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Ravi Gurumurthy: Hello and welcome to the mission. My name is Ravi Gurumurthy and on this series of the Mission, we're talking about what drives social change. And we've got a fantastic guest today. Jeremy Heimans, who is the CEO of an organization called Purpose and co-founder of Avaaz. And Jeremy has not only written about how social change happens, but he's a real practitioner.

Purpose and Avaaz have really been at the vanguard of building social movements. And today we're going to be teasing out why and how that happens.

Jeremy Heimans: Jeremy. Welcome. Good to see you, Ravi

Ravi Gurumurthy: I think one way, one place to start my. To look back over the last 10 years and thinking about all the big social changes that have happened that might have perhaps surprised us if we were having this conversation 10 years ago. I'm not sure we'd have been predicting major changes such as the legalization of, of drugs in America or gay marriage, particularly in very conservative states being legalized or changing attitudes to gender identity.

If you take those big changes, is there a sort of single way of understanding why they, why they've changed? And is there a sort of template for understanding how social change has happened in those areas?

Jeremy Heimans: It's a, it's a great question. I mean, I think there are, there are things that track there are similarities across issues, but there are also really important differences to, to understand.

Right. So it really depends on the issue and the characteristics of that issue. And the, the, the interests and the ecosystem around it. So maybe let's take a couple of the examples that you alluded to and sort of try to unpack them a little bit. So I think on, on gay marriage, you know, this is something I think, you know, this is a story that we all know.

It is a remarkably quick social transformation. I mean, it is striking just how recently social attitudes to homosexuality. We're radically different, right? I mean, the, if you go back to the late sixties, there was a famous time magazine, a cover story called the homosexual in America. And if you go back and read that it's the most viciously homophobic thing you've ever read, right?

Homosexuals are all perverts and they're all sick. And what are we going to do about it? And even sort of compassion toward homosexuals was not really socially acceptable. In time magazine, which is like the embodiment of kind of mainstream, you know, mainstream America at that time. Right. You flash forward to the nineties, you've got, you know obviously massive political inaction on the aids crisis again, because of, because of homophobia in large part.

And even, you know, you look at sitcoms. I, I saw an old episode of the 96 on Murphy brown the other day. Remember Murphy brown, great show. And there's a scene where one of the straight characters goes to a gay bar and his posture is like, He's terrified. Right. And the way that sort of straight men work in addition to, as recently, as 20 years ago, in most parts of, you know, most parts of the, the Western world was the way you showed that you were heterosexual was to be hostile toward gates, because that was how you sort of projected your masculinity.

Now, flash forward to you know, two, two, a few years ago, and I'm, I'm on a boat in in in New York. With my husband and the, there was a young teenager from, you know, would have been long island there with his girlfriend. And as he's getting off the boat, he points to us and says, And part of what that was, was the social demonstration to his girlfriend about.

So, so that arc, right, what happened in that period? And I think the, the transformation there is driven by a mix of. Sort of cultural change. Certainly a whole bunch of folks doing really incredible movement and political work. So, and it's hard to know which came first, but I think most studies of this have concluded that the key factor for gay marriage in that social change was more people coming out to their families.

So more people then you knew. Someone who was close to them who was, you know, LGBT Q. And so that transformation of having someone in your life, whether you conservative or liberal, that embodied the issue was key. Now, clearly that was related to. The beginnings of bringing LGBT people into popular culture in ways that may work sympathetic portrayals or more multi-dimensional portrayals because LGBT people were always in popular culture.

Right. But they were depicted often as. Deeply troubled or they were often the serial killer or the, you know, or the, or some kind of monster. Right. And so that transformation in the nineties, when pop culture in places like the U S with Willem grace with you know, Ellen degenerates coming out, these sort of cultural touchstones.

So there was a movement that happened and it was. Correlated with increases in people feeling like they wanted to live their lives openly. And at the same time, there were all of these people who from, you know, in the nineties and, and, and onwards were doing, what, what, what was at the time, really thankless, social change, work advocating for ideas like gay marriage, which again, as recently as 20 years ago, Was considered fairly fanciful, right?

As a political prospect, it seems like we were a long way away from, from gay marriage. Certainly being legal all over the, the you know, all over the industrialized world, is it as it pretty much is now. Right? So we were a long way from that. Now there were people who were building the foundation. Waiting for the political window, they were doing litigation work.

People like Evan Wolfson in the U S who is one of the great, you know, heroes of that movement who did incredible work you know, through freedom to marry from a very early stage, you know, the Hawaii cases, these early cases in the U S that were putting gay marriage onto the agenda. Andrew Sullivan, the political kind of commentator and thinker wrote an article in the nineties.

The economist had a cover story, the nineties endorsing gay marriage, but when the political window opened, you know very quickly what happened was there was this convergence between the shift in, you know, popular culture and in those who influence kind of what you might think of as. Dominant culture and elite culture where, you know, in the same way that in the nineties, if you were you know, you worked in finance or something in, in wall street, you, you had to stay closeted.

Suddenly all of the same companies were opening up their doors and saying, we're a tolerant employer. And here is that LGBTQ affinity group calls it,

Ravi Gurumurthy: the perception that that particular stakeholders. We're in favour of that.

Jeremy Heimans: Exactly.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I think one thing interests me is that for many of those people in those movements, they're slogging away for years and it can feel like they're making very incremental progress and then suddenly it can break and it can suddenly gain momentum really quickly.

And I think your point at the beginning about how for many people. Being homophobic or being in favour of gay rights as an instrumental thing and doing it not because of the actual issue itself, they're doing it because to the trimester, masculinity would press that girlfriend on that boat. That's I think really powerful because it is probably the key.

So why you get. Dynamo and this sudden acceleration of immense and when a social norm changes.

Jeremy Heimans: Yes, no, exactly. So, so much of it is that third behaviour that looking around kind of across from you and seeing what, what the, you know, how the norms have changed. And that is true on drug legalization, right? So we're seeing that transformation also very quick, where, you know, when we grew up, you know, there was sort of the narrative was the stigmatization of drug use, you know, just say no, all of that stuff. Right. That was so, so heavy in the culture. And marijuana was considered a gateway drug to these other more serious drugs. And that transformation again, I think brought a whole bunch of things together. I think there's one additional piece.

Ravi that's worth noting there, which is that on marijuana legalization, you have the same thing of like, you know, suddenly your uncle and aunt. Smoking pot, you know, suddenly you're seeing representations of it that are positive in popular culture. Politicians. You know joking about it or saying positive things about it rather than stigmatizing it, but you also have an industry.

So you have this sort of economic force as well. Where in the U S you know, lots of people now are making a lot of money out of this industry, and there's an economic force that is also precipitating the regulatory changes because there's a lobby industry,

Ravi Gurumurthy: which is isn't the case on gender identity or gay marriage in the same way.

Jeremy Heimans: Exactly. There wasn't a strong exactly that the economic forces that oppose. I think if you think about climate change, we kind of, we moved to the next sort of set of issues like climate change what climate change doesn't have going for it is it doesn't have that like pull of identity. It doesn't have the same dynamic as easily where it's like my, I know my auntie is affected by climate change.

Right. Even though of course, that is true. And there are very differential impacts of climate change. Right. In the same way. We don't think of it that way. So it doesn't have the pull of identity and it doesn't have the pull of the personal story. And that is a real problem for climate organizing because there's an emotion there that is often missing.

Right. And then what makes climate action even hotter is if you think about marijuana legalization, you've got some pretty strong economic forces now in favour of doing that on climate, as we all know, you have really strong economic forces, right? You also have any industry that stands to benefit from it.

And you know people are now recognizing that and capital is flowing accordingly, but that's a huge obstacle to change. Right. And so when you think about social change, the characteristics of the issue, the interests aligned around it are a huge factor in shaping how social change happens. And we conscious pull out the gay marriage playbook and heard that it's going to work on climate.

Because even though there are some things we can learn from that movement. It's not replicable. Yeah.

Ravi Gurumurthy: I'm going to climate change. It's really striking how 10 years ago, all the oil and gas will, will be where heavily against any renewable targets. But now we've built loads of wind. They're now the same vested interests, but in favour of wind and you see kind of conservative politicians actually reacting.

And, and wanting to sort of give subsidies to renewables. And it's totally shifted because we've moved the economic boundaries, but on, on, on climate change and the environment, how important is the fact that people do want to virtue signal and they didn't want to be associated. Strong environmental measures.

Is that not part of the story about why we've, we've w we've shifted our views on climate? Absolutely.

Jeremy Heimans: I mean, I think that that kind of virtue signalling is both a reality of you know, so much of what we're describing and talking about today is about. Sort of social proof and social norm creation and how we do that and how we signal to each other.

So we clearly need to harness that in a positive way on climate. And I do think that's important. We don't want to mistake small behavioural changes for the kinds of large scale tougher policy changes, which will really drive action on climate. So, you know, individuals behaving better will not in and of itself as we all know, solve the climate crisis.

However that virtue signalling can contribute to an environment that makes the larger policy changes easier as long as no one mistakes, one for the other. And as long as those people who are opposed to climate change do not distract us or use those small changes to somehow make the world think that they're doing what's required.

Right? So when a business says. Let's all switch off our lights and, you know, conserve water and all of those things, but they're actually lobbying against the regulation of climate change. This is very common, right? Well then, you know, that kind of virtue signalling can actually be very dangerous, but

Ravi Gurumurthy: now the massive momentum in favour of ESG, environmental, social governance issues amongst investors.

Do you think that that's unstoppable in its momentum or could we see a backlash or even worse? Could it just become less fashionable, less faddish and therefore receipt in terms of our consciousness and therefore momentum? I think the

Jeremy Heimans: danger is not that I think it is unstoppable in the sense that I don't think this is just, I don't think people are going to forget about ESG next year or, or even, you know, in 10 years.

But I think the big danger is that it is normalized and becomes a. It becomes watered down, diluted and, and on ambitious, and it just simply becomes scaffolding to support the existing system. That's the real danger. The real danger is we set standards that are relatively easy for companies to meet.

And the toughest parts of ESG, the toughest commitments that companies need to make. But, you know, I'm not made, but everybody has kind of figured out a way to talk about this

Ravi Gurumurthy: stuff. Yeah. So people calling us all the restaurant. Exactly. Therefore you can't tell who's

Jeremy Heimans: exactly. So that is, you know, that is key.

And so my example that I, I mentioned another, I think he's relevant there, which is sort of, you know, look at. Companies are spending money on their political activity, like, because that's often very different to their ESG practices. That's a place to look as an example of where the real energy is. So if a company is spending millions of dollars, opposing the regulation of carbon wild, you know, complying with its ESG, one of the things that's really striking at the moment, Ravi is if you look at some of the.

There are various industry indices that you can now find of course, ranking companies for their ESG performance. And they're kind of coming out with really bizarre results because you've got companies that are manifestly dad for the world right now, making weapons, or they are. You know, they are chevrons, but they've figured out a way to tick the boxes on the ESG requirements.

And then the sort of ratings groups saying Chevron is one of the top, the most virtuous companies in the world. I mean, I can, I'm not going to name the specific indices here, but people can Google it and, and, and, and find out it's really striking. So that's already a sign of this phenomenon occurring, which is so much of it becomes.

It's it becomes about the business practices and sort of compliance and a bunch of things like that. But the elephant in the room is what is the company doing and what is its net impact on the world? So if you are a fossil fuel producing company, you know, your ability to have a net positive impact on the world depends largely on getting out of fossil fuels.

So you can't ESG your way out. Does that make sense? And that is the challenge where you hold constant, what the business actually is, and just focus on its practices within those parameters, you end up with very, very distorted view. RBSG oh, and what's

Ravi Gurumurthy: your view of, of groups like extinction rebellion and the degree to which they create space for more radical action.

Cause they just drank the debate. They drank the Overton window or you know, all that. Chris get backlash and I'm putting more moderate people.

Jeremy Heimans: You know, I mean, firstly, I mean the obvious point is social change always requires an ecosystem. It requires an ecosystem of actors and that ecosystem requires you to have kind of radical folks pulling in one direction.

Moderate voices, making particular ideas, palatable and mainstream at. You know, the organization I run with using often deploying both strategies. Well, a lot of our work on climate has been about conservative audiences. It's, you know, in places like Poland, how do you normalize climate for conservative Catholics in the language of Pope John Paul, the second or in India?

How do you talk about climate change? Not as an environmental issue, which is not a winning issue, but as a public health issue about getting your kids to school without them, you know without, without them getting sick. So that works really important, but the work of groups like extinction rebellion, extinction rebellion is also incredibly important because that work is about you know, it's about putting radical ideas on the table early that later as you know, context changes, people will come back to it's about creating pressure.

The reality is, you know, they're all important strategies in different moments. All of those strategies can have negative unintended consequences, right? So of course, you know, some strategies can produce backlash and that can be dangerous. You know, I think there is, I think one thing we've seen in the U S is that some of the progressive lifts identity politics campaigning, which is incredibly important work in my view.

And I personally subscribed to the vast majority of that. Thank you. Has nonetheless antagonized, a bunch of other people in the U S who find it very threatening and who feel like they're being talked down on or policed. And so we just have to own that that happens, right? That, that doesn't mean that the people who are campaigning for those causes should stop campaigning.

Not at all. Right. But we do need to recognize when that, that that backlash is happening and think about strategies to address. So

Ravi Gurumurthy: if somebody says I've got one in my mind, you being this grand puppeteer behind multiple movements, some of which are framed in ways that are appealing to conservative Catholics and some which are sort of more radical, but is it true that do you end up being involved in supporting the various different movements on a given issue?

Are you ever there enabled to say, look, we need to dial this down because that's pissing off a lot of people and we need to dial this up. Is there an area. Is there an issue where you you've played that kind of role? Look,

Jeremy Heimans: we, we deliberately try to play a role that allows us to. Pursue strategies to reach different audiences, right?

So that we're not. So if we were say Greenpeace, then Greenpeace is one organization in the world that can only really has a constituency as a supporter base. And that massively limits what Greenpeace can advocate for. It makes it really hard when Greenpeace wants to run after, for example, conservative audiences you know, it's limited by its own positioning in the econ.

But an incredibly important actor, right? So the purpose just has a different role in the ecosystem because we're working with organizations, we're working in partnership. We're able to operate in such a way where we can pursue strategies that are addressed to different audiences and ideologies that doesn't make our ideology.

Moveable, but it means that in pursuit of achieving change and an outcomes on issues like climate change, we really recognize the critical role that these audiences play. And we don't feel like we have to agree with them on everything in order to work with them. Right. Including, you know, conservative Catholics.

We may not agree on some issue. But we feel incredibly strongly about the theory of change associated with helping to empower those groups on an issue like climate change.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Where did you come out on things like defund the police, where again, you could argue that there was a bit of a trade-off between making change happen through civil society and the pressure that was exerted.

On the police, through that campaign versus making change happen through electoral politics where arguably that campaign was, was, was potentially putting people off.

Jeremy Heimans: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think the substance of that campaign is different to the framing, right? So the substance really of that argument has been.

We need to change the role of policing and society. And rather than have police do everything from community service to becoming social workers to, you know, you know, kind of, kind of jumping in when there's violent crime, we need to radically. And it reduced the scope of what policing is reform that, and then have the other functions of policing actually carried out by more specialist expert folks like social workers, et cetera.

I'm not sure the framing defined the police captured that argument as effectively as it as it could have, right? Like the argument, I think, you know, doesn't is actually more nuanced than defund the. Sounds like, which sounds like it's saying all the traditional community building and social protection and cohesion functions.

That are currently being lumped with police forces that have no skills to do it and are saddled with deep structural racism you know, is different. So I would just say from a tactical perspective, maybe that wasn't the smartest framing. What does that mean in practice? When that then. Plays out in the political arena and in the, in the debate, I'm sure.

You know, again, it's the ecosystem, you know, we need that kind of pressure is valuable in pushing for a more radical rethink of the role of police, which is badly needed. Right. But that's, it's also both things can be true. That also may not have helped. And may we may see it in the midterms in 2022. It is going to be used by conservatives because the term itself.

You know, has this specific connotation that, that scares people to a more conservative in the U S right. It's going to be used as, as a punching bag in the, in the coming midterms. So both of those things can be true. It can be serving a valuable function and it can be responsible for a political backlash.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So if you want different messages for different audiences, Is it hard these days to get any traction with slightly more moderate messages in a world of social media, where in order to be viral, you have to be quite extreme and confrontational.

Jeremy Heimans: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's a lot of the dynamic of today is that, you know, and we all know it, the algorithms of the platforms, the political incentives are all to provide.

Right. And some of those herd dynamics, which can be very positive on an issue like gay marriage, as we talked about earlier can become very negative. When those, her dynamics mean that people are incentivized to kind of. More and more shrill. So that's clear the media ecology has changed as well, where, you know, because the mainstream media is role relative to the overall media landscape is so much smaller and social media's role, which didn't exist at all 20 years ago is so much larger.

Suddenly the kind of white of incentives. Is to be shrilled. So it creates an odd dynamic. Doesn't it? You know, where you go and you see this on Twitter all the time. You see people who start off being relatively moderate and temporary, and then you sell is following

Ravi Gurumurthy: them and nobody's following them. So they just

Jeremy Heimans: become more and more shrill.

And. Their followers and they get into fights with people and they spend their days in this kind of weird perpetual conflict. It sounds like it's a miserable way to live. Right. But that is part of the dynamic. And so one of the challenges for the leaders today on social change is like, do you participate in that?

Do you play that game or do you kind of step back from it? Are there examples

Ravi Gurumurthy: where you would try to get a campaign going that is about bridge-building and about tackling. A message that repolarization, or the framing of things around a cultural war,

Jeremy Heimans: and we've done a lot of that work at purpose and it's not easy, right?

So you need to find a specific sort of

Ravi Gurumurthy: centrist dad campaign. You know, that's not,

Jeremy Heimans: you know, you need to find specific anchors that do have. Some intensity. So we talk, you know, talk a lot about the distinction between favourability and intensity. Right? So 20 years ago, for most leaders in institutions, the game was being was favourability right.

Being broadly appealing not pissing too many people off. And now the dynamic is more about intensity. You don't need as many people behind you, but if you have like a really core base of people who, who will stand up for you and mobilize for you, that becomes so much more important because there's just so much activity and saturation that those with intensity tend to tend to win.

So inherently more moderate messages tend to get. Tend to attract less intensity. So you need to find anchors that are intense, right? So if you are, you know, I, you know, again, identity can be powerful, right? A sense of pride in your local city or something that, where there is an emotional core, because what doesn't work is just being bland, right?

You need to find something that people are passionate about and link that to a message that is, you know, that is less. That is less extreme. Yeah.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Can we put pivots with one of the challenges that we're working on at the moment, which is how you tackle obesity and if you think about the different issues we've talked about, it's somewhat reminds me more of the climate change challenge in that we're at the beginning of a journey where we're trying to move the framing of the debate from one about personal responsibility and diet and exercise towards saying actually it's the producers and retailers of food that are polluting our food environment and they need to actually change the whole structure in which we live in.

And there are big economic interests at play. It also all quite big political actions. So unlike perhaps gender identity or gay marriage, the economic and political dimensions are, are even more substantial. It's more akin to the kind of climate change example. You, you, you cited how. How'd you get, get something off the ground that, and how did you even think about the different ecosystem players?

Jeremy Heimans: Yeah, it's a really complex issue, you know, because it has some elements of the gay marriage and, and, and drug reform issues in the sense that it's about personal behaviour and, you know, it's about what people do. And it's very visible as a problem. And so it has that element, but at the same time, it has a really complex.

Instead of ideological issues around it. So for example, when, you know, when Michael Bloomberg is, you know, tried as mayor of New York to put a tax on soda, the soft drink companies really effectively used kind of American ideas about individual Liberty and freedom, like libertarian ideas to, to kind of squelch that they also.

Very cynically use the argument that well, you know, poorer neighbourhoods and neighbourhoods of colour, where the neighbourhoods that, you know, relied on these products and therefore that, you know, somehow this policy was discriminatory toward them rather than making the argument that actually these companies were coming in and deliberately make.

These more vulnerable populations, sick because of the widespread availability of those products. Right? So there's the complicated issues and unfortunately, our advocates for regulation, which, I mean, I agree with you. I think the solution space here is very much about regulation. It's regulating sugar, it's regulating the kind of consumer packaged goods industry, much, much more strongly.

That's you know, and I think that actually. Yeah, it's been a lot of failure to get to be. There should be a lot more regulation already than there is. And part of the problem as well, is that on this set of issues, there isn't the ecosystem. So on climate change, there are at least many, many, many people in a movement in many different kinds of configurations advocating for action on climate.

When you think about an issue like obesity, there's actually very little social movement activity on pushing to that And on the other side, you've got very well-funded commercial interests, opposing action. So that creates a real asymmetry. So to me, that's why we haven't gotten more sweeping action on this issue is because there isn't the ecosystem of advocates, right?

It's a little more complicated to frame it, than say cigarettes, right? Because in the pup, in popular culture, Cigarettes are seen as an unambiguous harm. Whereas, you know, kind of some of the things that are sold are considered delightful treats exactly

Ravi Gurumurthy: everything in moderation, a cigarette

Jeremy Heimans: we used to, but yeah, so that's why it's a really tough issue.

But to me that it's, it's a very ripe issue for Intentional investment in building an ecosystem and an infrastructure of advocates because the, this issue has massive social consequences causes enormous harms and mostly harms vulnerable people.

Ravi Gurumurthy: And to build that ecosystem in what kind of money and effort and time is required to actually get to critical,

Jeremy Heimans: you know, it really depends on the, on the issue and, and the goal.

But I think, you know, if you're thinking about it and you should like this, what do you need to do? So one is you need to. Invest in communications and campaigns that reframe the issue because you know that this soft drink company. We'll make this Liberty argument, this freedom argument and becomes part of the culture wars.

Cause they're sort of like all they're trying to regulate your enjoyment of Coke. Aren't they snobs, they're sitting there drinking their lattes and eating their organic food and you know, and that is very potent, right? So you need to invest in reframing the issue and getting it out of that. Right. So that's.

Yeah, pretty systematic. Right? It's like, you've got to kind of do some work stigmatizing those companies. Right. And the other thing that's quite interesting is those companies are not like the tobacco companies. They're still, they still get invited to Davos. They still they're still held up in very positive ways.

Right. Which I've always found really funny. Cause it's like to me, Pepsi and Coke. Pretty bad actors, RIT lodge, right? It doesn't mean that they can't be helped. And it doesn't mean they're not capable of doing good work. And I think we at purpose would work with those actors if there was a strong rationale to try to improve their businesses.

So it's not that they should be, you know, it's not like the unsalvageable, but they are nonetheless held up as. More credible and respectable than they should be. So there's probably some work to do on the kind of extinction rebellion side, really going after those companies, you know, in a, in a more active way for the contribution they're making, there's probably some culture change, work about reframing obesity and getting it out of that.

Well, if you're obese, it's your fault and getting it to that larger structural analysis, and then you need to invest in NGOs. You do invest in. We can really make that argument in a way to different constituents. You probably need a strategy for conservatives that actually addresses head on those libertarian arguments.

And that makes an economic argument in favour of regulation. Right. And you probably need arguments that will appeal to kind of lift liberals.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah. And, and when you think about France, let's go back to ESG on this one, because another route potentially is to try to shift investor behaviour. In relation to these companies, is it your view though, that that tends to come later more as a reflection of the degree of pressure that's been built up in civil society through the things that you just talked about?

Or can you, should we be astute to pursue all of these things in parallel at the moment you could, you could imagine investors in the same way that they forced the discussion of carbon and therefore disinvest or become an activist investor against. You could do the same with big food companies. But my question really is, is it worth trying to build up investor pressure on that or does that only come once they realize that it's a big publication?

That's therefore they have to respond to, because it's partly about a sequencing of our efforts, you know? Do you, do you spread yourself thin building the ecosystem from day one or do you, you sequence your efforts?

Jeremy Heimans: You, you do seconds your efforts, but sometimes the sequencing is unpredictable, so different issues.

Or what you're really describing is the difference between kind of an elite strategy and elite pressure strategy. And I kind of lodge a more mass precious strategy. You don't always need to break through with the mass pressure in order for. You know that the elite pressure to work, right? So you could totally pursue a strategy on this issue.

I think mass pressure is important, but a little harder. So I would be pursuing elite strategies like that, like, you know, relatively early, whereas in other issues where it's easier to kind of create the cultural groundswell, you know, you've had. Focus there first, because you know, you're going to have the wind at your back when you need to then sort of do the more technocratic changes I would say here, you know, you might have.

You might, you might get quite far by hopping on the back of some of the ESD thinking as it pertains to climate carbon, et cetera, and making the argument that we need a similar approach to harmful products that you know, basically expanding the definition within these new frameworks could be quite a smart strategy.

Yeah.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Particularly as there's sort of some common enemies between say the environmental movements. They be city movements such as it is exactly. I want to throw one final area at you. We've already talked a bit about very powerful vested interests economically. There's probably no more powerful interests than some of the big tech companies.

Apple's market cap, I think is about 2.3 trillion, bigger than most lots of countries. Where do you see this sort of that battle going? Particularly as there was you know, there was a sort of merged. Consumer backlash. Do you think that the powerful vested interests such as they are, can I just always going to be too powerful and I was going to take them on or do you see the signs of something shifting?

Jeremy Heimans: I mean, I'm relatively bullish on the, on the prospects over the next, say five years for significant regulation of technology platforms. Because I think that the, it is the rare issue of that, you know, a lot of the right and left. Actually agree on in a lot of ways for different reasons, I am coming at it in different ways, but I think you can build the majority's in favour of reducing the power of a platform like Facebook either with an antitrust.

Approach. I think there are a number of regulatory tools, but clearly I think everybody has recognized not everybody, but a lot of people have recognized that these platforms have thought too powerful. They actually don't have a lot of allies and yes, they're powerful economic interests. And they have incredible network effects, but I would argue that they're less powerful as economic interests and their capacity to lobby than say the fossil fuel industry, which is much more insidious and much more dispersed and therefore can be more effective at influencing politicians, et cetera.

I think Facebook has shown itself to be relatively ham-fisted as a lobbying force. You know as an example, some of them are more sophisticated. Some of them are pursuing kind of more sophisticated strategies like you you'll see you'll note that apple is really trying hard to get ahead of the privacy issue and is sort of trying to differentiate itself on its privacy proposition in a way that I think it sees the writing on the wall.

Right. And, and it's trying to. Race ahead of that. So my prediction is that yeah, you'll see the social media platforms potentially there'll be, you know, antitrust regulation. There'll be you know, I think the algorithms themselves, a part of the problem, the fact that these algorithms are at the discretion, frankly, of a bunch of engineers sitting, you know, in, in California for the most.

And they're deciding what we think, what we feel, what we see our political opinions. That's just a real problem. And those algorithms are not transparent. We cannot change them. We have no say in the governance of these platforms, despite their role in democracy. And of course we don't share in the economic value that they create.

For the shareholders of these companies. So I think there's, it's pretty unsustainable. I think the question to me as a kind of social movement practitioner is how will I movement? This is not gay marriage. It's not sexy in the same way. You know, it's not like, you know, someone who's been personally harmed by Facebook in that way that, you know, someone who's come out of the closet.

And so the turning a relatively wonky. Quiet policy heavy issue into something that has real social movement, energy behind it is not an easy thing, but I think an important thing, I also think that how these platforms get regulated is really important because there is a version of this where governments clamped down on the platforms, but in the course of it, they also clamped down on a bunch of important things that we value about.

Free speech and how we interact with each other and our capacity to organize politically. So we have to be very careful that this, this regulation doesn't actually end up squelching a bunch of things that are incredibly important to democracy. And I fear that. So that's why kind of social movements are going to be important because if this just gets left kind of behind the technocratic veil, I don't, I don't know where will.

I mean,

Ravi Gurumurthy: that seems like a general challenge with these sort of social movements where you get a lot of pressure and then you're starting to get then into the technocratic debates about how you frame regulation, which no one understands. Correct. And then the lobbyists get at it and you end up with a form of regulation that has surprised, surprised some unintended benefits for being convinced.

That happens time. And again, absolutely. Is that a, is that a sort of significant risk here? And what do you do on the social movement side? What'd you do? Yeah.

Jeremy Heimans: I mean, I think in a funny way, I wonder whether the risk. Yes. There's a real risk that it will, it will just end up benefiting the incumbents.

But as I say, because in a funny way, the concentration of power right in the Facebook, for example, has, you know, WhatsApp, Instagram, They're so concentrated that, that I'm not, I think it's less likely that regulators are going to cave to Facebook as such, but more likely that they'll cave to other interests and arguments that are bad for people and democracy that we'll use this as a Trojan horse to, especially outside of places like the us.

You know what you haven't at least first amendment type protections, but you can imagine lots of governments using this to shut down. Different kinds of political dissent order kind of essentially control the debate or monitor the debate in, in, in new ways. So I think, I think there's a, there is a real risk of that and that's why we need to be translating these technocratic arguments about algorithms.

You know, the smartest way to break up something like a Facebook. Right. How do you make that really simple? It's like the issue of data portability and interoperability as an example, like when we switch out phones, you know, here in the UK, if you switch from oh two to E or whatever, is it only two or three?

You know, you can do that like that, right? You don't need to. You know, it's a complicated porting that you need to do. Whereas with Facebook, one of the reasons it's so hard to leave is there's no interoperability. You can't go to a Facebook competitor and just pull all your friends over, you know, and all your content and yours,

Ravi Gurumurthy: I mean, you could in the future potentially choose your algorithm for your newsfeed.

Exactly. And that's yeah.

Jeremy Heimans: It's things like that. Right. So we have to find the things that people can get their head around that are important parts Of the reform debate and we have to popularize them. And I do have a bit of a concern on this, that there is a lot of great work happening. There's a lot of think tanks and kind of tech people, but you know, those people are not great at that.

They're not great at the popularization and the communication, and they don't even necessarily have particularly the, even the Silicon valley types who are arguing for reform They sometimes lack a larger lens right? That is needed, right. A justice lens and a quality lens, an equity lens that might be important in how those debates actually shake out.

So I think we have to get these policy debates out of the hands of the nerds and into the hands of the activist a little bit more. So let me just

Ravi Gurumurthy: end by asking you to get out your crystal ball. And if, think of, think of this conversation in 10 years’ time, do you think there are big social changes that we'll look back on them and say, well, we would never have predicted that would happen so quickly.

And we, you know, we've been relentless, we've been quite positive and optimistic in this conversation. We've talked about a lot of progressive changes, and I just wonder whether you have any more fears as well as.

Jeremy Heimans: Yeah, gosh, I mean, look, we we're, we are in a very precarious stage. I mean, I think we could be sitting here in 10 years and saying, wow, we no idea American democracy would collapse.

And that's real, you know, it really is. I mean, it is it is happening, right? So the, the, the, the, the voting system, the legitimacy of the elections, you know, the groundwork is being laid for an election in 2024. Good at potentially stolen, you know, that's really disturbing. And so, you know do I think that could happen?

Yes. You know, the rise of authoritarian populous is of course a big ongoing concern. It's interesting that like that isn't a wave that's. It's a dialectic rather than a wave. So you see the rise of those popular and then you see some sort of pushback against them, or you see the weakness of that strategy in some cases as well.

So that gives me some hope, right. In the sense that I don't. The last five years, you know, you know, good way of borne out the idea that like authoritarian populists are not winning everywhere and they are not destined to win everywhere. Right. The Le Pens, the, you know, the Trumps et cetera. So that remains a major concern, but I also believe that there's the possibility of you know, pushing back against, against those forces.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Jeremy Heimans, thank you so much for coming on The Mission.

Jeremy Heimans: Pleasure. Ravi. This has been fun.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Great. Thank you.

Jeremy Heimans: Thank you.