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- [00:00]
Roger McNamee
AI as a thing in Silicon Valley really exploded during COVID because tech companies lost control of their workforce. The workforce went home and didn't want to come back into the office. And so they wanted to break the back of the employees. And then the writer strike and the director strike happened. In Hollywood, they have another industry. They go and pitch. We're going to just wipe out all of these high cost employees. We're going to just get rid of them. That's the goal. And I'm sitting there going, we haven't gotten to politics yet.
- [00:37]
Bob Crawford
You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message.
- [00:47]
Hari Kondabolu
On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.
- [00:52]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
I'm Dr. Priyanka Wali, a double board certified physician.
- [00:55]
Hari Kondabolu
And I'm Hari Kundabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled do I have scurvy at 3am and on our show we're talking about health in a different way. Like our episode where we look at.
- [01:05]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Diabetes in the United states. I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.
- [01:10]
Hari Kondabolu
How preventable is type 2?
- [01:13]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Extremely. Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:24]
Maggie Freeling
The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [01:37]
Bob Crawford
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [01:49]
Maggie Freeling
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [02:03]
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988, to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
- [02:14]
Roger McNamee
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. But I didn't kill him.
- [02:21]
Malcolm Gladwell
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:33]
Kyle MacLachlan
Hey, I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City or just the Internet Stand. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture. Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me to Talk about navigating this high speed rollercoaster we call reality. Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:11]
Norah Jones
Hey, I'm Nora Jones and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing along is Back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levy, Rufus Wainwright, Mavis Staples. Really too many to name. And there's still so much more to come in this new season. Listen to Norah Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [03:44]
Bob Crawford
Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. Thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show where you ask the questions. The best way to get us a question is to record a video or a voice memo on your phone and email it to AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com that's AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com okay, today's question is a hot one.
- [04:10]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Ouch.
- [04:11]
Bob Crawford
I mean, I'm getting burned by it already just looking at it on the screen. Anyway, I've got a great guest here to help me answer it. He is Roger McNamee, and I'll let him give his own introduction.
- [04:24]
Roger McNamee
So I'm Roger McNamee. I spent 34 years investing in the tech industry. And then beginning in 2016, I have been screaming at the top of my lungs to reform the tech industry. Really big tech to protect democracy. I wrote a book called Zucked Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. It was about the first part of that journey, and I am at the moment chagrined by what has happened.
- [04:52]
Bob Crawford
So, Roger, we had a question from Jason Comas in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, your old stomping grounds outside of Philadelphia.
- [05:01]
Roger McNamee
What is political technology and is it being used in the United States? Okay, so the issue that we have here is that technology has been a factor in politics for a very, very long time, and it's been used a lot of different ways. So people started collecting data on voters to try to understand voting patterns and how to influence them beginning in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, you saw the beginnings of direct mail in the 70s. And then as personal computers came along and then network came along, this got a lot more sophisticated. The flip side of that was that once social media came along the opportunity to take that data and then directly target prospective voters with messages that might be, in some cases to inform them about something, or in other cases to misinform them, or in completely other cases, maybe to suppress their votes. And since 2016, the US electoral landscape has been drowning in technology. And I would argue that it's not just around elections. It's really everything now. And the Trump administration's success in 2024 owes an enormous amount to the fact that the tech industry, en masse, decided it was going to back Trump, not just with money, not just with their votes, but with their technology platforms to try to affect the outcome. And, you know, it's going to be a long time before we know exactly how and what they did to get that to work, but it was quite clearly successful.
- [06:52]
Bob Crawford
Obviously a lot of money invested on the part of Elon Musk.
- [06:57]
Roger McNamee
True, but not just Elon Musk. Not just Elon Musk. The really important thing to understand is that Meta, which is Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon, which is Jeff Bezos, but also the Washington Post, Google, Microsoft, all of them, to different degrees, lent really important assists to this.
- [07:20]
Bob Crawford
Let's go back to go forward. So your career, I mean, you, your career has been watching all of this change and transform. Tell our listeners about yourself and, and how. And what you've seen throughout your career and how it has changed and how you foresaw it was going to change.
- [07:39]
Roger McNamee
So I answered the call of Steve Jobs in 1982, when we were in the absolute kind of early days of personal computing. And Steve talked about the opportunity to use technology to empower people and increase their productivity. And to me, that seemed like just the perfect amalgamation of the values of the Apollo space program in the hippies that I so admired, you know, the people who created Atari and Apple. And it was. It was my tribe. And I was really happy to go there. And I was lucky because I began my career right before personal computers became significant enough to be their own industry. And so I've gotten to see the whole thing. And a little bit like Forrest Gump, I have by accident found myself in the right place at the right time, repeatedly, purely by accident. And I moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to California in early 1991, when essentially Windows was just beginning to work and the industry was making its pivot, which meant I was in California, inside the offices of a venture capital firm called Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, when Marc Andreessen came in to pitch Netscape, Jeff Bezos came in to pitch Amazon, and Larry and Sergeye came in to pitch Google. I mean, talk about having a front row seat for the revolution that was me. And then in 2006, by then I was really well established in the industry. I'd been around a long time, and somebody at Facebook reached out to me and said, my bosses are facing an existential crisis. Would you take a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg? And it was the strangest meeting I've ever had. But Mark was 22 at the time. Facebook was 2 years old. It had only 9 million users. In fact, it only had high school and college students. So I wasn't even able to be a user. But I believe that his original architecture, which required authenticated identity using your school email address and gave you control over privacy, that those two things would allow Facebook to create the first really successful social media platform. And it never occurred to me that there would ever be a problem with that, that, you know, why? How could talking to your friends and family ever be a problem? And, you know, Mark fooled me in some pretty profound ways. Or put it put a different way, I missed some cues that I, in retrospect, wish I'd picked up and that I really didn't pick up until a number of years later.
- [10:25]
Bob Crawford
Roger, you, you're an old deadhead.
- [10:27]
Roger McNamee
I am indeed. From, I mean, literally from childhood.
- [10:31]
Bob Crawford
And any old deadhead knows the name John Barlow.
- [10:34]
Roger McNamee
You bet.
- [10:35]
Bob Crawford
Talk about, I think, because I think about him a lot and how he embraced the Internet in its earliest moments for community, for a utopian society. Right.
- [10:48]
Roger McNamee
So talk about John. Yes, So I knew John well and I considered him a good friend. He grew up in Wyoming on a ranch, a very successful ranch. So he was a child of privilege. And his dream for the Internet was a little bit like the Wyoming ranch writ large. You know, the, the borrowing from the Ronald Reagan vision of everybody as the moral Marlboro man, but without the overt right wing elements to. Was an inherently libertarian vision. And he and I used to debate with some frequency that aspect of it because I, I believe that libertarianism, it's a, it's too anarchic for me. You know, I do believe societies need structure to survive. And the notion that each of us can be a completely independent unit strikes me as not only not realistic, but not desirable. And society is about an evolution where people learn to coexist by essentially pooling their skills, each according to their ability, each according to their need, and creating something that's much greater than the sum of its parts, where libertarianism is just the parts. And I Never agreed with John about that part of it. The part of it I found absolutely intoxicating was the notion that the Internet was a tabula rasa that we could architect. Therefore, I thought the debate was fantastic. And John was far more articulate than I and a much better networker than I was. And his vision, obviously was intoxicating to a large number of people. In retrospect, we made some really fundamental errors in the design of the Internet. The decision not to build identity into it, decision not to have a separate payment system, those are two things I think we've regretted.
- [13:04]
Bob Crawford
Talk about those just for a minute. Explain those two ideas, like building identity into the Internet. And yeah, the.
- [13:12]
Roger McNamee
The libertarian notion was that anonymity was inherently a good thing and that it would scale infinitely and you never had to worry about it. There was, even when John was alive, it was really obvious that whenever you brought people together and gave some people the ability to hide their identity, that inevitably trolling would take over that space and that it only took a very small number of trolls to ruin an otherwise fantastic community. And you saw this in chat rooms, you know, whether it was on AOL or other services, you saw this in newspaper comment sections. Everywhere that it came up, you saw it. And with respect to the early social media platforms, and if you count AOL as one of them, you know, but it certainly goes on to Friendster and MySpace and all that, the ability to obscure your identity led to massive trolling, and that's not a good thing, in my opinion. Now, to be clear, I think that the ability to protect your identity from others is also a very important value. So this is not one of these things where we want to disclose who everybody is all the time. But I do think we have to have some level of accountability, and we have to decide which of the spaces where anonymity is okay and which are the ones where it's not okay. So I don't think you have to enforce a situation where people must be disclosed all the time, but the flip side of it is you have to have spaces where. Where trolling is discouraged by the architecture of the product.
- [15:02]
Bob Crawford
So we have this libertarian space where people can mask their true identities. Now, let's talk about late 90s into the Obama period. How did politicians begin to use this or governments begin to use this?
- [15:21]
Roger McNamee
So it's a great question. So the way I handicap it is that when Obama got elected the first time in 2008, the role of Internet technology was inconsequential. But by the time he got reelected, in 2012, the model that we see today had begun. And what Obama did is he had a program, which he did with Facebook, where Facebook users would agree with to share their friends list with the Obama campaign in order for the Obama campaign to get people to register to vote and be aware of election day. So the principle that they were trying to do was pro democracy and good. But the underlying issue that I, as a Facebook user, could share my 1000 friends, or whatever the number is, with a political campaign without the permission of the people who are affected, that was wrong. And because they got away with it, Facebook went after 2016 thinking, that is going to be the golden ticket in politics. Basically, what happened between 2008 and 2012 is that Facebook first grew its audience dramatically by cutting deals where it shared friends lists with really attractive partners, think video game platforms and the like. You know, people who could bring millions of users onto the Facebook platform. And so Facebook was very much in the business of sharing, without permission, people's identity and friends lists. The Federal Trade Commission in 2011 entered into a consent decree with Facebook saying, thou shalt not do that. And if you do that again, we're going to bust you big time. And you have to go through a process where you prove each year that you haven't done it. Facebook literally paid no attention, as far as I can tell, to that consent decree. They just kept going as though nothing had happened. And so by 2012, they did this thing with the Obama campaign, which was clear violation of the antitrust decree with Obama's own FTC. And by 2016, they were in this position where they had traded so much stuff that everybody's friends list had been shared multiple times, maybe hundreds of times, and there was no ability by anybody to protect themselves from this. When 2016 came along, Facebook realized, okay, we had an impact in 2012. We're going to be the decisive factor this time, and we're going to get a lot of revenue because campaigns are going to target audiences with Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising. But we're going to help them do that to make it work better, and that's going to be a game changer. And they offer this both to the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign refused. And so what wound up happening was that the Trump campaign, with its partner, Cambridge analytica, paired essentially 30 million voter records in the United States. So this is 30 million out of 220 million voters. So one in seven to a Facebook idiot.
- [19:01]
Bob Crawford
So this was the big mistake of the Clinton campaign.
- [19:08]
Roger McNamee
I would argue that it was a huge mistake of the Federal Elections Commission. It was a huge mistake of the Obama administration. Obviously, the Clinton campaign put itself in a huge hole by not agreeing to do this, if for no other reason than to just neutralize the threat. But they looked at this and said, that's wrong. But Trump looked at it and went, wow, we're going to win because of this. Here's what mattered, okay, was that what is called custom audience of 30 million voters was then taken to the San Antonio digital offices of the Trump campaign, where employees of Facebook, employees of Microsoft worked hand in hand with Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign to create and target ads which were designed to suppress votes of white suburban women, young people and people of color. And they ran a bazillion experiments. They spent a bazillion dollars on Facebook. And if you look at it with uncanny accuracy, they suppressed those three constituencies in precisely the congressional districts that they needed to decide the election. An election where they got way fewer votes. The one piece that nobody's ever followed up on is that earlier in the year, in 2016, the Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and stole all the election books from it, which included the campaign books of both Clinton and every congressional district. Now, if you wanted to have perfect targeting, if you combine that with the 30 million voter data set that Cambridge Analytica created, you had a weapon unlike anything that had ever been used in politics. And surprise, surprise, it squeaked the thing out by the narrowest of margins.
- [21:23]
Hari Kondabolu
On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.
- [21:28]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Walley, a double board certified physician.
- [21:32]
Hari Kondabolu
And I'm Hari Kondabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled do I have scurvy at 3am on health stuff work.
- [21:39]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Talking about health in a different way.
- [21:41]
Hari Kondabolu
It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also.
- [21:44]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
What our health says about us and the way we're living.
- [21:47]
Hari Kondabolu
Like our episode where we look at.
- [21:49]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Diabetes in the United states. I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.
- [21:54]
Hari Kondabolu
How preventable is type 2?
- [21:57]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Extremely. Or our in depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are.
- [22:04]
Hari Kondabolu
Oh, it's hard to explain to rest of the world that like your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but like, you don't even know.
- [22:11]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
You don't know, you don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in.
- [22:17]
Hari Kondabolu
Listen to health stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:27]
Roger McNamee
All I know is what I've been told and that to have truth is a whole lie.
- [22:32]
Maggie Freeling
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [22:48]
Roger McNamee
I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.
- [22:51]
Maggie Freeling
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [23:00]
Roger McNamee
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky.
- [23:03]
Kyle MacLachlan
Housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [23:07]
Maggie Freeling
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [23:17]
Hari Kondabolu
I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said.
- [23:22]
Roger McNamee
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.
- [23:30]
Maggie Freeling
From Lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
- [23:41]
Hari Kondabolu
America, y' all better wake the hell up.
- [23:43]
Bob Crawford
Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [23:50]
Maggie Freeling
Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [24:11]
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History. We're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man could committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.
- [24:48]
Roger McNamee
He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice. To the right, I'm sorry. To the left, I love you.
- [24:59]
Malcolm Gladwell
From Revisionist history, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist the Alabama murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [25:12]
Ed Helms
Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.
- [25:22]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.
- [25:26]
Bob Crawford
What?
- [25:26]
Roger McNamee
Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s.
- [25:29]
Ed Helms
Basketball player who still wore knee pads.
- [25:32]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes.
- [25:33]
Ed Helms
It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and.
- [25:36]
Roger McNamee
A whole lot of games. Guests.
- [25:38]
Ed Helms
The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.
- [25:40]
Roger McNamee
I'm like, oh, wow.
- [25:41]
Ed Helms
Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
- [25:45]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
- [25:49]
Roger McNamee
Sorry, Jenna.
- [25:50]
Ed Helms
I'll be asking the questions today.
- [25:53]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
I forgot whose podcast we were doing.
- [25:56]
Ed Helms
Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.
- [26:00]
Roger McNamee
So let's.
- [26:01]
Bob Crawford
Let's. Let's see how it goes.
- [26:03]
Ed Helms
Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [26:12]
Jonathan Goldstein
I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.
- [26:19]
Bob Crawford
How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?
- [26:26]
Jonathan Goldstein
And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.
- [26:31]
Roger McNamee
And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.
- [26:41]
Jonathan Goldstein
Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism.
- [26:47]
Malcolm Gladwell
We could give you a whole brand.
- [26:48]
Roger McNamee
New thing where you're, like, super charming all the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always hide behind a microphone.
- [26:55]
Jonathan Goldstein
Listen to heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [27:11]
Bob Crawford
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Today, my guest is Roger McNamee. He's the author of Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He's been sounding the alarm bells about runaway technology since we were playing Snake on our Nokias. Today, we're talking about the intersection of technology and politics. I know it's a dumpster fire, but it's a great conversation. Remember, send us your burning questions about American history. Record yourself using your voice memo app on your phone and email it to AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com that's AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com. now back to our show. Roger, talk about January 6th and the role technology played in the attack on the Capitol.
- [27:57]
Roger McNamee
Sure. Okay. So Trump gets elected. He goes into office in 2017, and he tries a whole bunch of things right away, and it all of them either backfire or at least make him very unpopular. And then essentially, Covid comes along, beginning of 2020. It's an election year. Now, Facebook had been warned in May of 2019 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that there was this group called QAnon, and that FBI was classifying QAnon, which had begun around Pizzagate, and it basically was this monster conspiracy theory. And the FBI warned him that it was growing like crazy and that Facebook need to take steps to make sure it didn't grow like crazy on Facebook by June of 2020. So 13 months later, Facebook admitted to at least 3 million followers of QAnon on Facebook groups or Facebook pages devoted to QAnon. Right. So they didn't slow it down at all. And the Trump campaign had this genius insight, which was that Covid created a perfect melting pot and grounds for conspiracy theories. And the definitive purveyor of conspiracy theories was QAnon, which had spent the early part of 2020 absorbing the anti vax movement. And it was pretty straightforward because on social media, anti vaxx was really about new mothers groups. So anti vaxxers infiltrated new mothers groups, and Facebook would then herd new mothers to these groups where they would get radicalized. And Facebook did this on purpose. Right. They did it because radicalized people are just so much more economically valuable because they're vulnerable scams and they're vulnerable to emotional pitches in a way that a normal person is not. So QAnon absorbs anti vax, and in the summertime, Trump goes, we're going to absorb QAnon. So he merges Maga with QAnon. He starts talking QAnon stuff left, right and center, so that by September, when it's clear Trump is going to lose, he's got this massive conspiracy theory network online in his pocket. So he starts to talk about stop the steel, what happens? The QAnon guys pick it up, go nuts with it. The anti vax guys go nuts with it. And as you get to the election and he starts talking about, you know, how corrupt everything is and how it's been stolen, they start pointing people towards not accepting the outcome. Here's the key thing to understand. Of the thousands of people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th of 2021, the vast majority of those people were small business owners who had you asked them two years prior, prior to QAnon, could you ever imagine yourself attacking a police officer? Could you ever imagine yourself attacking the US Capitol? They would have looked at you like you were insane. But what had happened was they were groomed either by anti vax, QAnon or MAGA to be incredibly vulnerable to this alternate reality that was set up for Stop the Steal. And then the insurrection itself was organized entirely. Well, not entirely, but most heavily on Facebook. And people like me are looking at this thing going, hello, look what's going on here. I mean, there was no surprise. You could see it coming miles away. But of course, Trump was president, so he's got Washington turned off, he's got the standby button on, so his amp is turned on, but nothing's coming out, right? And you know, you look at this and you go, we are so screwed. And yet, because they committed so many crimes, all you had to do was let the law take its course. And instead we said, we're going to move on Biden and Merrick Garland. Yeah, but not just them. You know, obviously the Justice Department all the way down. Right? Congress all the way down. The Democratic Party had conditioned itself by then to be non confrontational to such an extreme degree that even in that window, when Mitch McConnell, a gazillion other people agreed that this was an insurrection and could not be allowed to stand, we did nothing. And anyone who thinks that political technology didn't play a role in that too, isn't paying attention.
- [33:06]
Bob Crawford
Well, part of the technology that followed that was the rise of the bro podcaster. And so this is one of the things that led to Trump's victory in 2024 was the support he received from the Ben Shapiro's and the Charlie Kirks and Steve Bann and Joe Rogan, of course. So how did these guys and how did the right become the technological, the political technological innovators?
- [33:38]
Roger McNamee
I don't actually think of it as political and technological. It's definitely political innovation. It was not technological innovation. I think what's going on here is that we created an environment over the course of, call it 70 years, where we trained Americans to view themselves as consumers first as opposed to being citizens. To beat the Depression, to win the Second World War, every American had to be a citizen. We had to recognize that we had shared interests and that we had to make sacrifices in pursuit of those shared interests. And we were all good with that. Tax rates were incredibly high, but they were used to finance public goods enjoyed by everyone. Public health, public transportation, public education, all of that. And we built this extraordinary engine that raised standards of living throughout the entire economy. And then beginning in the late 60s, the Republican Party decided it was going to do everything it could to kill the New Deal and return the country to oligarchy. Which is what had prevailed before the Depression. And it was a very long term strategy. And the Democratic Party stopped attempting to fight it and more or less embrace it. Clinton governed basically socially to the left of Reagan, but economically to the right of Reagan. And Obama continued that these guys were neoliberals, they were big on deregulation, they were big on allowing white collar crime to proliferate. And Obama had what is called a Section 1 case under the Sherman Antitrust act against Google. So section 1 is the portion of the Sherman Antitrust act that deals with anti competitive crimes are so severe you don't actually have to prove them, just the attempted. You know, it's like price fixing and things like that. The attempt to do it is, is all you have to have in order to get a win. And they had a Section 1 case against Google that would, have, had they prosecuted it, prevented surveillance capitalism from undermining our politics from 2016 on. Right. The case is so. But in 2011, Eric Schmidt, who was the most important funder of Obama's reelection campaign, prevailed on Obama to kill that antitrust case. You know, so when we're looking backwards, the key thing we need to understand is that Democrats have been enthusiastic contributors to their own demise. And you know, the thing that we have today with the continuing resolutions and all the other things related to whether Democrats are either going to fight or capitulate Trump, all of that is part and parcel of a democratic culture that has been in place and evolving for certainly 30 years.
- [36:52]
Bob Crawford
To wrap this up, let's talk about AI technology. One of the things we didn't see so much of in 2024 cycle or the deep fake videos, we did see some and they were starting to come in. How do you see AI political technology being utilized in the next.
- [37:12]
Roger McNamee
I'd like to actually zoom back slightly because I think AI. AI is currently practiced, is probably the most evil class of technology products ever created. You know, in my view, social media, Google search, The Microsoft Office, 365 Cloud based productivity tools, Google apps, all those things, those are really toxic products, but they've evolved to that position. AI is designed to be essentially predatory and to be hostile to the interests of everyone it touches. So you're talking about a technology that, the way that Silicon Valley has described it said we're going to invest a trillion dollars and we're going to create a technology that's going to revolutionize the economy for the better. Now here are the things we know for sure. They've invested roughly 350 billion so far. In doing so, they've totally distorted the power grid and accelerated climate change. They have used millions of gallons of drinking water in places where water is really scarce. They have stolen from you, from me and from everybody else every copyrighted work that's in digital form. They have stolen from you, from me, from everybody else, every piece of personal information that exists anywhere in digital form. And they've done that to create products that do not work as well as the things they supposed to replace. You look at Google search now with Gemini and you go, who wants a search engine that you have to fact check?
- [39:07]
Bob Crawford
That's right.
- [39:09]
Roger McNamee
There are clearly use cases where AI is valuable, but they don't require $350 billion worth of investment. Distorting the power grid, distorting the water tables, destroying copyright, destroying privacy. Those, none of those things is necessary. Those things are choices. Why? Because the goal, the AI as a thing in Silicon Valley really exploded during COVID because tech companies lost control of their workforce. The workforce went home and didn't want to come back into the office. And so they wanted to break the back of the employees. And then the writer strike and the director strike happened. In Hollywood, they have another industry. They go and pitch. We're going to just wipe out all of these high cost employees. We're going to just get rid of them. So the whole exercise is we're going to spend a trillion dollars in total, we spent 350 billion so far in order to unemploy every creative person in the economy. That's the goal. And I'm sitting there going, we haven't gotten to politics yet. What is good about that? In what way does society benefit? What it is, is, it's literally fascism in a box, right? Because you're essentially concentrating economic power in the hands of a handful of people at the expense of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
- [40:34]
Bob Crawford
Do you think people will always be okay with this? Because it does seem like there's a good amount of people that are kind of okay with it.
- [40:42]
Roger McNamee
Well, what's wrong is how those people are distributed, right? It's politicians and journalists first and foremost. I think if we went into the street, there's more antagonism to AI than any technology I've seen in my lifetime. I mean, it's actually really encouraging. The problem is the industry has bought off the politicians and it's bought off the press. I mean, the press is so dumb on AI, it's really, it's hard to even know where to start. And it's not every journalist I'M just talking about the big institutions. You know, they, they mindlessly act as stenographers. Every time Sam Altman or, you know, the CEO of Microsoft or, you know, Elon Musk talks about it. I mean, Musk's Grok product, when applied to news sources, is wrong 94% of the time. I mean, you sit there and you go, I mean, you can't explain that through chance, right? That's just a product that doesn't work at all. And, you know, explain to me Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And he's going, you know, we're going to get rid of copyright law to let these guys get away with us. I'm going, what in God's name are you doing? Look at Tony Blair. What is your excuse, man? You should know better. You're an MP for labor.
- [42:11]
Bob Crawford
We are at a hinge moment of history, Roger, and we are glad we have you to help us kind of work through it. Thank you so much for answering this question. Before we go, is there a question you might want us to answer on American History Hotline?
- [42:28]
Roger McNamee
The most important thing I want every American to think about is how are they going to change their relationship to technology? Our only hope at this point, because politicians are on the wrong side, the press is on the wrong side, every institution's on the wrong side. It's totally on us. What are you willing to give up in order to be part of the solution? I mean, years ago, I gave up Google, I gave up cloud based apps, I gave up all the meta apps, you know, and it turns out it's really easy to live that way, but most people just can't imagine it. And I'm sitting there going, I got news for you. If you don't abandon these products, you're screwed. Now, banning them is enough. It only works if everybody does it. But weirdly, we have every incentive to do that now. Just say no.
- [43:19]
Bob Crawford
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of Iheart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from Iheart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americanhistoryhotlinemail.com if you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at bobcrawford Bass, thanks so much for listening. See you next week.
- [44:12]
Hari Kondabolu
On the podcast Health Stuff. We are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.
- [44:16]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
I'm Dr. Priyanka Wali, a double board certified physician.
- [44:19]
Hari Kondabolu
And I'm Hari Kundabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled do I have scurvy at 3am? And on our show we're talking about health in a different way. Like our episode where we look at.
- [44:29]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Diabetes in the United states. I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.
- [44:35]
Hari Kondabolu
How preventable is Pre diabetes type 2?
- [44:38]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
Extremely. Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [44:49]
Maggie Freeling
The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [45:02]
Bob Crawford
America, y' all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [45:14]
Maggie Freeling
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [45:28]
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History. We're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
- [45:39]
Roger McNamee
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. I didn't kill him.
- [45:45]
Malcolm Gladwell
From revisionist history, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [45:58]
Kyle MacLachlan
Hey, I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City, or just the Internet stand. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture. Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me to talk about navigating this high speed roller coaster we call reality. Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [46:35]
Ed Helms
Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.
- [46:45]
Dr. Priyanka Wali
32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop. What?
- [46:49]
Ed Helms
Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.