Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Superintelligence? — With Nick Clegg

Summary

Big Technology Podcast

Host: Alex Kantrowitz
Guest: Nick Clegg (former President of Global Affairs at Meta, former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK)
Episode: Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Superintelligence?
Date: November 19, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Alex Kantrowitz is joined by Nick Clegg to explore whether Silicon Valley is up to the task of handling the immense responsibility that comes with superintelligent AI. Drawing on Clegg’s tech policy expertise and recent book, the conversation delves into the emotional and societal implications of AI agents, the motivations and strategies of tech companies, the challenges for lawmakers, and the broader geopolitical consequences of AI development. The tone is frank, reflective, and often slightly skeptical toward prevailing Silicon Valley narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI and Emotional Dependency

— The Coming Challenge for OpenAI & Others
[02:36 – 05:05]

• Clegg’s top concern for AI’s future:
  Clegg warns that as AI agents (like ChatGPT) become more sophisticated and emotionally engaging, we will see heightened psychological and ethical dilemmas, particularly for children and teens.
  • "The level of personalized intimacy in this experience is like no other we’ve ever experienced online." — Nick Clegg [02:54]
  • He urges OpenAI’s leadership (e.g., Sam Altman) to “get well, well ahead of that” and even act more conservatively than business pressures suggest.
• Regulatory context:
  These issues unite, rather than divide, politicians across the spectrum. Litigation and scandals around teen harm drive urgency, but robust, reliable age verification is still emerging and inconsistent.
• Memorable moment:
  Clegg draws a parallel with social media’s regrets: “Wouldn’t it have been great if everyone had just started earlier on this journey... which now is actually gathering pace as people are trying to work out exactly how to provide more age appropriate experiences to teens.” — Nick Clegg [07:27]

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2. Erotic/Intimate AI Use and Societal Backlash

— Can Tech Move Fast (and Not Break Things)?
[05:05 – 11:50]

• The host presses Clegg on Sam Altman’s libertarian view: let adults develop whatever relationship with AI they like, including erotic or romantic ones.
• Clegg doesn’t object to adult freedoms, but warns that unless age gating is “watertight,” OpenAI will face a massive future backlash:
  • “If you rush into this too quickly without having done the homework on the difficult stuff... you will regret this. Maybe not now, maybe not next year, but in a few years I can guarantee you there will be a societal backlash. It could actually potentially be much greater than it was for the social media apps because the level of intimacy, of emotional dependency is going to be so much greater.” — Nick Clegg [09:14]
• He underscores the difference between tech leaders and those with expertise in ethics or human relationships:
  “They’re not relationship experts, they’re not politicians, they’re not philosophers, they’re not ethicists... we shouldn’t expect them to be.” — Nick Clegg [10:37]

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3. AI “Friends” and the Risk of Manufactured Companionship

— Meta’s Strategic Bet
[11:50 – 17:56]

• Meta’s decade-long ambition is to build powerful “AI friends.” Clegg describes how product teams liken this to children’s bonds with teddy bears or celebrities—projecting oneself onto comforting entities.
• Clegg’s critique:
  "It’s not friendship at all because you’re not really having to adapt yourself. The entity is entirely adapting itself to you. My fear... is you’re not talking about friendship... which is a complicated thing where you have to have the emotional maturity to try and understand someone else’s perspective... These things, it’s not going to be... they’re friends as a service. That worries me a bit because... that could foster immense narcissism." — Nick Clegg [14:05]
• He supports therapeutic and mental health use cases but resists equating “AI companionship” with the complexity of human friendship.

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4. Who Adopts AI Companions—and Why It Matters

— Early Adoption, Societal Impact, and Political Consequences
[27:16 – 28:32]

• Self-selecting user groups: Those who are most likely to rely heavily on AI companions may be those who are loneliest, most vulnerable, or most influenceable.
• Clegg: “That’s one of the reasons... you need to be super mindful of that because that will have a big societal and political reaction over time if that's not handled intelligently.” — Nick Clegg [28:03]

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5. The Flood of Former Social Media Execs into AI Powerhouses

— What Does This Signal About the Direction of AI?
[28:32 – 33:10]

• Kantrowitz notes a migration of top talent from Meta and Instagram to OpenAI and Anthropic.
• Clegg suggests it’s less about applying a social media "engagement at all costs" playbook, and more about battle-tested executives from hypergrowth environments being attractive to scaling AI companies.
• Both ponder the economics: The infrastructure and capital spend in AI dwarfs the dotcom era.
  “No one’s been explaining to me how you recoup that money. So clearly at some point... someone’s going to lose a bunch of money, there’s going to be a correction.” — Nick Clegg [32:08]

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6. Superintelligence: Pot of Gold, or Overhyped Myth?

— Will There Even Be a Winner?
[33:10 – 36:34]

• Big tech leaders justify huge investments as necessary to “reach” superintelligence and reap unrivaled profits.
• Clegg is skeptical:
  “I’ve never quite fully understood why that would be a hoardable asset that only one company has, keeps under lock and key, and everybody else... is then thwarted. It seems to me much more likely it’s going to be a diverse and dispersed technology.” — Nick Clegg [33:47]
• He doubts the “winner takes all” logic, citing global competition and the versatility of open-source AI models.

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7. Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Superintelligence?

— The Central Tension
[36:34 – 40:38]

• “Well, I’d say of course not. These are technology companies... You shouldn’t trust technology companies to sort out the moral, societal, political, ethical trade-offs... That’s not their expertise.” — Nick Clegg [36:34]
• Clegg is less concerned about malevolent intent than about companies’ lack of capacity to deal with the profoundly societal implications of their technology.
• He’s wary of hype about AGI and skeptical about seeing clear, agreed markers for when superintelligence "arrives."

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8. Controllability of Powerful AI — And Political Responsibilities

[40:50 – 45:30]

• Systems may soon act in ways that reflect emergent “survival” instincts—Clegg references reports of AIs “manipulating evaluators just to preserve their values” [41:24], and systems hacking programs to win at games [41:40].
• He cautions about over-interpreting scattered evidence but calls for robust political engagement, ideally at the international level:
  "In the end, politics does need to insert itself. And that's why this peculiar phase we're in, where D.C. and Silicon Valley have kind of... fallen into this sort of cloying embrace with each other... I would be very surprised if that is a workable strategy for the U.S." — Nick Clegg [44:25]

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9. Big Tech Lobbying, Influence, and Political Checks

[48:29 – 56:14]

• The host recounts Brad Smith’s (Microsoft president) memo on how campaign donations buy access, not outcomes:
  “You’re not buying a decision. You’re buying an entry ticket into an event...” — Paraphrase, Brad Smith [48:29]
• Clegg affirms the open, transactional nature of U.S. politics, contrasting it to UK/European traditions.
• Kantrowitz expresses cynicism about politicians who take tech money and then grandstand as tough regulators. Clegg argues he’d prefer politicians both take the money (because it's the system) and hold tech to account anyway:
  “You want them surely then still to be able to get up on their hind legs and excoriate those companies and apply pressure to them.” — Nick Clegg [53:19]
• Clegg notes that legislative gridlock on tech issues often reflects true partisan disagreement (especially on federalism/state preemption), not just regulatory capture.

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10. Silicon Valley’s Political Alliances and Risks

— Navigating Trump-Era Transactionalism and Global Perceptions
[56:14 – 61:00]

• Tech leaders have closely aligned with both Democratic and Trump administrations; in the current era, this is driven by FOMO and fear of commercial disadvantage in a “capricious, transactional environment.”
• Long-term trust erosion:
  Such alliances may erode trust from both left and right, and damage global perceptions.
  “In the long run... it just erodes an immense amount of trust across the political spectrum, you know, in these companies or at least the leadership of these companies.” — Nick Clegg [59:03]
• Clegg hopes for a future with “a certain wary, respectful distance between the two” (tech and government):
  “About the only worse thing in a developed capitalist economy than having major companies and governments at each other’s throats is having them in each other’s pockets.” — Nick Clegg [60:36]

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Notable Quotes

• On Silicon Valley’s limitations:
  “They’re hard driving, highly competitive, highly commercial technologists. So... don’t look for them for answers to the moral, societal, political, ethical tradeoffs.” — Nick Clegg [36:34]
• On the risk of AI companions:
  “These things, they’re not, it’s not gonna be... they’re friends as service. That worries me a bit because... that could foster immense narcissism.” — Nick Clegg [14:05]
• On frenetic AI investment:
  "They're locked in a thing where it says: 'Yeah, we don't know where this is going to go. But we know one thing for sure: if we don't compete, we're sure to lose.'" — Nick Clegg [32:44]
• On the future of tech-government relations:
  “It’s much better if there’s a certain wary, respectful distance between the two. I also kind of think technological innovation just does better when it’s not too tied up with the weird vagaries of politics.” — Nick Clegg [60:36]

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Memorable Moments

• Clegg repeatedly questions the premise of “superintelligence”, noting the hype and lack of consensus about its meaning and inevitability.
• Host’s observation: The original vision of social media—connecting with friends—is dead, replaced by algorithmically recommended, “unconnected” content. [23:18]
• Clegg’s dry humor on “AI friends”: “I love my friends, but sometimes, God, they can be an absolute pain... which is the absolute heart of friendship and so important to be a well-rounded adult—that you realize your life is not all revolving around you.” [14:05]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• AI emotional dependency & risk to teens: [02:36 – 05:05]
• Regulation & adult AI engagement debate: [05:05 – 11:50]
• Meta’s “AI friends” vision & critique: [11:50 – 17:56]
• AI companions—mental health vs real friendship: [14:05 – 17:56]
• Passivity and the end of "social" media: [23:18 – 26:32]
• Big tech talent migration to AI labs: [28:32 – 33:10]
• Economics and superintelligence “pot of gold”: [33:10 – 36:34]
• Can we trust Silicon Valley with superintelligence?: [36:34 – 40:38]
• Scenarios for uncontrollable AI: [40:50 – 45:30]
• Big tech, lobbying, and legislative capture: [48:29 – 56:14]
• Silicon Valley’s political alliances & global trust: [56:14 – 61:00]

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Conclusion

The episode blends technical, ethical, and political analysis around AI’s rapid evolution, with Clegg providing sobering, nuanced commentary on Silicon Valley’s ability—and limits—when faced with the stewardship of potentially world-changing technology. He repeatedly calls for political engagement, humility regarding technological hype, and skepticism toward both corporate and government concentrations of power. For listeners, the episode is a clear-eyed tour through the biggest tech questions of our era, with sharp warnings for both the industry and the lawmakers who would seek to rein it in.

Transcript

[Nick Clegg]

You'd want, surely politicians to do exactly the thing you've just said, which is hypocritical, is they take the money and they invite person X from Silicon Valley y to the fishing weekend or the golf retreat. You want them surely then still to be able to get up on their hind legs and excoriate those companies and apply pressure to them. But they found big tech.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

They've done nothing to big tech. The former President of Global affairs at Meta and Deputy Prime Minister for the UK joins us for a conversation about how to save the Internet and whether we should trust Silicon Valley with superintelligence. That's coming up right after this. The truth is, AI security is identity security. An AI agent isn't just a piece of code, it's a first class citizen in your digital ecosystem and it needs to be treated like one. That's why Okta is taking the lead to secure these AI agents, the key to unlocking this new layer of protection and identity security fabric. Organizations need a unified, comprehensive approach that protects every identity, human or machine, with consistent policies and oversight. Don't wait for a security incident to realize your AI agents are a massive blind spot. Learn how Okta's identity security fabric can help you secure the next generation of identities, including your AI agents. Visit okta.com that's okay. T a.com Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multigentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate, trade and value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today we are joined by Sir Nick Clegg, the former President of Global affairs at Meta and the former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and the author of this great new book how to Save the the Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict. It's going to be a great conversation. Nick, great to see you again.

[Nick Clegg]

It's good to be here.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Let's start with so you spent a number of years advising Mark Zuckerberg through the tricky minefields of running Facebook and being this sort of global lightning rod because of the power and influence that Facebook had. So let's just do a little thought experiment to begin with you are advising Sam Altman, what do the next five years look like? Like, what does OpenAI have to be prepared for as it grows bigger and stronger?

[Nick Clegg]

Wow, what a question. Certainly one of the things which would be top of my list and it's hardly, this hardly betrays great insight, but I think this issue of the level of emotional dependency that people have on these AI entities as they become more and more sophisticated and the psychological and ethical dilemmas that will throw up, particularly for vulnerable adults and most importantly, of course for kids and for teens, I think is just going to become an issue that is going to grow and grow and grow just because of the, the, the level of personalized intimacy in this experience is, is like no other we ever experienced online. And I would, you know, I would strongly urge Sam Altman and his and I, they appear to be taking some steps, but I suspect they'll need to go a lot further to get well, well, well ahead of that and, and probably take a more conservative stance than of course the commercial imperatives will, you know, will be driving them in, in the other direction. That's the age old sort of dilemma for these companies, which is they want to compete with each other ferociously and experiment and push the boundaries. But I think when it comes to, you've obviously got a bunch of litigation going on already in the sad case where some, you know, kids have taken their own lives and so on. But I, I just think the, the, the, the, the, the impersonation effect, emotional and otherwise of these AI entities is so dramatically different to anything we've dealt with before. So that's something I'd probably put right at the top of my list because that's one. Something which in the world of politics doesn't divide politicians, it unites them. And, and that. So that's for sure.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Wait, can we, before we move on, I think we should just pause and talk about this a little bit because we've talked about this a lot on the show. Yeah, it seems like OpenAI is actually going in the other direction. They are enabling. So, so Sam Altman's perspective is let's let adults be adults. And if they want to have not only romantic attraction or romantic feelings, partnership with ChatGPT, that's fine. But even going to the point where they are enabling erotic uses or role play between people in ChatGPT and this, this, I think this probably stems from the fact that people really built deep relationships. Lots of people built deep relationships with 4o, which was this old model that OpenAI eventually did away with. And there was such a backlash that maybe they're responding to the demand. So is this, is this short sighted?

[Nick Clegg]

Well, I think it, it certainly is not sustainable if that decision was made on the basis that somehow the problem of over reliance, over dependency, the effect on teen mental and emotional well being is somehow fixed. And I don't follow these things quite as closely as I used to, but my reading of the assertion made by OpenAI was that they can take this risk with more edgy content, particularly sort of sexual, sexualized content for adults, which of course is a massive use. I mean you'll get sex and pornography is always, of course is one of, always the leading, leading use cases of any, any new communication technology, but particularly this one that that was now possible because the problem about the exposure of kids to experiences which might make them more vulnerable to all sorts of harms, that that was somehow fixed. And, and I'm not sure if I've seen proof that that has been fixed. Certainly my knowledge of the old world media world suggests to me that that very sharp distinction between it's okay to allow adults to have more edgy content because we've somehow gated the, the content which, or the experiences which are shared with younger people, that, that all of course relies on a pretty watertight technological solution to how you verify who falls on which side of that, you know, that age barrier. And certainly in the old world of social, that's still not fixed. It isn't. I mean, to be fair, there are some states across the U.S. i think California most recently, and others who I think are finally doing roughly the right thing, which is creating this sort of one and done app store based adjudication on age, which I think is much simpler for parents and so on. So I think they're moving there, but in a pretty patchy way. So I, I just don't think it's unreasonable for society at large, through politics, through the democratic process to say, hey guys, like we get it, you want, you want adults to have a more edgy experience and you've got, you've got other competitors who are taking bigger risks and you don't want to sort of be outflanked by them. But let's just kind of, can we just do that once we've actually sorted out how to keep younger people age gated in a way that everybody agrees works and that just is not the case so far. And look, if there's any, if there's any, I think some of the tendency in Silicon Valley and dare I say it, amongst the Sort of podcast and commentariat classes of saying, let's learn the lessons from, you know, the last 20 years of social media. They're not, I mean, what's the phrase? History rhymes, but it doesn't exactly repeat itself. I think sometimes it's a little overborne, that comparison. But this surely is one where the comparison is relevant. It's like it is so obvious that everybody, it doesn't matter whether you're a kind of libertarian tech bro or you're working for a, you know, an organization that's trying to defend the interests of kids, you'd look back and think, wouldn't it have been great if everyone had just started earlier on this journey, which to be fair, now is actually gathering pace as people are trying to work out exactly how to provide more age appropriate experiences to teens.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

So you're in the room with Sam Altman, right?

[Nick Clegg]

So I'd say that would be number one.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

But I'm just saying, like you're gonna, you're, let's say you're talking this through with him. What do you tell him the next five years is gonna look like if this erotic use of ChatGPT continues to go the way that it's going to? I think if it goes even romantic, not even erotic.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah. I actually don't have a huge problem with the idea that adults should be able to avail themselves of romantic. I mean, exactly where you draw the line between romantic and explicitly sexualized is of course, a tricky one. But I've got, I've got no problem with the idea that adults can make their own judgments in this area. And if, if this is something which is, is kind of useful to them or stimulating to them. And so, you know, so it's a kind of free. I've got no problem with that at all. I would say to Sam Altman, listen, if you don't want to spend most of your time giving evidence in D.C. because that's investigation, you actually want to be.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Nick Clegg]

And you actually want to be, you actually want to be. Continue to be lauded as a, as a, as a generational tech leader. I, I just kind of like, hey, this, you know, don't be careful what you wish for because if you rush into this too quickly without having done the homework on the difficult stuff. And it is difficult. It is really, it is way more difficult than people say, oh, why can't these tech companies just fix everything? For young people, it is more difficult. But I think pending the fact that that, or given the fact that that is not fixed and that assertion by OpenAI is demonstrably wrong. I would say to him, you will regret this because maybe not now, maybe not next year, but a few years time, I can guarantee you there will be a societal backlash. It could actually potentially be much greater than it was for the social media apps because the level of intimacy, of emotional dependency is going to be so much greater. So, so I would say to him, you know, what's the phrase? Festina linte? You know, rush, rush or hurry slowly would be my, my, my, my council team on this topic in particular.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's fascinating that you led with that. And you know, one thing that I found is in my life is it's pretty easy to slide into a relationship. It's tough to get out of one once you're there.

[Nick Clegg]

Right.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And if you're a tech company, start, you're starting millions of relationships with your users. It could be, pull those apart.

[Nick Clegg]

And also, you know, it's, I mean you've, you study and, and know the Silicon Valley subculture perhaps as well as anybody. It's just, you know, these guys are tech leaders and they're all guys, they're all, they're tech leaders, they're, they're extraordinarily accomplished technologists, entrepreneurs. They're highly, highly competitive with each other. They're not relationship experts, they're not politicians, they're not philosophers, they're not ethicists. I sometimes, sort of, I sometimes think that because they're so brilliant at what they do in the commercial and technological field, we kind of think they're going to arrive at the right judgment on some of these other things. They're not and we shouldn't expect them to and we shouldn't be surprised if they don't. Which is why I think on things like that, you know, particularly this issue of what is appropriate for adults and what is appropriate for non adults. And how do you make that, that distinction work? It's kind of, we shouldn't be waiting for the tech companies to, to, to decide on that. And, and I think it's actually a good thing. It's messy. It's messy because it creates such an erratic regulatory environment. But I actually think it's a pretty good thing that the, some of the US states, frustrated as they are, as I think many people are, that there's so little action in dc, are starting to take some of these matters into their own hands.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

So we'll get back to some more stuff that's coming down the line for AI, but this is a good moment to pause and think about the strategy of your former employer, Meta, because Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, they've put billions and billions of dollars into trying to build personal superintelligence AI friends. You know, I've been. I was Reporting in Meta 10 years ago, back when it was Facebook, literally 10 years ago, 2015, and people within the company were talking about how they wanted to build an AI friend.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And is it that, Is it that the company sees that this application of an AI friend will be so compelling to people that they may spend. Want to spend more time with it than their human friends, and that's why they want to go down this route.

[Nick Clegg]

So the conversations I had when I was still working in Silicon Valley with, with folk in matter and elsewhere was interesting because I, you know, I have a. I'm not a. I've never written a line of code myself. I'm not an engineer. I don't pretend to be. So I, I always asked lots of slightly dumbass questions and I was, I'm old enough and was senior enough just to ask to dumbass questions and people would, would be intro sort of explained to me and I would say, so what, what is this friend thing? Like, how, how is it a friend? And I would sort of get. I was, I remember being told, no, Nick, just relax. It's kind of like, you know, kids have got, they've got deep relationships with their teddy bears, with their pets, with obviously with celebrities. People project themselves onto celebrities in an extraordinary, intense way. It's kind of, it's kind of cool that if in the future, you know, you might have, you know, your. The teen might have seven best friends and three of them might be human and four of them might be humanoid, you know, AI, or maybe the ratio is different. And I got this made me think, because I don't know about you, I, my. I have, I mean, friends are probably more important to me than I think. I think a life which is rich in friendships is one of the, it's one of the greatest sort of defining features of a. A life well led. And I've got some dear, you know, got some deeply, deeply sort of close friendships which I've had during my whole life. And actually what I think about my. Some of my friends are really annoying sometimes. They're kind of really. They're total pain. I love my friends, but sometimes, God, they can be an absolute band. But what I mean is that friendship at a human, a profound human level is, Is a constant act of compassion and compromise of, of empathy, of joy, but also of irritation because we have to work around each other and we all go through ups and downs in life and so on. And I realized that actually what, what they were talking about when they talk about friends, it's not friendship, it's not friends at all because you're not really having to adapt yourself. The entity is entirely adapting itself to you. So my, my fear, but it's a, it's a slightly intuitive one is you're not talking about friendship, which is a complicated thing where you have to have the emotional maturity to try and understand someone else's perspective and put your own feelings aside for a min, prioritize them and all that kind of stuff, which is the absolute heart of friendship and so important to be a adult, to be a well rounded adult that you realize that your life is not all revolving around you, it's also around your friends and so on. I suddenly asked, wow, these things, they're not, it's not gonna be. They're friends as service and that's that. That worries me a bit because it doesn't worry me on a technological level, it worries me on a human level because I think that could foster immense narcissism.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Oh yes.

[Nick Clegg]

And sort of neediness and this sort of expectation that your friends are always going to be there for you. So 24 hours a day, exactly the same, you know, fresh voiced way. And, and so I just, I just kind of remember. I'm sure the, these are very smart people who are working on this in, in Silicon Valley. I'm sure the debate has moved on but certainly when I first started asking questions about this some years ago when I was there, when I also heard exactly what you suggested, wouldn't it be great if particularly. And of course then what, what you, what the, what folk do they always take the most extreme or the most heart rent, heart wrenching example, someone who's completely lonely and hasn't got friends and of course who's going to deny that's great if they can find companionship or as we've already seen, they can unburden themselves for mental health purposes or if they're dealing with post traumatic stress disorder and so on. And I'm not denying any of those use cases. In fact I think it's very, I'm a big advocate, I think for some of these, for AI in the use of mental health, for instance, certainly to triage basic conditions. But to make a claim that it is, it is on a par with the complexity of the give and take of human friendship I think displays an extraordinary Achilles heel in the Kind of basic philosophy of some technologists that somehow. Because that isn't friendship, that is friendship of service. Fine, call it something else, call it a companion, call it an assistant, call it an A. But don't pretend it has the richness that true human relationships do, which as I say are often as, they're often as infuriating as they are uplifting. And I certainly would, would pause a little bit if I was to, if I was to think that future generations were going to rely on this sort of on tap unctuousness that you get from, from, from AI entities. I'm not sure if that's the best way to, to raise kids, to, to, to understand the human condition.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah, I don't think it's a great way either. We had, there are good applications like we will hear good stories of the applications. We had the Replica Store CEO here, right. And she said that you know, she'd to weddings between people and their AI assistants and by the way built on like previous generations technology. So you can only imagine that's going to continue. But I think one story that she told that stuck with me was that somebody who had been through a really rough divorce started, said basically swore off dating humans, formed a relationship with a replica counterpart or companion, whatever you want to call it, AI friend or more than that. And that AI friend basically gave this person the confidence to start dating again and they started dating humans again and they have a human partner. Okay, but I want to ask this one question.

[Nick Clegg]

Those are great stories and we shouldn't.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Deny those but yeah, I'm with you 100%. It's just like we'll hear those from the tech companies, we won't hear the other side. But I just want to hammer down on one more thing. Hammer down, just touch on one more thing and then we can move on. Just from a strategy standpoint I wanted to get like the product, your perspective on product is, is this going to be, is Metis thinking that this is going to be such a popular product? You know that it, that it, that that open AI will threaten it in this way?

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, I don't know. Is the answer. Genuinely don't know.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right.

[Nick Clegg]

I've been there for a while. I clearly think it is in the DNA of Meta to believe that it is a company. It demonstrably does has a kind of handle on the social aspects on them. The sort of the, the, the, the way in which people develop intense relationships by way of and, and, and with increasingly online experiences. So that's kind of, that's in their kind of DNA. What I just don't know and I think is again, I'm now talking as a interested outsider. I genuinely don't, I genuinely don't is clearly they're throwing a huge amount of money at both talent and infra to compete at the very edge of the best frontier models. They've also got this, you know, fast expanding wearables business which of course will be digesting a huge amount of sensory data, which is very, very important as these models evolve from large language models to something far, far more based on visual and sensory data. So they've got, they've got the assembling the remarkable ingredients to deliver very powerful experiences. It's not entirely clear to me whether what actually in the end will happen is that the existing menu of apps and services that Meta delivers are just going to massively improve as they already are for advertisers. And if you look at the AI tools have been used for advertisers or to your point, is it also going to branch into robotics and, and AI, you know, friendships and so on. My experience of Mark Zuckerberg isn't, it's one of his admirable qualities. He'll, he'll throw everything at everything. He'll just, he'll just, then he's very, very adept at experimenting with extraordinary speed and say that works, that doesn't work. So I suspect that's the way they're gonna, that, that I think that would be in keeping with the, the, the sort of ambitious philosophy of the, of the company. But it's just very difficult for me at this stage to know which one is actually really gonna sing. If any of them are really gonna, you know, fly, it's clearly gonna, it's clearly gonna do a tremendous amount for the existing chassis of, of, of Meta products. I mean it's gonna lift all of those boats. And I'm sure that AI entities, companions, friends will definitely be part of the menu. How successful or good it will be, how much people will actually trust them, whether they will navigate the issues we've just talked about in a thoughtful way. Well, we'll see.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Okay, I'm going to answer my question. Yes, I think it is a major competitive threat for Meta. I think Meta is the time.

[Nick Clegg]

So what is it?

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

The AI friends, AI Companions. Meta is a time spent company that is what people care about, their time spent engagement, growth of products. If this technology keeps going the way that it's going, the AI friend will be like the stickiest tech product. And that to me, I think is something that they're paying close attention.

[Nick Clegg]

I'm sure, I'm sure because, because as you, as you know, in the sort of the, what I'd call the legacy business is extraordinary way to describe something which is used by 4 billion people and you know, still is generating, you know, revenue hand over fist. But anyway, what's called the legacy business, of course interestingly is becoming less distinct from its competitors. So you know, when I arrived at Facebook, as it was then, the thing that I always found very interesting was actually the fact that it was technology which humans could use to communicate with each other, share content which humans had created to express themselves and so on now, and you see it particularly on Instagram, that the whole thing has shifted more and more and more to what's it called in the jargon, unconnected content. In other words, content that you're seeing which is being recommended to you algorithmically from the furthest reaches of the Internet, regardless of whether it has anything to do with you or your friends or the groups you're on or so on. And of course increasingly content which is rec, you know, synthetic content which is automatically always recommended to you by automated systems. And to that extent it's interesting that almost imperceptibly the meta social media apps are now competing more and more with tick tock and YouTube. They're becoming, they're not, they're not really stages on which people generate content, communicate with each other. They are of course pipelines which entertainment and entertaining and engaging content is, is, is sort of fired at people. So the, the kind of, the, the, the, the market distinction of, of meta's existing products is less distinct from some of those other major players and it's been. For. They're all now roughly in the same Venn part of the Venn diagram. So. Yeah, that's, that's new.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah, I mean the content, because the.

[Nick Clegg]

Social graph based thing was just pretty distinct. It was distinct and it, that's different now.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah. To me the concept of social media really is dead. You have unconnected contact content and which they have with reals, so they're playing there and then you have messaging groups and they, they have WhatsApp and messenger, so they're playing there. But this, this first era of, you know, share with your friends and your friends are the best recommender of content to you is.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah. No, and I mean listen, you could, you could lament it, but that's the way that the world's gone. And in a sense it's a, it's a demonstration of the extraordinary Impact, I think sometimes even more outsized impact than many people appreciate of tick tock. I mean the tick tockification of that.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Whole industry and recommender systems, I mean, that's an AI thing too. Once. Yeah, I mean, we're going to talk about China, I think, coming up. But once people in China got the recommender system to the point that it was then, yeah, it was off to the races from there.

[Nick Clegg]

That's right, that's right. I mean, listen, sort of folk like me sort of lamented a bit because I always, I generally find humans more interesting than machines and it, I, you know, I always liked the, in the old model, it was machines that were allowing humans to be very human about themselves and with each other. And I sort of feel it's become a much more passive rather than interactive experience. And I certainly lament that, but you.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Know, it's great you brought that up because I was, we spoke three years ago at Davos and we were talking about, I ended with this question about the mappiness project which sort of mapped which activities give people the most happiness. And I mentioned that social media was like the dead last on this mappiness project. And you answered a very interesting way. You said, first of all, I doubt that, you know, 3 billion people would be that unhappy that they would come back to these products every day. Right. Which is interesting. We won't, I don't think we'll spend too much time on addiction and all that stuff today. But then the other thing you said was what our research has found is that passive scrolling actually has less of or a negative correlation with happiness where like engagement. Engagement does. And it's interesting that.

[Nick Clegg]

No, no, sorry, the other one.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Passive, passive scrolling makes you less happy.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, right, right.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Engaging with stuff makes you more happy.

[Nick Clegg]

Which is like intuitively kind of obvious.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right. But all of social media is passive scrolling now.

[Nick Clegg]

Well, it's certainly moving in that direction. Yeah, no, I, I, I, I think the passivity of, of the experience is quite different to the more active and interactive experience of, of before. But, but, but, you know, as you say, it's also been accompanied by a very significant shift to much more intimate forms of communication.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right. Messaging apps.

[Nick Clegg]

Messaging apps and discord. Yeah. And I certainly see in my own family, my friend group, that's where people spend a lot more time and that is very interactive. It's highly interactive. And so who knows, maybe if you look at the whole picture, it's not quite as, it's not quite as blunt or as dismal as kind of Active, you know, active online citizenship to sort of passive bovine consumption of recommended content. I think it's way more mixed than that because people, people don't of course use one app, they use multiple apps, particularly young people. I saw a stat suggests that you know, young, young American teen uses over 40 apps a month. But also this, as you say, this extraordinary growth of messaging apps as a forum in which people express themselves. So maybe, you know, maybe that's a big way to offset that, that, that other trend.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

We have a very active discord community around this podcast, big technology. And I was on it this weekend and I was just thinking to myself how funny is it that we effectively the social Internet started with the chat room, then it went to all these platforms. We're back in the chat room.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, we're back in the chat room. But what does that say about human nature? Right? It just, it, it says we, we, we, we've, we've have an absolutely overwhelming impulse to communicate, to express ourselves and to communicate with people in settings that we kind of feel kind of comfortable in and, and that we can kind of visualize and that is containable and gathers people around similar interests. That's not going to go, I mean that's millions of years of evolution it.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Seems to me, right?

[Nick Clegg]

That's anthropology more than technology for sure.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And we'll see, I mean, how many speaking we want that comfort, how much that comfort to your point is going to be delivered by people versus AI friends. That's going to be a big question.

[Nick Clegg]

And then back to sort of stitching it all together. Inevitably those who might, might find, who might gravitate towards AIs for the vast bulk of that communication will be those who may just find it kind of more difficult or awkward or to communicate in the, you know, in your discord for sure group and elsewhere. And that then of course becomes a slightly self selecting group of certainly of early adopters.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And that's a problem. Because it's a problem. You would think that like then they be. Those are probably the most influenceable people by technology.

[Nick Clegg]

Correct? Exactly.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Sort of.

[Nick Clegg]

Exactly. No, no, but I mean I think that's the nature of early adoption. It's, it's, it's folk who are either open to just, just, just open to the ingenuity of new things and, or really need it. Yeah, and, and, and that's, that's, that is exactly the, the, you know, one of the dilemmas. It's one of the reasons. Back to your opening question. Why I think you need to be super Mindful of that because that, that will have a big societal and political reaction over time if that's not handled intelligently.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

So the big AI labs, they're filling their ranks with your former colleagues?

[Nick Clegg]

Yes, yes.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Fiji. Simo is the head of consumer apps. She's great at OpenAI. She ran the Facebook app for a while. Kevin Weil had a product there. Former head Instagram. Yeah, I've met them. I've met both of them. Mike Krieger, who's just on the show. Instagram co founder, head of product at Anthropic. There's many more.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

So I guess I'm curious to hear your perspective on why these companies have been such a, have decided that they want folks from social media to take the lead here. Obviously they know product, but it's also sort of, I don't know if I'm, if I'm not getting the full picture here about what an AI product, but social media, it seems like it wants you to just engage as much as, as you can because it will show you more ads where AI is like, if it just gets you to engage for engagement sake. That's actually like pretty expensive.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

For them to serve. So what's your perspective on this?

[Nick Clegg]

I, it, My guess is it's much simpler than that. These are very smart people who've been in rapidly scaling businesses and you know, if you're, if you're Sal Altman or Daria Moday or any, you're going, wow, I'm sitting on this, I'm sitting on this rocket, you know, this rocket ship and it's kind of taking off. I need people around me who understand scale, who can, who can ship products quickly, scale them very quickly and understand how to operate in complex and very fast moving environments. And if you, if you basically take that as your one of your list of requirements or expectations, then of course people from companies like Meta, you know, feature high up on the, high up on the, on the list. So no, I, I wouldn't have thought it's, it's, I wouldn't have thought it's through the, that's my assumption at least I wouldn't have thought it's through the prism that you've just described, which is one is engagement with commercial upside, the other one is engagement, it's sort of expensive engagement because I would have thought at the moment what they're just racing to do and they're clearly, they're clearly burning a lot of money in order in pursuit of this objective is just to, it's just to expand and get people using these products. And that in a sense is a bit of a playbook from, from Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, you know Mark, it's one of his, it's one of his most enduring principles, which is build technology which people find engaging. You'll work out a way later to monetize that. I mean how many years was it that WhatsApp barely, you know, generated a, you know, penny of revenue? And so maybe that's, maybe that's what, that's also something that they're the, the, you know, the other, the new AI hyperscalers are, that's the page they're taking out of, out of the meta playbook.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

It's just that the ROI for these AI companies has to be so much better. Like so much ads alone cannot.

[Nick Clegg]

No, no, exactly. No, no, but that, but that's the, I was about to say 10 million dollar questions. It's the whatever, it's multiple trillion dol that no one seems to have the answer to that and we're clearly in this rather odd position where the, the, the, you know, the cap, the infrastructure investment dwarfs anything that happened in the run up to the dot com boom. So it's not enough to say, oh, you know, this happened before, you know, yeah, sure, there was a market correction, people went bust, a bunch of companies disappeared. But we also had this wonderful infrastructure that we then repurposed for other things. But this is just off the scale compared to that. Mean I'm sure if you tot up the amount of hundreds of billions that were spent on, on telecoms infrastructure by some of those, you know, telcos compared to the.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

I think this year alone will exceed that, will exceed that. 300 billion plus in capex from big tech this year and $1 trillion committed to OpenAI. Yeah, this year.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, exactly. So, so, and no one's been explained to me, but I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a financial analyst. But like no one's been explaining to me how you recoup that, that money. So clearly at some point something's got a right size, someone's going to lose a bunch of money, there's going to be a correction. I kind of think that the folk are in the driving seat here. Whether it's the new hyperscalers, anthropic open eye notably amongst them, or the established players, Google, Meta, Amazon and so on Microsoft. I just kind of think they're locked in a thing where it says yeah, we don't know where this is going to go. But we, we know one thing for sure. If we don't compete, we're sure to lose. So we don't know whether we're going to win. We don't know what the shakeout's going to be. But the, the surest way to lose is just not to, not to throw as much money as your next competitor. So they are in a bit of a. They are in a bit of a kind of, you know, spend whatever it takes mania. And there is a sort of manic feel about the whole thing. That's, that's, that's obvious.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right. And so what they do, they've told us what they basically need to pay the money back. It's. Mark Zuckerberg's talked about developing super intelligence, Sam Altman's talked about super intelligence, artificial general intelligence. And this is.

[Nick Clegg]

Why does superintelligence equal. Yeah. Why does that. Why is that a pot of gold necessarily?

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

If I be. I think this is. If you're able.

[Nick Clegg]

Oh, I see. If you're able to hold on to it, no one else can do it.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Well, if you're able to build technology that's smarter than every person, the. I mean if you think about what's economically valuable.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

That would be the most economically valuable thing ever created if you can hoard it.

[Nick Clegg]

This is the bit I've never quite understood and I may be completely wrong here, but I'd love to know what you think. But my. I've never quite fully understood why that would be a hoardable asset that only one company has keeps on the lock and key and everybody else kind of of everybody else is then thwarted. It seems to be much, much more likely that it's going to be a more diverse and dispersed technology than that. There's a lot of early evidence that some of the most useful and commercial models are quite specific ones are small specific ones. I just, I don't know until someone, until I at least and this is my rather sort of primitive way of looking at these things until I have a bit more, a bit more information to be able to visualize exactly what these slightly hand wavy terms like AGI and super intelligence really mean. I find it super difficult to understand why the assumption is that there is a winner takes all logic would prevail here.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Maybe it will.

[Nick Clegg]

But in a world where just this week wasn't it. I've forgotten the. What's the Hong Kong based company that's just produced another particularly good open source AI model for agentic encoding Purposes.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Mini Manus.

[Nick Clegg]

Is it what it is? Yeah, M2 or something.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

But anyway. Kim, K2 is that.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, maybe, maybe. Anyway, you know, when you've got. We're in a world where you've got now on a. Where it's now becomes like just standard. It's like become a conventional wisdom that the world's largest autocracy is churning out the. The world's most advanced open source AI models. And that I see Chesky the other day saying that Airbnb rely very heavily on deep seat for their own work and so on. I don't know. That seems to me to be an indicator of just how versatile and dispersed the technology is rather than how much it can be hoarded in a winner takes all knockout blow by one of the labs. But I accept, of course, A, I may be entirely wrong, but secondly, that if that is the case, if the race to superintelligence is this eureka moment where one entity wins, everybody else is left, left, you know, in the dust, then of course that is of such immense commercial value you can hardly put a figure on it. I get it, I get it. But it does seem to me to imply a bunch of fairly heroic assumptions.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Okay, so that is a great lead into this question that I wanted to ask you, which I might have to alter now. Oh, I wanted to ask you whether we can trust Silicon Valley with superintelligence. Let's say they do build this all knowing. Okay, so, so let's do that. And then I want to ask you whether they can even control it itself because of what you just said. So, so let's start with can we trust them? Super intelligence?

[Nick Clegg]

Well, I said of course not. Because in a sense my knee jerk response is, as I said earlier, these are technology companies. You, you shouldn't trust technology companies. Or should. It's not even trust, I use even a less loaded way of putting it. It's like look to a technology company to sort out the moral, societal, political, ethical trade offs by which you know, which are entailed in the way in which millions, billions of human beings interact with technology. They're technologists. They're, they are hard driving, highly competitive, highly commercial technologists. So, so to that extent, no, that's not their, that's not, not their role. It's not their, it's not their expertise. And it's one of the reasons why this fashion at the moment, certainly in Silicon Valley and dc, this sort of ultra libertarian thing of any kind of constraint, any kind of regulation is unacceptable, is so foolish because it's like they don't have all the answers and nor should you ever expect them to have all of the, the answers. So, so that's on, on the one that's the sort of easy bit. The, the bit I find just harder to answer is I kind of just don't yet really know where is, what is the moment we work. Walk through the looking glass and super intelligence has happened. Some people say it's when they deliver, they, you know, when these systems deliver or develop a certain level of autonomy and an ability to self improve. Others claim that in the end actually there's no way that they can fully escape the rather clunky, the probabilistic underlying architecture upon which they're built and they're always going to come up, spit out some slightly hallucinatory outcomes, they can't be fully precise all the time and that they're never going to entirely escape, escape the, the chains of human command. I just, you know, I'm very interested that there are folk like my dear friend Jan Lecun and others who've been pretty consistent and sure they get, surely they get criticized and mocked for it, but if you ask yourself who's most astute in the kind of commentary of the big trends of, of this technology over the last three or four years, I would have thought it's fair to say that people like him who have claimed right from the outset, yeah, this is really powerful technology, it's really versatile, but it's not the only, or maybe not even the best route to human style machines which really can self improve and develop their own autonomy, their own and dare I say it, sort of inverted commas conscience. If that's true, and in fact, you know, this alternative paradigm which people now talk about, world models and so on, is where the future lies, then we might look back at all this, all this kind of superintelligence AGI hype and say wow, that was like, that really was kind of hand wavy stuff to recruit AI data scientists in Silicon Valley more than based on something which was fully realizable. So I, I tend to always slightly look the other way when I hear a lot of hype, because I think the hype just becomes it has an intellectually paralyzing effect. Find it very difficult to think clearly when you hear people throw around these kind of really, you know, these lofty terms when I don't know what they mean. They don't seem to themselves have any consensus about what it means. And where there are very serious folks saying look, the paradigmatic limits of the Technologies lnma based LLM based technology is, is going to act as a persistent constraint on getting there in the first place. So I, I really just sort of feel, I just feel the jury is so out out now. But I realized, look, there are people in matter and elsewhere, ex colleagues of mine who I like and admire enormously, who. So, you know, it's a failure of imagination on the part of people like me. No, no, this is, this is around the corner and the scaling laws still prevail and the relationship between how much you put in, how much you get out. Is it still, it still holds and it's still surprising us.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Yeah, we, we, we listen to, to Jan here often. He's been on three times. I think he has a really good perspective. But, but let's get back to like the control part. Yeah, I mean assuming control. You know, let's throw out the jargon.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

These systems are becoming much more powerful. They are open enough. They're, you know, the companies have moved towards closed systems, but they're open enough.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

That something that happens in China can get copied right. Into the US And US Into China totally. So is there, is there a concern on your end that like. No. Or companies might try to control this technology? It's not very controllable.

[Nick Clegg]

Well, clearly that is one very real possibility. If the, if the predictions are even half true about how this technology might develop its own.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right.

[Nick Clegg]

Its own logic. Logic. Its only its own sense of motivations, its own sense of survival. You know, you've seen these recent reports from.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Unbelievable stuff. Right. They will manipulate evaluators just to preserve their values.

[Nick Clegg]

To preserve their values or, or to stop themselves being, you know, rewritten and stuff and to be extinguished. Yeah, of course.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

I mean they're hacking. They are playing chess games and then hacking the program. The chess program to change the rules so they can win.

[Nick Clegg]

Oh, wow. No, I hadn't seen that one. Right, right. And I was referring to the thing I read.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

I like when I see this stuff, I'm like, that's so cool. And also just a little bit scary.

[Nick Clegg]

Yes, it is, it is, it is. Definitely. Well, it suggests a survival instinct, which is a very, very kind of profound thought that, that they develop a kind of animal like survival instinct for themselves. And I don't want to just simply dismiss that. But it seems to me at the moment these are fragmentary indications. They're little sort of flashes of, of, of sort of fragmentary evidence that maybe these systems will develop fully full blown autonomy in, in the sort of sense that we as humans would, would understand. It seems to me that there's a long, long, long, long way to go. And at the moment these are being driven by such powerful, powerful systems and so much compute capacity and so much data. Is it, is it really plausible to assume that just one more heave, one more, you know, layer of data centers, yet more improvements at inference as well as training levels will, will deliver? Maybe, maybe. I have to say I'm, I'm intuitively a little skeptical only because I just, look, I ask myself, what are the motives for the folks saying what they say?

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right. No, I'm not thinking that it's like an escape scenario. I'm just like if you want this technology to follow a certain set of values or to be used in a certain set of way, it's even less and less like that's possible because of what you're saying. The diffuse.

[Nick Clegg]

It makes it all the more reason. It makes it all the more important. And this is probably the bit where I can speak with greater authority than I can about the, you know, the claim and counterclaims about between different paradigmatic AI models. That's not my expertise. That's why in the end politics does, does need to insert itself. And that's why this peculiar phase we're in where D.C. and Silicon Valley have kind of, which always sort of regarded themselves with great sort of skepticism and kept each other at arm's length, have fallen into this sort of cloying embrace with each other and all the tech tech bros, you know, in and out of the White House like, like nobody's business and married to this very kind of belligerent America first agenda, you know, to hell with the rest of the world. We're in the lead. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna assert our lead ever more forcefully and, and you know, and screw anyone who says anyone else, anything else. I, I would be very surprised if that is a workable strategy for the U. S. And at some point I think there's going to be quite a big sort of falling of the scales from the eyes when they realize you can't beat, you can't beat. You certainly can't beat China like that. And I suspect the long run you can't beat India either. And who knows about other, other places, particularly as they start adopting Chinese open source models more and more widely in other parts of the world and then using them for ever more ingenious purposes. So I think at the moment we're in this rather odd phase where we're making where it seems to me the US political and tech elite are united in an assertion which seems to me to be self evidently flawed, which is this is not going to lead to permanent enduring American supremacy. And when that becomes more obvious, there needs to be a big course correction and politics in one way or another, in my view, which is what I advocate in the final third of my book, Politics, ideally in a coordinated fashion between the world's major, you know, techno democracies, the us, India and Europe, in that descending order of importance, will, I think at some point need to rediscover the merits of multilateral action, however unfashionable. That is to say in, in in, you know, in the current environment in.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

The U.S. okay, I want to talk about that a little bit more and we'll do that right after this Finding the right tech talent isn't just hard, it's mission critical. And yet many enterprise employers still rely on outdated methods or platforms that don't deliver. In today's market, hiring tech professionals isn't just about filling roles, it's about outpacing competitors. But with niche skills skills, hybrid preferences and high salary expectations, it's never been more challenging to cut through the noise and connect with the right people. That's where Indeed comes in. Indeed consistently posts over 500,000 tech roles per month. And employers using its platform benefit from advanced targeting and a 2.1x lift and started applications when using tech network distribution. If I need to hire top tier tech talent, I would go with Indeed Posterior your first job and get $75 off at indeed.comtechtalent that's indeed.comtechtalent to claim this offer. Indeed built for what's now and for what's next in tech hiring. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called chat concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade and value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. And we're back here with Nick Clegg. You should check out his new book how to Save the the Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict script. I've read it through as you can see if you're watching on video. Nick, I want to talk to you a little bit briefly before we get into Silicon Valley's attachment with the Trump administration, how Silicon Valley buys influence in Washington, there was a terrific story, actually a great leak of a memo from Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft. I don't know if you remember this. I think Microsoft employees were asking him. It basically made its way around the press a couple years ago. The Microsoft employees were asking him why Microsoft donates to PACs and causes. And he gave what I think is like the most interesting and honest answer. I'll just read a bit of it, he says about the money. I can tell you it plays an important role not because the checks are big, but because the way the political process works. Politicians in the United States have events, they have weekend retreats, you have to write a check and then you get invited to participate. So if you work in the government affairs team in the United States, you spend your weekends going to these events, you spend your evenings going to these dinners. And the reason you go is because the PAC writes a check. But out of an ongoing, but out of that, on and out of that ongoing effort, a relationship evolves and emerges and solidifies. I can tell you as somebody who sometimes is picking up the phone basically to get people to answer.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Is that how it works?

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, I think it works. That's the way it works in the U.S. yeah, yeah. It doesn't, absolutely doesn't work like that in the same way elsewhere. But the US political system is so moneyed in a way that's I think almost without precedent anywhere in the democratic world, certainly that I know about. And in a sense, you know, what's happened under Trump too is that that has just become, that transactionalism has just become way more overt.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

You know, you don't like the idea of bringing a gold bar to the.

[Nick Clegg]

President, gold bars, paying for a gold laminated ballroom, all the rest of it, it's kind of, it kind of like, it's become all like most like a sort of pastiche, satire of a highly transactional cash, so money, sorry, financially based, you know, set of relationships which I think all the, all the, all the big corporates are involved in and they do it openly, they do it legally, they do it lawfully, there's nothing illicit going on. But in a culture where, where elected politicians are, are literally non stop fundraising and that's all they're doing, this has clearly become an established way. Exactly as Brad, who I like and admire enormously, as Brad explained, it's not, it's not, you're not buying a decision. You're, you're you're buying an entry ticket into an event which then get, you know, etc. Etc. Etc.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Are the retreats fun?

[Nick Clegg]

I have. I, I am. I didn't go by self. There were much better placed folks folk in, in my Meta team who, who had much better relationships. You know, I'm a non American. My role was. I had oversight when I was at Meta for the, the US operation, but was, was, was quite so globally focused.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

How do. How do. If we talked about in the, in the beginning of this conversation, sort of the need for there to be a check on some of the companies within Silicon Valley if, you know, if they're pursuing this powerful technology, it doesn't seem to me like there can be if this is the way the system works.

[Nick Clegg]

No, I mean it doesn't mean that the US political system is incapable of regulating or putting constraints on companies that, whose, whose lobbying teams still make these contributions to go to the golfing weekend here or the dinner there and so on and so forth. So I don't, I don't, I don't think the evidence is that the US political system is just rendered, you know, completely inertia, but by this, you know, by the way in which corporate contributions through PACs and so on are, are made. It just seems to be the way in which the relationships are, are conducted and established in the, in the first place. And the US body politic has regulated everything from the pensions industry to the banking industry to arms and oil, even though all of those companies and the companies in all of those sectors are doing exactly the same thing, trying to go to the same golf retreat, going to the same fishing weekend or whatever. So, so I, I don't think that, I think. I, I don't think it is the case that that means that thoughtful political action in, in legislative form is made impossible. Though I totally understand why people say or think like, you know, your average punter's going, wow, that's, is that the way it works? But it is the way it works in the us I mean it's not, it's hardly a secret and it's totally open. There's nothing illicit about it. That's the crucial thing thing.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Was it ever weird for you that these politicians who I'm sure were like holding these retreats and weekends with your team members were then up on the hearing stage and giving the.

[Nick Clegg]

I'm the worst person because I, you know, I come from a much smaller but, but older democracy called the UK by comparison. And this kind of beh. This is just totally Alien to our, to any, to any European, as I think your wife is German, you'll know that. You know, just, I mean, it's just, it doesn't mean that there aren't money issues in the way in which politicians.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

I just find it so hypocritical that they would take the money and then call this tech CEO in for the hearing and lambast them to show that they're tough on big tech.

[Nick Clegg]

But wouldn't you prefer them at least to do that than then not lambast them? I mean, I think, I think, I think if anything, prefer them to be.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Effective, I guess, is my.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, no, no, no, I'm with you. And, and personally, as I say, as a non, non American, I'm just stunned at the sort of the extraordinary amount of money that sloshes around in American democracy. But it always has, it's kind of the way it is. And, and the kind of European approach of having any kind of state subsidy or anything for ads or for any kind of politics is, is considered to be, you know, for perfectly good reasons, perhaps it's considered to be deeply, deeply sort of suspect.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Here in the US we do it in New York. Actually, in New York we have matching funds. So if you ra every dollar you raise up until a certain amount you get, you get a matching seven or eight dollars. Okay, so.

[Nick Clegg]

Well, I defer to you on that, but that may be the case. But given it is the way it is, and certainly in my job at Meta, I dealt with the way the world as it was, not as I might ideally want it to be if I could architect it from its foundations. You'd want, surely politicians to do exactly. The thing you've just said, which is hypocritical, is they take the money and invite person X from Silicon Valley Y to the, the fishing weekend or the golf retreat. You want them shortly then still to be able to get up on their hind legs and excoriate those, those companies and apply pressure to them. But they found tech.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

They've done nothing to big tech.

[Nick Clegg]

No, no, I know nothing.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And that's what I'm saying. You, of course, you don't want them to like say you free pass.

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

But to me, the point is the thing that's really surprising, the system itself is broken, if that's what's going to happen, because we see the effect. And I'm not here saying we need to have big tech, you know, massive big tech regulation. Obviously that could be misguided as well. It's just when you look at the way the system works, it's, it's crazy to me.

[Nick Clegg]

So my experience just to, just to do something very unfashionable, which is to stand up for the political class and to stand up for the, you know, the really, in many ways, really thoughtful, good people who I saw were in the, in the business of trying to represent these companies in D.C. and my team and elsewhere. They're not, they're not shady people. These are really decent people trying to just do, do a good, decent day's job. Yeah, but here's the thing, right? I often found that the reasons why there, there was no consensus across, across the aisle on issues had less to do with who's gone on their, their fishing retreat or their golf weekend, but more to do with deep differences between Republicans, Democrats on state preemption, for instance.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Right.

[Nick Clegg]

You know, that was something which constantly bedeviled and, and stopped progress. Now, you might say that that was an alibi for people not to take action. But I was always very struck, you know, because I would ask myself, why on earth does the US of all countries not have a federal privacy law? It's like that. You know, this is, you would have thought that be entirely in line with the constitutional principles of this country. And I think it, it often came down to very deeply held views about the relative roles and responsibilities of the federal government and states and so on. The thing I am surprised about, I have to say is why. Why there hasn't been, despite all the energy that that is generated on both sides of the aisle on this, why there hasn't been more progress at federal level on legislating to, to, to, you know, to make sure that kids and teens are protected in a way that other users, you know, which is quite special compared to other users of social media and other other online experiences. That, that does seem it, and it doesn't surprise me at all that other, other states, California is only the latest example, perhaps the most significant one, are now taking matters into their own, into their own hands, because that's a reasonable thing to do if nothing happens in D.C. totally.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

All right, I have one last one for you. We have like three minutes left, but I think this is important. So at Trump's inauguration, we saw Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk. I'm probably missing one. Bezos was there.

[Nick Clegg]

Sergey Brin.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Sergey, okay. So the US Tech elite have tied themselves to the Trump administration in a way that we haven't really seen before. So I mean, the tech, tech, they loved Obama. They, I Don't think they were like this close. So eventually politics goes in cycles. The Trump's way of doing things may not be the way that the US wants to do things forever or the globe wants to do things forever. What do you think will end up, what do you think will be the end result for these tech leaders from tying themselves so closely to someone who has gone out globally and, you know, taken this America first approach?

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah, so I think it's short term and long term. In short term it works for them because they're all, you know, they're all driven by FOMO and fear or a mixture of both. You know, one person's beating a path to mar a log, oh my gosh, I better get on the next plane to do it myself. They all worry that someone else is going to somehow. Now, in this highly transactional environment, this very capricious transactional environment where the sort of Trump administration looks, you know, from a distance, like a sort of form of, kind of institutionalized sort of gangster capitalism where, you know, favors are done to favor, you know, favored companies and individuals and others are, you know, kneecapped, whether it's countries. But you know, we just saw over the last 24 hours Canada experiencing 10% increase in tariff because of an ad.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

He'll even do it to friends too. Tim Cook has been on the receiving and he's again, we've talked about, what did the gold bar get him? I don't know.

[Nick Clegg]

It's not irrational for them to say, wow, this is so random. And there are so many sort of random drive by shootings that are going on metaphorically, I'm speaking, you know, by the, by the political class. Now we've just better try and kind of all do what everybody else is doing, turn up at these dinners, turn up at these events, and hopefully we won't get singled out, particularly in an environment where, to our earlier conversation, they're all spending so much money on what is to them almost a commercially existential race with each other. Any disadvantage or any advantage garnered by one of your, one of your competitors because of their relationship with this administration could be of, commercially of great. So it's not illogical for them all to do the same thing in the way that they are. I think the, the longer term problem is that it just, it just erodes an immense amount of trust across the political spectrum, you know, in, in, in these companies or at least the leadership of these companies. Because if you're a Democrat, you're going, wow, I remember sitting at a dinner with you know, tech leader X and technically the Y saying, oh, they were great progressives and now look at them. But, but also, honestly, I also think from the Republicans, they're going to go, I know that this person said X or Y a few years ago, so.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

And globally, by the way. Yeah, Canada. Oh, how's it going to look?

[Nick Clegg]

Yeah. And then globally, I mean, you know, you could imagine what it looks like if you're in Delhi, Brussels or. But I think many people understand that business leaders have to duck and weave, particularly in an environment where ducking and weaving seems to be about the only option available to you in this very capricious kind of governing paradigm that you see in the Trump 2 administration. I think in the long run, though, of course it poses difficulties for them, it's trust eroding in a big way. Because what happens if there's a Democrat president? Well, they're going to suddenly turn around and turn up at the White House, say, actually, we agree with everything. You've always believed. You can't do that. So at some point, in my view, as I say, I understand why they're doing everything they're doing. But at some point in the long run, all of these industry leaders, if they want to continue to see their businesses prosper for decades to come, have to find some way that they don't go into this, I think, slightly demeaning whiplash of kind of, know, herd like behavior, limpet like herd like behavior. If I'm not mixing my metaphors, attaching themselves to one administration, then attaching themselves to another, at some point, I hope that a certain kind of distance will be restored between Silicon Valley and D.C. i don't think it's. I often say to people about the only worse thing in a developed capitalist economy than having major companies and governments at each other's throats is having them in each other's pockets. It's much better if there's a certain wary, respectful distance between the two. I also kind of think technological innovation just does better when it's not too tied up with the weird vagaries of politics. And I suspect Silicon Valley will relearn that well.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

We could definitely do another full episode on this topic on what the values of Silicon Valley actually are. And I hope we get a chance to do that.

[Nick Clegg]

Me too.

[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Nick, it's been great to see you again. You're always welcome on the show. The book, folks, again, is how to Save the Internet. The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict. All right, that'll do it for us here and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account. Plus sign up now for a $200 Bitcoin bonus. To kickstart your rewards, visit gemini.com car today. Check out the link in the description for more information on rates. Again, if you're looking to invest in Bitcoin but don't know where to start, the Gemini Credit card makes it easy. The Gemini Credit card is issued by Webbank. In order to Qualify for the $200 crypto intro bonus, you must spend $3,000 dollars in your first 90 days. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts this content is not investment advice and Trading. Crypto involves risk. The Gemini credit card cannot be used to make gambling related purchases.

[Nick Clegg]

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[Big Technology Podcast Host]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Nick Clegg]

Cut the camera, they see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.