Dex Hunter-Torricke: Translating the Titans of Tech

Host 0:00 The verdict is in. That landmark social media addiction trial, Meta and YouTube found liable for a product that harms the very children who use it.

Trevor Noah 0:09 Big tech, your gig is over.

Host 0:12 They do it by design. They're trying to keep us all scrolling. It's bad for us. It's really bad for kids.

Trevor Noah 0:17 I'll tell you this, if the jury had returned a no, the champagne corks would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta.

0:25 And for parents, we now know that they were manipulating our children for profits. Every kid with a cellphone that ... With any device with a camera and connection to the internet is in danger. [upbeat music]

0:44 This is What Now? with Trevor Noah. [upbeat music]

Speaker 0:58 How do I pronounce your name, by the way? Uh, Dex and then Hunter-Torricke. Oh, Torricke. Yeah. Okay. So the E, no, it's not a- Yeah, yeah. Okay. Where's the last name from? Scottish, weirdly enough. Scottish? Yeah, so my, my dad's side of the family went to India in, like, the 19th century. They were Scottish, and they were part of the East India Company. So they were, like, the working class Scots who made up, like, a huge part of the East India Company, and then that's how the British Empire went and conquered places. So I think they were, like, merchants or, like, soldiers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It's, like, such a hazy bit of history. And then there was, of course, just this one, like, very elderly aunt, you know, in her 90s who, like, told me, like, the family history. She was the only person who'd, like, mapped this thing out. Yeah. She was the only one who knew. Yeah. Yeah. The Dutch East India Trading Company. Yeah. What a story, man. Yeah. What a w- It, it, it's funny, it's ... Sometimes it feels like we're living through new times all the time, and then you, you read, like, a history book, or you read, like, you know, an old story that's being told about something, and you go, "Huh." Feels like everything is the same just with the technology of the day. And a different cast of characters, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, just this revolving

Speaker 2:12 door of people. Yeah, because, because when I, when I think about, like, a lot of the work that you're doing now, uh, and the conversations you're having, I go, some of the conversations we have about tech feel very similar to the Dutch East India Trading Company. Yeah. You know? We're talking about an organization that got so big- Mm-hmm ... it had the power to shift governments. Yeah, had its own armies. And ar- Yeah, it had its own armies. It, it, it changed how people lived their lives. It started living ... It, it sort of was lawless. Yeah. Had shareholders. Yep. Right? I think it was the first publicly traded company ever. Yeah. And because of that, it just shaped the world in many ways that weren't necessarily for the better. Yeah. And it's really funny, 'cause, like, now, when you talk about the future and the fact that you've got this immense concentration of power- Yeah ... and you then try to figure out what could that look like 100 years from now, and people say, "Oh, well, obviously, like, this is all just dystopian nonsense. You're not gonna have these mega corporations- Yeah ... like, ruling things." Yeah. It's like, we already had that. [laughs] We've literally come from that. That's not new. Yeah. [laughs] We've literally, literally come from that. But let's, let's, let's talk about your story in this. You know, um, I, I remember the first time your, your name came up in my world. I, I was reading something about the tech industry, and I've always been fascinated by how the tech industry has evolved. Hmm. You know? I've met many people involved in tech, founders of some of the biggest companies, founders of s- startup still- Mm-hmm ... trying to get their thing going. And there's one thing I'll say. For the, for the most part, every single one of them seemed to have, in Silicon Valley in particular, an idealistic view of the world- Mm-hmm ... and how they planned to make it a better place. Yeah. You know, they were like, "I, um, got this app, and, you know, it's gonna make accommodation better for everybody." Mm-hmm. "And I've got this app, and it's, it's gonna make getting a car easy for everybody," and, "I've got this app, and it's gonna make restaurant deliveries- Mm-hmm ... easier," and, "I've got this app, and it's gonna improve how people connect with loved ones," and, "I've got this app, and it's gonna ..." And everyone, everyone came in with this wide-eyed optimism. But I'd love to know how you- Yeah ... started in this world. Like, w- what was your original journey? How did you get into Silicon Valley? Yeah. You know, and then we'll get to the world of you, like, knowing Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Elon Musk and all of these- Mm-hmm ... people. But, but let's start at the beginning. Yeah. How did you get in Silicon Valley?

Speaker 4:29 I was obsessed with changing the world from a very early age. I was a very weird kid. And part of it was just I was growing up in the UK in the '80s and '90s, and my dad was the, you know, he was a person who was a refugee as a kid. You know, he was four years old when he was a refugee during the Second World War. He'd grown up in a refugee camp in India. Wow. And he'd come to the UK in the late '50s, you know, total outsider, you know, probably a few pounds in his pocket. Um, you know, society was deeply racist. And, you know, his life was just terrible. Like, I didn't learn about it until many years later, actually, near the end of his life, you know, um, when I was 30 years old, and I was working in Silicon Valley at that point. Um, my mom, she was an immigrant from Malaysia, came to the UK in the '70s to be a nurse in Britain's National Health Service. And growing up, we had absolutely nothing. There was no money. Um, you know, I grew up mostly in the southeast of England- Mm-hmm ... uh, in this town, Tonbridge, and it was sufficiently provincial at the time that when me and my sister walked down the street, people would literally stop and stare 'cause they'd never seen people who weren't white. You know, kids would come up to you on the playground. They'd say, "Can I feel your hair, mate?" Um, I always remembered, like, kids would, would ask, "Do you speak Chinese or Japanese?" And I thought, I was born in Hammersmith. [laughs] I mean, like, how, how likely is it that I speak Chinese or Japanese? But, like, that was annoying enough for me that, like, from this very early age, I was, like, interested in, like, why we even assign these ridiculous labels- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... to people, and we make these assumptions, and they constrain our whole lives. And, like- If I had spoken Chinese or Japanese, like, so what?

Trevor Noah 6:09 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6:10 Um, and so, like, I really wanted to, like, spend my life trying to figure out, like, how do you improve these systems that shape your whole life from before you're even born? Why is it some kids get these amazing lives from the beginning? Why is it that others really are struggling the whole time against the tide of history? And the logical place to start there was at the UN. So I moved to New York in, uh, 2008, and, uh, I, I got a job at the UN. Um, I'd done research on the UN for my master's. Um, I got a scholarship to go to university. Um, and, you know, I was, I was the first in my family to get a degree, so I got two of them for good measure. Thought I will just, like, absolutely, like, work really hard now to, like, you know, try and rise through the system. And, um, you know, at the UN, I realized really quickly that it's not the sort of place that actually you can change the world most days. You're just trying to get through the day.

Trevor Noah 6:59 That's a, that's... You, you're not the first person I've heard say this, and it's, it's, it's... It's one of the most, um, depressing and frustrating things to hear people say-

Speaker 7:11 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 7:11 ... is that they go work at the UN. I would argue most of the people who go work at the UN are smart, idealistic, world-changing-

Speaker 7:21 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 7:21 ... people who want to see things become better.

Speaker 7:24 Yep.

Trevor Noah 7:25 You know, so it's everything from, like, the best lawyers, the best, like, accountants, the be- like, whatever it is, they, they go, "I wanna use these talents to ha- help make the world a better place."

Speaker 7:33 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 7:34 They get to the UN, and they're like, "Oh,

Trevor Noah 7:37 this place doesn't seem to move anything."

Speaker 7:39 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 7:40 But w- but w- help me understand why. Like, w- like, what, what is happening at the UN? Or rather, what is not happening at the UN that could be or should be happening?

Speaker 7:48 I think people don't really understand how poorly resourced and how weak the UN is structurally. Like, the New York City Police Department has a budget orders of magnitude larger than the entire UN globally, and, like, that's shocking to a lot of people. The UN has hundreds of thousands of peacekeeping troops in the field worldwide. They feed millions of people globally through their aid programs.

Trevor Noah 8:11 Yeah.

Speaker 8:11 It's an organization that's supposed to be at the center of international law-

Trevor Noah 8:15 Right, right

Speaker 8:16 ... stopping conflict. But, like, ultimately, the UN is just a vessel for its member states. You know, it's for 100 and, you know, 90 several, you know, countries.

Trevor Noah 8:26 Yeah.

Speaker 8:26 These are the folks who call the shots, and it's really a very small number who really call the shots. It's the UN Security Council. It's-

Trevor Noah 8:31 Right, because they have veto powers and-

Speaker 8:33 They have veto power.

Trevor Noah 8:34 Yeah.

Speaker 8:34 You know, it's the UK, France, the US, Russia, China. And I think a lot of countries, a lot of people in the world would argue, should that be the club that gets to have a vote, you know, in-

Trevor Noah 8:44 Yeah, the deciding vote, not just a vote

Speaker 8:46 ... the deciding vote-

Trevor Noah 8:47 Yeah

Speaker 8:47 ... on all manner of things that shape the entire world and all of our lives and the course of conflicts and the fate of nations. And that's why the UN fundamentally doesn't work. It is a structure designed not to save the world. It was designed to stop us having World War III. It was designed to freeze the international system in 1945. That's, that's literally what it was for. People misread the original functioning of the organization, and I misread it. And that's why after, you know, I was at the UN for only, like, two, two and a half years, every day was deeply frustrating because I thought, "There's a problem. There's a crisis. There's a disaster."

Trevor Noah 9:20 Yeah.

Speaker 9:21 "Why can't we fix these things?" And the answer was structural. It's not, uh... it's, it will never be in position to do those things probably. Um, you know-

Trevor Noah 9:28 Is that, is that because fundamentally you can't have a body that is ruling over autonomous bodies? Like, I mean, you have the UN, which is a club for countries, but countries already have their own laws. They have their own rules. They have their own everything. So how do you have a club telling other people what to do? At some point, every country just goes, "No."

Speaker 9:49 I mean, throughout history, nations have agreed to compromises, to alliances-

Trevor Noah 9:55 Yeah

Speaker 9:55 ... to international institutions that do constrain their actions in some ways when they believe it's ultimately in their national interest.

Trevor Noah 10:03 Right.

Speaker 10:03 So obviously you have things like the European Union. You have NATO. You have the oldest international organization, the International Postal Union, you know, literally the rules of how you get post delivered from one country to another.

Trevor Noah 10:12 [laughs]

Speaker 10:12 So, like, we have all these things, right? Air safety. Um, but, like, the UN is something that was crafted for a very narrow strand of things, and over time-

Trevor Noah 10:20 Okay

Speaker 10:21 ... you know-

Trevor Noah 10:21 All right

Speaker 10:21 ... the, the nature of the actors behind that has shifted enormously. And of course, we're in a moment now, right, where the United States, which had at least a rhetorical commitment to advancing, you know, political liberalization-

Trevor Noah 10:32 Yes

Speaker 10:32 ... the world and free markets-

Trevor Noah 10:33 Yeah

Speaker 10:33 ... and so on, has very clearly chosen to take a different path, which I'm [laughs] I'm sure we'll get to. But after, after the, the time I was at the UN, I thought, "This is not going to work, um, at least not for me. I don't feel I'm having an impact. Where can I go?" Tech seemed the obvious place to go, a place which has lots of resources, and technology clearly is one of those other motors of transformation in the world. It's something that should be deeply hopeful and about fixing a bunch of these problems.

Trevor Noah 10:57 So what did you, what did you study in university? What are the two degrees?

Speaker 11:00 I did politics.

Trevor Noah 11:01 Okay.

Speaker 11:02 Um, and then for my master's I went and did Russian studies. So actually-

Trevor Noah 11:05 Russian studies?

Speaker 11:05 Yeah. I focused on, uh, Russia's foreign policy in the world-

Trevor Noah 11:08 Wow

Speaker 11:08 ... which was already deeply, uh, destabilizing.

Trevor Noah 11:10 Wait, wait. Why, why... Of everything you could've studied, why that?

Speaker 11:13 I was living in Europe. Uh, I went to do my undergrad, um, 2003.

Trevor Noah 11:18 Yeah.

Speaker 11:18 And this was just before the European Union and NATO had expanded to the East-

Trevor Noah 11:22 Okay

Speaker 11:22 ... and Russia was about to become the bordering state, and I immediately had questions about that. You know, I was a teenager. I thought, "We've got the world's largest country with a very patchy track record on human rights and rule of law and democracy, and it's about to become our next-door neighbor, and surely we need to prepare to understand how to deal with that new strategic-

Trevor Noah 11:44 Mm

Speaker 11:44 ... challenge." And it was interesting because this was pre-Putin, you know, starting to, you know, march into other countries.

Trevor Noah 11:51 Yeah.

Speaker 11:51 Uh, you know, 2008 when I arrived at the UN was when-

Trevor Noah 11:53 He was, he was in power by this time though, right?

Speaker 11:55 Oh, yeah.

Trevor Noah 11:55 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11:55 He, he took power in 2000.

Trevor Noah 11:57 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 11:57 And, you know, he was still seen as an ally of the West. You know, he would get invited to all these, you know, summits with, you know, Blair and Bush and so on.

Trevor Noah 12:04 Oh, wow.

Speaker 12:05 And-

Trevor Noah 12:05 You forget that that was a time.

Speaker 12:06 Yeah. And a lot of the students who were on my program at Oxford These were kids who were apologists for Putin. It was the wildest thing.

Trevor Noah 12:13 What do you, what do you mean? In what way?

Speaker 12:14 You'd literally get into debates with them, and they'd say, "Oh, he's making Russia strong again, and he's a, you know, he's a great ally of the West. And, you know, anyone who, like, questions that entire thesis is just anti-Russian." And it was like, I love Russian literature. I, you know ... If you want me to, you know, talk about Russian literature and food and all of that, we can do that. But, like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the, the fate of nations. And of course, uh, you know, we got to a moment when suddenly, um, people realized that all the things that we had sort of swept under the rug in the, uh, name of just having a, a nice cozy alliance-

Trevor Noah 12:46 Yeah

Speaker 12:46 ... having Vlad Putin at the table in the club, all these things were utterly meaningless. There were a different set of interests at work.

Trevor Noah 12:52 So

Trevor Noah 12:53 h- here's something I've, I've always wondered about Russia, is like, is, is Russia acting or are they reacting? And what, what I mean by this is, you know, when you, when you look at the Cold War-

Speaker 13:07 Mm

Trevor Noah 13:07 ... which you studied, I mean, clearly, like w- like all of this, there are parts of the Cold War where I go, "Huh, it feels like Russia is reacting to what America is doing." It feels like Russia is reacting to its perceived, like, threat, or it- it's worried about, like, bombs or not having the ... You know. And there's, there's, there's moments where, like, Russia is, like, bluffing throughout history-

Speaker 13:29 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 13:29 ... which I w- I f- I find ... Like, if it wasn't on a, on a geopolitical scale, it would be great comedy.

Speaker 13:34 Sure.

Trevor Noah 13:34 'Cause Russia's constantly bluffing.

Speaker 13:36 Yep.

Trevor Noah 13:36 "We've also got a bomb." Or, "We've got a bomb just as big as yours."

Speaker 13:38 Yep.

Trevor Noah 13:38 "We've got a military just as good as yours. We've got ..." And there's all these moments where they're bluffing, bluffing, bluffing-

Speaker 13:43 Yep

Trevor Noah 13:43 ... bluffing, bluffing. You r- you, you, you f- you find these moments where it comes to a head, and then it simmers down.

Speaker 13:49 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 13:49 And then from the inside, Russia, Russians seem to go, like, "Yeah." When you look at it in hindsight, they go, "We actually never wanted any of that."

Speaker 13:56 Right.

Trevor Noah 13:56 "We never wanted the fight." You know, Gorbachev being like, "I didn't want that shit. Come on, man." W- as somebody who studied it and, you know, you've been at the UN and all of that is, h- how do you, how do you perceive Russia's reaction to the world? You know, like some people would go, "Well, Russia was always going to react to NATO being in its backyard-"

Speaker 14:15 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 14:15 ... the same way America would react to a, another country's force being in its backyard.

Speaker 14:20 Sure.

Trevor Noah 14:20 How, how, how do, how do you process that, having studied it, actually?

Speaker 14:23 I mean, I think it, it's possible that a nation as complex as Russia is both being reactive, uh, and proactive, uh, both at the same time-

Trevor Noah 14:33 Hmm

Speaker 14:33 ... and has a very divergent range of interests that might explain, you know, all the things it's done over the last couple of decades, right? I mean, there are fascinating historical debates now about were there moments in the lead up to the end of the Cold War and right after where you could have dramatically shifted-

Trevor Noah 14:50 Yeah

Speaker 14:50 ... you know, the path that Russia eventually took. And, you know, there were moments where, you know, even after Vladimir Putin came to power, he at least rhetorically, um, you know, explored, you know, very different scenarios what, uh, a different security architecture could look like for Europe. People back in the early 2000s literally had discussions about could Russia join NATO.

Trevor Noah 15:10 Right.

Speaker 15:10 Um, you know, which was something that, you know, Vladimir Putin literally, you know, he held events where he would talk about that as potentially a long range goal for Russia. But, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, scholars will debate this stuff. You know, actually at the, uh, at the dawn of the Cold War, um, there were proposals from the United States to put all the nuclear weapons in the world under the control of the UN, and it turned out that wasn't really a sincere thing. Um, that was-

Trevor Noah 15:33 Oh, I didn't know that, actually

Speaker 15:33 ... it was actually them trying to call Russia's bluff, uh, 'cause they knew Russia actually would never agree to it. They would just want to have their own arsenal, and so it was just a way to get the US to have some nice PR. Um, but, you know, it's something where I think this speaks to kind of the moment we're in, right? This actually is very relevant to some of the stuff I'm working on. Um, there was no vision really for what a post Cold War international order-

Trevor Noah 15:54 Yeah

Speaker 15:54 ... that really was inclusive, that would represent the world's people, that would stop nations simply descending into grievances and, you know, end up butting up against just Western hegemonic power. There was no plan whatsoever, and we're sort of still in that moment. There's a bunch of leaders now who really regret the state of the world, but they have no vision for what a real future could look like. In many ways, they just want to go back to some idealized moment of the past.

Trevor Noah 16:20 Yeah.

Speaker 16:20 It's the '90s. It's 2007 before the economic crisis. It's 2015 before Trump. We're never going back to any of those moments. Um, that is not the way to actually save, um, you know, societies. That is not the way to ultimately stop any of these problems. And so that is something that is deeply cyclical, a bunch of elites constantly being off balance.

Trevor Noah 16:39 Yeah. We, we had, um, um, uh, Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, on, on, on the podcast, and it was interesting because she really helped frame how the world and the UN are, are, are working through a unique lens. And it was that larger countries and more powerful nations have often dealt with, you know, a one-way sort of street.

Speaker 17:06 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 17:07 It was like, "We say and we do, and then that's it. We, we, we don't look for feedback."

Speaker 17:12 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 17:12 "We don't seek a response." But now the world has changed.

Speaker 17:16 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 17:16 You know, whether it's because of globalization, whether it's because of trade, whether it's because of migration and immigration, smaller countries affect the bigger countries.

Speaker 17:24 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 17:25 You know, it's, it's, it's gonna be climate change. It's gonna be famine. It's gonna be ... People are gonna move around the world.

Speaker 17:31 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 17:31 The people who can't move are gonna end up finding themselves in some of the worst places where then the worst things happen. You know, you look at ISIS, et cetera-

Speaker 17:38 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 17:38 ... what's happening in Libya and stuff like that, and that affects the, quote-unquote, "Western world." And you, you, you can't have it as a one-way street anymore. You can't just tell small nations what to do or who to be.

Speaker 17:50 Yep.

Trevor Noah 17:51 You have to be in a dialogue with them, and I don't think the bigger countries are used to that.

Speaker 17:55 Uh, they're not, and, uh, you know, the West was top of its game for a long time economically, militarily.

Trevor Noah 18:02 Yeah.

Speaker 18:03 Very stable societies. It got to dictate terms to the world-

Trevor Noah 18:05 Yeah

Speaker 18:05 ... to your point. And so many of the things that are unfolding now where our economic might and our institutions are in decay- And our place in the world is being questioned.

Trevor Noah 18:17 Mm.

Speaker 18:17 These are things now where a lot of leaders, a lot of publics who have grown up in that world where the West was at the top of its game, they think, oh, it's all a lot of alarmism to believe that things could really dramatically deteriorate.

Trevor Noah 18:29 Yeah.

Speaker 18:30 And fundamentally, this is all just a bit of turbulence, and then things will go back to normal. And they don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people in the world have lived through everything that's unfolding now and much, much worse. When people talk about doom or the breakdown of societies, well, that's happened to so many people.

Trevor Noah 18:47 Yeah.

Speaker 18:48 It's happened in our lives in just the last few years.

Trevor Noah 18:49 Yeah.

Speaker 18:49 Which is why, you know, there's now tens of millions of refugees in the world.

Trevor Noah 18:53 Yeah. It's, it's, it's one of those situations where it feels like for the first time in history, or rather in, for the first time in, first time in modern history, the major countries are experiencing what all the smaller countries have always been experiencing.

Speaker 19:07 Yep.

Trevor Noah 19:07 You know what I mean? So, so, so you, you have this UN epiphany. You realize that nothing seems to be moving in the way that it could be moving-

Speaker 19:16 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 19:16 ... or at least how you thought it would be moving, and then you decide to go into tech. But this is, this is, this is when? Around 2005, '6, somewhere there way?

Speaker 19:27 Think 2010.

Trevor Noah 19:28 2010 or-

Speaker 19:29 Yeah

Trevor Noah 19:29 ... okay, so it's much further on.

Speaker 19:30 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 19:30 All right. So 2010 you go-

Speaker 19:32 Still very early

Speaker 19:33 for a lot of those companies.

Trevor Noah 19:33 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 19:34 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 19:34 Tech, tech wasn't what it is now.

Speaker 19:35 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 19:35 Like, it was a burgeoning world of like maybe-ness. The dotcom boom still had like the effects where people were like-

Speaker 19:42 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 19:42 ... "Ah, I don't know, the bubble could burst." You know, so it, it, it was almost like punk in a way-

Speaker 19:47 Yeah

Trevor Noah 19:47 ... tech at that time.

Speaker 19:48 That's right. I mean, it's, it's kind of wild to think back to that moment now because, of course, we only think about those Silicon Valley companies as big tech.

Trevor Noah 19:56 Yeah.

Speaker 19:57 That wasn't even a label.

Trevor Noah 19:57 Yeah.

Speaker 19:58 And it was sufficiently quaint that, you know, uh, there was a film being made at Google the first time I went to Google in my career. Um, so I started at the beginning of 2011, and, uh, my buddy Jim who sat next to me, he was the PR guy assigned to manage this film which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were making set at Google, The Internship, or like The Intern.

Trevor Noah 20:17 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 20:17 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 20:17 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 20:18 And it was actually like, it was like a rom-com set at Google.

Trevor Noah 20:20 Oh, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 20:21 Because you could pull off that kind of warm, fuzzy shtick, and people would go and see it 'cause it was like, oh, Google. It's this warm, fuzzy company where everyone sits on colored balls and invents the future.

Trevor Noah 20:28 Yeah, and they have the food-

Speaker 20:29 Yeah

Trevor Noah 20:29 ... and everyone chills, and there's no real offices.

Speaker 20:31 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 20:31 And it's just a... Yeah.

Speaker 20:32 Totally. And like Steve Jobs was, you know, still alive. You know, the iPhone had just been, you know, announced 2007. So it was like very recent. You know, um, Facebook wasn't even a public company yet.

Trevor Noah 20:41 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 20:41 Um, you know, and after, after I was working at Google the first time, I was working for Eric Schmidt who was the executive chair, uh, chairman then. I then went to work for Zuckerberg. You know, I went over to Facebook right before the IPO, and it was a tiny, tiny company. It was less than 2,000 employees. Um, you know, it was only a few years past the point where everyone was just hurriedly adding all your friends, you know, as soon as, you know, Facebook-

Trevor Noah 21:02 Yeah, yeah

Speaker 21:02 ... extended to your, your college. And yeah, i- at the time it was just sort of we're, we're making it up as we go. But it still feels like the early years of the internet when, you know, every day was a new discovery, and things were deeply hopeful in a lot of ways. You felt like you were part of inventing this amazing future.

Trevor Noah 21:19 Yeah.

Speaker 21:20 Connecting people and ... Look, all the mission statements, they sound brilliant, don't they? You're connecting the world.

Trevor Noah 21:24 You are.

Speaker 21:25 Isn't that a brilliant thing? We should want to connect the world.

Trevor Noah 21:26 That's what we all want. Yeah.

Speaker 21:28 But then it turns out the world's really complex, and a whole bunch of things that you're not expecting will happen when you connect the world.

Trevor Noah 21:35 We'll be right back after this short break. You know what I love about spring? Everything just feels fresh again. The weather shifts, people start going outside more, and suddenly you feel like you should be eating something that didn't come out of a packet. That's why I like going to Whole Foods Market this time of year. Whole Foods Market is your go-to destination to celebrate the fresh flavors of spring with seasonal produce at its juiciest, plus limited time flavors throughout the store. This is the time to get together and share vibrant finds with your loved ones, and you feel it as soon as you walk in. You've got organic bagged salad kits, fresh produce, potatoes, parsnips, radishes, spring onions, artichokes, all the things that make you feel like you've got your life together. And then of course you go in for that, and you leave with things you didn't plan for, like a peach apricot rose Italian soda, or those 365 by Whole Foods Market strawberry pretzels that somehow disappear before you even get home. And if you're hosting or even just showing up somewhere trying to impress people, the bakery has you covered. The mango yuzu Chantilly cake, the strawberry shortcake, these are the kind of desserts where people don't ask questions. They just assume that you know what you're doing. And the nice thing is there are deals throughout the store, especially on 365 brand items, so you can feel responsible while still treating yourself a little. Because that's really what spring is about, starting fresh and then rewarding yourself immediately. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring and save at Whole Foods Market. [upbeat music] So,

Trevor Noah 23:23 so when did it, when did it flip for you? I, I, it's funny, I was actually reading a book, um, maybe you even know the person. Oh, I'm gonna be so bad with this. Is it called like Careless People?

Speaker 23:33 Oh, yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:33 Or is it-

Speaker 23:34 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:34 You do, you know it.

Speaker 23:34 I do know that one.

Trevor Noah 23:35 Yes. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's written by a woman who used to work at Facebook.

Speaker 23:41 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:41 And-

Speaker 23:41 I worked with her. Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:42 Oh, you worked with her?

Speaker 23:43 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:43 Okay. Oh, this is fascinating.

Speaker 23:44 [laughs] I'm in the book.

Trevor Noah 23:45 Oh, that's wild.

Speaker 23:46 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:46 Oh, this is even-

Speaker 23:47 Yeah

Trevor Noah 23:47 ... this is crazy for me.

Speaker 23:48 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 23:48 Wow. Okay. So I was reading this book, and the reason I started reading it was just because I was like, all right, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in tech. I, I'll read a whole bunch of things about what's going on there, autobiographies, et cetera. But then I read this book and, uh, it was really interesting to see an account of Facebook's evolution.

Speaker 24:08 Mm.

Trevor Noah 24:09 You know, like we, we, we like to deal in absolutes in society, so we go Facebook, you know, people will be like, "It's absolutely bad."

Speaker 24:15 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 24:15 Or, "No, it's absolutely good." And, and it's like when you read this book, you realize there was a time when Mark Zuckerberg- Didn't see himself as anything other than a guy who was running a tech company that was trying to connect as many people as possible in the world.

Speaker 24:28 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 24:28 And the people who worked around him were like, "We're just trying to connect the world."

Speaker 24:31 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 24:31 And every time the word politics was brought up, they were like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to meet with presidents. We don't want to know presidents. We just make tech that connects people all over the world." I didn't know that you were there for, like, that. I- this is crazy that I'm reading the book that you were-

Speaker 24:44 Yeah

Trevor Noah 24:45 ... basically a part of. So help, help me understand, what went wrong?

Speaker 24:55 A bunch of those technologies are things that did exactly what they were designed to do. The world did get connected. There's billions of people using all those products. Um, there was a very, very simplistic narrative and understanding of what would unfold as the world got connected, as all those technologies rolled out. And a bunch of the good things, fantastic. Um, tech can change the world. But there's another part of what happens. The world changes tech. It doesn't just show up in this vacuum.

Trevor Noah 25:30 Mm.

Speaker 25:30 We never tell that story. And of course, a deeply complex world with technologies that change the way billions of people live and work, every industry, every government, the nature of our relationship with each other, with our communities, that's something which it turned out very few people had any real understanding of what the full scale of those challenges would be, how interconnected they would be.

Trevor Noah 25:57 Yeah.

Speaker 25:57 And I think there's been a widespread systemic failure of leadership across societies. The tech industry absolutely, you know, has a lot of that responsibility. They built these things. They're things which they had the closest understanding of as they emerged. But the failing is absolutely not exclusive. We also had a absolutely historic, you know, collapse in leadership from political leaders, from a bunch of other people who have immense power on the trajectory of those technologies and how our society should respond. If tech hadn't had all the effects it's had in the world, if you didn't have social media and smartphones and AI and so on-

Trevor Noah 26:34 Yeah

Speaker 26:35 ... I think it's probably quite likely that we'd still be facing huge crises at this point. You know-

Trevor Noah 26:39 Oh, interesting. Okay

Speaker 26:39 ... a bunch of these things are unfolding. You know, and of course, you know, AI is a thing which I'm very focused on and is a big part of this. But part of the reason what I'm doing now is, in fact, not just about tech really, is if AI vanished tomorrow, we would still have gargantuan problems.

Trevor Noah 26:55 Yeah.

Speaker 26:55 We would still be in really bad shape. It is the combination of the tech with a deeply broken world that adds up to the state of dysfunction we're in now.

Trevor Noah 27:04 Yeah, in many ways, I, I, I like to think of it the same way I think of, like, a nuclear weapon. Humans will always fight, but a nuclear bomb means the effects of that fight are going to be so much greater than they would've been otherwise.

Speaker 27:18 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 27:18 Right? I think the same goes for AI. I think the same goes for social media. People who work in these industries will often say, "We aren't the cause of this. People will always find a way to blah, blah, blah." And I'm like, "Yes, yes, I agree with that."

Speaker 27:29 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 27:29 "You're not wrong. However, the tool that you've provided the people with has given them an outsized-"

Speaker 27:35 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 27:35 ... ability to inflict damage or harm on society." And so I, I want to go back to, like, y- your, your early days. So wh- when you, when you first got into the tech industry and, you know ... Like, let, let's use Facebook because, you know-

Speaker 27:47 Mm

Trevor Noah 27:47 ... Facebook is, is really, like, at the center of many of these conversations right now.

Speaker 27:51 Sure.

Trevor Noah 27:51 So w- what were you, what were you doing at Facebook?

Speaker 27:54 Uh, I was a speechwriter. So I was the company's first speechwriter. The company was just about to go public. It needs to communicate a lot more. And you know, folks like Zuckerberg, a lot of the other senior leaders, um, you know, they had to talk to everyone from Wall Street to public's, media. Um, you were constantly doing events and engaging with other leaders, um, moving the entire company. You know, this is an organization that grew enormously in the time I was there, from a couple of thousand people to tens of thousands in just the space of a few years. And all along, you know, I was there to help figure out, how do you manage the telling of that story at scale?

Trevor Noah 28:32 Oh, wow.

Speaker 28:33 And that's something which, of course, you know, in order to tell that story well, you have to be able to get under the hood of any number of these deeply consequential issues, all the things that are, you know, really controversial, the things that are really significant. You have to, um, deeply understand the executives and those voices as well. Um, you know, I was a speechwriter for a lot of my early career, and people often think the voice of people is about the combination of words, and that's the easy part. The words are an expression of ideas. And that's really what made the job so fascinating. It was all about trying to figure out, what are those ideas that can galvanize and move, you know, massive, you know, populations and audiences-

Trevor Noah 29:11 Yeah

Speaker 29:12 ... and all these communities on a set of technologies doing something completely new in history? And it was, it was a very, very, um, you know, intellectually, you know, hard and extremely fulfilling perch in which to see history being made. It was also something where once you get under the hood, you realize, wow, there isn't actually a deeper level of thinking quite a lot of the time. And I think that's something that came, came out in, in the book you read.

Trevor Noah 29:35 Yeah, it did.

Speaker 29:35 There were actually, there were lots of things I disagree with in that book. There were lots of details which I think were, like, you know, absolutely not, in fact, how things went down.

Trevor Noah 29:41 Oh, okay.

Speaker 29:42 But I mean-

Trevor Noah 29:42 That's good to know

Speaker 29:43 ... that's also part of history. You know, people will have very different perspectives on that-

Trevor Noah 29:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Speaker 29:46 ... all of those things.

Trevor Noah 29:47 So l- let's, let's start with the good days then. You, you join this company. It is changing the world.

Speaker 29:54 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 29:54 It i- is this burgeoning idea. W- what, what were the messages that you were trying to get to the public, or what were the messages you were trying to help Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg get to the public about itself at that time that you thought were noble?

Speaker 30:08 The power of connectivity to change lives and move societies forward, that is absolutely true. It's still true. Um, people can absolutely detest, you know, any number of these companies. Most of us still carry a smartphone. Most of us have social media. Um, these are things which have become really valuable in our lives.

Trevor Noah 30:29 Yeah.

Speaker 30:30 Those are all real, real things. Um, they're things which, um, you know, can mean a huge difference in the quality of life for communities and, um, families and, you know, all sorts of people. You know, in fact, my own journey, you know, going from, from where I started to, you know, being able to do all the things I'm, you know, doing, you know, in my life, um, in fact, I think technology was a big part of that.

Trevor Noah 30:51 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 30:51 You know, I remember I was at home. My parents were of no help guiding me in my career, obviously. Like, when I was a teenager and I was trying to figure out, like, how do I apply to university, it's like my parents didn't go to university. So it was literally me staying up late, you know, typing away on my dad's old computer, literally flinging out queries into the early internet trying to figure out, like, wh- what would you need to do to do all these things.

Trevor Noah 31:11 Yeah.

Speaker 31:11 Like, what is an internship? [laughs] You know, stuff like that. Where would g- where would y- where would you find that information in those days?

Trevor Noah 31:16 Yeah.

Speaker 31:16 What was I gonna go down to the library and ask the librarian? Like, so that's the value, right? And there were things when I was at the company which really would fill you with pride. I remember going, you know, to rural India with Zuckerberg. I traveled on the trip. It's in, in the book, I think.

Trevor Noah 31:31 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 31:31 And you would meet people whose lives had been completely changed by having access to the internet. I remember there was a... We were at this village in the middle of nowhere in India, and it had just got access to, like, an internet cafe. And this old man had come into the cafe to get help from one of the, like, kids who, like, had learned to use the internet 'cause he wanted to track down his friend-

Trevor Noah 31:53 Wow

Speaker 31:53 ... who he hadn't seen in, like, years. And he was like, "Can you help me, like, research this thing? 'Cause he was my best friend and I haven't seen him in, like, 20 years, and, like, he's somewhere out there and I don't know where he is." And, like, this kid found him in like five minutes, and this guy started crying. And it was like, that is- I mean, that is-

Trevor Noah 32:09 Yeah

Speaker 32:09 ... the sort of-

Trevor Noah 32:09 That, that's the magical side of it

Speaker 32:10 ... deeply tangible impact, right?

Trevor Noah 32:12 Yeah.

Speaker 32:12 But this is the thing, th- this is the tremendous duality of the moment, that you can have things like that which are real, and you can acknowledge those things, but, like, there's all sorts of other things happening, too.

Trevor Noah 32:23 So what, what was, what was the first thing that sort of triggered your, your, your Spidey sense? What, what was the first thing that made you question the noble mission you were on?

Speaker 32:32 It was the refugee crisis.

Speaker 32:34 Um-

Trevor Noah 32:34 Which one?

Speaker 32:36 Yeah, which one? So 2015 when, you know, the war in Syria was-

Trevor Noah 32:42 Okay, yes

Speaker 32:43 ... you know, at its-

Trevor Noah 32:43 So the Syrian migration, when people-

Speaker 32:45 Yeah

Trevor Noah 32:45 ... yeah, fleeing into Europe-

Speaker 32:46 That's right

Trevor Noah 32:47 ... going through Germany, et cetera.

Speaker 32:48 So you, you suddenly-

Trevor Noah 32:48 Yeah

Speaker 32:48 ... you have this, like, rapid acceleration in the number of people being displaced.

Trevor Noah 32:52 Okay.

Speaker 32:52 And you had tens of millions of people on the move. So at the time, there were about 65 million refugees in the world. And, um, it was the greatest number in history, um, biggest humanitarian disaster of all time. And my dad was really sick that year. So he had lung cancer. It was the last year of his life. Um, we knew that he only had a few months left. He had started smoking when he was about 12 years old-

Trevor Noah 33:13 Oh, wow

Speaker 33:13 ... as a child refugee. You know, that's, that's, that was the really deeply unhealthy life he had, you know, living in the refugee camp. And anyway, it finally caught up with him. He was in his late 70s. So, um, you know, I had really come to understand his story in that last year of his life 'cause he never talked about it. And I had a very bad relationship with my dad. You know, he'd, you know, had this terrible childhood. He was, like, very abusive. He was psychologically very scarred from, from his childhood.

Trevor Noah 33:38 I can only imagine. Yeah.

Speaker 33:39 Yeah. And so I'd made, I made peace with him in the last year of his life. And so I was already, like, bubbling with a bunch of feelings.

Trevor Noah 33:46 Yeah.

Speaker 33:47 And then it was September 2015, and this photo went all over the world, and you probably would recognize it if you saw it. It was this photo of this three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi, who was a Syrian refugee.

Trevor Noah 34:00 I think so. Is it the one, if I'm not mistaken, is it in the back of the ambulance maybe? Or was it... it's like a-

Speaker 34:04 That was a different one.

Trevor Noah 34:05 Oh, that's a different one.

Speaker 34:05 It was-

Trevor Noah 34:05 Okay

Speaker 34:06 ... it was the little boy who drowned-

Trevor Noah 34:08 Oh, no, no, no

Speaker 34:09 ... on the shores of Lesbos.

Trevor Noah 34:09 Okay. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 34:10 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 34:10 Yes.

Speaker 34:10 And, and there's a f- there's a famous photo of the body on the shores of this island, and it looks like he's sleeping. And, you know, he drowned along with his five-year-old brother and his mother trying to cross the Mediterranean-

Trevor Noah 34:22 Oof

Speaker 34:22 ... to get away. And I remember that moment because all the world leaders were so shocked because publics were so outraged, and people were so upset. I remember, you know, you had prime ministers going on TV saying, "Right, that's it. We're gonna, we're gonna stop this thing now.

Trevor Noah 34:36 Yeah.

Speaker 34:36 We're gonna intervene. This is where we draw the line." Of course, 10 years later, there's now 135 million refugees in the world, which is more than two world wars combined. And it hasn't gotten any better. It's getting worse by the day. But at that time, that was the first moment where I thought, "Look at the gulf between the ambitions of the world's richest people-

Trevor Noah 34:58 Mm-hmm

Speaker 34:58 ... with all their vast technology, you know, saying that we're going to lift humanity up, and there is humanity right there, the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of our time." And you can say, "Well, why should it be up to the CEO of one of these tech companies to go and, and solve that problem?" Well, maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe they have some part to play in it, but that's, that's not the point. And the point is, if you have a thesis that your technology is now going to be this thing which automatically leads us to this better future, and the future is playing out right there, and you are not doing anything to even investigate how you might shape that, then, uh, your thesis starts to ring a little hollow. And I remember sitting at my desk in Facebook in this palatial headquarters, you know, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, just thinking, "God, I'm like... I'm at the edge of the world in, like, air-conditioned luxury, and that is the animating reality of people all over the world, and people who are just like my dad when he was a kid." That's my dad's story playing out right there. Anyway, he, my dad passed away, you know, just a little bit more than a month after that photo came out. And, um, you know, I went back to England and, uh, you know, I had a, you know, a bunch of time, you know, to, to think over the next few weeks, and I, I decided that's it. I, uh, I've gotta find a different path through this industry. And I was... So I mean, that really was something which started, you know, a bunch of these gears spinning. I still was in tech for a bunch more time, and it was something that I began to take more and more of a position that I had to be involved directly in shaping the cause and the movements and the, the issues that were playing out in very different parts of the world.

Trevor Noah 36:29 So I, I understand that on a, on an altruistic level- You know, as it pertains to the world. But I'm trying to understand where your disillusionment began with regards to Facebook, and then we'll, and then we'll move-

Speaker 36:43 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 36:43 ... into, like-

Speaker 36:43 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 36:43 ... the broader tech world itself. Because I'm hearing, I'm hearing what you're saying. You know, you, you were taken aback by a story that was affecting the world, and on, on your s- on your side, it was affecting you personally as well because it-

Speaker 36:53 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 36:54 ... you know, it had echoes of a past that had shaped you in many ways. But I, but I don't understand how this then casts Facebook in a bad light, you know? This is just a social media company. What is it that Facebook did, what is it that Mark Zuckerberg said or did that made you go, "Facebook is part of the actual problem that we're not- not the cause of everything in the world, but Facebook is contributing to these problems"?

Speaker 37:21 Facebook has become a central piece of the machinery for how you convince the world of things. It's the battleground of ideas played out across Instagram and WhatsApp, and Facebook connects billions of people. It connected the world. And all of the central problems of our time are playing out in those communities. And so Facebook absolutely has a role in how it prioritizes and it thinks about the architectures that might dramatically shape and shift how the entire world acts on any number of problems. And of course, the company absolutely would point to all the things that it thought might be positive stories for the company and how it, it did those things. You know-

Trevor Noah 38:04 Mm-hmm

Speaker 38:04 ... you'd look at, here's all the money that's raised on charity on Facebook. True thing. Um, very, very powerful for lots of organizations to raise money on Facebook. But at the same time, there'd be other things where, you know, the company would have a sort of, "Eh, we've got enough on our plate. You know, that's, that's not really a thing for us right now." And so actually, I'm not saying that suddenly Zuckerberg had to make the refugee crisis his number one thing. I absolutely think if you have a thesis about you're connecting the world and you're building this motor of society, and you happen to be one of the world's richest people, you probably should make it a part of your responsibility. But there's any number of other issues which absolutely are things that- where the company dropped the ball on. Why is it our societies are so deeply divided and angry now in a world awash with disinformation and hate? That is something which absolutely was in the company's power, and it touched the lives of refugees and non-refugees alike. It shapes all of our lives. It shapes the entire digital ecosystem, and the company did not meet its obligations there.

Trevor Noah 38:59 When I, when I read, um ... You know, when I read this book, uh, and when I've read different accounts of people who've worked in, uh, Facebook and then, to a lesser degree, Twitter, uh, yeah, at the time, they'll talk about how they got frustrated at seeing which scales the company would put its thumb on.

Speaker 39:20 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 39:21 Right? Tech companies generally will tell us, the general public, that they are not shaping anything.

Speaker 39:29 Right.

Trevor Noah 39:29 They will say, "We're a platform. We're a message board." It's part of the reason they don't, um, have the same obligations that a TV station does.

Speaker 39:37 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 39:38 So, you know, if, if somebody tells a lie or an, an egregious lie on CBS or NBC or one of those-

Speaker 39:44 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 39:44 ... they get held accountable.

Speaker 39:46 Right.

Trevor Noah 39:47 Facebook, Twitter, all of them go like, "No, no, no, no, no. We say nothing."

Speaker 39:50 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 39:51 "All we do is provide a message board, and the people say things, but we do not participate in what is being said or not being said."

Speaker 39:59 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 40:00 All right? When you read accounts from people who've worked in these organizations, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth.

Speaker 40:07 Yeah, that's absurd.

Speaker 40:08 Like, look at how much the algorithm on X shifted once Twitter became X under Elon, right? You'd, like, spend five seconds in there. It's just a complete cesspool-

Trevor Noah 40:17 Yeah

Speaker 40:17 ... of the absolute worst people who've been algorithmically boosted now to dominate your feeds. So, like, absolutely, there are choices made every day in the architecture of these platforms and, like, the content they're surfacing. Like, you know, one of the things that, you know, occurred, you know, during the first Trump administration onwards was, um, you know, Facebook started experimenting with reducing the volume of news and political content in some feeds, uh, because they discovered that people were getting to the point where they were so, like, exhausted from the amount of political content-

Trevor Noah 40:48 Yeah

Speaker 40:48 ... that they said, "Oh, you know what? This is bad for engagement. Let's just get rid of the news." And that's the thing where, hey, maybe that actually gave people some better, you know, experience in their a- maybe they spent more time. That would be how Facebook would define a better experience.

Trevor Noah 41:02 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 41:02 But, like, in fact, if your society's in flames, wouldn't it be, like, more responsible to actually share these things? Like, if you had a thesis that this is the, you know, global town square. That was literally how, you know, Jack Dorsey-

Trevor Noah 41:16 That's, yes

Speaker 41:16 ... used to describe Twitter.

Trevor Noah 41:16 That's how they sold it, yes.

Speaker 41:17 Then the global town square has to have all the conversations that matter in it, right? Not just the ones that, you know, give you the easier life when you're living, you know, in Palo Alto or San Francisco.

Trevor Noah 41:26 Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating because you, you realize that these guys have built a world where ... How do I ... It would be so much easier if they were just trying to be evil.

Speaker 41:45 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 41:47 But it seems like their evil is a byproduct of the apathy or rather the-

Speaker 41:52 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 41:52 ... appetite that they have for just getting their thing to grow as much as possible.

Speaker 41:55 That's right. I think that's spot on. And that, that is the complexity of this entire situation, right? If they were just cartoonishly villainous-

Trevor Noah 42:02 Yes

Speaker 42:02 ... you know, like Zuckerberg was like, "Right, I'm gonna, like, get these people's data," and it's like, it was never like that. In a way, it's like, you know, the data's, you know, to fuel what Facebook really is, which is a big ad, you know, machine. Um, you know, his ultimate evil is to give you some crappy clickbaity ads in your feed. I mean, it's not, it's not the most, you know, you know, wild scheme ever invented.

Trevor Noah 42:23 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Speaker 42:23 But, like- The failure to engage with a whole bunch of other things which are within his power and which are playing out on the platforms, that can end up exerting tremendous evil in the world. So it's something where there's a, there's a, again, this great duality about these things, right? And you can be an engineer working at Facebook, and every day you go in there and you work on things that are really, really boring, designed to sort of incrementally improve user experience, and they do improve user, user experience, and yet you are also part of an institution that might also be doing things which in some other part of this vast global machine actually aren't effects you like at all. And you still need people to go and do the good things as well, right? Um, you know, all institutions are imperfect, and there's lots of good people, I think, who work within tech companies-

Trevor Noah 43:04 Yeah

Speaker 43:04 ... because they, they are driven by nothing more than they want to build systems that really do solve problems for people.

Trevor Noah 43:09 Do you think, do you think we got it all wrong in terms of, like, assigning a political point of view to tech leaders? I, I think of all of them, Jeff Bezos, um, like when he bought The Washington Post, people were like, "Oh man, democracy has been saved," and they came up with that slogan, "Democracy dies in darkness," and it was this whole thing, and it's like, oh, this is what we need mega titans to do is save the journalistic world that we... Mark Zuckerberg, people are like, "Oh, yes, he is a titan of free speech, and because of him, we will move this thing." You, you, you look at all of these, these figures, even Elon Musk, they're like, you know, electric cars, and here he is-

Speaker 43:47 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 43:47 ... pioneering a world that gets us away from fossil fuels, and it seemed like they were liberal bastions.

Speaker 43:54 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 43:54 It seemed like they were progressive icons that were trying to move society to a place that was better for everyone. And then almost overnight, it was like, well, Jeff Bezos is like, "Nope, nope. Shut that down. Move that thing. Uh, pay the people less. Get this go- I'm, I'm doing my own thing." Zuckerberg was like, "Actually, screw the news and, and we're not fact-checking anything, and we're not doing that."

Speaker 44:16 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 44:16 "And, and you know what? I, I'm actually pro this. I actually think Trump's a cool guy, and I'm at the inauguration." And you see this happening.

Speaker 44:22 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 44:22 And Elon Musk is like, you're like, "Oh, so he likes electric cars, but not necessarily... He doesn't care about the whole thing." It's, it's, it's, it's this weird, like, it's this weird gray that I think people struggle with.

Speaker 44:35 Yes.

Trevor Noah 44:36 From the inside, did you see a shift, or do you think that there was just a big misunderstanding of who these people were from the very beginning?

Speaker 44:45 I think it was both. Um, people are desperate for heroes, and, you know, I moved to New York in 2008, you know, right on the eve of, you know, the economic crisis unfolding.

Trevor Noah 44:56 Yeah.

Speaker 44:56 And how many more crises have we been through since then? It's like the 21st century has been a never-ending series of disasters befalling most of the world. And in that context, people will always look for heroes. Um, we're looking for good guys and bad guys. We're looking for a simplistic narrative to make sense of deeply complex events. Who were the good guys in the economic crisis?

Trevor Noah 45:16 Yeah.

Speaker 45:16 Um, you know, there were lots of different bad guys. There were lots of different shades of gray every single day, but the real villains weren't even just these individuals, you know, we would sort of say, "Ah, that person's going to prison, right? Screw that person." There's entire systems that are rotten, and of course, this is the nature of many of the problems that are playing out now. We have deeply rotten, you know, systems that, um, you know, are behind many of the problems that are, you know, unfolding in many, many different domains. Um, so I think that was part of it, but also it was genuinely, um, you know, it was a whole bunch of very new challenges emerging in the world, which in ways these were leaders who simply weren't engaged at all. Um, there were things where, um, they might have had more constructive roles. They almost certainly would have had more constructive roles if they took those seriously. But there's lots of other leaders who should share that blame too. Um, the failure of technology in our societies is only part of a general failure of societies in the last couple of decades, which political leaders, a whole set of other, you know, thinkers and actors, they absolutely should share in that blame too.

Trevor Noah 46:19 It's weird because it's, it's like we're trying to figure out where the first domino fell.

Speaker 46:23 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 46:23 Right? Some would argue there's a moment when Facebook said, "We're going to allow political people on Facebook. We're gonna allow them to run campaigns. We're gonna allow them to buy ads. We're gonna..." Some would say, "Oh, that was it. That was the domino." Other people would say, "No, it's when the lawmakers allowed Facebook to have the thing that it w- So w- where do you think the first dom- W- Like w- were there conversations within the company in and around politics and Facebook when this was still, you know, sort of burgeoning?

Speaker 46:52 Oh, yeah. I mean, these conversations, uh, you know, have been going on for many, many years. You know, um, these were things that, you know, predated me. Um, you know, companies were already really agonizing over these things, you know, as, as social media was, you know, getting started and reaching, you know, big scale. And a lot of the thinking, right, was again driven by things that were very idealistic. Can you build a global town square-

Trevor Noah 47:12 Yeah

Speaker 47:12 ... in which of course you want democratic discourse. You want politicians on there, and you want people exposed to their views. And these are things where, you know, political content would naturally appear because, you know, if you want to build something for free expression, then people will talk about, you know, something that is one of the central things in our, in our lives and our societies. You know, that early idealistic moment in that journey of tech, um, you know, for me was the Arab Spring. You know, I remember walking into the hall at Google when news came through that the Egyptian government had fallen. People started cheering, and it was literally like, you know, there is something in the world happening-

Trevor Noah 47:45 Yeah

Speaker 47:45 ... you know, fueled, you know, combined with the power of technology. You know, people power plus these, you know, instruments for like mass communication and, and collaboration suddenly like exerting, you know, dramatic shifts in societies. Um, but it's, it's very hard, I think, to think of, like that's the domino that, you know, played the central role when really there were so many, you know, interconnected systems that really were, were breaking at the same time. The failures of leadership were happening on any number of fronts, right? You know, disinformation on Facebook, right? You've got the failures of platforms to think through how algorithms would, you know, shape content and shape-

Trevor Noah 48:21 Yeah

Speaker 48:21 ... you know, communities.

Trevor Noah 48:22 Yeah.

Speaker 48:22 But at the same time, you had a global order breaking down in which nations like Russia, Iran, China, uh- The US, a whole bunch of people were all employing cyber weapons and looking to drive influence operations through social media, and to weaponize all of those new platforms in order to achieve their geopolitical interests. That's a reality too. And so you can't just, uh, you know, look at one of these problems. You gotta actually have a, a thesis on how all these things play out together. [upbeat music]

Trevor Noah 48:52 Don't go anywhere, 'cause we got more What Now after this. [upbeat music] You said that you, you really had this moment for yourself in 2000 and-

Speaker 49:09 That was 2015 when I started having-

Trevor Noah 49:11 2015 is-

Speaker 49:12 Yeah

Trevor Noah 49:12 ... when you, when you start feeling this.

Speaker 49:13 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 49:14 You then leave

Trevor Noah 49:16 in 20-

Speaker 49:17 I left Facebook in 2016, but I was still in the tech industry.

Trevor Noah 49:20 So you, so you-

Speaker 49:21 Yeah

Trevor Noah 49:21 ... stayed around for a while.

Speaker 49:22 Yeah. I was working for Elon then when I was at SpaceX. And so-

Trevor Noah 49:25 Interesting

Speaker 49:25 ... I went to the space industry, which is something that should be deeply hopeful. I mean, I grew up watching Star Trek, um, you know-

Trevor Noah 49:31 And many elements of it, of it have been. Like I-

Speaker 49:33 Yeah

Trevor Noah 49:33 ... I often say this like with [laughs] with my friends all the time. I go, "Look, man, I'm not a fan of like half of the shit Elon says-

Speaker 49:39 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 49:39 ... and like his views on many things." But I'm like, you know, Starlink and the idea is pretty amazing.

Speaker 49:44 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 49:44 You know, we live in a world where many people are not connected-

Speaker 49:46 Yep

Trevor Noah 49:47 ... to the internet, and we've seen what that can do to their financial outcomes or-

Speaker 49:50 Totally

Trevor Noah 49:50 ... you know. There's a young dick somewhere who's trying to-

Speaker 49:53 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 49:53 ... find another internship. You can't do it. But if you have an internet that doesn't need last mile-

Speaker 49:59 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 49:59 ... it changes your, your life. So it's fascinat- electric cars, I don't think the industry-

Speaker 50:03 Yeah

Trevor Noah 50:03 ... would've moved if it weren't for Tesla.

Speaker 50:04 That's right.

Trevor Noah 50:05 You know? So there, there's, there's many elements where it is deeply hopeful.

Speaker 50:09 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Trevor Noah 50:10 But you seem to have gone from one place to another, and am I correct in saying that you are disillusioned by the entire tech industry now?

Speaker 50:18 No. Tech, this is the duality of the moment.

Trevor Noah 50:21 Yeah.

Speaker 50:21 It continues to this moment. Um, I absolutely believe in the power of technology. No, no one's ever accusing you of being anti-tech.

Trevor Noah 50:28 Okay.

Speaker 50:28 Like technology is something that can be and should be deeply hopeful if it's managed well. Is it being managed well by our societies? No. Are tech industry leaders meeting the moment and the nature of the disruption that is now unfolding as a result of AI-

Trevor Noah 50:46 Mm-hmm

Speaker 50:46 ... and a bunch of these breakthrough technologies? Absolutely not. And so that's why I'm no longer in the industry. Uh, I don't think that's the right perch to be for somebody who wants to focus their time on figuring out how as societies do we get out of the mess that is the consequence, the backdrop of a technologically infused civilization in the year 2026. Um, but the technology itself could do wonderful things, right? That is the complex everyday duality which infects every part of how we think about these technologies, which is why, you know, lots of leaders, lots of institutions, lots of regulators, they really struggle with this stuff. AI might help us cure all diseases this century. That is something which lots of scientists are very hopeful about.

Trevor Noah 51:28 Yeah.

Speaker 51:28 We're gonna see the first drugs coming to market in the next few years which have been developed with the help of AI, which can treat cancers and all sorts of things. That's real. But at the same time, you also have AI driving disinformation and hate and cyber weapons and all these things, fueling autonomous weaponry and AI military targeting systems right now in action today in the Middle East, which are inflicting enormous damage on people's lives. You have an industry with a rapacious appetite for resources, which is absolutely going to be part of accelerating climate change and the devastation of ecosystems at a time when we're heading for some of the worst case climate change scenarios. And you have this soaring gulf in societies between the winners and losers in our economy. You know, 12 billionaires in this country have as much wealth as 49% of the world now, and that's before we've seen most of the effects of AI on economies. If anyone think, think that's, that's gonna get better, they, uh, have got a bridge to the future to sell.

Trevor Noah 52:26 Right before you left Facebook, did you voice your concerns and try and like shift the company?

Speaker 52:33 Uh, as a cog in a machine, I did all the bits that I felt were within my ability to go and do these things, uh, every single day. Um, what could I do? I was a guy who was, uh, a words guy. And so my, my ability to argue over the message and how you frame these things and what are the things we should really be talking about, that's something which I absolutely exercise that power every single day, and that's, that's what drove my whole career.

Trevor Noah 52:58 Did you experience any wins?

Speaker 53:00 Yeah. I mean, you would get lots of sort of little wins.

Trevor Noah 53:03 Yeah.

Speaker 53:03 You know, like-

Trevor Noah 53:04 Do you remember any?

Speaker 53:04 Yeah. I mean, like even like how choosing to even like, you know, focus on, you know, topics which people would say, "Oh, really?" Like why is like some tech executive like posting about, you know, uh, let's say international development?

Trevor Noah 53:21 Okay.

Speaker 53:22 Um, I took Zuckerberg to the UN in 2015. Um, you know, like that's the thing where, you know, for me as a former UN person, it felt really important actually that you bring Silicon Valley, you know, people building these platforms with this immense reach together with a set of people who are deeply non-technological-

Trevor Noah 53:38 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right

Speaker 53:38 ... but need to achieve really hard things in the world. So for me, you know, a lot of the work I did was on advancing this idea that connectivity should be a human right. It should be something that people have access to, and they have the ability to express themselves freely. Um, I consider that, that a very, very small win. Um, lots of other things I would, I would lose arguments all the time. One of the things that I, you know, was part of my sort of final chapter when I was, you know, at Facebook was, um, Trump was now running.

Trevor Noah 54:06 Yeah.

Speaker 54:06 And I absolutely did not believe that Trump should be given a, um, you know, an unfiltered megaphone to spew all sorts of hatred. And I had furious arguments with, you know, very senior people, you know, saying, "You are the boss of Facebook. You have a megaphone. If nothing else, you get to say that that's not acceptable." And they wouldn't even do the bare minimum there. You know, they sort of, you know... I remember I had a huge argument with some folks there about, you know, a post which I had drafted for Zuckerberg to take on Trump directly and call out his bullshit.

Trevor Noah 54:35 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 54:36 And you know- It's been reported and, you know, it's been covered in some other media over the years, uh, in the Washington Post, I think. But, you know, that was the thing where I lost that argument. You know, the company was absolutely, you know, you know, cowering with the idea that this is something that, you know, they should have any sort of direct view on. And so they- it ended up with one of those messy, unsatisfying compromises where like a post was put out and all the sort of sharp bits of language were, you know, watered down, and it didn't mention Trump by name. It was just this sort of like thing-

Trevor Noah 55:01 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Speaker 55:01 ... expressed in the ether. And it was like, why are we playing coy with this stuff? Like, if you really do believe in, you know, the values, which at the time Zuckerberg really said he believed in, you know, things like standing up for dreamers, you know, standing up for the rights of, you know, underrepresented people-

Trevor Noah 55:17 Right

Speaker 55:17 ... for, for immigrants, um, you know, for communities, you know, that were, you know, diverse. All those communities Trump attacked from literally day one when he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower-

Trevor Noah 55:27 Yeah, yeah. Right

Speaker 55:27 ... and he said that it was his mission to basically, you know, exorcize them from society and roll the clock back to the '50s. And if you're not gonna stand up for your values when you know there's something as consequential as a future president of the United States, you know, starting to spew those things, when are you ever gonna stand up to them?

Trevor Noah 55:43 So, so Facebook, I sort of understand because it's, you know, it, it's public-facing in many ways and, and we see its effects. You know, you see, um, Facebook on trial or Meta on trial for like Instagram and the things they knew and how it affects, um, you know, younger users, particularly girls. Um, you see them on trial for like trying to get kids addicted to the platforms that they create.

Speaker 56:05 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 56:06 So, so they're, they're pretty like front-facing. Help me understand on like a SpaceX side, what could go wrong? It's, it's space. You, you're launching rockets into space, and then this is a good thing. You know, you launch the thing and you make it cheaper, and you put-

Speaker 56:17 Hmm

Trevor Noah 56:17 ... satellites where they're supposed to be, and we see the world and, and like w- uh, what, what could go wrong at SpaceX?

Speaker 56:23 Well, uh, this is now well after I've left SpaceX, but now SpaceX is one of the companies that is, uh, obviously a prime defense contractor, and part of the work, um, you know, that is now unfolding is, you know, to obviously develop a new generation of weapons and infrastructure to enable the US to win future wars. Um, you know, there are proposals such as Golden Dome, you know, the absolutely astonishing space-based missile defense system that Trump wants to build, which some estimates say will cost over a trillion dollars. SpaceX is gonna be the primary contractor for all of that.

Trevor Noah 56:58 Hmm.

Speaker 56:59 And these are things now where, again, this is the duality of the, the moment. Um, you could say, "Oh, it's a defensive missile shield. It's designed to shoot down incoming, you know, nuclear warheads."

Trevor Noah 57:11 Yeah.

Speaker 57:12 Maybe that's okay. Except if you are part of a nexus of leaders and institutions which are exerting tremendous political authority and economic power because the technologies you're developing have become so central to economic growth in the United States, you have the ability to radically shift agendas here. If you've chosen instead to just make a bunch of money building space-based military infrastructure rather than using your overall influence to in fact shift us to a world where maybe we don't have to fight, why are we preparing for a nuclear war instead of trying to figure out how to not have nuclear wars? Then I would say that is a historic mismatch of resources. That is like not the wrong strategy. That is not the right strategy. And of course, Elon Musk himself, well after I worked for him, has now taken on a role which I think is unforgivable in the tech industry and in the world. The a- the work he did on its own of gutting USAID through DOGE, which we have emphatic reporting about the lives that have been lost-

Trevor Noah 58:16 Yeah, it's, it's-

Speaker 58:16 ... the children who have died

Trevor Noah 58:17 ... been devastating, yeah.

Speaker 58:18 He should not ever be rehabilitated. Like, that is a guy who should be on trial.

Trevor Noah 58:22 Yeah, that, um... Yeah, that, I mean, that's, that's probably one of the most heinous things him and the administration did-

Speaker 58:29 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 58:30 ... because it was, it was just spiteful.

Speaker 58:33 That's right.

Trevor Noah 58:33 Do you know what I mean? It, it had no, it had no material effect on the United States, on its budget-

Speaker 58:38 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 58:38 ... on its money, but the effect that it has now had on the countries and in the world that needed it has been like d- like generationally

Trevor Noah 58:47 devastating.

Speaker 58:47 That's right. So that's the thing, right? Space and space technology could just be brilliant, and if we just looked at that, if we just had a tunnel vision, we had a navel-gazing on that-

Trevor Noah 58:54 Yeah

Speaker 58:55 ... fantastic. But like when your boss is like out there gutting aid agencies and children are dying, like the two things are connected.

Trevor Noah 59:01 So, so what do, what do you feel like your mission is now then, now that you are not in the industry? What, what are you, what are you trying to rally? What are you, what are you trying to move people

Trevor Noah 59:10 towards?

Speaker 59:11 I am very focused now on the societal implications of AI. Um, I spent the last several years, uh, you know, I was back at Google and, you know, a lot of the last 15 years have been involved in AI, and the technology and how quickly it is gathering steam, how much more advanced it's getting, how much more advanced it will be in the next decade, that is something which is going to be wildly more devastating than any of the consequences of the mismanaged technologies of the last 15 years. And the consequences will crash land on societies all over the world. We are not prepared for these things at all, economically, societally, geopolitically, environmentally, and that's the agenda that I'm really focused on. The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things. We talk about AI governance.

Trevor Noah 59:58 Yeah.

Speaker 59:58 And there's a whole bunch of stuff which is about how you manage the AI systems themselves. That's like 1% of the problem. 15 years from now, probably less than 15 years, when a lot of people have lost their jobs to AI, and we have no economic solutions, we have no idea how to give people a good quality of life, that is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing with those systems. What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources, and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions if not billions of people? Um, between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one-third of the 20th century, and it's accelerating all the time. And these are, these are things where in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to governments who are desperate for economic growth now, right? A lot of the advanced economies-

Trevor Noah 1:00:51 Yeah

Speaker 1:00:51 ... in the Global North-

Trevor Noah 1:00:52 Yeah

Speaker 1:00:52 ... they've got plateauing growth, they've got declining living standards. They go to them and say, "Build this wondrous technology."

Trevor Noah 1:00:58 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:00:58 "Build this infrastructure. We will give you back the keys to a good future." And of course, that's not happening. Um, this is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States and mostly in China. And I think the world we're gonna end up in, you know, in the next, you know, 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today, with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people. I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get, uh, good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them, that is not gonna happen at all on the path we're on. And so is the tech industry gonna solve these things? No. And in fact, they, they have tried to minimize debate about these things, they've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions. Now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're gonna do to manage all of those effects, and that cannot be left up to the tech industry.

Trevor Noah 1:01:57 But now we're in a situation where, like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech and now tech is affecting the world.

Speaker 1:02:07 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:02:07 Right? In the lead-up to, you know, some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some of the most insane, like, amounts for-

Speaker 1:02:22 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 1:02:22 ... for, for, um, political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or-

Speaker 1:02:30 Yeah

Trevor Noah 1:02:30 ... constraint on, um, AI. And whether we like it or not, you know, money shapes a lot of, uh-

Speaker 1:02:39 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 1:02:39 ... an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed.

Speaker 1:02:46 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:02:47 And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them. It seems like a, an infinite loop that's, that's for the most part already lost unless something big breaks, as we've seen, you know, in the past. It's only when something big breaks that, that something changes dramatically.

Speaker 1:03:02 I mean, I, I don't think we should be under any illusions. The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing. I've spent the last, you know, six months traveling the world talking to leaders and, you know, a whole bunch of people behind closed doors where you have some really, you know, spine-tingling conversations. And there's a s- there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win this, this race for AI, and-

Trevor Noah 1:03:33 Yeah. Hmm

Speaker 1:03:33 ... a bunch of other people will get screwed, but we'll be okay, and that's not gonna happen when of course you have societies all over the world that are gonna be in chaos. No one gets out of this thing in one piece. But, uh, we're in a moment now where I think actually a lot of people across societies, you know, who are paying a bit of attention, they're seeing things are failing on any number of fronts.

Trevor Noah 1:03:53 Yeah.

Speaker 1:03:53 You know, you look at all the polling. Why is it the overwhelming majority of societies in almost all the world say things are generally going in the wrong direction? People are angry. They realize that, you know, there aren't new answers. There is no vision coming from the top anymore. And in that context, you then have Big Tech racing to install these systems where people are now really worried about their jobs. You know, there's a lot of polling showing that the number one thing that gets people, you know, panicked about AI, which explains why it is in fact incredibly unpopular with societies, is because they're worried about their future jobs. Um, so this is something where I think actually there's a lot of people who already are looking for a very different approach to how you manage these things. Um, the debate has not shifted there yet because I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of what might happen, the speed at which this will unfold, and how interconnected all these agendas are. When people really do understand that the technologies that might give you your amazing apps on your phone also might be things that destroy the prospects of your kids having future jobs and also will threaten, you know, natural ecosystems-

Trevor Noah 1:04:53 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:04:53 ... then it becomes a very different, um, agenda.

Trevor Noah 1:04:57 So I hear you on a, on a, on a, on a macro scale, but, like, what are we actually doing?

Speaker 1:05:07 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:05:08 Or what are we actually trying to do? Like, where, where, where does it start? Who does it start with?

Speaker 1:05:14 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:05:15 What is the first action, the second action? What do we hope to achieve on the other side of it?

Speaker 1:05:19 I think before you can get really granular about lots of tactics, you really need to have won on the idea. Like, does anyone think Donald Trump is the president because of his exceptional ability to run a disciplined campaign?

Trevor Noah 1:05:33 Hmm.

Speaker 1:05:34 Like, he had an idea, and it was an idea fit for a moment and p- you know, poised to disrupt a whole bunch of bad incumbent ideas. His answer was another set of bad ideas, some really truly evil and villainous ideas, but he had ideas. And what is happening now is that in the absence of any vision of what our future could be, we're just staggering on, trying to prop up the things that are not working, the remnants of these old economic, political, geopolitical systems, the shreds of the international order built in the 1940s. No one is truly saying, "This isn't working. What could something that actually works look like?" And don't, don't focus on what's politically achievable. Focus on what do you actually want to build. If you could get away with it, what's the real best case scenario?

Trevor Noah 1:06:22 Hmm.

Speaker 1:06:23 And I think you have to start there because if you do that, the world isn't static. The moment you have leaders with vision, you can change reality around you in enormous ways. You know, Donald Trump is the guy who was hosting The Apprentice, and now he's the most powerful man in the world.

Trevor Noah 1:06:38 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:06:38 The moment you have a vision, you can start to really move things in ways that may seem utterly implausible. And I think actually the things that most people want in the world Including the United States and the UK, wherever you look, are generally things that were pretty timeless. They want to be able to give their kids a better quality of life than they have. They want to be able to live in peace. They don't want to have to worry about going to war. They, they want to preserve nature.

Trevor Noah 1:07:04 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:07:04 They want to have a climate, you know, that is something that, you know, isn't something that's, you know, collapsing. And when you really wake people up to the fact that there is no plan for any of these things now, and we're almost out of time, and there is still a chance to not only avert the disaster, but here's the thing. What if we could use all that technology now with a very different vision of our societies and our politics and our economics to build a radically better future, something that really does solve these problems for all time in a big way? Then a lot of people get really hopeful. They get excited about that. You know, so this is the stuff that, you know, I'm going around the world talking about. I absolutely don't believe we solve our problems by pretending they don't exist. There's a certain strain of people who think, "Oh, this is too depressing. Let's not talk about all these things." But if you can admit the path we're on is not working, but then also wake people up to what could the tech really do if it was harnessed with an agenda designed to truly provide a good life to everyone, not just to that narrow sliver of billionaires and to the-

Trevor Noah 1:08:03 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Speaker 1:08:03 ... you know, tiny percentage of people, then people really, I think in many cases, they long for it. They wish that there was something coming that would save us.

Trevor Noah 1:08:11 That's an, that's an interesting, it's an interesting idea because it's, it's, um, yeah, it proposes, it proposes something that I guess isn't often pushed, which is first shift the mindset and then let's get into the granular. Let's sell like the idea of a future or a world and get people on the same page. Is it possible when we, I mean, like we even having this conversation are at the mercy of the very machine that we are trying to disrupt.

Speaker 1:08:44 Mm-hmm.

Trevor Noah 1:08:45 I al- I always think about that paradox. I go, you are putting a thing on the internet, on social media platforms, basically trashing the social media platforms-

Speaker 1:08:56 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 1:08:56 ... and the way they run, which, which i- inherently is like this weird conflict of interest-

Speaker 1:09:01 Mm-hmm

Trevor Noah 1:09:01 ... slash even like it, you, you, you go will it even allow you to do it if it gets to a certain point? Like, like how do you think of that conundrum? Like where, how do you, how do you begin a movement when the very thing that is moving you is part of the thing you're trying to change?

Speaker 1:09:15 I mean, it's something which, uh, I think there probably are real consequences, right? I mean, things that we may not even know about. Um, you know, the lack of transparency in how our algorithms operate means that certain content may, may be deprioritized when it's critical, um, or, you know, touches certain issues. That's something, you know... I was at Meta's oversight board, you know, a few years ago, which, you know, was an independent body looking at how content was managed on these platforms and, um, the things that the company did every day to put its thumb on the scale will blow your mind. You can see all that data online. Uh, the board has made it publicly available. It would shock people, but they can't stop everyone. If conversations, uh, and agendas really are, you know, moving people-

Trevor Noah 1:09:55 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:09:55 ... and there's lots of other channels which we can go for, right? Um, these are agendas which have to be pushed politically in business, you know, in the vast majority of the world's economies, which are not the tech industry, um, through communities-

Trevor Noah 1:10:09 Right

Speaker 1:10:09 ... um, through nations all over the world. You can, you can advance ideas on infinite numbers of other vectors, which ultimately are going to penetrate and, you know, you see lots of, you know, different points of view on social media, even while you've got some platforms which have clearly tried to put their thumb on the scale.

Trevor Noah 1:10:25 Yeah.

Speaker 1:10:25 People aren't gonna shut up, and in fact, some of those heavy-handed attempts to muzzle debate or to pretend that everything's fine, it's just the Industrial Revolution again, that stuff backfires so catastrophically on the people who say those things.

Trevor Noah 1:10:37 Right.

Speaker 1:10:38 You know, because of course, you know, I think every serious person realizes that's, that's bullshit. Um, so I think we have to try. I mean, ultimately it comes down to this, right? The, the vision of the good future, and then how we actually achieve that, turn it into a plan. You know, what does a new economic model look like for societies when machines will take jobs? Um, that's gonna be really hard. It's gonna be the hardest thing we've ever achieved in history, and the odds are stacked against us from the start, and we would never choose to do it at this moment in time-

Trevor Noah 1:11:06 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Speaker 1:11:06 ... when we're already reeling from crises, and yet, what other choice do we have? And that's the thing. I think there's a moment now where politicians, they can just keep trying to pretend everything's normal, and they can try to cosplay basically as, like, '90s politicians when everything was sort of-

Trevor Noah 1:11:19 Yeah, yeah

Speaker 1:11:20 ... you know, one-dimensional.

Trevor Noah 1:11:20 Yeah, simpler. Yeah.

Speaker 1:11:21 They can do that, and that's what most of them will do. Humans are just like AI. They're bad pattern recognition machines. So people will look at all this stuff and they'll be like, "Ah, actually, it's not this doom and stuff. It's just, it's just this stuff over here. Uh, it's stuff from the past we've already seen." But, but they'll fail. They won't solve these problems, and because they will not succeed in solving them, angry, volatile populations facing declining living standards and rising chaos, they will overthrow those people. They will demand probably worse alternatives. That's why populists are coming to power. That's why nationalists are advancing every day, and then we end up in more and more chaos. But the politicians who realize that that is not the good future, and now we really need to say, "We don't have the answers, but we do understand what is happening and the problem," they will be the people who can begin to shift that agenda, and that's what I'm trying to do now, to work with the leaders, to work with people who really want to start having that radically different conversation. And I don't think talking about it is a sort of kumbaya kind of thing. It's not a, "Let's spend years-

Trevor Noah 1:12:20 Yeah, yeah

Speaker 1:12:20 ... you know, having a nice conversation."

Trevor Noah 1:12:21 If you-

Speaker 1:12:21 It is, "This has to happen really fast now. We have to have people understand specifically what is happening, and if we can do that, then we can very quickly get to practical tactics and an agenda." But we have a, we have a narrow window in which to do all these things now.

Trevor Noah 1:12:37 A narrow window and a, yeah, a mighty, mighty tall ask. Dex, thank you very much, man. This has been, uh-

Speaker 1:12:42 Thanks for having me on.

Trevor Noah 1:12:43 Yeah, man. Um, good luck. Good luck on the, on the rest of the tour and the leaders that you meet. Um, I think you've given us a lot to think about. Yeah.

Speaker 1:12:52 Yeah.

Trevor Noah 1:12:53 It's gonna be a hell of a 15 years.

Speaker 1:12:56 There is a way out of this stuff. We are not destined to fail, but we have to admit that it's not working.

Trevor Noah 1:13:02 All right. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 1:13:03 Thanks for having me.

Trevor Noah 1:13:06 [upbeat music] Thank you so much for watching the episode. If you enjoyed it, pass it on to a friend. If you didn't enjoy it, pass it on to your friend still. Let them suffer for a change. And don't forget to engage with us in the comments. Uh, if you wanna, uh, suggest a guest, maybe there's questions you want, maybe there's ideas that you have, you can chat to us. We will read through the comments, and we'll get into it. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for hanging out with us on What Now? And remember, we do this for you, so we would like to hear from you. Till next time. Thank you.