← The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost
The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost
Nick Clegg: Why UK Free Speech is Under Threat; Silicon Valley Needs to Man Up; China Leading the AI Race
00:40:46
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- [00:00]
A
There was just this odd culture which seems to have taken root in recent years of very rich, successful men, business leaders in Silicon Valley, who feel terribly sorry for themselves. I slightly feel like saying just man up, kind of, you know, just grow some. I don't believe that America is going to beat China in this AI race in the way that they appear to imagine they might. I think China is far, far too powerful if and technologically gifted and adept. And the technology AI is far too versatile and dispersed to technology to imagine that someone's going to deliver one knockout blow.
- [00:39]
B
Let's talk about free speech. When you see people like Elon Musk, say the UK or JD Vance, say the UK doesn't have free speech, what's your response?
- [00:50]
A
Actually, as it happens, I do think the balance is out of whack here.
- [00:59]
B
Welcome to the Master Investor Podcast with me, Wilfred Frost, where we celebrate and learn from the success of the greatest investors, business leaders and politicians in the world, giving you, our listeners, the edge. My guest today was Deputy Prime Minister of the UK from 2010 to 2015 and then President of Global affairs at Facebook owner Meta from 2018 until earlier this year, essentially rising to be number two to Mark Zuckerberg. I am delighted to welcome to the Master Investor podcast Sir Nick Clegg. Sir Nick, a very good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us.
- [01:36]
A
Very good to be here.
- [01:37]
B
And an author of a new book, how to Save the Internet, which we're going to be talking about throughout the conversation today. And this is just out.
- [01:44]
A
Yep, just out this week.
- [01:45]
B
Available to buy wherever you get your books. So, Nick, I mentioned that we want to celebrate and learn from the success of the greatest. And you fall into two of our categories there, which is rare. And on this in particular, we want to celebrate success and learn from it. Do you think that America does that better than the United Kingdom?
- [02:06]
A
Oh, I mean, undoubtedly. And I think the gap is getting bigger and bigger. I am, as you can imagine, as the Americans would say, I'm a great patriot. I'm a great. I was deputy Prime Minister of this country. I love this country. I think we have not only an extraordinary history, but a wonderfully sort of creative, slightly ingenious gene. You know, we inhabit this soggy, muddy island floating off the northwest fringes of Europe. I mean, and yet we still remain a remarkably creative place, a vibrant place, but I think for a whole bunch of reasons, and it's accelerated in recent years. I worry that it's like sort of it's settled like a dust on the country. You just feel there's an underlying sullenness and grumpiness about the future. It's as if the country has fallen out of love with the future. I find here certainly much more than us, but actually more than some other European countries these days, which is quite striking. There's a sort of. There's a tendency maybe particularly in the kind of political and media environment, to kind of tear people down and tear ideas down all the time. We're very good as Brits, at talking about what we don't like, and the Americans are very good at celebrating. Sometimes we find it, as Brits, a bit frothy, a bit insincere, but, you know, it kind of. It kind of has a. It has a sort of momentum of its own. If you, if you, if you say that you're optimistic and looking forward to doing something. Whereas there's a sort of fearfulness about almost every aspect of the future at the moment. And we've seen this now in various manifestations in politics and elsewhere and in culture. There's this odd tendency for us to be very nostalgic about our. And it's good to be proud of our past. We shouldn't be trapped by our past. And. And there's a fine line between those two.
- [04:06]
B
And do you think just because you and I moved to America and came back at slightly similar times, do you think it took you to have that move, to notice the scale of that difference, or do you think the gap has got bigger over the last decade?
- [04:18]
A
Well, in one sense, the gap, of course, just has got bigger. When I was deputy Prime Minister, the GDP of Europe, which we were part of, the EU we were part of then, and the US Were roughly the same. I mean, it slightly depends how you slice and dice these stats, currency calculations and so on, but roughly the same. Now, the US GDP compared to Europe, I think, including Britain, is, what is it, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 times greater. That is a huge difference. And that's partly because of events. I think we limped out of the 2008 crisis and America bound out of it. We sort of crawled out of the COVID pandemic and they sort of sprung back to life. I mean, the American economy is an extraordinary sort of beast. So I think those are. Those are events which have. Which have certainly made that difference more clear and more distinct. There's demographics. We're an aging society, and we, of course, inhabit a. A hemisphere, a neighborhood. Europe, which is just a much more tricky place to live than in the US has got what Canada and Mexico, north to the south and two great oceans east and west and then this great continent sized economy. We are a cluttered series of small and medium sized countries living cheek by jowl next to each other in a pretty dangerous neighborhood. So there are all those differences of geography and of history and demographics and certainly of economics recently. But you're right, like as ever, one experiences this when you go on holiday. Even if you go on holiday for two or three weeks and you kind of put down the newspapers and don't read the day to day news, you always get a slightly different sense of perspective of your own home country. And of course anyone who's worked or lived or studied abroad will, will recognize that you do get that sort of clarifying perspective when you're somewhere else. It doesn't mean that I found our life in, in California an unvarnished sort of joy. There's always good and bad of every place. But I do feel we've got into a bit of a grump and we've sort of got ourselves into a bit of a ditch really in terms of sentiment. And sentiment in business as much as in anything else is so, so important. And once it kind of curdles, it's very, very difficult to kind of reinvigorate it.
- [06:38]
B
We'll come towards the end on maybe your advice for the current government to, to reinvigorate it. Just wanna dwell on perhaps some of the negatives you point to on the American business culture. I was two weeks ago anchoring on CNBC with Andrew Rossorkin and he quoted something. I think it popped up on Twitter whilst we were on air on X, whilst we were on air that you'd said to the Guardian, if you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. You said of Silicon Valley and David Freeberg of the all in pod then weighed in and it created a little bit of a conversation. What did you mean by that? Of Silicon Valley culture?
- [07:11]
A
I actually think I heard that quote, so I think this was from a print, I hope. I sort of said it in a tone which suggested that I didn't come up with that pithy phrase, I think. But I said it in the context of the following. One of the things I found most striking in Silicon Valley, I still for the life of me can't quite understand it. And maybe it's because I come from the rough and tumble world of Westminster where you kind of just need to kind of, you either toughen up or you just get flattened. But there was this really odd combination in Silicon Valley of Lots of very, very rich men. And not all of them, of course. I'm not generalizing about everybody. I have lots of dear friends there and many people I admire. And I'm not directing this at Mark Zuckerberg either. But there was just this odd culture which seems to have taken root in recent years of very rich, successful men, business leaders in Silicon Valley who feel terribly sorry for themselves and they sort of, they sort of whine about not being liked by the New York Times or not being invited to sort of polite dinner parties. It's sort of, and I found this combination of immense wealth and power and sort of simpering self pity an incredibly unattractive aspect of the sort of latter day leadership of some parts of Silicon Valley. So that's what I was commenting on is.
- [08:27]
B
So what does that come down to then? Is there an some insecurity, do you think, or what?
- [08:31]
A
Yeah, I don't. Honestly, I think it's a, maybe it's personality types, maybe it's a craving for acceptance. You know, I, I've never, I've genuinely don't understand it because these same people celebrate the fact that they're disruptive and that they, you know, that they challenge the orthodoxy and that they mess up other people's business models and introduce. It's like I feel like saying, hey dude, if that's what you're doing, kind of don't expect everyone's gonna throw bouquets of compliments at you cause you're a disruptor. So either be a disruptor and then take the flak that comes with that. And by the way, I know this myself from a different. I played a very disruptive role in politics and people get very, very angry if you disrupt a status quo. It's sort of the anthropology and psychology of it is the same. And so I don't quite get it. I really, in a weird kind of way, given that a lot of this has been associated with this eruption in this slightly sort of plastic masculinity that you see now in parts of kind of American society and American industry and American politics, you've got the whole BRO podcast. I slightly feel like saying just man up, kind of, you know, just grow some. If you're going to compete in the jungle of different vested interests that you're disrupting, kind of don't expect people to kind of applaud you every step of the way. You're inserting yourself into something where you're always going to get reactions. And I, and I found that probably as an ex politician, I found that of course, particularly difficult to understand if you're, and again, maybe the British political culture is particularly aggressive, but I just kind of, I found it really, I still to this day don't understand it. It's like, don't, don't do that kind of thing then if you want to be sort of inoffensive to everybody.
- [10:18]
B
It's interesting. I mean, you obviously going through the media here in British politics I think is pretty brutal. So you probably had that thicker skin yourself. Just quickly, to round off this part of the discussion, we've seen lots of Cabinet meetings with the President Trump version two, administration two, and quite a level of praise and sycophancy from cabinet members last week. I don't know if you saw Thursday night there was a dinner in the White House and the same thing happened, went around the room. Yes. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg. Again, it was pretty extreme, the praise. I mean, does that sit, how does that sit with you?
- [10:58]
A
Look, I'm a sort of old fashioned Gladstonian liberal. I kind of feel there is a sort of division of labor in a successful, vibrant capitalist economy where of course politicians and particularly prominent business people should have be able to sort of, you know, converse with each other. But I always say there's only one thing which is worse than having businesses and politicians at each other's throats in a, in a dynamic economy. It's having them in each other's pockets. And the odd thing I find is that what seems to be uniting all these people, and I'm not directing any of them individually because clearly some of them in like, I know Sergey Brin and others who were there were sort of lifelong progressive Democrats. So they've, they've all clearly as a group and that's very Silicon Valley, they all tend to, you know, again, they kind of like to think they're all terribly striking out on their own, but there's quite a herd like behavior. They've clearly all calculated this, is that this is in the best interests of their business and they're perfectly entitled to do that. What I find interesting as a, as an interested bystander now or observer is what appears to unite a lot of that discussion around that dinner table is this ardent wish to beat China in the race for AI. And I think that was ostensibly part of the sort of discussion. It's about AI and American leadership in AI but of course, in having this ever closer relationship between the political power and commercial power, oddly enough, they behave in a way that is actually much more akin to Chinese behavior patterns where the traditional accusation has been that Chinese businesses take their steer and take their cue too much from a political power. And it's going to be interesting to see how this pans out, because I don't believe that America is going to beat China in this AI race in the way that they appear to imagine they might. And as you saw it at that dinner table, how much money are you going to spend? Wow, that's a big number. How much are you going to spend? That's a big number. It's almost as if it's a tacit assumption that America can beat China in AI in the way that it outspent the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And there's going to be a Berlin Wall moment and then suddenly someone in Silicon Valley is going to say Eureka in the middle of the night. I've got AGI, I've got super intelligence. We can now keep this under lock and key and dictate terms to the rest of the world. I think China is far, far too powerful and technologically gifted and adept to be sort of treated like that. And the technology AI is far too versatile and dispersed to technology to imagine that someone's going to deliver one knockout blow. So at some point it seems to me both Silicon Valley and the powers that be in D.C. are going to have to rethink this very belligerent America first approach where they kind of just, you know, they beat their collective chests and say we're bigger and better than everybody else. They are bigger and better in many respects, but they're not going to win like that in the end. They're going to have to rediscover some old fashioned skills like actually working in partnership with some of some of their partners rather than slapping sky high tariffs and insulting them.
- [14:07]
B
Well, let's dwell on AI then just a little bit since you brought it up, because a very interesting to hear the threat from China, as significant as it is in your eyes. What about this pace of spending in the us? I mean, I'm really interested in if we focus on meta. I think it's fair to say that Mark Zuckerberg has formed in overspending on a new idea, the Metaverse. Very clear example of that. In the last six months, maybe 12, but certainly the last six months since you left, the spending on AI has been extraordinary. Do you think he's overspending?
- [14:44]
A
So one of the reasons why Mark Zuckerberg is such a remarkable, I mean, you can say what you like about him and Many people do, for and against. But just setting aside your views about social media and so on, why he is such an exceptional business leader, I mean he's more or less single handedly built this, whatever is it now, trillion five dollar company and so on. The largest social media operator in history is because he is not afraid of making very big swings. And when he, and what he tends to do, which I've always liked about him, is he doesn't sort of deal in half measures when he makes a bet, he makes a very big bet and he kind of, I think he's highly competitive and he kind of feels there's no point in doing things in half measures. If you're going to compete against a lot of other very, very gifted and accomplished companies, you've got to go all in. So that's kind of, that's the way he's always done it and it's why he makes these big bets. Remember when he bought Instagram and WhatsApp? He was mocked for it. You paid way too much. Actually turned out to be an extraordinarily prescient acquisition. And you sure people now cast aspersions on the metaverse. I actually start them to thinking that the long run, that bet's going to pay off because I think we will eventually migrate from phones we hold in our hands to some, you know, some kind of interface that we, that we, that we, you know, put on the bridge of our nose. But setting all that aside. So I think it's very much in keeping with his, the way he competes, the decisions he makes. For what it's worth, I look, you need to get many other people who are, you know, AI, data scientists and others on your program to give you a fuller answer to this. I remain a little skeptical about some of the hard hype around AGI or superintelligence and so on just because I think if you look at the Trends, remember even six, eight months ago we were told that GPT5 would be the moment we walk through the looking glass and that would be the moment suddenly we would be inhabiting another universe. It's a great incremental improvement on GPT4, but it's an incremental improvement. So maybe, maybe we're not just in a world of ever more exponential increases in capability and versatility for this technology. Technology. Maybe now all of these big hyperscalers are in a world of just squeezing more out of the same fundamental technological sort of LLM based paradigm. And if that's the case, you're going to have to ask yourself some very big questions about whether in the long term you're going to this technology in and of itself is going to generate such substantially increased revenues that it makes up for the huge Capex investment. Now look, I think as far as Meta is concerned, Meta has just this extraordinary, you know, just this extraordinary core business of the advertising, the ad business. And as long as that just carries on churning away as powerfully as it does, it's got money to, to burn. But at some point, at some point all of these big companies and that some of them are starting to generate some revenue from, from, from their products, either B2B or you know, the whole API based approach from Anthropic and OpenAI and so on, you know, generate some revenue. But you're hard pushed to claim now that it's enough to recoup. I suspect a lot of them and I suspect if Mark Zuckerberg was on this sofa, I'm not sure if he put it like this, but I think they probably kind of think they just have to spend all that money because their competitors are doing it anyway.
- [18:13]
B
Interesting snapshot, I think to some summarize what you think on this. Since you've left not in absolute terms but relatively of the holding you had in Meta stock, have you sold some of it?
- [18:24]
A
Oh no, I sold it all. I don't hold any Meta stock at all.
- [18:28]
B
Because of a principle or because it was overvalued?
- [18:31]
A
No, I was sort of, I'm not really. I don't think that I thought I did extremely well, of course, because as you can imagine senior executives in Silicon Valley, you're remunerated principally throughout, you know, these layered stock options or units. And I thought, well, I've done so well, you know, I'll probably now have time to try and you know, do other things. It was just a sort of, I had a great ride and I probably didn't want to overdo my luck and.
- [18:55]
B
It felt I also, which is interesting.
- [18:58]
A
I also feel on a sort of personal level I am, you know, I had such an interesting time at Facebook then, then Meta forever in the debt to people like Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. Really proud of the work that I did then. But I just, I've been very lucky. I've had sort of two or three very distinct chapters in my career. I spent 10 years in Brussels, I spent 12 years in, in, in Westminster. I spent seven years or almost seven years in Silicon Valley. I have found I'm now 58. It's generally, at least it suits me Better just when you move from one to the other, just move, just turn the page. Don't, don't sort of cling on to stuff too much. Just, just, you know, I never did that with politics either. I never wanted to hang around in the penumbra of politics, so it suited me to do it like that as well.
- [19:42]
B
And there's earlier books to capture those chapters as well as the new one of how to save the Internet. Let's talk about free speech. When you see people like Elon Musk, say the UK or JD Vance, say the UK doesn't have free speech, what's your response?
- [20:04]
A
Well, I have a sort of. I have two very strong reactions which point in slightly opposite directions. On the one hand, I feel like saying to them, just butt out. Just butt out. Just like we're not sitting around pontificating about what about the excesses of American politics or the imbalances of them. And by golly, there are plenty, certainly, I think government ministers generally don't, don't do that. And also there's just this shocking double standard. You know, the way in which this, the new US Administration is quite actively and deliberately, in a way that I think certainly against the spirit. You can argue or not whether it goes against the letter, but certainly go against the spirit of First Amendment free expression in the US in the way that they cow and bully and seek to intimidate any countervailing or critical voices from both business and politics, I think is a shocking example of double standards. Having said all of that, actually, as it happens, I do think that the balance is out of whack here. I read, I think, in the Economist some weeks ago that the police now arresting, I think, around 30 people per, or making 30 arrests per day related to online speech offenses, and that those arrests are often made based on statute that was passed certainly well before AI and possibly well before, you know, the Internet fully, fully flourished. And I certainly, when I've looked in some of the examples, I thought to myself, yeah, that's really unpleasant speech or egregious speech. But really, surely a kind of a part of the definition of being in a free society is that people say ghastly things, offensive things, awful things, ugly things, and we don't sweep them under the carpet. So I. Yeah, so on the one hand, I think there is a bit of a point, and I do think we need to think long and hard on this side of the pond about whether we've overdone it. And I think we have. I certainly think the way these sort of almost pre digital statutes are being applied. But conversely, I kind of also feel that the last people we need lectures from on open discourse and debate is from this administration in D.C. well, and.
- [22:25]
B
That'S then I think you're pointing that perhaps directly to J.D. vance, but I'm fascinated by that answer. And I guess to put it all together, you were pretty central in the decision to take Donald Trump off Facebook. He was obviously taken off Twitter as it was then for a much more extended period of time, perhaps without the same formal process that you did at least go through. Do you have to also look at Elon Musk and commend him for buying X and changing the whole tone towards that sort of area? I mean, there's a lot of nuance there.
- [23:00]
A
It's a lot of nuance. But it's a very good question. And I think you are right to sort of put your finger on this huge sort of pendulum swing where, I mean, I'm sure there are other ways to describe it, where the perception was that sort of uber progressive sort of woke like approach to speech just became excessive. And there's certainly a very strong sentiment, as you know, on the right in American politics that the big Silicon Valley companies were went overboard in prescribing speech. And they allege there's much less evidence of this, but they allege that under government pressure at the time that too much speech was proscribed during the period of the pandemic and the lockdown and so on. And I think there is a lot of validity to both assertions. I remember actually, oddly enough when I arrived in late 2018, Miriam and I with our kids in Northern California, I felt more constrained about what I could say than any time my adult life. I remember sort of saying a couple of jokes which I thought were rather innocent and they were clearly deemed to be slightly risque or off color or something. I made a sort of mental note. I just shouldn't indulge.
- [24:12]
B
What were the jokes?
- [24:12]
A
I can't remember. But no, I can't remember. That's not really the point was I, I remember it was there was a sort of humorless earnestness at that time about, about speech and you really felt you were treading on eggshells. So I think that is true. I also, and I've said this publicly and I've given evidence in, in Congress and so on. I think we, with hindsight, sure. With perfect hindsight vision, the panic that everybody felt when this virus, this was killing people on quite a large scale. There wasn't a vaccine yet. I mean, the world had never dealt with it before. There's no wonder that people went, ah, maybe we, you know, maybe we shouldn't have this content circulating or that content circulating until we know how to handle this. So I think all of that is true and it was inevitable and perhaps in the long run a healthy thing, that there was a reaction to that. But the problem, as ever in culture and politics and in society generally is that the reaction ends up almost throwing the baby out with the bathwater and then you get this sort of almost ludicrous cardboard cutout of sort of slightly kind of unthinking libertarian idea of free expression where there should be no constraint at all. And then it gets worse. Of course, when in the hands of people like Musk, you actually realize on examination it's a bit of a one eyed view of free expression. It's kind of free expression for stuff that he likes and not free expression about stuff that he doesn't like, particularly when he starts or appears to start hand picking content if it, if it impinges on his reputation or his business. So I think, I think these big, I think that it's too early almost to write the history of this. My hope is, my hope is that over time kind of we settle down and accept as we have generally accepted in civilized society, that there are certain things particularly which forms of speech which particularly incentivize or threaten real world imminent harm, which, you know, there is a legitimate say to say, legitimate basis on which you say that kind of speech is not permitted. But I think at the moment we're still too much in the throes of the backlash to the original backlash, if you see what I mean.
- [26:18]
B
But what's really interesting, put aside the individuals and who's making the argument if someone says we don't have full free speech in the UK right now, it can't be labeled as a crazy right wing thing to say, no, I don't.
- [26:31]
A
And I think it's, well, look, I'm a liberal, I come from that sort of Gladstone in tradition of liberalism and I think I'm never going to concede to anyone a greater sort of philosophical belief in the value of free expression and speech is, I've always said, and I think it's, and I personally feel that over the last, what is it, 10, 15 years on both sides of the Atlantic, but most prominently in the United States, progressives have completely lost the North Star on free expression. Free expression used to be a progressive thing, you know, the civil rights movement and others used to defend was the famous thing, the march through Cokie when the civil rights organization defended the rights of the Ku Klux Khan Klan. I think it was to demonstrate this is right back in the 70s. And I think it's very important that people on the center or center left shouldn't concede to the right the sort of monopoly of care about free expression. And I always say one person's hate speech is another person's rights to free expression. And you know, I worry sometimes that this role reversal where the right of appropriated to themselves being the sort of tribune of the high priests of free expression. Given how inconsistent and self serving they are in the way in their conception of free expression. I think it's really important that other voices assert themselves in this debate and don't just concede it.
- [28:05]
B
One of the big things for the social media has been that obviously they haven't been classed as publishers.
- [28:11]
A
Right.
- [28:11]
B
And Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 in the US has been a big, big factor in that. I'm really interested in your take on how that will play out with OpenAI. There's a really high profile case in the US going through the courts at the moment with the suicide of Adam Rains who got outright advice from ChatGPT on how to commit suicide. An OpenAI statement said, we're deeply saddened by Mr. Rain's passing and our thoughts are with his family. We'll put the full statement in the show. Notes. Is this different now because it's not individuals expressing themselves freely on a platform. It's a computer generated machine that's presumably owned by a company giving the answers.
- [28:53]
A
I think it's very different. I think clearly this will play out in litigation, so it's somewhat difficult to predict exactly where the lines will be drawn. But my view is there are two very, very consequential things going on. Firstly, that these big platforms, these so called aggregators, could plausibly assert year after year, often by the way, in the face of criticism from publishers, newspaper publishers, media organizations and so on, they could plausibly say no, we carry content that is generated, self generated by human beings themselves and then exchanged freely across our sort of pipe across our pipes. You can't hold us responsible for what Nick Clegg sends to Wilfred Frost and vice versa. That I think now changes dramatically because in future Nick Clegg or Wilfred Frost will be talking to an agentic AI or an AI powered avatar who will be talking to us directly, if you like. On will be the sort of sharp arrowhead, or the manifestation of an underlying technology which is in which is entirely built and designed by the company itself. And so the company won't be able to say, oh no, we've got some sort of distance from this content, because they will actually be inserting themselves as one part of that interaction. And I think that has a very, very profound implications. And as I explain in my book, I worry tremendously that maybe it's changed since I've left, but that people in Silicon Valley weren't engaging enough in what this means, particularly when you're dealing with interactions between kids and teens and AI entities and of course, vulnerable adults who can be very susceptible to this kind of process of impersonation which these AI entities increasingly adopt in a very sophisticated way. That's the first thing. The second thing which I think is so interesting, particularly for a company like Meta, is that the kind of USP of Meta for a long time was what's called in the jargon, its social graph. In other words, that it. It had a. It had a view on, on how humans interacted with each other as friends and family and so on, on Facebook groups and on social media and so on. But increasingly, of course, Meta services are becoming much more akin to TikTok or YouTube. They're becoming pipelines for algorithmically recommended entertainment content, principally, but not exclusively, short form video. So what I find interesting as an observer of Silicon Valley is you've got these big entities where there were some very profound qualitative differences. They were slightly operating in different swim lanes, where certainly in Meta's case, they are increasingly operating in the sort of TikTokified environment which is all about content plucked from the Internet or indeed synthetically generated by AI machines and then algorithmically recommended at people to consume. Not passively is not quite the right way to put it, but it really becomes a form of more passive consumption rather than interaction with other human beings on top of the platforms. And it's going to be fascinating the years to come to see, given that Meta therefore will have in a sense, less qualitative distinction from some of its big competitors, how that plays out.
- [32:15]
B
It might lead to a cleaner kind of Internet, I guess, if companies have to take more responsibility. If the example of Anne Marine I just said there, and that case is playing out in the U.S. as to ChatGPT's responsibility, I'm interested just in light of what you just said there, stepping back, whether you think Facebook has any responsibility, small or significant, towards Molly Russell's passing. I know it was a year before you joined, you've answered questions about it before. Obviously the coroner did conclude there was some responsibility. What's your view? All said and done on that.
- [32:55]
A
So of course I would defer to the coroner's report who stated clearly what he felt the role was and wasn't in terms of her, I think particularly her consumption of content on Instagram. And it quite rightly is still a case which I think deeply, deeply shocks and shakes people just because of the terrible, terrible tragedy of it. I wasn't at the company when she took her life, but I certainly made it my business to really look into it in great, great detail and I honestly don't think I, you know, it was very important to me that I played a very active role in the company to make sure that the kind of experience she had online would not be possible anymore. And I believe that there are a huge number of changes have been introduced which I have not made the Internet a peril or risk free environment, not at all. But where I think some of the content she consumed just simply wouldn't be, simply wouldn't be made available to her in the way it was at the time. Which of course is absolutely no comfort to, to, to her grieving family. But I, I, I do believe, and I like to think I played quite a prominent role in this, that the industry is now, and certainly the company that I work for is now very, very different when it comes to teens online, very different than it was back then.
- [34:18]
B
Just a final question on that. If it's possible that the Internet in the next decade could be cleaner if AI content is the responsibility of the publisher, does that change the way you think about if suddenly bigger steps can be taken even on social media? Or does free speech prevent that if it's said by individuals?
- [34:39]
A
I think, I mean as it happens, and I get roundly criticized, oh, all he does is defend big tech and so on. It is just a fact that the standards, the content standards governing what you can and can't say or what is promoted or not promoted on Facebook go well, well, well, the so called community standards, which, that was one of my responsibilities to oversee the evolution of these community standards which lay out and you can look at this online and it takes, you know, the company takes input from scholars and others I think on a non, non stop basis to refine these standards and it covers everything from IP fraud to hate speech to bullying, harassment and so on. It's really important to remember those standards go well beyond what the law says. Of course it's always difficult to suggest anyone should have any sympathy for these great big juggernauts. And boy, do they make mistakes. And boy, have they, you know, committed sins of both commission and omission in the past. Absolutely. But it is worth remembering that these are private companies which are being asked to adjudicate about what the boundaries of speech should be or well beyond the law, well beyond what Democratic politicians and those Democratic politicians, or indeed, dare I say it, people in the media then shout at these platforms and say, why are you going further than what the law said? And so you're putting these private sector companies, you know, there's a lot of countervailing expectations there, particularly where, as is the case, notably in the United States, you have such a polarized debate about free expression versus content moderation. You're asking these private sector companies to almost arrogate to themselves a sort of role as a sort of philosopher king to sort of square circles which the Democratic politicians themselves have refused to grapple with. And that's why sympathy is absolutely not the right word. But sometimes it is a little harder than some of the kind of polemic around free expression suggests that this idea that you can make the Internet a nice cuddly place where you only see nice cuddly content, it's never going to be like that. I would actively encourage people to be in fact increasingly skeptical of what they consume online because so much more content is going to be this AI generated slop where you don't know whether it's from a human or from a machine. I'm afraid one of the ways that we're going to have to ensure that we can live with the online world going forward is to foster society wide and particularly amongst our kids, society wide.
- [37:16]
B
Scepticism about what they see, obviously meta have rolled back some of the things you put in place since you left. We're very much, very close to being out of time. Sinek, final question for you, which is what is a common thread in leadership that applies in both politics and in business?
- [37:37]
A
Well, my experience, and I'm sure some of your viewers are not going to thank me for this, I actually think leadership in politics is way harder. Way harder generally, generally, of course, depends slightly what business you lead. But what you're trying to do, how you're trying to grow, what market you're trying to go for, who your competitors are is, it's kind of clear in business you can either you, either you might find yourself in a very difficult sector or you might find yourself buffeted by unexpected events, but the trade offs tend to be more two dimensional than in politics. In politics, the trade offs are just dizzying by comparison. You've just got so many countervailing forces because society is just exceptionally complicated and because you have to, day in day out in government, basically make a choice between a whole series of unappetizing and invidious choices. And I also slightly to our earlier point, I was very struck when I moved from the public sector to the public private sector. And I'm not trying to deliver some great apologia for politicians. They can be as venal and flawed as anybody. But I always remember thinking that back to our earlier conversations. I always remember being struck how very senior CEOs would be terribly upset about some disobliging adjectives that they found about them on page 13 of the FT or something. And they tend to be actually, oddly enough, slightly more cloistered and feather nested from from public sentiment than politics. Certainly in the British system. The great things about the British system is you can be as junior or senior, but you're there on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning in your constituency surgery being berated by Mrs. Miggins who has an argument about the overgrown lander from the garden of our neighbor. It's a very, it's a very grounding experience where I think the CEO class can get quite quickly out of touch. So I think the trade offs are more complex and the, and the accountability is, is, is much, much more direct and aggressive in politics, I think. Yeah, I would unfashionably stand up sometimes for the political class cause it's so easy for people business. And I do hear this a lot who kind of almost say, oh well, politics is easy, it's not and government.
- [39:45]
B
Is really, really hard and obviously the pay is tilted in opposite direction as well. So hear here on that message. Sinik, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Master Investor Podcast.
- [39:57]
A
Thank you.
- [39:58]
B
If you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a five star review and subscribe. Next week we'll Speaking to Dame Helena Morrissey, Remember that nothing you've heard on the Master Investor Podcast should be considered direct financial advice. More on that in the show Notes. The Master Investor Podcast is produced by Paradine Productions and Master Investor Podcast Ltd. In association with Birdlime Media. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please do subscribe on YouTube or click follow on your podcast platform and then you'll be automatically notified each time a new episode drops and we will see you next week. For now, Sir Nick, thank you so much.
- [40:37]
A
Thank you.