Nick Clegg: What really happened at Facebook?

29:40You joined Facebook in 2017, right? 18. You must have thought about whether that company had played a role in getting Trump elected. Did that never cross your mind? Did you never think there's any evidence to suggest that Trump would not have been president of the United States. That's all the same thing. Did Facebook play a role in that? Sorry, it's like saying, do I think the Daily Telegraph plays a role in British politics or your podcast? Because everyone plays a role because it's all part of how we consume and share information. I'm just interested because, again, Sarah's book... So I do, by the way, I do think it is patronising to assume that you...

30:14I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, that one social media app can somehow... One giant influential app. OK, but there are many others. Is there many other big apps? I'm going to quote again from Sarah for one second, because she talks about a meeting that Mark Zuckerberg had in, I think it was December. He went to AIPAC. He met with Barack Obama and Barack Obama basically pulled him aside, according to her conversation with him, and said, you've got to watch what you're doing. This is really dangerous and you are going to start putting dictators in power if you don't watch what the company is doing.

30:49So Barack Obama was telling Mark Zuckerberg about the power of Facebook. And yet I hear you are kind of five years later saying it's patronising to assume that it had a big impact. So that's not what I say in the book. You're taking one sentence from the book where I'm making a particular reference to what I think people, what a rather techno determinist view that people have, which I strongly disagree with, that the idea that the technology you consume or use has an automatic effect on the way that you think and believe. I think there's no evidence that's the case. I do think that is somewhat it's techno determinist.

31:19I do think it's patronising. I'm not extending that to a conversation. which I didn't know about. I wasn't there at the time. I've spoken to Barack Obama separately about social media. I've been in conversations with him and Mark Zuckerberg many, many years later. We can talk about that if you like. You're once again asking me about a conversation which I was not a part from a book which I haven't read from an employee who wasn't even in a company when I arrived. I can only speak to you from my own experiences. I have not at one... I have not... No one can read my book and reasonably suggest that the book says what you are now suggesting.

31:50It says I'm not giving social media a clean bill of health at all. I wouldn't have pushed as I did. I changed the whole company's stance on regulation from being implacably against regulation to actually embracing. I think the whole range of things that governments need to do, which you can't just trust the tech industry to do itself. I introduced and others did as well. It was a collective effort, a vast range of of measures to protect kids. Is that work complete? No, of course it's not complete. Can you expect the industry to come up with all of the solutions? No. Does some of the solutions need to be imposed by parliaments and governments?

32:23Yes. Do I think parliaments and governments should go even further than they already have? Yes, I do. So look, I'm slightly dismayed that you seek to foist upon my book an interpretation of social media based on a time when I wasn't even living in Silicon Valley or even working in that company. And I would like, if it's possible, to go back to actually the themes which are in the book, derive my own personal experience. It's about your judgment of your time there. And I want to go to something that was your direct action, which was removing Trump from Facebook. You recognise his posting included incitement to violence.

32:56You removed him from Facebook. Does that feel like the right move three years on? I think it's about anyone. I'm sure some people say, oh, you know, you should have done it earlier. It's an easy, easy decision to make. I don't think it's an easy decision to make at all for a private sector company to suspend, in that case, the outgoing president of the most powerful democracy in the world. I clearly don't agree with his politics and I abhorred many of the things that he said then and has said on different occasions. But I know it definitely troubled me then and troubles me now because it's it's the back to your earlier point about power.

33:34It's the use of private sector power intervening in the political and public realm. And as a sort of old fashioned liberal, I think you need to do that warily. But you did it because you recognised that it could incite violence. In other words, you saw that link between political volatility. Emily, companies like Meta, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, remove millions and millions and millions of pieces of content. But they don't often do it to a man who's been president. No, no, but you seem to be kind of almost insinuating that it's just some sort of weird, wild free for all. No, it isn't.

34:04There are these rules, if you want. We can go into a little bit of detail. I'm just asking whether you recognise. It's quite important, this. There is a connection between social media and political volatility. That's all I'm saying. You can see that. Let me try and explain to you. Let me try and explain. There are things called community standards, which are, I think there are 20 to 21 categories of content, which Meta as a company, and I guess the other companies do something similar. One of my responsibilities in the seven years I was at Meta was to oversee the development of these rules. They're rules, and they say there are certain categories of intellectual property fraud you can't commit on Facebook.

34:37You can't. Bullying and harassment, certain categories of hate speech. And incitement to violence is clearly a category of content, which, of course, these companies don't want on their... And can I explain to you why they don't, which is why it's so different to the caricature I think you seem to be perpetuating here? Because it's their... Remember who pays their bills? It's advertisers. If you're an advertiser selling a car or kitchenware or, you know, washing up liquid. You don't want your content near vile, hateful, insightful content. So the company has a vast, it's not even altruism, has a vast standing commercial incentive to make sure that its content rules, these community standards, are abided by.

35:21One of my responsibilities in overseeing a whole bunch of teams in that company was, in this instance, was did what Donald Trump said, I think he initially said it on Twitter and then just reposted it automatically on Facebook a couple of hours later, did that break those community standards? That was the judgment I had to make. And my judgment at that time was that it broke the community standards and it was very important for Facebook. In the end, however much it was a high wire act suspending a very prominent, powerful, if outgoing, president at the time, I thought it was very important to demonstrate that it didn't matter who you were, you could be the Pope or a pauper, if you broke the company's community standards, you would attract the same penalty as anybody else.

36:03So that was my thinking. That was the decision I took. I, of course, stand by it now. Your question was a somewhat different one. Do I think it's a difficult decision? Of course, I think it's a difficult decision. No, no, no, it wasn't that. It was whether you recognised that if he had incited violence in the post, I think that was part of why he'd broken the community standards according to your 21 rules, wasn't it? Incitement to violence. Yeah. Then presumably... But do you know all of what he said? This is so interesting. was on every television in the country, was on every radio station, was every newspaper.

36:33It's this sort of extraordinary insinuation that somehow what he said on Facebook was uniquely corrosive, but what he said on every single network, every single cable news television channel or programme or programmes that you've been on, somehow don't have the same effect. And guess what? Actually, a lot of the limits that Meta imposes on speech are much stricter than many of the, certainly than cable news in America. Many of the advertising restrictions, for instance on political advertising are far stricter. You removed him. So, I mean, don't get mad at me. You removed him. So this is according to your rules.

37:06No, but you're then trying to extrapolate that and say, therefore... No, I'm asking, do you recognise that there is a link, a strong link between political volatility, instability and social media? Do you recognise that? I think history shows that political volatility, I'm afraid, was not invented when social media was invented. Do you think Stalin or Pol Pot or the polarisation extremism of the 1930s or world wars or civil wars going back decades and centuries, none of them erupted? Mass violence, prejudice. So you don't think that social media then plays a particular role in this? That's all I'm trying to understand.

37:46Again, the research, if you look at the research, what the academics call, and I describe this in the book and I describe it as dispassionately as I can, called affective polarisation. The research suggests there appears that effective polarization, as academics measure it, actually increased most rapidly in the years, I think the 80s, before in the United States, in large parts of the West, before social media was invented. And more than that, that a lot of polarization seems to have increased most rapidly amongst people who use social media the least, often people who haven't got college or university degrees who are elderly.

38:20So the evidence, since I'm interested in evidence, is not as cut and dry. Does that mean that companies like that should be indifferent to what is said on their platform? Absolutely not. Did I make sure while I was there, not least perhaps notoriously in the case of suspending Trump, that if the community standards were broken, sanctions and penalties were applied? Yes, I did. Do you think it cost you your job? What, that I suspended Trump? Yeah. No, I left. I didn't. Are you sure? Am I sure I left? I mean, are you sure you didn't get fired? That's a really weird question. Who else is going to know whether I got fired or not?

38:55Me. I left. I chose to leave. I chose to leave at a time of my own choosing. Not because the company decided that you'd be no use to them when Trump was re-elected? It's a whole bunch. Do you want to go into the reasons why I decided? I mean, why I decided to leave? No, I'm just asking you. A lot of people are saying, well, did he really leave or was he pushed? That's the question I'm putting to you. OK. And I'm giving you the answer. I left. I chose to leave. And if Kamala Harris had been elected, do you think you would have stayed? Might have done, might have done. I certainly felt that I wasn't particularly interested in, it didn't really appeal to me or my sort of skill set when I saw that the sort of, it wasn't just meta, that Silicon Valley as a whole was going to enter into a wholly different relationship with the powers that be with the US.

39:37Can I finish the sentence? I thought at that point, I had actually spent most of my time at that company advocating a sort of distance really between Silicon Valley and politicians. And I felt that, as they clearly are now, working sort of hand in glove with each other. I mean, you now have the chief technology officers, a lot of these big platforms, not just Meta, who actually, I think they've been adopted into military regiments that are in the US, which are being used to deploy the AI inventions of Silicon Valley for, you know, the defence and national security purpose of the United States.

40:11they're free to do so. Is that something which sort of interests me? Was that in line with my view about the kind of division of labour between politics and... No, of course it wasn't. OK, that's a generous assessment. I mean, I guess one way of looking at it is... There's a running theme here. Everything I say, you sort of feel is not... You want me to sort of almost say what you want me to say, which is that I'm more sort of critical of this. No, no. I'm trying to give it to you as discretionally as possible. No, no, no. I'm trying to give our viewers, our audience and our listeners a sense of what your takeaway is of Facebook, of Meta Now.

40:47And frankly, we all saw that picture of Trump's inauguration with Mark Zuckerberg and others standing right behind him. We read about him ditching the external fact check. I just wonder, Nick, whether you didn't after seven years think, why have I wasted my time here? Was it all for nothing? I mean, there he was. Because they went to the inauguration. Right back in Trump's pocket. Because they went to the inauguration. Right back in Trump's pocket. Sorry, you think that everything I did for seven years was for naught because they went to the inauguration? I'm asking you if you feel that way. Do you feel that way?

41:19Well, self-evidently, I don't. It was an odd question. Because all of the Silicon Valley leaders collectively went to the inauguration. Would I have gone? No. Do I therefore think everything that I did for seven years was... What an odd assertion. Well, you're certainly quite defensive, but I think it's a fairly natural question to ask. I'm not defensive. I'd be quite open with you. I'm very exasperated that you A, portray my book as saying something which it doesn't say, which I think is honestly not very... You're quite phlegmatic about the rights and wrongs and the damages and the influence of social media.

41:51I'm surprised. Yeah, because you have a fixed view. And I hate to break this to you. I don't have a fixed view. I've read your book and I'm asking about it. No, but maybe your fixed view is not correct. And what I'm trying to do in the book, amongst other things, is absolutely to break down what I think is a tendency for people to sort of throw rocks at this problem, this issue, and make what I think are simplistic and sweeping assertions about the role of social media in society, about the role of social media in politics. And what I try and do, you call it phlegmatically, I try and do it as objectively and rigorously as possible in the book.

42:23I would urge anyone to read the book and then decide for themselves. I try and lay out what the evidence is. I don't, for instance, think there is evidence to your earlier assertion that social media is somehow wholly, largely or exclusively responsible for political division and polarisation, given that political polarisation and division, unfortunately, has been around since the dawn of time and erupts and re-erupts at a whole bunch of different moments. in our collective history. So you're right, I don't indulge in, because I don't believe in indulging in caricatures about complicated subjects.

42:55And I've always believed, whether it's in politics or as in Silicon Valley, that instead of just sort of dismissing complexity, it is sometimes necessary and more honest to actually engage with it. That's what I try and do in the book. That's why, of course, I find it a little bit exasperating. We spent, what, 40 minutes with you basically asking me questions based on a set of assertions. About gene safety, yeah. No. Well, about the stuff that people are genuinely interested in. And I've explained on team safety, I think we should go a lot further. We go a lot further than we currently have done.

43:23And if you want to know, I'm exasperated on that point because I said to a succession of ministers in the British government, this government and previous ones, you're not legislating far enough to make age verification watertight.

43:43We'll have more from Nick Clegg on the UK on what it felt like to say sorry and have that put to music.

43:55Bite into a stacked sandwich made with hero bread or a fully loaded bagel. And the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it's up to 19 grams of protein, but it is. You wouldn't believe it has 11 to 32 grams of fiber, but it does. Hero Bread makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with taste, but without all the net carbs. We're talking 0 to 5 grams net carbs per serving. With Hero Bread, there are no compromises, just flavor. There's none of the stiff baked goods you'd expect from Better For You brands. There's just the soft, fluffy bread you crave. Plus, small batch drops of indulgent favorites, like the popular 2-gram net carb Hero Croissant and 3-gram net carb Hero Pen au Chocolat.

44:41And right now, Hero Bread is offering 10 % off your order. Go to Hero.co and use code IHEART at checkout. That's code IHEART at H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See nutrition facts on Hero.co.

45:00The News Agents. Let's talk a bit about the way the book ends. And you get on to AI. We've talked a bit about the case for the Internet staying open. and you explain that it is, I mean, it's already becoming harder with the sort of triangulations we're seeing between Modi and Xi and Trump doesn't seem to be an open government kind of guy particularly. What about AI? Do you think that governments around the world get how radical this shift is going to be to the workplace, to all of us, to jobs? I think the honest answer is no one really knows, is the honest answer. I think you've got a lot of claim and counterclaim again about what generative AI is and what it's going to bring.

45:38You have a real tendency in Silicon Valley. It's a hype-filled place. People are constantly leaping from one hype cycle to the next. And you've got to remember, a lot of these people are making these predictions about it's going to put everybody out of work by next Tuesday and so on. They've got technology to sell. They've got to raise money for the latest foundation models, which are very, very expensive to build. So you've got another cycle. And we also have a tendency, which is a curious one, which is we call it artificial intelligence, but we spend all our time anthropomorphizing it. We sort of keep sort of imbuing it with human qualities.

46:11They're machines. They're probabilistic machines. They digest vast amounts of data. There's a whole debate about exactly what kind of data they can ingest, but just vast, vast amounts of data from the public Internet and so on. And then they make these connections, these particle parameters, billions of them across all that data set. And they spit out these probabilistic. I was using Chachi BT this morning. It's amazing you ask these questions. It talks to you in a sort of human voice. but it doesn't it doesn't sort of know the world it doesn't it has no conscience it has no so so i feel we're trapped in an environment where clearly this part this and this technology is very very powerful very versatile seems to me obviously will have some very profound effects on how we shop how we book our holidays work i mean you've got you've got young adults how kind of entering the world again again it's not the first time that technologies had a very disruptive effect over time on the labour market.

47:03We used to live in a country where 85 % of people made their living in agriculture, agricultural mechanisation. Do you think this is bigger than the Industrial Revolution? I personally think some of the hype about saying it's bigger than fire or the wheel or the printing press is excessively breathless. I think it is, remember, artificial intelligence has been around or talked about since the 1950s. It's an evolution in it. I think there are some jobs which clearly will get, obviously disruptive by by ai because you'll have ai agents and bots doing things that human beings might do i think the question i have and i just really don't know what the answer is is not will it have a sort of an effect on the labor market clearly it will it's i think the more important question is how quickly will it yeah what's the pace because i think history suggests that um again looking at the evidence that that it's the pace of technological disruption of the labour market, which is the most painful thing.

47:59If it's very sudden, it obviously creates an enormous amount of societal pain. If you have time to adapt to it, then I think we as society, we've done this before, whether it's through, you know, mechanisation, agricultural, industrialisation and so on. And on that, I just don't know. I think there are some areas of work where I think the impact is going to be quite quick. There are other areas of the labour market where I actually think the adoption might be much much more slow than that not least because this technology is quite flawed remember it's it you know don't rely on this technology if you want absolute accuracy in law or accountancy i absolutely i mean you can try and fine-tune your own models tell chuck gpt when it's wrong it's really funny yeah i always tell it when it's wrong and it apologizes straight away yeah no exactly no exactly and it'll do it in that slightly unctuous tone which they all which they've all adopted now so so so i think it's i think it is It's a very powerful technology.

48:52It's very versatile technology. I think there's clearly transformation in things like medical and health diagnostics and others, which are going to be fantastic. For me, on the labour market question, since that's what you asked about jobs, I think it just all depends on how quickly this is really adopted in workplaces. of it and quite all the early evidence suggests that i think there was a mit study out a couple of weeks ago which suggested that actually where executives have tried to introduce it in their companies i think in america the benefits have been pretty pretty meagre so i think everyone's still trying to work and remember lots of people have an incentive not to deploy it in their workplace because they're worried about their own job so i think there'll be some resistance so i think pace is the thing i would really look out for um and that's a difficult one because I certainly think as far as Britain is concerned, since we're not going to compete with the American and Chinese companies on building these models in the first place, the area where we might extract the greatest benefit is actually deploying it more successfully in schools and hospitals and workplaces than in other.

49:54So there's a sort of ambivalence about the pace. I want to come back to British politics for a moment. You've been at the heart of government. You will have seen the Keir Starmer sort of mini reset or relaunch yesterday. I'm sure you wouldn't give him advice but what would you be doing differently thinking differently how would you approach so I don't really follow I don't follow it with much the impression I get is they're still trapped in a set of judgments or misjudgments they made before they even got into power which is often the case in politics boy do I know it see the way I see it because all of this comes really down to the government and the economy and their commitments to producing growth and why they're failing to do so and i think so not not small boats not immigration i think it's super important absolutely but they need to get on top of that i suspect they will over a period of time i think in the long run by the next election this is my guess my guess as i think one way or another they'll get on top of this small boats issue i think they have to they have to show their control that's if i was in government i'd be remorseless on that i think they i think they one way or another they will um i think however it's what people feel about their jobs about money in their pockets about you know are their wages rising in real terms and so on and i think there that's for me the more fundamental problem for this government which is that the labor party and i remember this when i was in coalition basically spent a decade lying to itself and its supporters about some of the basic facts of how you run an open economy with a floating exchange right like like i was they you know they vilified any attempt to try and bring any fiscal discipline or any fiscal kind of constraints to to to um you know the what we what money comes into the government what money goes out they fetishize this word austerity and so on even though during the coalition years i can only speak for the coalition years not what george osborne and others did afterwards but during the coalition years we actually reduced the deficit more slowly than george than gordon brown and alice darling had planned themselves and legislated for so So they became so opposed to any kind of the sort of basic laws of economic and fiscal gravity.

51:59Then late on before they just before the election, they thought, oh, we must try and do something to, you know, keep the markets off our back. So they made this totally rash claim of saying we're not going to touch any of the big any of the big taxes, income tax, VAT and employee national insurance. Well, they didn't say employee. They said national insurance. Oh, okay, okay. You'll know better than I do. But anyway, which is the big levers. And then, of course, they had this endless narrative saying there's not been any growth for 14 years. Not true. So, I mean, literally false. The latter years of the coalition, I'm very proud of this.

52:35We actually took, helped, certainly the government at the time, take an economy which was deeply damaged by the 2008 financial crisis. And by the middle years of the coalition onwards, it was the fastest growing economy in the G7. So I think if you go into government, tying your hands unnecessarily on tax, basically fibbing about the economic record of the last decade and a half and being so sort of moralistic and sanctimonious about any attempt to try and introduce fiscal discipline to an economy, you end up with the result which we have now. Today, we have found that long term borrowing rates in this country are now the highest they have been since that financial crash.

53:16That is very serious. It means that we're spending about 10 percent of our of government revenue just on servicing our debts. And the cost of those long term yields are going up and up and up. We've now got the highest debt, long term debt servicing costs of any G7 economy. So they're in real, real trouble. They have got no margin manoeuvre because of those errors. And I don't honestly have I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves personally. I think they're good, decent people, but I've no sympathy for them politically because it's a series of misjudgments they've made over the last decade.

53:50And I think what they should have done, this is my view, and I felt it at the time, was when Trump was elected, they came out and they said the world has changed utterly. They were right. And at that point, I think they could have carried the country with them if they'd said that the world has changed utterly and we are going to change with it. We're now going to face basically a tariff war with our erstwhile. And done what? And borrowed? No, no. I think they will need to revisit taxation, but you need to do it with a full suite of taxes, which is… So you'd say raise taxes, would you? It's part of the mix.

54:22If you're facing the highest long-term borrowing costs since the financial crash in 2008, you have a number of choices. You either, well, you have to generate more revenue, you have to either reduce spending, or you have to raise some taxes, or a mixture of all of them. It'll be a mixture of all of them. It always is. but they've got into such trouble because they've taken off the table the very taxes where actually you can spread the burden most and of course I know if you read the pages of the Guardian or just soak the rich and that'll all be solved. I'm afraid I wish it was as easy as that sure you can put up taxes for the rich that's never going to pay for the huge huge costs that this country now faces.

55:03You have to have some broad based tax measures included in the mix You were in government for five years with David Cameron and George Osborne Do you speak to them still? Do you speak to David? I haven't for a while. I think I'm seeing, I think we've agreed to see each other shortly, but no, I don't. Would you call them buddies? No. Did they screw you? I mean, do you think at the end of it, all's fair in love and elections? No, I think in politics you shouldn't whinge about. No, no, no. I mean, by the way, when I said they're not mates, because I didn't go into government to find mates. I mean, thankfully, I've got a rich circle of friends of my own.

55:35But, you know, do we have perfectly civilised conversations when we meet with each other? Of course. I don't hold any animus. And on politics, you've got you shouldn't go to politics. You live by the sword. You die by the sword. You know, I made mistakes. I think I think the coalition government, I think with each passing day, in my view, of course, maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm not wholly objective. But I think any reasonable assessment would suggest that government for that five year period, particularly given what we inherited in the in the shadow of the terrible financial crisis in 2008, was the best government this country's had over the last decade and a half.

56:06And I think the record shows that it was it was a reforming government. We had a fastest growing G7 economy. We had low employment. Things we didn't fix were things like productivity and real wage increases were slow to come through. And then unfortunately, finally started coming through. And then everything was undone by that madness of Brexit. which I still think is one of the greatest acts of self-harm, really, in the last century for our country. I was thinking back, Nick, I think you did one of the only political mea culpas I can remember of the last ten years. Yeah, put to music. Put to music.

56:40We shouldn't have made a promise. We weren't absolutely sure we could deliver. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so, so, so. There's no easy way to say it.

56:55I wonder what you think of the political apology now. Everyone seems very good at apologising for other people's misdeeds or missteps. My political apology. Do you look back and you think, oh, I went out there, I apologised, I then lost my seat, the party tanked, why did I bother? Because I don't think it's as simple as that. I don't think it's one event or one apology that makes the political weather. I mean, I think, you know, look, smaller political parties in coalitions, unfortunately, seems to be a bit of a rule of thumb across Europe. We're not really a country that has coalitions very often.

57:29It was the first and hitherto last coalition in this country in the post-war period. But if you look in Holland, if you look in Germany, I'm afraid it's a pattern over and over again, particularly where centre-left parties go into coalition with centre-right parties and so on. You tend to get hammered. We didn't have any, I mean, I'm not whining about this, but we just didn't. We didn't really have any major vested interest in the press who were prepared to look out for us. So look, do I think if I hadn't made that apology, the outcome of the 2000? Of course not. I don't think I would have made the blindest bit of difference.

57:57Why do you think people don't apologise anymore, though? Oh, because it was this whole sort of, you know, sort of PR orthodoxy that it shows weakness. Look, everyone has to take their own decision. I think the Lib Dems, and I think we, and I think I were in a totally invidious position on this issue because fees had been introduced by the Labour Party, not by us. It had actually been increased against their own manifesto commitment previously by the Labour Party. We then inherited a report from a man called Mr Brown, which had been commissioned by Peter Mandleton by the Labour Party, to have no upper limit on fees at all.

58:33And we'd inherited this thing, trying to come up with the best possible policy. It wasn't consistent with our own manifesto. But guess what? I hadn't won the election. I didn't have a majority. I think we were in this position, but people were, you know. I guess the thing that, you know, you've had people saying for the last 10 years is you could have abstained. You could have just said, you know, you know where my policy is. I know where the Tories are. I'm just going to abstain. I still would have got the blame because I was the deputy premiers who were in government. I mean, people don't look at the exact voting record to decide how they.

59:02Honestly, most normal human beings, thankfully, don't look at politics as closely as you do or I used to. And they wouldn't. They would have just looked at a government. Yeah. To be honest, my question was only about the political apology. I was just interested to see whether you think, you know, is the mea culpa dead? Now? Yes. Well, it certainly isn't the age of Trump, isn't it? Where you just you literally just do very unscrupulous things and you just you appear to sort of it's just not my style. It's not the way I would have been able to operate. I could see sort of how much, you know, kind of controversy and anguish and anger that decision had taken.

59:40had made uh i tried to explain it over and over and over again you know of course in politics what they say if you're explaining you're losing so you know i felt i felt i should try and sort of be open about the fact that of course i regretted that that you know that things turned out like that but if it wasn't that i probably would have found something else to uh you know regret guess what we're all flawed governments are not perfect uh no government's record is is unblemished i'm incredibly proud of the coalition. I genuinely think it's the best government this country's had in a very long period of time.

1:00:14But yeah, I kind of, I like to think that most voters would kind of just accept that if you, you know, if you feel you've messed up, you kind of say so. But who knows, maybe, maybe that is now out of fashion. If it is, so be it. Nick Clegg, thanks very much. Thank you.

1:00:39made with Hero Bread or a fully loaded bagel. And the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it's up to 19 grams of protein, but it is. You wouldn't believe it has 11 to 32 grams of fiber, but it does. Hero Bread makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with taste, but without all the net carbs. We're talking zero to five grams net carbs per serving. With Hero Bread, there are no compromises, just flavor. There's none of the stiff baked goods you'd expect from Better For You brands. There's just the soft, fluffy bread you crave. Plus, small batch drops of indulgent favorites, like the popular 2-gram net carb Hero Croissant and 3-gram net carb Hero Pen au Chocolat.

1:01:23And right now, Hero Bread is offering 10 % off your order. Go to Hero.co and use code IHEART at checkout. That's code IHEART at H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See Nutrition Facts on Hero.co.

1:01:42The News Agents Well that's it for today The book I was referencing in that interview was called Careless People by Sarah Wynne-Williams She's been gagged by the company she wrote about in the book so she's unable to join in future conversations or interviews but you can catch my original interview with her on The News Agents The episode's called Inside the Murky World of Facebook That's all for today We'll be back tomorrow See you then

1:02:10This is a Global Player original podcast.