Atlantic festival held in washington, d. C. [cheers and applause] i always wanted to be on the arena stage. Toughest crowd but will try to keep it lively. Thank you for being here and repeat visitor to the atlantic festival. If you repeat it six more times you get a punch card. I wonder if we can talk with serious and sad thing, the news this morning that your friend and colleague, senator feinstein has passed. You were very close with her and i am sure everybody would be interested in hearing a little of your recollection of working with her and being friends with her. She was an extreme leader in San Francisco, california and somebody who was a true trailblazer because of her devotion to finding solutions to problems. This sounds like oldfashioned politics which i still adhere to, she was looking for wear that Common Ground could be found and inhabited. And she was absolutely fearless but also very open. She was the primary sponsor of the assault weapons ban back in 1994 in large measure because of the experience she had discovering are your colleague on the San Francisco city council, harry milk murdered and the speech she gave in support of the assault weapons ban and see someone who has been grievously and fatally shot and trying with her fingers in the bullet holes to try and stop the pleading. And she was brave. She was honorable and honest and she was willing to hold anybody to account, because one of the other amazing results of her leadership was when she chaired the Intelligence Committee and she was determined to do a study of what had happened during the iraq war, during the war on terrorism, waterboarding, other kinds of abuses, whether they had been directly or indirectly ordered or had a blind eye turned toward them and she fought everybody about that. She fought fellow senators and Obama Administration and fought everybody and came out with a huge thousand paged report and turned into a movie staring adam driver, but she was undeterred because she believed so strongly you have to face the truth about assault weapons or behavior that we werent proud of. So she was a great colleague of mine. One final story, after the 2008 primaries, then senator obama called and asked if i would meet with him, but could we go somewhere that wouldnt draw a lot of attention. Well, thats going to be hard. [laughter] i called dianne can barack and i meet at your house and she said sure you can. I had total trust with her and i got down in the back seat of the car leaving my house, obama put a press lid on and told his staff he wasnt going anywhere and spent a couple of hours in her link room talking about the campaign and what i would do to support him, what he saw as the challenges in the general election kind of conversation that led to working closely together, him asking me to be secretary of state and asking if we wanted more chardonnay. So i will miss her a lot. It was the wine summit. Char done a chardonnay summited. We wanted to talk about, something you written for 9 atlantic. It has become a truism that politics is downstream from culture and what we are learning more and more and culture is downstream from theology and a whole bunch of other things and you wrote this piece for us, the weaponization of loneliness. And you are trying to explore war what are the deeper causes of polar isation and unhappiness that isnt supported by facts. And just walk us through a little bit how you started thinking about loneliness, technology and all these things and how they lead to the dysfunction that we feel we are experiencing. Thats a wonderful set of questions, jeffrey, and for me, i started thinking about this many years ago thrvments been a lot of commentary about whats happening to americans, whats happening to our society long before trump showed up, before the internet and social media where people were feeling dissatisfied, unmoored, unsettled by the pace of change. Little did we know how fast it would move. I wrote a book back in the 1990s called it takes a village. That was you . [laughter] yeah. I am coming back for the latte. I wrote that book because in part of what i saw politically and culture rally where people were having challenges figuring out how do we raise our children and form families, how do we combine work and family on particular issue for women like me. When i wrote that book, there was a lot of talk about lets call it meaning in life, purposeful ifs in life and something i spent a lot of time pondering. And then i began reading some people like Robert Putnam and others who were talking about the value of what they were calling social capital in healthy associates that really focused on quality of life issues and where people were frankly more satisfied with how they were organized and living. So fast forward, we began to see the disruption which initially was thrilling. The technological disruption and rise of social media and excited to be with people anywhere in the world with the flick of the phone and your phone had the main frame computer, there was so much very thrilling about the world we could inhabit. And a lot of the best commentary about it is how it was going to bring us together, cross lines and bridge divisions and that is something we saw and we were focused on, but there was the dark underbelly and how technology was being manipulated and being used. You know, when barack obama ran for president in 2008, he really pioneered using technology to bring people together on behalf of his campaign and very successful and held up as a model, but by 2016 when i ran, the underbelly of the internet, we had already seen in gamer dates, the uprising of miss no, sir gist particular uprising against women are outsider of any kind talking about the way that people who gained all the time were behaving and how that unfortunately filled into the socalled real world and beginning to see indicators and running through this was psychological operations which formed the basis for a lot of the technical developments and propaganda and active measures not just by the russians. We were watching in realtime the kind of changing of the impact of technology in ways that i certainly had not foreseen and did not understand and we began to get evidence from scientists, medical doctors particularly pediatricians and psychiatrists and others that they were beginning to see very clear impacts from screen time, not just screen time, what people were doing on those screens and American Academy of pediatrics which got very little attention but came out and said no child under two should have access to a screen and since revised that to a higher and higher age because we are learning how screens have technology, how the addiction to technology literally changes the way your brain develops. There was a beginning of a commentary sounding the alarm about all of this and then we began to get evidence beer increases in anxiety, depression, eating disorder particularly among young women and young menace well and then covid hit. And then covid was a mass exercise in loneliness and dislocation. And so then we come out of covid with a long trail of consequences that we are frankly in my view still working through and then the Surgeon General put out a very thoughtful report talking about how loneliness is both physical and Mental Health risk. We now have evidence that loneliness exascerbates conditions to poor health, often precipitates those conditions. Outcomes are worse. We are seeing evidence of how being involved in the outer world having friendship networks being involved in volunteer activities, associations, sports teams whatever brings you together with other people is actually a net positive for your health. So the evidence is pushing us towards recognizing Old Fashioned that we need to figure out how to bring people back into personal contact at the very time when the addiction to social media and the screen is driving people more and more down rabbit holes and often alone. I talked to the Surgeon General after the report came out and said he was particularly concerned about young women. And i said whats the difference between young women and young men . He said we dont know for sure, but my speculation is that young men who spend a lot of time in front of screens are more likely than not doing something, like playing a game, learning how to code, coming up with some kind of activity that keeps them engaged and often with other people especially if you are gaming. Young women are wheres young women are often alone, scrolling, seeing things that make them feel bad about themselves, finding out theyre being left out, being pressured to engage in activities like sending pictures of themselves which are really fraught with all kinds of dangers and risks. So i thought that was a really interesting insight. Because if you can form a Real Community online, maybe you can avoid some of these consequences. But too often people are not doing that. They are now, you know, very insular, lonely place. So and last thing i would say is, in the article i talk about how steve bannon, who is in the gaming industry jeffrey this is what i wanted to go to. [laughter] surprisingly, i wanted to go to steve bannon. [laughter] sec. Clinton well, better you than me is all i can say. [laughter] jeffrey i didnt make you write it. Sec. Clinton i did put that in the article because bannon was in gaming originally. Jeffrey he had insight. Sec. Clinton he was in the industry for a while. His insight was all these young men were seeking something. They were incredibly engaged in their gaming and they could be weaponized, they could be used because oftentimes their emotions were so raw, i mean, yelling and screaming at their screen, yelling and screaming with, you know, the guys theyre with. But and instead of being on a Playing Field doing that, whatever room theyre in, and they can be reached individually, not just collectively, and he had the insight that you could take that energy and, frankly, some of that negative reaction that gaming produced, and weaponize it for political purposes. Jeffrey the roll back just for one minute to the founding techno optimists of social media and of the screens. Do you think that so mark zuckerberg, for instance, had a belief, im going to credit him with being this being a sincere belief, that instant Global Connectivity to everyone else in the world was a good thing rather than a bad thing. My question to you is, a, was that Just Marketing ultimately . Or did they genuinely believe that this would be a good thing . And, b, is there a good internet that you can imagine is there a good social media ecosystem or does it always kind of devolve into lowest common denominator nastiness . Sec. Clinton well, i will give the benefit of the doubt to the early founders, as you say, the techno optimists. I do think they believe that. Then, though, they had to figure out how to pay for what they wanted to do. So if you could have a Free Internet with no pressure to maximize negativity because fear and hate and anger drive more interactions, people are more likely to remember it if it was negative, and then you can place ads against it, but first you have to make that connection, i think if there has been a couple of things, when the Communications Act in the 1990s was passed, the idea was very optimistic that there would be this open internet that would be available to people. It could provide these connections. And so it was viewed as a passthrough. And it was not viewed as having any responsibility for gate keepk like you do at the atlantic. You actually fact check, you fact check people. I know that because ive written pieces for you and you, you know, have standards that you try to apply. But the idea originally behind the internet and then the development of the social media platform was that they were like, you know, just passthroughs. So they shouldnt be held responsible. Things should just flow through. Jeffrey that was an economic decision. Sec. Clinton partly, but it was also out of this techno optimist perspective. Like, you know, theyre not a publisher, theyre more like a utility. People push their electrons down. We dont know where theyre going to end up. Is it for a Nuclear Power plant or to turn on your toaster, but were going to allow them to have that lack of accountability. No liability for what was published. Jeffrey but they control the algorithm. Sec. Clinton they control everything. Jeffrey and the algorithms accentuate the negative. Thats not sec. Clinton but i dont think certainly most people, probably the tech leaders themselves understood that. But i dont think policymakers, the public, the press, i dont think most people understood that in the late 1990s, early on. That the algorithms would in effect be determining what you watched and therefore what ads you would be subjected to. I think, you know, once it turned into an addriven, rather than subscription, it could have been subscription, but that was not the choice made. And now we are at the brink of yet even more manipulation through Artificial Intelligence and, you know, generative Artificial Intelligence. So i think that everybodys doubling down. Now, they come to washington and they say, oh, please, please, stop us from doing anything bad, you know. [laughter] govern us. Put guardrails up. And then they go back to urging their engineers to come up with even more ways to get more people to spend more time through their algorithms on the site. And i think the loneliness piece of this is that rather than the dream of interconnectivity, it has caused disruptions, divisiveness and even destruction because of the manipulation. Not only by the Tech Companies themselves, but increasingly by leaders who use it. You know, i mentioned to you that maria, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the great journalist from the philippines, is visiting us at columbia where im now teaching a Foreign PolicyDecision Making course. And she was one of the first people who understood how leaders were beginning to manipulate the algorithms. Because if you pour enough content, you know, into a site, the algorithms pick it up. They see, oh, people looking at that, lets get more of it. How much faster can we get it . And so if youre in myanmar and youre in the military in myanmar and you want to drive the rohingya people out, you began using social media. If youre in the philippines where 97 of people in the philippines used facebook, that was their major news source, but also their major, you know, ability to connect, then you get a dictator like duarte and others who use that. So this is now a serious threat to international relations, to national stability, to the kind of impact on individuals that we were talking about earlier, and we seem incapable of really coming together to do something about it. Jeffrey stay on this tech business issue for a second. Because a lot of people would say, especially in that side of the coin, you know, populism, nastiness, misinformation existed before facebook and the internet. I mean, obviously in populous movements, theyre in American History. Theres a counterargument that said that trumpism could not possibly exist without the alge rythic help of these companies. How do you algorithmic help of these companies. How do you see that role . Sec. Clinton well, youre right. Human nature being what it is, it existed for a very long time. But never with the amplification and the acceleration of lies and misinformation and disinformation that we have today. This is so much more sophisticated by a factor of, you know, so high i cant imagine. So i dont think we can say tech changed human nature. But tech went right to jeffrey uncovered human nature . Sec. Clinton well, played to that part of human nature that is most subject to fear and anger and hate. Because it was good business. I mean, a lot of these guys dont have a political agenda or if they have a political agenda, they will say, oh, yeah, you know, we want, you know, more people to have better lives and they have a kind of optimistic leftleaning sort of analysis. But their activities are driving more and more people into acting on their fears, acting on disinformation, than was ever possible before. You know, rwanda led to a genocide almas ker because genocidal massacre because of radio. The balkan war, setting serbs and croads against Bosnian Muslims was started by the radio. Look at the damage it did. But now we can set people against one another so much more easily and with very little accountability. And i think that is very much the challenge we face in trying to figure out, if we can, put at least part of the genie back in the bottle and the only group in the world thats done that is the European Union. With their attempt to regulate technology. Jeffrey but European Union countries have culturally have a dinner understanding of different understandings of censorship and free speech than we do. So the question is, when does putting the genie back in the bottle cross over a line into censorship . Sec. Clinton theres never been protection for certain forms of speech. You know that. Because youve been a journalist for so long. I know that because im a recovering lawyer and i remember [laughter] you know, some of those cases. So its a false charge that trying to regulate harmful, damaging speech is a violation of free speech. Because remember, you know, the companies themselves can do whatever they want to do to regulate speech. You know, you could have a site which says, you know, i for one am never going to let the the algorithm is going to kick out the name trump. Its never going to appear. Thats a business decision. Thats their right to do that. Not that they would. They make decisions about pornography, theyre getting further and further behind in trying to prevent children from accessing that. But they try. But when youve got bad actors saying that the government cannot try to correct false information about things like vaccines, because that would, quote, violate free speech, thats a total misunderstanding of the whole cannon of free speech law. So do you have to be careful . Of course you have to be careful. But that doesnt mean it cant be done. And one of the arguments that i have made for quit