Not the toughest crowd but we will try to keep it lively. Thank you very much for being here and youre a repeat visitor to the atlantic festival so i appreciate that. If you do six more times you get a free latt the e. You get a before card. Sign me up already. Get to the punch card but i we want to talk about some very serious things and i want to start with very serious and sad thing, the news this morning that your friend and colleague senator feinstein has passed. You are very you were very close with her and im sure everybody will be interested in hearing atl little of your recollection of working with her and being friends with her. Well, i was, yes a friend and great admirer of dianne feinstein. First in california, first in San Francisco, then california and obviously in our country. I just i saw her as 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 always looking for where the Common Ground can be found and inhabited and she was absolutely fearless but also very open and she was the primary sponsor of the assault weapons ban back in 94 in large measure because of the traumatic experience she had discovering her colleague on the San Francisco city council, harvey milk murdered and i will never forget thehe speech she gave in favor of the assault weapons ban when she talked about what it is like to see someone who has been grievously and turned out to be fatally shot and she was trying to best she could with her literally with her fingers in the bullet holes to try to stop the bleeding. She was brave, she was honorable, she was 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 wasen determined to do a sty of what had happened during the iraq war, during war on terrorism, waterboarding, other kinds of abuses, whether they had been t directly or indirect, you know, ordered or had a blind eye turned towards them and she fought everybody about that. She fought fellow senators, she fought the obama administration, she fought everybody and she came out with a huge thousands of pages of reports later turned into a movie starring adam driver. But she was undeterred because she believed so strongly that you had to face the truth about whether it wasel assault weapons or, you know, behavior that we werent proud of. So she was a great colleague of mine. I will tell you one final story, so after the after the 08 primary, then senator obama called and asked if i would meet with him but could we go somewhere that wouldnt draw a lot of attention. Thats going to be hard and we thought, i called dianne, dianne, can barack and i meet at your house and she said, sure, of course, you can. And, you know, i had total trust in her. I literally got down in the backseat of the car leaving my house so that nobody would know i was coming. Obama put a press lid on as you might remember and told his press that he wasnt going anywhere and then we spent a couple of hours in her living room talking about, you neglect, the campaign, about what i would do to support him, what he saw as the challenges in the general election, the kind of conversation that led to, you know, our working closely together, him asking me to be secretary of state and dianne left us alone except every so often popping in asking if we wanted more chardonnay. So i will miss her a lot. She was she was a very special person. So it was the chardonnay summit that led to you being secretary of state. The chardonnay summit. Pretty big job. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. We wanted to talk today about something that youve written about for the atlantic and the interesting thing about this subject is, i mean, its become truism that politics is whattream from culture and we are learning more and more is that culture itself is downstream from technological disruption and psychiatry and theology and a whole bunch of other things and and so you wrote this the piece foror us recently the headline weaponization of loneliness, the name of the session, in fact, and and in it you are trying to explore what are the deeper causes of the polarization that we the general on happiness that isnt always supported by a set of facts, and i was wonderingg maybe you could walk us through a little bit how you started thinking about loneliness itemization technology and all of these things and how they they lead to the dysfunction that we we all feel are experiencing . Thats a wonderful set of questions, jeffrey, and really for me i started thinking about this many years ago. , you know, theres been a lot of commentary about whats happening to americans, whats happening to our society, you know, long before trump showed up, even before the internet and social media where people were, you know, feeling dissatisfied somewhat unward, unsettled by the pace of change, little did we know how much faster it would move and i wrote a book back in the 90s, it takes a village. That was ewe . That was me. I didnt get briefed. Sorry. Well, i will send you briefings next time. Thank you. I am coming back for the latte. Yes. I wrote that book in part because of what i saw politically primarily but also culturally where people were having challenges, figuring out how do we raise our children, how do we form families, how do we combine work and family, particular issue for women like me and so when i wrote that book there was a lot of talk about lets call it meaning in life, purpose in life, usefulness in life and it was something that i spent a lot of time pondering because there wasnt any easy answer to it and than 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 societies that, you know, really focused on quality of life issues and where people were frankly, you know, more satisfied with how they were organized and living. So fastforward, we began to see the disruption which initially was thrilling, the technological disruption, the rise of social media, i mean, it was so exciting to be in connection with people anywhere in the world, with literally, you know, a flick of a phone, your phone had the Computing Power of a mainframe computer, you know, 20 years before. Theres just so much that was very thrilling about the world we could inhabit and, of course, a lot of the best commentary about it was how it was going to bring us together, cross lines, bridge divisions and that was something we saw and we were focused on but then there was the dark underbelly and how technology was being manipulated and being used, you know, when, you know, barack obama ran for president in 08 he really pioneered bringing technology on behalf of his campaign and it was 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 gate, uprising, uprising against, you know, women or outsiders of any kind, talking about, you know, the way that people who gamed all the time were behaving and how that unfortunately spilled into the socalled real world. So we were beginning to see some indicators and running through this was psychological operations which really formed the basis for a lot of the Technological Developments in propaganda and act of measures, not just by the russians, Cambridge Analytic but others. We were watching in realtime the kindt of changing of the impact of technology in ways that i certainly hadad not foreseen, dd not understand. And then we began to get evidence from scientists, medical doctors, particularly pediatricians, psychologists and others that they were beginning to see very clear impact from screen time but not just screen time, what people were doing on these screens and the American Academy of pediatrics came out some years ago which got very little attention but came out and said based on what we are seeing no child under 2 should have access to a screen. They have since revised that to a higher and higher age because r we are learning how screens, w technology, how the addiction to technology literally changes the way your brain develops. So there was a beginning of a commentary, sounding the alarm about all of this and then we began to get evidence about increases in anxiety, depression, eating disorders particularly among young women but also young men as well and then covid hit. And covid was a mass exercise of 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 vivik mercy put out a very thoughtful report talking about how loneliness is a both physical and Mental Health risk. We new have evidence that loneliness exacerbates conditions of 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 toward recognizing something kind of oldfashioned 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 and i talk to the Surgeon General after the report came out and he said he was particularly concerned about young women and i said, so whats the difference between young women and young men, he said i we dont know for sure but our speculation, our hypothesis 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 youre gaming whereas young women are often alone, scrolling, seeing things that make them feel bad about themselves, finding out they were left out, being pressured to engage in activities like sending pictures of themselves that are really fraught with all of dangers and risks. So i thought that was a really interesting insight because if you can actually form a Real Community online, maybe you can avoid some of these con sec cons but not too often they are in a lonely place. Last thing i would say in the article i talk about how steve bannon who was in the gaming this is where i want to go to. [laughter] surprisingly i wanted to go to steve bannon. [laughter] well, better you than me is all i have to say. Yeah. I didnt make you write it. But i did put that in the article because bannon was in gaming originally. He had an insight. He had an insight but he was in the industry for a while. Right. And his insight was that all these young men were seeking something. They were engaged, they were, you know, incredibly devoted toe their gaming and that they could be weponized, they could be used because oftentimes their emotions were so raw, yelling and screaming at their screens and yelling and screaming with the guys theyre with, instead of doing in playingfield, in whatever room, they can be reached individually and 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 weponized it for political purposes. Roll back just for one minute to the the founding techno optimist of social media. So you dye 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 well, a, was that Just Marketing ultimately or did they genuinely believe this was 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 . Well, i 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 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 had been a couple of things, maybe, you know, 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 gatekeeping like you do at the atlantic. You have to factcheck people, i know thatow because ive written pieces for you and, you know, have standards that you try to apply. But the idea originally behind the internet and the development of the social media forms was that they were like, you know, just passthrows and they shouldnt be held responsible. That was an economic decision. Part an economic decision but out of techno optimist perspective. You know, theyre not a publisher. Theyre more like a utility. People push their electrons down, we dont know exactly where the electrons are going to end up, is it for a Nuclear Power plant or turn on your toaster but we are going to allow them to have that lack of accountability. No liability for what was hepublished. But they control the algorithm. They control everything. And the algorithms perpetuate the negative. I dont think people certainly,y, most people, probay the tech leaders themselves thes understood that. Right. But i dont think policymakers, the public, the press, i dont think most people understood that in late 90s, that the algorithms 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 ad driven 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 and, you know, generative Artificial Intelligence. So i think that everybody is doubling down. They come to washington and they say, oh, please, please stop us from doing anything bad, you know, govern us, put guardrails up and they go back to urging their engineers to come up with more ways to make more people spend more time through algorithms on the sites. 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 owit. I mentioned to you ma maria reza, the noble peace prize winner, great journalists from the philippines is visiting us at colombia where im teaching Foreign PolicyDecision Making course and she was one of the first people to understood how leaders were beginning to manipulate the algorithms. If you pour enough content, you know, into a site, the algorithms pick it up. They see, people are looking at that. Lets get more of it. How much faster can we get it . And if you were in myanmar and you want to drive the people out, you begin to use social media. If you are in the philippines where 91 of people in the philippines use facebook, that was their major news source but also their t major ability to connect,en then you get a dictar like duarte and others who use that. So this is now a a serious threat to, you know, 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 aboutto it. Lets stay on this tech business issue forld a second because a lot of people would the coin, you know, populism, nastiness, misinformation existed before facebook and the internet. Obviously populist o movements throughout American History. Theres a counterargument that says that trumpism could not possibly exist without the algorithm from the companies. How do you question the role of technology, the technologies in the rise of populism and trumpism . Well, youre right. Human nature being what it is, it has existed for a very long time but never with the amplification and the acceleration of lies and misinformation and disinformation that weon have today. Is so much more sophisticated by, you know, factor of, you know, so high i cant imagine. So i dont think we can say tech changed human nature but tech the went right to the human nature. 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, we want, you know, more people to have better lives and they have 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. You know, rwanda led to massacre because of radio. The balkan war against muslims was set by the radio and 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 that we face in trying to figure out chif 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. But European Union countries culturally have a different understanding of censorship and free speech than we do. The question is when does putting the genie back into the battle cross to censorship . Theres never been protection for certain forms of speech, you know that because youve been a journalist and i know that because im a recovering lawyer and i remember some of those i cases. [laughter] its a false charge that trying to regulate harmful damaging speech is a violation of free speech because, remember, you know, the companie