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TikTok, Huawei, and the US-China tech arms race
“When the Chinese get good at something, all of the sudden, the United States says, ‘This is a national security risk.’”
That’s what Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group, argued on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer while discussing the increasingly hostile geopolitical environment between the two superpowers.
Threads, Twitter, & the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Hi, I'm Jon Lieber, and this is US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta last week announced the launch of Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter that reportedly already has reached a hundred million signups, a huge number in just a week. This long-awaited move by. One of the kings of social media could dramatically alter the media environment heading into the 2024 election.
Twitter is enormously popular and important in the political and media world in the US, but has increasingly become a source of consternation and stress for highly engaged political users, particularly those on the left, after the takeover of the platform by Elon Musk, who has pursued what has looked at times like a bizarre and at least partially ideological strategy to upend Twitter's content moderation rules, and in his personal feed, highlighted tweets that troll liberals and promote conspiracy theories. Other competitors to Twitter, like Mastodon or Bluesky, have not achieved mass reach necessary to pose a serious threat to Twitter's dominance of the online media ecosystem, while others like Truth Social remain niche corners of the Internet.
Other outlets like Telegram have grown in importance, but do not provide the open platform of the more dominant social media apps. All of these trends point to the increased atomization of the media landscape globally. In the last 50 years, the US has moved from three dominant national broadcast news networks to a patchwork of increasingly fragmented social media sites with very little gatekeeping and strong, and in some cases partisan, ideological communities.
The launch of a viable competitor to Twitter will accelerate this trend. Meta's content moderation will build off what is learned from managing Instagram and Facebook. This could make it more than just a convening site for people interested in talking about sports and politics, and instead give it a unique appeal for political liberals in the US who don't like where Twitter is going.
That's not to say that conservatives won't be found there too. Even in the height of their concerns about Twitter censoring conservative speech, major conservative figures and writers did quite well on the platform, expanding their reach even as they said they were being stifled. A more fractured online information environment will be even more difficult to moderate than a unified one and provides more avenues for echo chambers and allow politicians to more aggressively micro-target their messages and could render it much more difficult to restrict the spread of disinformation in the 2024 election, especially if Twitter and Threads become the domains of the political right and left, respectively, and if their corporate owners pursue different content moderation policies.
We'd also expect campaigns to start taking advantage of this fractured media landscape, as they have already, targeting different messages to the different audiences on their different channels, making it much more difficult to see what's actually happening on these campaigns as their messages go to increasingly smaller corners of the Internet.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
Hard Numbers: Strong Threads, Italian ‘Succession,’ Democracy dwindles in Hong Kong, and the Romanian port keeping the world in grain
53: Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former PM and richest man, died last month without leaving instructions for how his $7.6 billion fortune should be distributed throughout his family. Berlusconi never publicly declared a successor to his business empire spanning real estate, television, cinema, and sports, leaving his two eldest children to jointly own 53%. “Succession” season 5 anyone?
88: In another hit to democratic freedom in Hong Kong, its legislature voted to overhaul district-level elections, reducing the number of directly elected officials from 452 to 88. This decision effectively eliminates the pro-democracy faction of the government, which in the last election, humiliated the pro-Beijing camp, winning 90% of the seats.
27 million: The Romanian port of Constanta is preparing to handle 27 million tons of Ukrainian grain as the 2023 harvest begins. That’s more than double the amount it shipped annually before the Ukraine war, and it’s struggling to accommodate the influx in addition to Romania’s own grain exports.Podcast: Why Scott Galloway is “cautiously optimistic” about AI - but not TikTok or Meta
Listen: AI is both exciting and scary these days. It could solve big challenges but also lead to political chaos and authoritarian surveillance. On the GZERO World podcast, tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway warns that AI-powered social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok can be used for espionage and propaganda, potentially manipulating younger generations without them even realizing it. However, generative AI's potential to organize vast stores of data could revolutionize traditional search engines and provide huge value in unstructured data sets, particularly in healthcare and defense scenario planning.
Galloway, well-known as the co-host of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and host of The Prof G Pod, also expresses concern about the extreme political polarization in the US exacerbated by social media and suggests solutions like mandatory national service, more places for young people to gather, and greater accountability for social media companies. Additionally, Galloway warns about the negative economic consequences of population decline and calls for a more open immigration policy.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.TRANSCRIPT: Why Scott Galloway is “cautiously optimistic” about AI - but not TikTok or Meta
Scott Galloway:
It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue we're rotting from the inside out. Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside.
Ian Bremmer:
Hello And welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and on today's episode, we're in the middle of an AI explosion. Like every emerging technology from nuclear fission to the internet, there's a lot to be excited by, but also a lot to fear. Tools like ChatGPT represent an exciting new era of generative AI, that is technology that can create human-like text, images, and video content, once thought to be uniquely a human skill. But even their most ardent evangelists admit that these tools can also be used for evil. And I'll talk about all that. Some of the biggest text stories of the year so far with Scott Galloway, tech expert and NYU business School professor. Let's get to it.
Announcer 3:
The GZERO World podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Something's often missing in the way we talk about the climate crisis, and that's the issue of justice and equity. On season three of Heat of the Moment, a podcast from Foreign Policy in partnership with the Climate Investment Funds, host, John D. Sutter, explores the concept of a just transition away from fossil fuels and hopefully towards a net-zero future. Listen to season three of Heat of the Moment: A Just Transition wherever you get your podcasts.
Ian Bremmer:
Scott Galloway, Good to see you. Glad to have you here.
Scott Galloway:
Thanks, Ian. It's always good to be with you.
Ian Bremmer:
I want to start with an issue that has been increasingly both exciting me and worrying me, which is the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Where are you on the panic versus elation scale?
Scott Galloway:
I'm more sort of somewhere around a six or a seven, and that is, I'm cautiously optimistic. If you look at any major breakthrough in technology, we kind of go through the same cycle, and that is we immediately go to job losses, or we go to a concern around job losses. And we're seeing that here. The majority of the articles are around how many thousands or millions of jobs are going to be lost in the services sector or in kind of the information, like this could do to manufacturing or this could do the information economy, what robotics did into manufacturing is kind of the general consensus of the media.
And what you see throughout history is every major technological innovation usually has a certain amount of pain and dislocation, but over time, creates a lot more jobs than it destroys. I mean, three out of five people in America used to get their living from agriculture, and we essentially destroyed all of those jobs with technology, but we created a ton of new ones. So I believe we're going through the cycle where we're more fearful than hopeful, but I actually think it's going to create a lot more jobs and I think it's exciting. I think it's going to have huge impacts specifically around healthcare.
Ian Bremmer:
So let's explain to the audience for a moment Chat GPT, OpenAI. What is it? Why is it such an extraordinary transformative technology?
Scott Galloway:
So it's sort of a language prediction engine that looks at language and analyzes it to the extent that it can predict the next word, if you will. It doesn't think or come up with answers. It comes up with words. So if you say, what is the color of the night sky? It looks at its dataset and figures out that the best answer is it'll say black. And it can also even start to figure out tone in the sense that it figures out what words the relationship between them, and recognizes words that are posed to inquiry. So it's sort of a prediction engine and ChatGPT is kind of the first public product from OpenAI, a group that was formed at least initially as an organization that would attempt to be mindful of the problems that AI would produce. But AI's been around a long time. AI is in customer call centers, it's in Netflix, it's in the tech stack and Meta, but this seems to have encapsulated a lot of the promise and energy and has created, if you will, an arms race all of a sudden.
Ian Bremmer:
So which are the companies that you think or the sectors that you think are so far most effectively able to grab onto these new opportunities?
Scott Galloway:
Well, it could take search to the new level. If you think about Google, search really hasn't innovated in about 20 years. The only thing that's changed about search is that there's more and more ads that are less and less obvious, or less and less transparent that they're ads. Remember when you initially did a Google search 20 years ago and there were two blue shaded first returns that said ad. Now they've taken those shades away and sometimes 60, 70% of the first page, the actual results in the right rail are not necessarily a place that takes you to the best answer, but it takes you to a place that Google can further monetize and their incentives have made them very disruptable because what ChatGPT and sort of AI driven or language structure driven search does, it says, okay, rather than offering you dozens and dozens of answers that might be somewhere between 30 and 70% accurate, we think we can give you one that's sort of 60 to 80% accurate.
And I mean Google, it's a classic innovator's dilemma, and Google had this technology, Google developed a lot of it but doesn't want to undermine or disrupt an unbelievable $150 billion toll booth business model and give people the best answer. They want to give them a lot of answers. So I think the first kind of industry to be disrupted, if you will, will be search. Now whether or not it holds the same promise, I think it holds huge promise around unstructured data sets to feed in all of your health records and then start making interesting predictions or things you should be at least cognizant of in your own health. But it would strike me that it has huge applications around technology and disrupting traditional players. And then we're probably going to see all sorts of applications in healthcare. I also wonder what it means for our defense department in terms of scenario planning, but that's more your bailiwick.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, I can see also, I mean if you want to make sure that you're making tools off of this, you don't just want to pivot towards giving someone the best answer. You'd also like to give them the best answer that also supports your sponsored ad buyer. So in other words, ChatGPT plus making sure that you're going to sites that would be reflected in favor of that company.
Scott Galloway:
Well, right away, if you want to talk sort of short term chess here, it appears that Google is probably going to shed somewhere between a hundred billion and a half a trillion dollars and leak it to Microsoft. Microsoft's $1 billion 2019 investment in OpenAI. And then their ability to incorporate it more quickly into the Bing search engine, although we haven't really seen what it can do. It's likely that Bing's share is going to go from whatever it is now, 5 or 6% to potentially 20%. I mean, I don't know about you, but when there's BingGPT or Bing powered by AI, I'm going to try it and I haven't been on Bing in years. And if Microsoft can be a formidable player in search, you're going to see it go well above $2 trillion, which it hit for the first time in a while. So it feels as if the biggest short-term tactical loser right now is Google and the biggest winner is Microsoft.
But this has inspired in arms race, the likes of which we haven't seen. The cycle time here is so fast. Think about Netflix. Netflix had the field to themselves for 10 years and then it got very crowded very fast. Take that entire competitive process and shrink it down to about 10 weeks and that's happened here. But you can expect Meta, Apple, Amazon, and thousands of companies to all of a sudden start spending a lot of time talking about how AI is improving the quality of their offering. It's an arms race right now. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I saw Salesforce announcements earlier this week. Of course you saw Buzzfeed announce that they're going to be providing some level of support from GPT, it had boosted their stock. I mean, how much of this is we just want to make an announcement and get a bump? And how much of this do you think are structural changes to business models? Again, on search, it strikes me as if that really works, it's a structural change in the business model. But I mean there's got to be a lot of hype around this too. I mean, everybody now just saying I want to be in on it.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah. And I'm usually the one that feels like technology has a tendency, that a lot of times the performance doesn't catch up to the promise. I felt that way about wearables, VR, AR, the Metaverse, Web 3. I'm on record as saying that I thought these things were kind of head fakes, that there wasn't going to be a lot of there there. The last time I was this excited about a technology was Voice. I still think Voice is an unbelievable technology and it's going to transform the way we live our lives, if you will. This feels like there's some real beef there. I don't know about you, but I find myself spending a lot of time. We spoke off mic, I'm writing a book right now and I'm using ChatGPT for research. If I want to find the compound annual growth rate of the Dow versus the DAX or something, it does give you what feels like pretty solid information pretty quickly.
So I think this is going to seep in and have more ... I mean, it's the fastest 0 to 5 million users in history. It was something like 150 days for Spotify, a 100 from Instagram, it took ChatGPT 5 days. It does feel like there's going to be a ton of interesting apps. My guess is like most technologies that are successful, we won't anticipate, we'll overestimate where it'll be successful and underestimate and aren't even imagining where it might actually tap in. But this has got so much capital coming forward, and keep in mind the hype can turn into the reality because the hype creates cheap capital where you can pull the future forward, and actually find interesting innovations because you can throw so much human and financial capital at the problem.
Ian Bremmer:
Now Google is of course rolling out a similar GPT type technology inside their search. And I mean, they had a stumble at the outset because it responded badly to a demonstrating question, but that'll be forgotten quickly. What struck me as interesting is this is of course a more advanced version of the same technology that that Google engineer had some sort of a relationship with and said, "Google has developed sentient intelligence" just a matter of months ago. There are a lot of people that are going to have relationships with these bots. There are a lot of people that are going to have a hard time differentiating between what is a human being and what is the latest version of GPT. And I wonder what that makes you think.
Scott Galloway:
Well, we used a term before the best answer, and the problem is right now, and it doesn't take long. You see the potential pretty quickly if you use ChatGPT or DALL-E for very long and there's a lot of upside. But you can also imagine asking ChatGPT to come up with 20 myths or conspiracy theories around vaccines in the voice of a credible doctor. And then testing those conspiracy theories on social to see which gets the most traction, picking the two or three that spread the fastest, pouring some fuel behind them, weaponizing a bunch of bots. I mean, this does feel like it's an engine room for misinformation and the notion, and it gets a lot of stuff wrong. So you can see it could go very bad places very fast. And what's interesting about ...
I mean, a few interesting things about OpenAI. OpenAI was initially funded to try and serve as a guardian or a governor or a shepherd or a kind of safety council or guardrails for what a lot of people felt was a technology that could have a lot of negative externalities. And then quite frankly Ian, and I know this sounds cynical, they smelled money and they converted to a for-profit. I mean, I don't think any of the initial funding or formation of OpenAI anticipated that it would be a point of differentiation for Bing after a $10 billion investment. I don't think that's why it was initially formed.
The other thing is that was really interesting is Sam Altman, who's a very bright guy and is now the CEO of ChatGPT immediately partnered up with Microsoft. And I think that what he sees as the following, that AI is going to be very difficult to establish any sort of competitive differentiation or long-term advantage. That AI, if you will, will be used to create an equivalence across different AI chat bots. And so he immediately said we need to reverse integrate and find a partner with very deep processing power. Supposedly each question or query takes a few cents in processing power, which is about seven times what a Google query takes, and then also forward integrate into an application that already has a mature business model. And that is Bing and search.
So I think Sam looked around and said it's about to get very crowded, very competitive, very fast, and we need to sprint and partner with someone that has deep cloud processing and also has a front end on it right away. And that just gives you a sense for I think, how competitive this is going to get. I think there's going to be a lot of different chatbots and I wonder how differentiated they're going to be.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, well, I mean one is of course if your data set isn't great. I mean Google's saying that their chat bot is working off of current affairs as well, and Google has incredible amounts of data. Microsoft has massive cloud and processing power. I mean both of those things strike me as significant barriers to entry to small startups.
Scott Galloway:
Well, you're zeroing on the correct point and that is that the people who might end up having the rare earth material here are the people who have control and produce really robust data sets. I mean, as much as I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and Twitter, you wonder if Twitter, if someone were to say to me that Elon Musk got his $45 billion back, that somehow we recovered that $45 billion equity investment, which has been vaporized as of now. I would guess that a artificial intelligence engine found a way to take the unstructured dataset that we produce every day in terms of mood, emotion, what we're talking about, what news is trending, and that he licensed it and got huge dollars for that dataset that we produce every day on Twitter.
So whether it's health information, weather information, sports information, there are going to be a ton of companies that pop up that do nothing but collect structure and feed data sets into these beasts that will have insatiable appetites. I mean, it's kind of the difference between light crude and Texas West Intermediate. I think the real value here will be the people who control the most interesting and robust data sets.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, I mean, given the real time connectivity that so many people around the planet have on social media, I mean you could imagine that the fastest way to find out about an emerging new pandemic or even your latest flu wave would be much more effective through a dataset like that, which so far has been relatively unmined for that scientific purpose at least and monetizable.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah, it just reminded me, and it's a weird analogy, but Secretary Buttigieg talking about, they asked him what infrastructure investment he was most excited about and he said, smart sewers, you put sensors in sewers, and they can tell when COVID is spiking in an area. Could Twitter be a smart sewer? And that is, could it wade through all of the material and waste and find out interesting things around what's trending, where people are starting to get angry, where people are starting to become ... When there's violence across nations, will you be able to get to a point where you can predict that with greater accuracy based on the way people are behaving and the sentiment and the language they're using on Twitter?
Ian Bremmer:
So I have to go to on a slight angle here, as a political scientist. In your view, does that make it imperative that TikTok is banned in the United States?
Scott Galloway:
I think of just TikTok as the ultimate propaganda tool. I think Facebook and Meta are the ultimate espionage tool, and I think they've actually ... I would bet, my thesis is the reason there's been absolutely no regulation of Facebook is I would bet, and I'm curious if you believe this as well, that our security apparatus works pretty closely with Meta and there's sort of a behind the closed doors deal that we will continue to help you hunt down bad guys. I mean Meta is the ultimate espionage tool. It not only knows where you are, what you're doing, but who your relationships are and how you interact with them. The GRU, the Mossad, the NSA couldn't have thought of that in their wildest dreams. I think TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool. Young people would now rather have TikTok than almost all other major media. They're on it. So I think the CCP would be stupid. If I take the body of your content and a lot of your stuff's on TikTok Ian, some of it's very pro-America, pro West.
Ian Bremmer:
I hope it's not.
Scott Galloway:
It's there. You're there boss. But some of what you say is very pro West and optimistic. Some of what you say highlights the many issues we have in the West. I think the CCP would be dumb not to put their thumbs on the scale of content slowly but surely that sheds the West in a poor light. And my fear is slowly but surely without even knowing it, the best sting, remember the movie, The Sting with Robert Redford, Paul Newman?
Ian Bremmer:
Sure.
Scott Galloway:
The best sting is the con or the mark that never knows they were conned. And I worry, we don't even know we're being conned right now because I think slowly but surely, we're raising a generation of civic, business, nonprofit and military leaders that every day just feel a little bit worse about America. And I think you see it in our surveys. People think the economy is really bad when it's not. People don't want to acknowledge the progress we've made around everything from systemic racism to eliminating infectious diseases. There just doesn't seem to be any appetite to acknowledge any of it. And I wonder if it's slowly but surely going to get worse at the hands of TikTok.
Ian Bremmer:
I agree with the problem. I will say that on the, people feel the economy's doing badly, that's been a structural problem in the United States for a long term. The data at least doesn't bear out that Americans are feeling much worse about it than they did 20 years ago, 40 years ago. But your broader point that this is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes or certainly can be used for the purposes that would be beneficial to whoever happens to own the platform, whether those are commercial or non-commercial. I think that's a very real issue indeed.
And for decades, the biggest issue in terms of digital inequality was about the digital divide. Who are the people that are online and offline? And there are a lot of people that just don't have access to information. Increasingly what you and I are talking about today is it's less about the digital divide. It's the people that are online that believe things that aren't true, they're being fed disinformation, and just how much this can be accelerated and weaponized in this environment of generative AI by these social media platforms strikes me as an unsustainable trajectory.
Scott Galloway:
In my book, Adrift: America in 100 Charts, naked plug, people ask me, "What's the biggest threat to America?" And I say, I would argue that geopolitically, and I may even be just parroting your words here, that it's hard to imagine a time when we were stronger. We're food independent, relatively speaking, we're food independent. We're energy independent. No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines. Smartest, brightest people in the world all still want to come here. We have an economy right now that is growing again, our inflation is bad, but it's less bad than anywhere else in the world. It's like if you want to talk about what's bad about America, I think you have to show up with, where would you rather be? In China where the equivalent of the Dow has been cut in half? In Europe, which has low growth? And I mean, who exactly is doing half as well as we are or who's doing less bad than we are right now.
But the problem is the horror movie, if America's a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. 54% of Democrats are worried that kid's going to marry a Republican. I was very discouraged watching the State of the Union just how angry we are at each other. These are people who are elected representatives, all Americans, many of them similar backgrounds, all doing the same job. They work together, they live close to each other, they go to cocktail parties with each other, and they scream at each other in the middle of the meeting. It just shocks me, the lack of camaraderie, the lack of patriotism, the lack of connective tissue. We're rotting from the inside out. Externally, I would argue we've never been this strong, but we're tearing each other apart from the inside. And I do think social media and media's cycle time that leads to catastrophizing everything gives us the sense that things are much worse than they are. And it's not another nation's fault. It's your neighbor's fault.
Ian Bremmer:
So what do you think the beginnings of any solution might be? Because the social media companies are clearly not self-regulating in a direction that would lead to resolving this problem?
Scott Galloway:
Well, I'm a fan of antitrust. I think if you had more competition, that eventually a social media company would raise their hand and say, "We're going to age gate at 16. There's no reason to have kids on social media." And that P&G and Unilever would like that, that we're going to be more stringent about misinformation and we're going to stop pretending and using the First Amendment as some sort of blanket coverage to not do anything. And we're going to fact check things just as traditional media companies do. And they claim it's too complex. It's not. This isn't an issue of possibility, it's an issue of profitability, it would take their profits down, it would make them legally liable, have exemptions or pull out some 230 around election misinformation or health misinformation, break them up, more competition. But also, I don't think this gets a lot better until someone, a key executive at a big tech company is criminally charged and walked off. We can't come up with fines that are big enough. So the algebra of deterrents here is just not in place.
And then on a broader level, from a national scale, I think we need mandatory national service. I think we need to get young people in the same uniform again, so they see each other's Americans not as people of different sexual orientations or different political parties. I think we need more third places so people can get together, young people can get together and establish mentorships, establish romantic relationships. The fundamental element of any society is relationships, and we aren't building enough of them because people are in their homes or on their devices, more vocational programming to level up men who are becoming economically and emotionally unviable at a young age. Germany, 50% of its populace has some sort of vocational certification .in the US, it's 5%. In the UK, 12% of all job titles on LinkedIn are apprentice. Here in the US, it's 3%. So a massive investment in young people that makes them more optimistic about the future, shared collective experiences and the service of our nation and holding our media complex, specifically social media, more accountable for the damage they're doing.
Ian Bremmer:
So is it fair to say, I mean that both the positive developments that we're seeing in the United States in terms of its geopolitical, its economic strength are being driven, will be driven very strongly by new changes in AI. But also all of the negative things that you just suggested that are deep problems inside the United States, especially when we talk about relationships between people, that's also one of the biggest challenges that will be exacerbated by the rollout of these new AI tools?
Scott Galloway:
Anytime you take one source or material or a piece of information and you convert it into something that is more valuable, whether it's petroleum, whether it's oil into petroleum, whether it's a attention into ads. My observation is anytime you have an arbitrage, there's emissions and externalities and we decided to regulate the emissions around carbon emissions. I mean, we might have been a little bit late, it might not go as far as we should, but we have emission standards. We have an act to try and reduce carbon. When we have translated or arbitraged attention to Nissan ads, it's created a very negative externality and that is keep people's attention. I mean, think about the cadence of news. If we could only have one headline news story, the last century, it probably, I would bet would be the West turns back tyranny. If we had to pick one headline for the last a 100 years, if we had to pick one headline for the last 50 years, I would argue it would be unprecedented historic prosperity led by China and the US.
I would think you would have to have positive headlines. But because we have a headline every three seconds to try and maintain our attention, we go to catastrophizing because that's what keeps our attention. But we don't seem to want to have the same type of regulation or standards to control or recognize these emissions. Now the next question is what emissions will emerge from the arbitrage from these data sets to money with artificial intelligence? And one thing we know that we're really bad at, we know or we can be fairly confident in the short term, there'll be a lot of job dislocation, but like every other technology, it will create more jobs than it replaces or that it destroys.
The question is what do we do with those people in the short term? That's what we're really bad at, right Ian? We're really bad at helping retrain and support through the transition the people that get left behind, but this will create a different flavor of noxious emissions. You just got to hope that we address it earlier. I don't know if you saw the hearings yesterday on Twitter, but it's just very discouraging and doesn't really buttress the notion that we have the skillset to regulate and control these emissions or even recognize them. Somewhere between 4 and 8% of our elected representatives have a background in engineering or technology. So I think it's a real concern. And to date, there has been absolutely no regulation around big tech. So we haven't even figured out what the emissions are.
Ian Bremmer:
And it's happening so much. It's becoming structural so much faster. I mean with the arbitrage of carbon emissions, we're late, but we've also had decades to get the joke. And you don't have decades to get the joke on the arbitrage from artificial intelligence. Frankly, you've got a couple of years. That's it. Yeah, exactly. I mean the people that you hope are going to be doing it, they're in power right now. It's a part of the problem.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah. And not only that. I'm an ageist. I don't know about you, I have a more difficult time wrapping my head around technology as I get older. And every year we continue to have the oldest elected representative body of almost any democracy. The average age of our elected representatives is 62. So I mean how many 62 year olds ... So that means for every 40 year old we have, we have an 84 year old. At one point, I think a third of all elected representatives had someone on their staff print out their emails. So are these the people to really be figuring out the legislation and the regulation for technology? We have a real dearth of domain expertise around the people who need to figure out the laws here.
Ian Bremmer:
One other thing I wanted to discuss, a topic that's on your mind a fair amount is the demographics more broadly, and I don't want to do it that way. How do I want to move to it. Let's see. Before we started the show, you mentioned as well, Scott, you want to talk about something completely different, which is that you've been fascinated recently. I mean, I've been fascinated by AI. You've been fascinated particularly by changes in demographics. Tell me what it is that you meant by that?
Scott Galloway:
We're about to go population negative. China's supposedly going to be 600 million people by the turn of the century. By the turn of the century in the US, get this, we're going to have 6 times as many people over the age of 80, and half as many kids under the age of 5, meaning the nursery schools will be like zoos with people sitting outside of them looking through fences, marveling at these creatures they don't see out in their natural habitat. And the reality our productivity peaks at about 44. The nations that have gone into population decline, Japan and Italy have seen very registered, really negative consequences on their economy. And the question is, how are we going to produce the productivity to take care of this increasingly aging workforce. In addition young people ...
Ian Bremmer:
Sounds like we need the AI faster.
Scott Galloway:
Something like that or you know what I think? At the end of the day, and I want to be clear, I got a lot of pushback on this because people equate population growth with climate change. And if you look at climate change, it's really not as much a function of population growth as it is the lifestyle and energy choices of the rich. But at the end of the day, we're going to have to create a context, more economic security, more possibilities for young people should they choose to have kids. Because essentially what's happening is people are deciding not to have kids, and my thesis is not that they don't want them, it's that they can't afford them. Kid can now cost about $350,000, and each year the wealth of youth has been cut in half, the wealth controlled by people under the age of 40 as a percentage of GDP has gone from 19% to 9%. The biggest tax deductions, mortgage, tax, interest or capital gains are taxes that old people enjoy. Who own stocks and owns their home old people. Who rents and makes their income from sweat? Young people.
So if we want to have a population that continues to be productive, and quite frankly creative, there weren't a lot of 70 plus year olds at the Grammys. The majority of Nobel Prize winners in science and economics is based on work that they did in their PhD during their doctorate. We need a country that has youth and feels good about the future and builds families. I want to be clear, the onus is not on any one group or any one gender to have babies. I don't think anyone should feel guilty. It's no one's fault, if you will. Or if it is someone's fault, it's that we haven't created the same economic opportunity that our generation had and the choices to have a family if they want. But if we go into population decline, I think we're really going to struggle as a society to maintain the productivity, the lifestyle, the money for climate change and the investments we need. I think it's a huge issue.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, one, you could still be having more because you're a robust male specimen.
Scott Galloway:
Go on.
Ian Bremmer:
So first of all, you should take some personal responsibility for this, Scott. But secondly, the demographic explosion that is still being seen around the world is mostly in the poor countries. I mean Africa is going to add another billion to 3 billion people by 2100. India is still a very positive demographic expansion. Those are poor countries, and to the extent that human capital can be harnessed, it's going to be a very positive thing for the world. It's also going to have resource stress attached to it. We're going to go from 8 billion certainly to post 10 billion over that period of time. But you're right, there's going to be shrinkage. And one big question is do the United States change? Because the US isn't just about demographics. Historically, it's also been about immigration, and yet the political drivers in the United States has been in, we don't want those people, even though a lot of those people have done some pretty extraordinary things in building the country.
Scott Galloway:
You're exactly right. It feels like immigration is the answer to a lot of this. A third of market cap in the NASDAQ is by first generation immigrants. 20% of the market cap in the NASDAQ is Indian immigrants, Microsoft, MasterCard, Adobe, all Indian immigrants. And the notion that we would take the secret sauce, we're a football team that gets the number one draft choice every year and says, no, we don't want them. I mean ...
Ian Bremmer:
MasterCard's a white guy now, by the way. The Indian guy retired. You're right. It was.
Scott Galloway:
Give it three years, give it three years, give it two bad earnings releases. Anyways. But if you think about the notion of just how crazy it is to turn away or not have much more open immigration policy, the biggest issue on people's minds is inflation. And the key component right now, the stubborn part of inflation is wage growth. And so immigration sort of would help abate that or assuage that issue.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, the biggest demographic disasters in the world right now, from a wealthy country perspective, Japan and South Korea. The Japanese absolutely refused to allow immigration to be a part of the solution, and so they've done nothing and it's getting worse. South Korea has a better trajectory in part because they've actually opened the borders.
Scott Galloway:
But hasn't that at the end of the day, and it sounds very passe, hasn't that been our secret weapon? Is that we're open to these incredibly bright, ambitious, hardworking people who are willing to quite frankly, work harder for less money than us.
Ian Bremmer:
That's Why you and I are here, obviously.
Scott Galloway:
I mean, it just feels like, again, okay, you can have every first round draft choice. No, we don't want them. We're going to demonize them. It makes absolutely no sense. And you see it in Brexit, what just a disaster that was. I'm living in London right now, amazing culture, fintech community on fire, amazing universities, and they figure out a way to manage to snatch defeat the jaws of victory with this ridiculous legislation that increases their costs and limits the markets they can sell into. I mean, it's just insane some of the decisions we and the West are making around this stuff.
Ian Bremmer:
Scott Galloway, great to have you here.
Scott Galloway:
Yeah, it's great to be with you Ian.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Well, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter. It's called GZERO Day.
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The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Something's often missing in the way we talk about the climate crisis, and that's the issue of justice and equity. On Season three of Heat of the Moment, a podcast from Foreign Policy in partnership with the Climate Investment Funds, host, John D. Sutter, explores the concept of a just transition away from fossil fuels and hopefully towards a net-zero future. Listen to season three of Heat of the Moment: A Just Transition wherever you get your podcasts.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.- Podcast: We have to control AI before it controls us, warns former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ›
- Beware AI's negative impact on our world, warns former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ›
- Ian Bremmer: the risk of AI and empowered rogue actors ›
- Podcast: The future of artificial intelligence with tech CEO Kai-Fu Lee ›
- Ian interviews Scott Galloway: the ChatGPT revolution & tech peril - GZERO Media ›
TikTok is the ultimate propaganda tool, says tech expert Scott Galloway
Social media has revolutionized the way we connect with each other, but at what cost? On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer speaks to tech expert and NYU Professor Scott Galloway, who thinks that Facebook and Meta are the ultimate espionage tools, collecting vast amounts of data that even intelligence agencies couldn't have dreamed of. He also suspects that the reason Facebook hasn't been regulated yet is that there may be some secret deal between them and the government security guys.
But when it comes to TikTok, Galloway thinks that the widely popular app, developed by a Chinese company, is the ultimate propaganda tool. He thinks the Chinese Communist Party would be dumb not to "put their finger on the scales" and adjust the content to make the West look bad. The scary thing is, we might not even know we're being played.
Galloway fears the younger generation is slowly being manipulated without knowing it, and they're feeling worse about America without realizing the progress we've made in various areas. TikTok a key culprit behind this trend.
Learn more about Galloway's eye-opening insights on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, airing on US public television stations nationwide, starting this weekend. Check local listings.
- Sen. Mitt Romney on TikTok: Shut it down ›
- Hard Numbers: Qatar gets snubbed, Croatia gets Schengen nod, Nigerians get less cash, Indiana gets tough on TikTok ›
- Hard Numbers: World Cup emissions, Russian mercs on TikTok, peak US inflation, Spanish letter bombs ›
- Graphic Truth: The world is crazy for TikTok ›
- The AI arms race begins: Scott Galloway’s optimism & warnings - GZERO Media ›
- Ian interviews Scott Galloway: the ChatGPT revolution & tech peril - GZERO Media ›
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Hard Numbers: Meta’s mess, Bangladesh’s bailout, Africa’s floods, China’s gender gap
11,000: There’s nothing meta about it: Mark Zuckerberg’s company on Wednesday laid off more than 11,000 employees, totalling 13% of its workforce. The cuts come after a wretched year for Meta, which is struggling with lower digital ad revenue amid a global economic slowdown, while facing fierce competition from other platforms for younger users. Zuck says the company will now focus more narrowly on artificial intelligence, advertising, and his beloved metaverse.
4.5 billion: Bangladesh is the latest country to have secured a provisional bailout – worth a whopping $4.5 billion – from the International Monetary Fund. Already highly indebted before the dual crises of COVID and the war in Ukraine, Bangladesh has seen its foreign reserves completely dry up.
4 million: Farmers across Central and West Africa are reeling after torrential floods decimated their crops. At least 4 million people, mostly small subsistence farmers, say their harvests have been destroyed. This comes as many import-reliant African countries were already facing severe food insecurity due to the war in Ukraine.
33: Under President Xi Jinping’s tenure, female participation in the Chinese workforce has dropped significantly, with the country's place in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report having fallen 33 places since 2012. Cultural norms in China have certainly shifted since Beijing hosted the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, where Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed that “women’s rights are human rights.”
Whistleblowers & how to activate a new era of digital accountability
Frances Haugen famously blew the whistle against her then-employer, Facebook. She says we must recognize that the gap between fast-changing tech and slow-moving governments will continue to widen, and the best way to narrow it, is to encourage people to speak out against questionable practices. These whistleblowers need better laws to protect them, she tells Ian Bremmer in a GZERO World interview.
Despite all of this, Haugen still has hope that the corporate culture inside tech companies can change for the better. The role of social media companies in politics is still growing, and now the failures of social media companies can have life-or-death consequences.
Haugen suggests that governments need to rethink how they regulate social media companies, and hold them more accountable for the consequences of their actions.
The EU just approved the Digital Services Act, which for the first time will mandate social media companies be more transparent about what they do with personal data.
If if it works in Europe, the DSA could inspire similar laws in other parts of the world too. Haugen also discusses the preponderance of "bot" accounts on social media, and says companies often choose to ignore the large numbers of fake followers.
When social media fails, lives are at stake
Former US President Donald Trump had many Twitter hits. But he's been kicked off since the 2021 Capitol insurrection over fears Trump's tweets would stoke further violence.
Social media companies play an outsize role in American politics. That's why the Jan. 6 committee has subpoenaed most of them to probe their role in the 2020 election Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.
But the influence of Facebook, Twitter, and others on our lives extends well beyond that. And it's not just Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend having a bad vaxx trip — the failures of social media companies can have life-or-death consequences.
Platforms like Facebook have helped stoke violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And the endless scroll of perfect bodies on Instagram has had a harmful impact on teenage girls, with some reporting suicidal thoughts.