Podcast Special: The really dark side of Cambridge Analytica
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The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2018
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
From 2009 to 2010 Sven Hughes worked for SCL group, the parent company of the controversial — now deceased — Cambridge Analytica. In this Spectator Podcast Special, Sven, now the CEO of a company called Verbalisation, talks to Freddy Gray about his work for Nix.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a special edition of The Spectator podcast. |
| 0:10.1 | I'm joined today by Sven Hughes, who is the CEO of a company called Verbalization. |
| 0:16.6 | And Sven used to work for SCL Group, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. |
| 0:22.6 | And he's got rather an interesting story to tell us about his time there and his work there. |
| 0:28.4 | And so Sven, thank you for coming in, first of all. |
| 0:30.7 | Lovely to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Freddie. |
| 0:32.9 | And I'd like to ask you about sort of how you came to be involved in SCL. |
| 0:37.5 | I'll keep calling it Cambridge Analytica, but when you were working for them, they were called SCL Group. |
| 0:41.1 | That's right. |
| 0:41.6 | And how you came to work for them, your background a bit. |
| 0:45.5 | I mean, I think you started in the Army, is that right? |
| 0:47.8 | That's right, as a reservist, yes, that's right. |
| 0:49.5 | So it takes from the Army to SCL and what happened. |
| 0:53.7 | Well, my background is twofold. |
| 0:55.5 | I was a reservist in something called psychological operations and then in support of British Special Forces. |
| 1:03.8 | And running parallel to that, I was working in the advertising industry as a associate creative director, copywriter at a big advertising agency in London. |
| 1:15.1 | And I was sort of head-hunted into SCL to join them as their head of elections in about 2009. |
| 1:24.3 | Right. And who asked you to do that? Was that Alexander Nix? |
| 1:27.3 | That's Alexander Nix, yes. So he was actually presenting to our company. And who asked you to do that? Was that Alexander Nix? That's Alexander Nix. Yes. So he was actually presenting to our company at the time and we were talking through the meeting. I think he was interested by some of the things I was saying. And I think I'm right saying one of his colleagues had actually been to a lecture I'd given several weeks before about behaviour change and behaviour change |
| 1:44.3 | methodologies. And so he offered me a job on the way to the lift on the way out and said, |
| 1:49.7 | can you start in a couple of weeks. We might be getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back a little bit |
| 1:53.3 | and talk about, you know, sciops. I mean, because I think a lot of people, sceptics like me, |
... |
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