My guest is Nick Clegg. Nick Clegg was the UK's deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015

in the UK's first coalition government in more than 70 years. He had been leader of the Liberal

Democrat Party since 2007. Before his career in British politics, he worked in the European

Commission in Brussels and was a member of the European Parliament.

In 2018, he became president of global affairs at Meta, the former Facebook, a post he left earlier this year.

He is the author of a new book, How to Save the Internet, The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI of AI and political conflict. Welcome to the podcast,

Nick. That's very good to see you again, Paul. Nice to see you. Right. Let's get fracking.

I'm going to start with something which seems to me like a paradox because the tone of your work

is actually, in many ways, wouldn't say downbeat, but quite critical about how the world is shaping

up, not just on geopolitical conflict terms,

but also the role of technology. And yet you are resolutely upbeat and optimistic, which may

seem a bit of a paradox. For example, I'll start with this quote, your words back at you.

Nation states are plowing their own furrows. The global internet is splintering international and regional

silos. In fact, the global internet, in its truest sense, no longer exists. So is it too late

to do anything about, did it? Well, I think it's true to say that the global internet doesn't actually

exist. You could argue it never really existed because you have a Chinese internet, which is

based on a wholly different set of values and is hermetically sealed, almost hermetically sealed

off from the rest of the world. And you have an increasing tendency amongst some autocratic

or authoritarian or semi-authoritarian jurisdictions to follow suit.

So I think you've got a world in which you have a Chinese internet, non-Chinese internet,

based broadly on American technologies and American values.

But you are going to see, in effect, Russian Internet.

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