite way of putting it. And I'll tell you why. I think, I need to check now, but I think 95 % or thereabouts of the news links you will find on social media, guess who puts them there? The publishers put them there. Because they want their eyeballs.

29:50Yes, so they use social media themselves to actually attract. And then these platforms, by the way, build for these publishers, build all sorts of ways in which they can then monetize that. In other words, they can then, if you click onto that link, then it goes, you know, I've done this countless times. Then you go to a paywall and they say, oh no, you can now subscribe now. You get five free articles or whatever. We've been through all of these flows and that's how they make money. So this idea that their content is being stolen when these platforms have no interest, largely speaking, because it's not actually why people use Instagram or Facebook.

30:23And Facebook relegated news, didn't they? I think was it under your watch? Well, news is not the most important thing on our feed. People mostly want pictures of their community. Well, yeah, it's a rather sort of unedifying standoff happened, actually, in Australia. You mentioned Australia again, where the Murdoch Press and others started spinning this yarn. And honestly, it's just a yarn to the Australian government at the time that somehow their content was being stolen and so on and so forth. So companies like Facebook turned around and said, well, we don't want this. We don't need it. We don't want it.

30:51And by the way, without getting into the sort of, again, the weeds of this, that's somewhat different to if you're running a search engine like Google, where you have to scrape news because you need to come up with these little snippets that every time we search something. But if you're a social media app, you don't need news. Most people don't. As you said earlier, most people are watching Strictly or watching football. They're not people are people. The vast majority of people are not actually very interested in seeing stuff about news and politics on their on their social media feeds. They want to hear about their friends, their family.

31:23They want to be entertained and so on. And so I think that sort of the relationship, if I can put it like that, between the publishers and social media has always been quite checkered. By the way, it doesn't mean that the social media companies have behaved, you know, behaved perfectly. I think they've sometimes chopped and changed their algorithms, chopped and changed their systems without, you know, without consulting anyone, without announcing anything. And that's, you know, that's aggrieved the industry. And I would stress, I actually think the debate, in as much as the social, in as much as the publishers feel they have an axe to grind, I think they have more reason in an age of AI than they did in the age of sort of old-fashioned social media.

32:03Well, because I think... I want to put you there too, because there is an argument out there, often advanced by people who don't like what these big companies are doing, and they might well be right, that AI is theft. Because AI is built on the mass exploitation of other people's work, essentially. Is there some merit to that argument? I think there can be some merit in that, which is why I have much more sympathy with some of the kind of special pleading, if I could put it like that, from some of the content producers than I did from the Murdochs and others in social media, one in the way that I described, because if these AI machines, and they are vast, when you train what is called a foundation model, which is the base layer upon which you then build the AI applications, that is the bit where you need huge amounts of data, you need huge amounts of energy, you need huge amounts of GPUs, you need to build all these data centers and so on.

32:58GPUs are general processing units. So, yeah, so compute capacity. It's the thing that... Okay, called compute, yeah. Yeah, and it's the thing that... It's why NVIDIA is now the most valued company in the world because they've got a bit of a grip on that market at the moment, though I suspect that will change over time. But here's the thing. I think the companies that build these foundation models have every right to use data that's just out there on the internet, that's just been put out there, that's publicly out there. You can't expect these companies to, you know, everything that's just been publicly and freely circulating on the internet to go to every single person who's, you know, posted anything and said, you know, can we ingest that in our training data?

33:39But stuff that has clear copyright protection, that clearly, whether it's by book publishers or others, specifies that they shouldn't be used without permission, then clearly the AI training model developers, the big hyperscalers, should respect that. And if they want to, and that's increasingly happening, they should, of course, be encouraged to license content that they think is particularly useful to their models. so I think this is going to evolve I think as ever a balance will need to be struck if you ask these AI model developers to you know seek to seek permission for stuff that's been out there and it's been out there for ages and be used multiple times well AI would grind to a halt overnight but equally I think content providers and content creators have every right to be very very clear that if they don't want their content included in these vast training models they should have the ability to withhold their consent and only to grant it on terms which they accede to absolutely what's mark zuckerberg like really he's um he's an engineer he's he's sort of very techie he's very immersed in engineering he's like a lot of those people who excel in that world he's very gets very very immersed in in things he's got this extraordinary ability to focus he's remorselessly competitive i'll tell you one thing that i liked about him which somewhat surprised me i kind of thought if you're one of the richest people on the planet and you've been living this abnormal life completely abnormal i mean films were made about him when he was like 21 yeah you know he's never led a normal life and it's the one thing that surprised me was he retains which is quite unusual he retains an unusual ability to listen and doesn't mean he's not very assertive when he's made up his mind doesn't mean he's very stubborn which he can be when he's made up his mind but he has this sort of very sort of technologist view if he doesn't understand something he needs to learn all about it he needs to talk to the people who do know about it and and sort of suck suck up all their knowledge and then come to a view and he and he does that very very rigorously and methodically so i like the way and of course when i came on board in a sense i the reason sheryl sandberg and mark zuckerberg reached out to me was precisely because they felt well we're not politicians we've got ourselves into all sorts of trouble you know you can then argue whether it was by sins of commission or omission in the wake of cambridge analytica the 2016 election they i think rightly identified at the time that a lot of new regulation would emanate from europe and they said look we need someone who just knows much more about the world of politics and government and so on.

36:24So from my point of view, the division of Labour was great because he didn't want to deal with that kind of stuff. And one of the things I found hardest to deal with when I moved, when Miriam and I moved with the kids to Silicon Valley and I started working in these gleaming, I mean, you've been there, these gleaming sort of glass and steel contraptions draped along these motorways in Silicon Valley.

36:50Sure, it was the sort of technological side and i immersed myself in in in the sort of technology of it to understand that it was the language it i just i realized immediately that i there was i coming from a world of assertion and and a sort of this very british westminster thing of sort of sarcasm humor charm menace all that kind of stuff all the kind of pontification of the floor of the house of commons the cut and thrust of television in political debates and i came to a place where And none of that worked. Because if you didn't have the data and you couldn't show the system and you couldn't show the before and after stats, you didn't get anywhere.

37:28So I had to really rewire the way I kind of expressed myself in order to prevail in the, like any large organization, you only prevail by persuading other people of your point of view. And it took me a while to do that. Even though you're making arguments about politics and things like regulation. Can I just push back on one aspect of Zuckerberg? I know he's a friend of yours and, you know, he can, in the end, he can defend himself. But there's just one thing which is, again, a common sort of a motif about him, which is that basically in his pivot to Trump, you see someone who's put the pursuit of power and pragmatism above principle.

38:03They look at this guy who's taken up jiu-jitsu. They look at this guy who goes on Joe Rogan's podcast and says he likes the odd bit of masculine energy. They look at your departure from the company. They look at the appointment of Dana White, who's this kind of kingpin of UFC ultimate fighting in America. And they say, hang on a second, Mark, you were this Harvard liberal. You were this kind of open up the world, connect everyone type when that was the right way to go in the age of Obama. And now there's something about his pivot to Trump. And they find it a little bit, not just tone deaf, but a little bit sickening, actually.

38:37Yeah. I mean, look, two things I'd say. Firstly, don't be surprised that the people, and it's not just Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook at Apple, Sergey Brin, for heaven's sake, who used to be an absolutely prominent progressive Democrat. But all of these people, they're business people. They're running businesses. We shouldn't imagine that these people, they might claim that they are. They're not. They're not philosopher kings. They're not moral leaders. Don't look to them for that. But they've asserted themselves missionaries. And that I've always disliked. And it was one of the first things I said when I arrived.

39:13I said, stop all this crap of somehow pretending that, you know, that Silicon Valley and the Britons are moral. They want to connect the world. They want to spread power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't bear all of that because it's so it's obviously not true. They are great technologists. They're great innovators. They're great builders. but I wouldn't look to them which is why I remain firmly with the view that governments should remain absolutely in the driving seat on the big judgments about the trade-offs that technologies like this bring when they're when they're taken up at such huge scale in society and I just would I don't and I don't actually think many of them would take this as a critique they're defending their businesses they're ferociously competitive with each other their first duty they think to themselves to their employees to their shareholders is that their company should prevail and that's what they care about that's what they think about every waking minute and i i if if the implied critique i totally agree with that i thought this early frothy stuff in silicon valley where they pretended that somehow i mean i i'll give you a amusing anecdote just to illustrate the point So in autumn of 2018, I went along to the, it was a two-day induction for new employees at Facebook at the time.

40:25And I was probably by quite some way. The ex-Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Vignes there with his notepad. I was. I was there with my notepad and I did all the role-playing things. I was probably by quite a long short and the most senior person there. But I wanted to go through what everyone else did. And everyone from literally new recruits from the catering department to the engineering department were there. and I remember Sheryl Sandberg asking me afterwards after two days what did you think of the induction and I said I think it's ridiculous because I spent two days in this induction in one of the most in a company that's making fatter profit margins than almost any other company on the planet and not once did anyone explain to me how you make money and this was the phase in Silicon Valley where they almost pretended they weren't money-making entities and I think in a weird kind of way with all of the events since then there's a sort of slightly more I think the I think a lot of the I think a lot of the blather around um around these technologies has been somewhat stripped away by controversy or by choice or by politics they're businesses I think they're very important businesses I had a wonderful time working there I was very proud of a lot of the work that I did and it's not just a Zuckerberg thing that's a Silicon Valley thing where oddly enough in seeking to compete with China.

41:40Silicon Valley and DC are behaving in a very Chinese way because, of course, the great critique in America about China was always that technology was too close to government. The business was too close. Anyway, but back to my point, it was amazing. So when I arrived in 2018, they almost wouldn't admit to their own newly freshly minted employees that they made a lot of money and that they were a very successful business. I think all of that has changed. I and much less idealistic. I certainly, even in my time that I was there, I saw quite a lot of people leave because they'd come to Silicon Valley almost imagining that these big tech companies were going to be like, I don't know, working for an NGO.

42:18Why did you want to leave? Was it because the atmospherics were changing? Was it because you'd done your time? Was it because you felt out of sync with the new vibe? Why did you want to go? Yeah, all of those above. Yeah, a mix of all of those things. Yeah. Look, here's the irony. In the many, many debates over many years that we would have internally in a company like that, with the board, with Mark Zuckerberg and so on. I was the only person who'd actually been elected to anything. And I was always, and I was always noted, but here's the thing. I was always the most prominent voice saying, listen, you need to rebuild relationships with governments.

42:50You can't just be at war with them all the time. That was partly my, that was a big bit of my day job. But, you know, I always say there's only one thing worse in a sort of capitalist economy than having big businesses and governments at each other's throats. It's having them in each other's pockets. you've got to strike again a bit of a third way I know you've got to strike the right balance and I was always the advocate of you've got to you know you've got to have some a bit of an arm's length relationship I argued for many years ago I didn't didn't prevail I actually argued even that getting out of the business of running political ads on Facebook altogether globally because I just I just thought it was I just I just thought the more we could get out of politics the better so so obviously when the decision was and it wasn't a decision as such it wasn't sort of you don't wake up one morning and decide this it was a massive vibe shift which really brewed from from 2020 onwards uh the polarization around the lockdown and the 2020 election and so on and then of course the takeover twitter by Elon Musk that really moved the Overton window in a big time in a big time in Silicon Valley when I saw the whole of Silicon Valley it wasn't the company I worked for we're just going to go really go massively into politics when I'd always kind And I said, I think, and I still remain of that view.

44:03I remain of the view that private sector enterprise and innovation flourishes best when it's at a respectable distance from political power.

44:15Really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Nick Clegg. If you are, then please do subscribe to this podcast, as a lot of other people are doing, on BBC Sounds. And that way you won't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Thank you so much. And now back to Nick Clegg. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.

44:55It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

45:21Based on everything you've seen in Seneca Valley and before that in politics, can you just give our listeners a sense of where you think all of this is going? It has concentrations of power. It has what they need to do now to get ahead of these trends and to not lose out in a world that seems to be being remade around them by these very powerful people. The first thing I'd say, and I worry about this, is what we experience online is a very great speed mutating from something that was driven by humans. It was content that humans would generate, good, bad, lovely, ugly. to content that is synthetically generated and algorithmically recommended to you.

46:03So these great platforms, which is actually one of the reasons I was always, if unfashionably, defenders of them, they were platforms for human expression, human content, human connection, will increasingly become pipelines for algorithmically recommended entertainment content, where we as humans become, if you like, more passive recipients of both synthetically generated content, which is then automatically recommended to us. This is my profound concern. You know, I've got a great phrase for this, to paraphrase Grace Jones, which is, I think we're becoming slave to the algorithm. Yeah, and here's the irony of ironies.

46:46I think a lot of the critique of what I call social media one was wrong and was wider than Mark because I think it underestimated how much agency humans had. But weirdly enough, it's a critique that I think is coming into its own or will do as we move into a more synthetic environment. That's so annoying. That was supposed to be my critique. Damn. No, but well, so I, and I, and here's the thing to your point about power. And I think this trend of what I call in the book, the power paradox that these technologies empower us, but aggregate and concentrate so much power into the hands of the people who run these industries.

47:23I think that's going to happen with Nobson because we're all going to, certainly if that's, you listen to anyone really from Dario Amadei to Elon Musk, it doesn't matter what sort of spectrum they come from in terms of the debate around AI, they're all aiming for the same thing, which is that we all end up becoming very dependent on agentic AI, on AIs that do everything from help us cook, plan our holiday to share our deepest, darkest fears and thoughts and so on. Agents or assistants. Correct. And so you're going to have a level of personalized dependency on AI entities, which are synthetic entities, which is quite, quite different to being connected with another human being via Facebook, you know, circa five years ago, which is certainly the industry I worked in at that time.

48:12And yet at the same time, of course, that the underlying physics that produces that very personal feel, you know, that very personal agentic AI, call them Bob, call them Susan, who may even appear in very realistic sort of avatar form to us soon, will be based on a technology which is very, very centralising at its source. To build these foundation models in the first place is only something that very, very small number of private sector entities, I mean, it's worth dwelling on this. The UK government, if it wanted to, would not be able to spend the money that one, never mind all of them collectively, that one of these American companies is spending every year at the moment.

48:50Can I put some numbers, just to really spell out for people? Microsoft, which is currently worth, I think, around about market cap up or down, around$3 trillion, will say we're going to spend$40 billion. I'm making this number up. Okay,$100 billion. $100 billion on an energy. This is very energy-intensive stuff. And meanwhile, you've got the UK government that can't find$5 billion of welfare savings. What we're talking about here is an extraordinary financial power of those building this technology, which is a corporate power, a company power, an institutional, private sector power, which is partly about, by the way, infrastructure, energy consumption, about how you generate that energy, where does it come from, versus governments that can't find, which is skin.

49:30Correct. But my point is that the expense of building what I call the base layer exacerbates the power paradox we talked about earlier. If only a very small number of very, very wealthy entities can build the stuff in the first place. And they're also the entities that then deliver your Bob or your Susan in sort of almost imposter human form. this this this bifurcation of power where we become ever more personal or more and more reliant on this technology in a highly personalized way um which i think as i describe in the book begs particularly difficult questions for kids so that debate will i think only get bigger over time vulnerable adults and so on and at the same time it can only be delivered to us through the deep deep pocketed, you know, entities in China and the US.

50:24So I think all of that is a concoction, which is going to create ethical, moral and political dilemmas, which make the kind of people who will do my job that I did for a while in Silicon Valley, you can call it interesting, but also very, very challenging. And now all of this, of course, is taking place, since you asked for big trends in the context in which the American sort of techno-political establishment, which is really now congealed under Trump too, believes, as far as I can make out from what I've heard privately and what you read publicly, believe that they can deliver a knockout blow against China, that this existential race for AI supremacy is akin to outspending the Soviets.

51:12And there'll be a sort of Berlin Wall moment when one of these big American entities, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, will suddenly deliver AGI, artificial general intelligence, or superhuman intelligence. They'll somehow then be able to put that technology in a box, lock it and say, you know, we are going to prevail forever and on. I think that's nonsense. I don't think that's going to happen. I just don't think America is going to beat China like that. I don't think there will be a knockout blow. If you look at the way the Chinese are already actually leading, here's the irony, in open source technology, which is democratizing the technology for free around the world.

51:51Here's the irony. So you've got the world's greatest autocracy that is, oddly enough, in its competition against the world's greatest democracy, America, doing more to democratize the technology that they're competing over. And so I think, amongst other things, in terms of big trends, and that's really the subject of the last third of my book, at some point, the American political and economic establishment will realize that they're not going to win. They're not going to win on this current trajectory. And if they want to win, they're going to have to relearn something they've clearly lost under these last few months under Trump.

52:26They're going to have to relearn working in partnership, leadership through partnership, particularly with the Indians and the Europeans. You call for a kind of union of tech democracies. So India is sort of this triumvirate of India as the world's biggest democracy, America and the European Union. And I know that that's partly what you think Donald Trump gets wrong about America first, isn't it? Completely. Yeah, that he thinks it is. Partly. I mean, you're not exactly going to get these partners to help you out against China if you spent all your time clobbering them with tariffs and demeaning them and insulting them.

52:56What do the people listening to you now and watching you now, other than understanding these issues, other than seeing these trends and thinking about them, what do they need to do to win in this future? There's a sort of, I infer from what you're saying that we need to prize human connection while we can, which is what makes being alive wonderful. You know, how two sapiens or groups of sapiens connect with each other. That connection is going to become more and more valuable as agentic AI takes over. But how can we prepare for this new world and win in it? I'd say two things. One, play around with the technology a lot.

53:31Just really just play around with the technology. Use the different, use the different, use Claude, just get, feel comfortable with them. The amount of ink that is spilt, I read it almost every day in our newspapers about people condemning these technologies without actually using them is quite remarkable. Use it first. And then secondly, and I think we need to inculcate this in a big way in our kids be very very skeptical about what you see online because there's just going to be vast amounts of synthetic slop and then i think the i think governments and others need to step in big time to work out what you do with people who for mental health or other reasons or for and certainly of course for kids just can't be expected to act with that degree of sort of deliberate agency.

54:21And that's, I think, one of the most difficult and interesting new challenges that we face. That's very clear. I want to end, you've been very generous through the time, I want to end with a couple of reflections on British politics. You were standing as a sort of anti-politics candidate as a kind of radical liberal in the centre ground. These days, anti-politics is not coming from people in the centre. It's coming from people at the edges or the fringes. Why did that happen, do you think? Well, I think I'm, in a sense i'm the textbook example of how difficult it is to be anti-establishment and then be part of the establishment it's just like it's a it's a transition which clearly i didn't successfully navigate i i i um i made a set of assumptions which clearly you know were wrong i i i thought it was obvious that no one had won the election so you kind of had to share power if you're going to have a government i just was that wrong well no sorry it's not factually wrong it factually correct but I had not I had not understood how quickly what I consider to be inevitable compromise gets branded instead as betrayal and you know I just it's human nature although if you fight three elections to the left of this yeah this is Tony Blair's argument if you fought three yeah to the left of labor and then you get into government the Tories then at birth the coalition was yeah it's gonna maybe exactly listen I got I'm not in a sense this will play I mean, whilst I think actually the government that we ran for those five years between 2010 and 2015, I think indisputably is the best government this country's had in a decade and a half, if not more.

55:53Clearly, the political kind of consequences for the reasons you describe and others didn't work out. And I think it's the really enduring question of our times. Voters here in this country and elsewhere, as you say, this is now 16 years ago, have been saying over and over and over again, no, we want something different. No, we want something different. No, we want something different. And every time something different is delivered to them, they say, no, that's not different enough. They want something else. What is interesting about the new populism is how they appear sometimes to be able to go from the kind of anti-establishment politics of opposition and into government.

56:35And they continue to become the kind of anti-establishment voice in government. And they can govern very, very badly, but still paper over the cracks by just constantly. And so I think that I think for liberals, small old liberals, there's this kind of assumption that populists get found out when they get into government. And actually they can continue running against things. So Donald Trump is running against universities, running against the media, the fake news media. But you say small liberals. One of the themes is this wonderfully, if I may say humbly, this successful podcast the first three months is that people both on the left, like Ash Sarkar, who's a Marxist, and on the right, like James Zaw, who's a national conservative, big influence on reform.

57:19have said that basically the thing that everyone needs to wake up to is that we're living in a post-liberal moment, that we are all post-liberals now. And actually in that context, I want to ask you a question that I asked James Orr. I asked him whether what liberalism got wrong is that it has no values or that it has the wrong values. And this is what James Orr said. I think the problem with liberalism is not that it's got no values, but that it gets values in the wrong order. Conservatives and liberals care equally about freedom They just have a different account of where it should be ranked And I think crudely liberals want to see freedom as upstream of everything The organising horizon of everything And conservatives will say, no, that kind of freedom is a licence for anarchy What do you make of that criticism of liberalism?

58:14I from a tiny excerpt by the way he's a very sophisticated thinker so I don't much though I might not agree with him I don't want to take it out of context I think he's almost referring to libertarianism more than liberalism is what I can make up I think he thinks that we're living in the end of equals at the twilight of liberalism whether you go back to 1945 or 1789 or 1776 but basically this idea that freedom was the supreme goal of politics maybe that is more of a libertarian idea but I think he means liberalism more broadly and I think he thinks that liberals and he does mean liberals not libertarians here i think he would say liberals not you specifically are weak and they're weak because on issues that really matter it's like david frum would say the liberals don't enforce borders fascist wills yeah of course liberals should enforce borders and yet it's under liberals that immigration under biden or the tories whatever um liberals are weak about the collapse of the family in large parts of urban america britain or the fact that many kids are growing up without fathers and they think that liberals have the wrong priorities and are too weak to assert common sense requirements of being human?

59:14So I don't actually think liberalism, the sort of, dare I say, right back to the Gladstonian liberalism that I sort of, and British, the long, proud tradition of British liberalism that I certainly have always espoused myself and sought to always try and follow myself. I don't think it's weak at all. But here's the big but. It's based on a bunch of, at the moment, fairly unfashionable concepts. Firstly, that you always prioritize reason over prejudice and assertion. It seeks to prioritize the brain over the heart when actually so much political behavior is driven by the heart rather than the brain.

59:56So you're colliding. It is true. Liberals do. They will cogitate rather than agitate. They will look at evidence rather than rely on emotion. I remain of the view that the liberalism is, in a sense, the sort of political expression of an enlightenment tradition, which believes in science, believes in the sort of method of reason and science and argument and weighing them up and then deciding. And that, of course, can come across, I think, is very equivocal in a political environment where people just want a spasm. They don't want a solution. They want a spasm. and we live in a in a in a world of emotion of politics at least where emotional spasms do much better than the reason and i think the trick politically is to make reason look strong and deliberate and not weak and indecisive and i think what accompanies that if you believe in reason you also believe in openness you have to and i mean openness in the greatest sense of the word you have to be open to other people's ideas you have to be open to the idea that you're wrong you have to be open to challenge you have to be open to a mixture of inputs and i think again one of the things that happens in society when people are feeling anxious about their own well-being about whether they're going to hold down a job whether their pay is going to go up whether they're going to be able to give their kids the holiday that they want whether they're going to be able to pay for the for the extension to their to the house or whatever is that um far from being open you quite understandably just become more and more focused on your own needs and i think in our country we've been battered over and over and over again pretty well non-stop since 2008 by a series of things that have really just made us more and more insecure and anxious wholly predictably as a country is it any wonder that in that environment people are less interested in the politics that says well hang on a minute i want to kind of look at the evidence here and are instead much more attracted to someone who just says, I'm going to end the small boats in, what is it, 13 days, 12 days, whatever nonsense that he spouts.

1:02:08No, it doesn't surprise me at all. Does it mean that liberalism is wrong? No. Does it mean that liberalism can't make a comeback? No. Does it mean that liberalism doesn't actually, is actually, in my view, remains best equipped to provide us with the best answers? I definitely think it is. But it requires, it does require politicians of real genius and talent to take that alchemy of reason and of openness and insert it into the much, much more lurid, bite-sized politics that we now inhabit than I certainly did at the time when I was on that television debate 16 years ago. Final thought. What's next for you?

1:02:46Every time you're written about in the newspapers, people keep referring to your wife's political ambitions. Yes. And she's, just to be clear about this, she set up a political movement. Yeah, my next chapter might be as a political spouse. There you go. You're going to be the first gentleman of Spain. That's what it's going to be. Primero señor. You speak Spanish, don't you? Because your wife, Miriam, has set up a kind of political organisation there. Yeah. Is that a big part of your future? Well, it's certainly a big part of her, and therefore it's a very big part of mine. So she set up something which is, I suppose it's loosely analogous to what Emmanuel Macron set up, you know, before it turned into a political party.

1:03:23Or Marsh. Do you remember? Actually, I don't think this was deliberate. It's actually got the same acronym. It's called España Mejor, Better Spain. And it's like a nationwide civic movement. I'm sounding like my wife's press officer here. As Miriam has said, and I think people are really paying attention to what she's saying, what her team are doing in Spain, because there's no civic movement like this, that if they can't, through that sort of civic activism, get some of the changes that they want, then of course, maybe entry into politics is what they'll need to do. And we'll see what happens there.

1:03:58For me, I'll tell you something that I feel really, really strongly about where I'd love to try and play a role, however small or insignificant, but some role is there was I at Meta in Silicon Valley. I was whatever you call me, number two, three of the company, whatever. I was very senior in the company. I was European. The COO after Sheryl Sandberg was European. The CMO is European. The chief data scientist is European. The head of cyber is European. The head of the Facebook app, a wonderful French lady, friend of mine, who's now become number two to Sam Altman, was European. So why are all these Europeans running these great American companies?

1:04:39Why can't we do it in our own neck of the woods? Why can't all these great innovative technologists here in London, who come out of all of our great universities and set up great tech startups, why do they immediately get snapped up by American companies? I mean, I think... Because those companies are rich and offer them a lot of money. Yeah, exactly. And so I think one of the biggest challenges we have as America and Europe decoupled, and let's be real, that's happening. And this is going to persist beyond Trump too. This sort of deconstruction of the post-war and Cold War settlement definitely is leading to the Atlantic getting wider and wider and wider.

1:05:22I've become more and more French in my thinking about this. I think the friendship for accidental reasons. I'm sure they'd be overjoyed as they often are by the things I have to say. But we have to learn to stand on our own two feet more. We can't continue to rely on Uncle Sam to do everything for us. I think it's seriously getting out of hand. All of us, I bet you everybody involved in the production of this podcast is using American hardware, is looking at American software. And then the moment we come up with a good idea, I mean, Demis, as I was, is a good example. I think for very good reasons he sold to Google.

1:05:57But the moment we come up with a good idea and these companies start developing any scale, they get funded by VCs in Sandhill Road in Palo Alto, who then tell them to relocate to California. And before you know it, they're listed publicly on NASDAQ and they're basically American. So we're not only importing their technology, we're exporting all our good people and our ideas. I would love to play some role, and I have some ideas about how this could happen, to just give some of those European innovators a shouting chance of remaining European as they get bigger. Nick Clegg, it's great to see you.

1:06:31Thanks for coming. Thank you. Lovely to see you.

1:06:35Well, just to start almost at the end of that conversation with Nick Clegg, which I really enjoyed. I mean, yes, I've known him for a long time. We've had some pretty fractious interviews when he's come on the Today programme in the past. And I hope that conversation brought out a different side to him and was quite revealing. But when he spoke at the end about the power of reason, when he made a defence of cogitation, not agitation, when he talked about the power of deliberation over the politics of emotion, you know, it did feel slightly like I was talking to a politician from a very, very different era.

1:07:09It is just true to say that in the era of Trump and populism, national populism in particular, the politics of emotion is very much in the ascendant. It's at the forefront of our public life and the politics of reason, which looks for the messy compromise and talks about the tradeoffs, feels somewhat in retreat. And the irony, of course, is one of the reasons that the politics of emotion has trumped the politics of reason is because of the power of social media. So there was a sort of strange irony in what Nick Clegg was saying because he seemed to pine almost for an era of politics before social media had changed politics so fundamentally.

1:07:46I thought what he said about synthetic intelligence was so important and profound, not necessarily original. Lots of other people on this podcast, from Carlo Rovelli to Dario Amadei, the boss of Anthropic, the AI giant, have said the same thing. But when you hear someone like Nick Clegg, who's been working at the very top of a major tech power in Meta, say that what has been loosed upon the world, what's been unleashed, is a massive, massive, almost incalculable volume of synthetic intelligence that will rival human intelligence. It sort of makes you just pause for a moment and think, wow, we have reached a very particular moment in human history.

1:08:25Human history was defined by the application of human intelligence. History was driven by the fact that human intelligence, when it created technologies that changed what it was to relate to the environment, basically drove history forward. And now, out there in the world, through computing, through artificial intelligence, is a rival form of intelligence, which could soon be more intelligent and more capable than humans at some tasks. That's a really extraordinary moment in the history of our species. And I think what he talked about, about this coming flood, this coming avalanche, really, of synthetic intelligence should make us all take pause as to whether or not we actually want that.

1:09:01I think there was a bit of an inconsistency, perhaps a tension, you might call it, not to say an internal conflict or contradiction. On the one hand, saying, as Nick Clegg did, that he's concerned about excessive concentrations of power. I think that was the implication of what he was saying in terms of how the criticisms of the first, if you like, round of the internet over the past 15 years weren't valid then, but might be valid now. But on the other hand, he's saying that it doesn't necessarily work to go into these companies, these monopolies, as they often are, and break them up. And I just wonder whether or not the Nick Clegg that was entering Parliament in the early noughties, the Nick Clegg that was Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government and leader of the Liberal Democrats would sometimes say to the Nick Clegg that was just being sat in this room and having that conversation on this podcast, would sometimes say, you know what, the obvious answer is you do need to break up those companies.

1:09:52I'm not necessarily saying that that's my view. And the answer, the argument that Nick Clegg came up with was actually, it's not very obvious how you would do that or what the benefit would be. But he seemed very uncomfortable with the concentrations of power, which he has for the past seven years, been a fundamental part of. And by the way, wasn't it so interesting? Isn't it so fascinating about all these people that worked in Silicon Valley that they are somewhat skeptical about giving kids access to screen time? I remember talking to him about this a few years ago and I got the strong impression that he and his wife Miriam were trying to restrict screen time for their children.

1:10:28And my experience of years of covering tech firms and being in Silicon Valley a fair bit was that the most powerful people in the world of tech are keeping their kids away from that tech. And I think there's a lesson in that for all of us.

1:10:45Now, remember, if you like that conversation with Sir Nick Clegg and if you've got questions about how to navigate this era of AI, please send us your questions for Naomi Alderman the brilliant writer and novelist who's just written her first non-fiction book about this very subject it's called Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today she's been searching for lessons from previous information revolutions like the invention of writing and later the printing presses to really try and make sense of the times that we are living through and therefore she's a rather good fit for this podcast if you've got questions for her Please WhatsApp us on 0330 123 94 80.

1:11:23That's 0330 123 94 80. Or you can email radical at BBC dot co dot UK. And we will try to put those questions to her in one of our extra Q &A episodes, which we're doing in a kind of experimental way with our guests over the next few weeks. And I should say that Naomi Alderman has sold a lot of copies of her books, whether it's Disobedience or The Power or the other books that she's written, which have been turned into TV series as well. If you just want to ask a question of Naomi Alderman about those books or about her career in writing or maybe about her experience as someone who grew up Jewish but then rejected her life as a practising Jew, do get in touch with us via WhatsApp or email.

1:12:08And that's it for this episode. By the way, this week on Political Thinking, Nick is chatting to the leader of Plaid Cymru. That's Rune Ap Yorwuth. off the back of a big win for him and his party. They saw a reform in an election in Labour's Welsh heartland just a few weeks ago. And in six months, he could be First Minister of Wales. In the meantime, he tells Nick what Welshness means to him and also how the death of his mother led to him abandoning his BBC career in pursuit of politics. You can get that on BBC Sounds on Friday, which is obviously where you can also subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan.

1:12:43That's me. And remember, you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan. That's still me on the BBC iPlayer. Speak to you next week. Goodbye.

1:13:13Now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.