Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

On In Reality, we spend most of our time on the media environment in the US. But information integrity is also under assault in Europe, where Russian propaganda efforts are, if anything, more pervasive than here. For example, late last year, Russia hit Poland with a wave of AI generated TikTok videos featuring attractive, but deep faked young women arguing that Poland should exit the EU…

At last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, delegates named misinformation the leading threat to political cohesion and social trust. So hence today’s guest, John O’Brennan, professor of European politics at Ireland’s Maynooth University.

John and Eric cover the information environment on his side of the Atlantic. They talk about the perverse incentives that have aligned big tech with the pollution of the information environment. We’ll pivot to the role of media illiteracy and illiteracy in general in the erosion of social trust. As

we recorded this, the 2026 Davos Conference was unfolding against the inconceivable backdrop of the President of the United States, demanding his allies hand over Greenland. So they cover that too…

 

Transcript

 

Eric (00:01.026)
John O’Brennan, welcome to In Reality.

JOB (00:04.696)
Thanks very much.

Eric (00:06.766)
It’s nice to have you. You are the professor of European politics at Mnuth University in County Kildare. As we speak, the World Economic Forum in Davos is underway. And while that is often a kind of sedate kind of meeting of the elites, this time, presumably, it is not because President Trump has just doubled down on his emphasis that the U.S. needs to possess Greenland, how is that playing across European politics?

JOB (00:43.222)
Very badly for all kinds of reasons and in different ways. Overnight, Trump, for example, published private conversations, texts from Emmanuel Macron and from Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister who is head of NATO. this isn’t the first time he’s done this, but the aim, I think, was to discomfort.

the Europeans in advance of not just his appearance in Davos, some of his cabinet members, of course, are already there. Scott Besant arrived at the weekend. But I think it was also kind of intended as a shot across the bows of the European Union when they meet on Thursday evening and potentially into Friday in Brussels. This is an emergency summit that’s been called relatively rare.

in recent times where all of the 27 leaders of the EU member states will gather together to try and agree an appropriate response to what Trump has threatened, which is from the 1st of February to impose an additional 10 % tariff on EU goods coming to the United States, going up to 25 % from June. I think this time it’s different.

You might not tell that from the published text that Macron sent to Trump because it’s of a type that we’ve become familiar with. It’s creepily suggesting of vassaldom and being a supplicant of the US in power terms and of this phenomenon of Trump whispering where European leaders have collectively and individually

Eric (02:13.217)
In what way?

JOB (02:42.66)
pursued a policy of appeasement of Trump over the last year. It hasn’t worked. They’ve been humiliated over and over again. And all they get for their supplication is more threats and more actions that are completely in contravention of what’s supposed to be one of the biggest friendships and one of the longest enduring friendship in geopolitics. So I think we’re

We’re reaching a real crunch point in Europe this week, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what happens in the latter half of the week could be as important as what happened in Munich in 1938, because Greenland is the Sudetenland of our time, where you have this predatory imperialist ogre intent on taking over this territory.

and advancing all kinds of lies to justify the act or the potential act. And you have all of these European allies scrambling to try and respond. Now, I think this is going to be different because this is about territory and this is a red line, I think, where Europe is concerned. So already we’ve seen suggestions about the

potential for tariffs. European leaders didn’t do this last summer. People like me were strongly urging them to do so. Instead, they opted for what they thought would constitute an optimal, peaceful solution, which was zero American tariffs on goods coming to Europe, 15 % tariffs on European goods coming to the United States.

Along with others, I thought this was a terrible mistake because Trump is a classic playground bully. His psychology is very simple to understand in my view. And since then, instead of getting the peaceful landscape of trade, which they wanted, it’s actually got more and more volatile. So that’s why I think what happens this week, both in Davos and in Brussels,

Eric (04:57.23)
Okay.

JOB (05:02.538)
is exceptionally important because the Europeans either confront this cancer now, or it’s going to get much, much worse in the months and years to come. And yes, I’m absolutely convinced Trump is serious that he wants to put troops on the ground in Greenland and take it over. So that’s the dilemma I think Europeans are wrestling with. Do we risk the complete sundering of the NATO alliance?

because NATO is completely over if Trump goes ahead and does what he’s been threatening, that will mean the Europeans for the first time since 1949 are on their own and have to find ways of defending the continent without the United States.

Eric (05:48.142)
That is chilling. And I can’t tell you as an American how disheartening it is to have the actions of my country in my name as an American citizen compared to the Anschluss into Sudetenland in 1938. That is chilling. We will see what happens this week. And I just am shocked at this moment.

of history. I never thought I would live to see such a date. Let’s pivot now.

JOB (06:21.889)
And I think Eric, your shock is actually paralleled in Europe for those of us who really value the relationship with the United States. There’s this terrible almost sense of mourning about it that something that was so solid is now literally dissolving into air.

Eric (06:44.652)
Yes, it’s mournful.

Let us now pivot to the main task of the In Reality podcast and talk about the information environment. So last year at the World Economic Forum, which seems like a much more placid and peaceful occasion, the World Economic Forum listed misinformation as the number one risk to political cohesion and social trust. And I know that you agree with that. I think that that

term lands differently in the US and in Europe. let me ask you, put the question this way. When it comes to misinformation, disinformation, which worries you more? it foreign interference from outside malign actors like Russia, say, or social media driven misinformation from within democratic societies?

JOB (07:43.48)
Well, I think there’s an intimate connection between the two, actually. And the common denominator is the presence in Europe and elsewhere of completely amoral big tech titans who do not give a damn what ensues as a result of what their companies actually do, who are behaving in a way that

elevates greed almost to an unimaginable level and just do not give a damn about the consequences that flow from what they do. Now, many of them will say as a defense, we are mere platforms. We’re not responsible for the content. But I think that kind of response looks increasingly shrill in Europe and

I think we are reaching the point where a confrontation with those big tech oligarchs is coming.

Eric (08:50.286)
Tell me what that confrontation would look like.

JOB (08:54.275)
Well, the very best book on this topic came out last year from a French Italian author called Giuliano D’Ampoli. The book is called The Hour of the Predators. And what he describes in the book, and it’s a very short 144 page book, really succinct. He was an advisor to Emmanuel Macron for a period of time. He was in the room.

Eric (09:09.582)
Hmm.

JOB (09:23.297)
with a lot of leaders and with a lot of the tech titans when big decisions were being taken over the last decade. And what he’s describing is this alliance between these predatory strongman authoritarian leaders, principally Trump, but including people like Orban, Narendra Modi in India, and needless to say, Putin and Xi Jinping and Erdogan as well, between them and the big tech.

platforms. And if you look at their behavior, Elon Musk, for example, continually preaches this refrain about free speech. And yes, he has at different times allowed his company to take dictation from dictatorial regimes. I think people know that his regime, his platform is banned in China and in Russia.

In Turkey, he has at different times willingly done what the government has dictated he should do in closing down opportunities for the opposition. The leader of the Turkish opposition, of course, has been imprisoned by Erdogan. And this isn’t the only instance of this. So there’s this almost symbiotic relationship now between these

predatory political forces and predatory economic forces, and they are literally tearing the world apart. part of this, I think, is about geopolitics, but part of it is about the micro level where the consequences of that alliance are being felt across Europe.

in individual member states of the European Union, for example. Now, this isn’t a uniform effect because malign actors will use big tech for specific purposes where they have an agenda in a specific country. For example, we know that the Russians used TikTok and spent tens of millions of euros trying to elect a fascist in the Romanian presidential election.

JOB (11:45.919)
in 2024.

Eric (11:48.962)
John, I think that many Americans are not aware of what happened there with the extraordinary result that an election was annulled or forbidden for two days before it was supposed to happen because of Russian interference. Can you explain what happened?

JOB (11:59.093)
Yes, the, the-

JOB (12:06.038)
Yeah.

Russians realized that they could use social media quite precisely. And in this case, they mounted a campaign principally on TikTok, spending huge amounts of money targeting, actually micro-targeting voters, but also in particular targeting young people because TikTok as a platform is

not principally, but in good part, one where young people are prominent. So they took a candidate who was quite obscure at the beginning of the presidential election, and then he somersaults to the top of the ranking of candidates as we get towards the election. So this was direct and overt interference in a national election in a European Union country.

The Russians did it again in Moldova next door to Romania last year in the parliamentary election. Again, spent a huge amount of money and actually came up short for a whole variety of reasons. But this isn’t new, Eric, right? We can go back to the Brexit referendum in 2016. And this was the first real instance, I think, where we saw

Big Tech being used maliciously by a combination of internal or British actors who wanted Britain to leave the EU with outside malign forces whose aim was to destabilize Britain as much as possible. And there, there was a leading journalist in Britain called Carol Cadwallader. She worked for The Guardian at that time.

JOB (14:06.366)
Along with others, she produced absolutely concrete evidence that one particular firm called Cambridge Analytica was micro-targeting voters illegally using Facebook. Kat Wallader goes on a bit later, having worked on this for many years, to give a TED talk in Silicon Valley. She literally went and faced the tech companies and she said,

And this is a very memorable phrase for me. Facebook is a crime scene. A crime has been committed against the British people and against the British state. And it has resulted in complete turmoil. And British politics has been absolutely convulsed by Brexit since 2016. And it continues to matter today, I think, because

Eric (14:42.062)
Mm.

JOB (15:02.132)
Having seen Keir Starmer’s statement about Greenland yesterday, was pathetic and weak. But one of the reasons for that is that Britain is now isolated within Europe. And had it remained within the EU, it would, I think, have a very different approach to what’s going on in Greenland. So there are all kinds of ways.

Eric (15:24.486)
John, me ask about the internal misinformation. So, Brexit was clearly a financial disaster for the UK and it was brought about by a misleading campaign. But as you noted, not everybody was an external actor. Not everyone had an interest in disrupting elections or democracy the same way that, say, the GRU and Russia does. So what’s the incentive for your ordinary

in the US or Ireland or the UK to spread misinformation, use social media in that way.

JOB (16:02.811)
Well, I think there are a range of impulses that guide people. It can be ideological, where they don’t like the government of the day, or where their ideology is entirely anti-system. Think about Steve Bannon in a kind of earlier iteration. It can also be financial. We can literally talk about grifters who take money.

Eric (16:14.296)
Mm-hmm.

JOB (16:32.264)
from outside actors. know that the Russians have been very, very active all over Europe, including supplying cash to far-right parties. We know that Marine Le Pen’s party, for example, in France has accepted Russian money in the past. There are strong suspicions about one particular political party in Britain.

I’ve often heard it said, and I spend a lot of my time in central and Eastern Europe because that’s where my work largely is. And I’ve often heard it said that the Russians really couldn’t believe after 2000 how cheap the Europeans were to buy off, to bribe and to intimidate and everything else. for example, I have a friend who is a very prominent journalist, a security journalist, and he

uses OSINT technology to track what states like Russia and some of the actors connected to them, the technology that is used by investigative journalists, in particular through using GPS and through other advanced tracking mechanisms to identify

Eric (17:39.566)
What is OSINT technology?

JOB (17:58.306)
criminality or kind of actions of this kind. And he tells me it’s even in a country like Ireland that is relatively unimportant, a small state on the edge of Europe, but but part of the European Union. The Russians try to co-opt politicians and academics. They will either bribe them or.

use Compromat. For example, we have one member of the Irish parliament, everybody knows who he is, who the Russians compromised in an operation that goes back some years. Now, if you go to a bigger polity, like say the Netherlands or Germany, just do the math, there are many, many more of these people. So that is a big part of the problem.

But there are also so many individuals and groups who, for all kinds of reasons, hate the status quo and want to change in the status quo that they’re willing to either flirt directly with these kind of groups. And I’m sure you know, in the US, there are people who have been identified by big news organizations as directly taking money from Russia. These are prominent podcasters.

people who have social media following that are very large. So there’s a multiplicity of activities, I would say, in, if you think about Europe as a single jurisdiction, but the intensity of that activity varies both from time to time and in particular, I think in election context and referendum context, it can be quite intense.

Last week, for example, I met the Norwegian minister for culture and her brief includes disinformation. she was very clear in saying we haven’t found any evidence of Russian interference or attempts to interfere in Norwegian elections. Now, that’s also the case in Ireland, by the way. But that’s not the case. If you look at Poland, if you look at Romania, if you look at Bulgaria, which is now going to have.

JOB (20:18.961)
general election within about eight weeks, I think. There’s an intensity of Russian activity in all of those places, and they want to divide people. They want to polarize political systems. They want the European Union to collapse. And of course, both Trump and Elon Musk have a similar aim. They want to see the destruction of Europe because for them,

It represents everything they hate. The rule of law embedded in what the EU does. The European Union has the biggest regulatory force in the world. They hate all of that. And so the Russian and American objectives here absolutely coincide. And mis and disinformation, I think, is a very key part to the strategy, certainly on the Russian side over a long period of time.

Eric (21:14.862)
John, let me pivot away from politics, which you have succeeded in totally depressing me, and talk about the secondary effects of social media. So quite apart from things like polarization and disinformation and undermining democracy, the other things that social media has brought us include shortened attention spans and increased narcissism, body dysmorphia.

You yourself have highlighted a decline in reading, a drastic decline in reading attention and reading among young people in their spare time as one of those worrisome social effects. Why does that bother you so much?

JOB (21:59.052)
Well, I should say first, I am very far from expert in this area, but the extent to which mis and disinformation has begun to feature in political discourse and in actual politics in Europe has kind of drawn me into this world to examine it more closely. There are lots of different things going on. One of the most important, think,

is the appearance of the smartphone in about 2007. It changed everything. There’s a brilliant British journalist who now works in the United States called Johann Hari. People may know his work, but his book, Stolen Focus, I think is really important here because he says to people as they try and grapple with this sense that they may be addicted to

Eric (22:43.694)
Mm-hmm.

JOB (22:58.187)
their phones, that your focus hasn’t just been lost. It was stolen away from you by companies that knew that the algorithms they were using in their products were addictive. And I can see all of the evidence of this in the university system. Students just refuse to read nowadays. It’s just astonishing to me. Ireland is

one of the most literate countries in the world. We are ranked second in the world in the PISA rankings for literacy, which is 15 and 16 year olds, their competence around reading. And we also have the second highest educated population in the world judged by university graduates. So amongst Irish people, 25 to 44,

Almost 60 % have a university education that compares to, think, about 20, 25 % in the United States. Yes, here we can see all the evidence of this in our classrooms. Firstly, students don’t know anything. They are literally clueless. And now we only have nine universities. The standard of teaching, Eric, is extremely high. It always has been.

But this is the sort of stuff that we’re encountering on a regular basis. I’ve asked in class, for example, over the last year, how many of you have read War and Peace? Not a single person out of 30. How many of you have watched Apocalypse Now? Because we were doing things that were relevant to it. One person out of 30. Before Christmas, I asked a class

Eric (24:45.964)
Hmm.

JOB (24:49.578)
What was the capital of Germany before Berlin came back in 1990? Nobody knew except for a visiting French student who lived close to the German border. So they don’t know anything, number one. And by the way, these are a lot of these people are coming out of university with relatively good honours degrees. I would say a majority of the people coming out of our universities now graduating.

cannot write a coherent sentence in English. Now that’s an incredibly frightening thought because it signals the collapse of literacy. 50 % of Americans have a reading age of 11.

Eric (25:28.76)
Yes.

JOB (25:34.058)
I mean, if you want to think about that and what it signals, I think it’s truly frightening. Now, some people think that we’re kind of reverse engineering the enlightenment in a way, and we are becoming pre-literate beings again. So the world before the 18th century is what’s relevant here. In the first decade of the 18th century,

Eric (25:48.246)
Mm.

JOB (26:03.403)
there were only 5,000 books published in Britain. By the end of that century, that number had ballooned extraordinarily. So we’re talking about tens and tens of thousands of volumes being published every year. So what we saw emerge is a reading public. There was this great sort of enthusiasm for reading and it really took off to the point where nowadays

the world as a whole is obviously the most literate it has ever been. Yet because of the smartphone and because of other factors, we are seeing this retreat from literacy and it’s now accelerating, would say, significantly with the appearance of AI because what AI does is allow you to cheat. You don’t have to do that laborious work of reading

making inferences from texts, looking for nuances in language that all disappears. It’s all out the window. And so, and this is before we’ve even got to the point where people are regularly embracing and using kind of generative AI. And we know that the take-up of it since ChatGPT was introduced in November, 2022, the take-up is incredibly high. We’re talking about

70, 80 % of the population in Ireland now uses generative AI for everyday things on a very regular basis. even before we get to that, the literacy issue is absolutely chronic and it’s getting worse all the time.

Eric (27:36.524)
Yeah.

the fastest uptake of any technology.

Eric (27:51.764)
well, moving on to another cheerful topic. I, I wanted to talk sort of about the general information environment. there is literacy in its explicit terms, like the ability to read or the experience of, a broad kind of library in your, in your head. There’s also

media literacy and kind of a which is essential to a democracy, which is meaning that you have a sense of what in the information environment is true and what isn’t. I was struck recently listening to a podcast, the guest of which was David Borenstein, the co-director of a recently Oscar nominated documentary about education in Putin’s Russia. Borenstein is familiar with propaganda worldwide and he said there were

JOB (28:41.6)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (28:46.04)
two kinds of reactions that he’d observed to propaganda. People in China, at one end of the spectrum, believe what they’re told by the government. People in Russia, equally saturated with propaganda, believe nothing and are cynical about the ability of people like them to believe whether, to discern whether anything is true. Where are we headed? To which end of that?

JOB (29:01.525)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (29:13.142)
spectrum, which you say we’re headed in Western democracies.

JOB (29:16.522)
I think it’s the Russian model for sure. And I think the Russian aim here from the beginning has been to turn Europe into what Putin turned Russia into. So when Putin came to office in 2000, Russia was a kind of messy, chaotic democracy, but it was a democracy. There was a press that was lively and

Over a period of years, he closes it all down. There’s a brilliant book from a young British Russian author, which is called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. His name is Peter Pomerantsev. He’s since moved to the United States and has written a lot of other interesting books about disinformation. But that book is extraordinary because he was there in the early years.

when Putin and his acolytes begin to capture both private and public media that had been more or less free during the Yeltsin years. They close all of that down progressively over time. And that’s a big part of the strategy. So what they’ve done is to kind of transplant that to Europe. They’ve attempted at least to do that. And their aim is to get

people to the point where they just can’t believe anything they see or hear. So the narrative itself is not important. In fact, at any one time, they may be encouraging three, four five different narratives about a particular issue. And what matters is that the base level of confidence in truth is eroded.

and is eroded over and over again to the point where you get to where Russia is now in the way that you just described.

Eric (31:19.192)
where everything is possible and nothing is true. John, you’ve been clear that you believe that increased regulation is a key step in redressing the harms that are being caused here. In the US, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, we have basically abandoned regulation and left it to the EU and its signatory regulatory law, the Digital Services Act, to bear the

the torch for regulation. Tell me about that law. What is it accomplishing? What does it set out to accomplish? How successful has it been so far?

JOB (32:03.69)
Well, I think even before we do that, we need to also talk about what some people call the mainstream media or the corporate media structure. I think it’s really evident now from what’s going on in the United States that it’s a terrible mistake to let oligarchs own television stations and newspapers. By the way, that was one of the things that motivated Putin in the early 2000s because there were oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, for example.

Eric (32:12.451)
Hmm?

JOB (32:33.567)
who owned one of the leading television stations. And Putin realized that this was a political weapon that could be used against him. And look at what’s happened in the U.S. with CBS, for example. It’s just extraordinary. If you look at the oversized influence of people like Murdoch, the kind of impulse for the great succession television drama, all of that has been happening for decades.

Eric (32:59.509)
Mm-hmm.

JOB (33:03.593)
politics simply hasn’t responded to the nefarious influence of these people. And Britain is the best test case of what happens when you let oligarchs run television and radio and newspapers, because they have agendas that are very often entirely at odds with the common good, however you might define that.

So I think there is a case for Europe as elsewhere. I’m just presuming the United States is lost for some years. This can’t be done now. But there is a case, I think, for entirely changing the structure of media ownership, putting in place, for example, cross media ownership rules, which severely limit the amount of media that any one individual or company

controls. In fact, I would as much as possible in encourage the political decision makers to insist that important media are owned by trusts that can certainly have some corporate presence or involvement, but where they don’t have this outsized power and influence on politics. Now,

Your question was about the DSA. Now, this is the European Union’s landmark piece of regulation. And it came about because exactly the things we’ve been talking about, the new information space that has emerged over the last 15 years or so. The DSA has all kinds of strong provisions within it.

The question that really matters is, is there the political will to actually do what is necessary? And I think the answer there is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that firstly, it’s a very recent piece of legislation. It’s 2022. It’s really only been operational for two years, almost to the day. The EU process itself is kind of slow, Eric.

Eric (35:15.598)
Mm-hmm.

JOB (35:26.299)
It has different institutional actors. It takes a while for any particular case that may be brought by the European Commission against, one of the big tech companies. It takes a while for the Commission to do an investigation and come up with a decision. And then those companies have the right to go to the Court of Justice to challenge that decision.

For example, in Ireland’s case much earlier, the European Commission did a big investigation to our relationship, Irish state’s relationship with Apple. Their argument was that we had given Apple through two particular deals in the 1990s, the ability to completely evade tax all over the European Union, so to completely evade their responsibilities.

Commission investigation took many years. The result of it was that it said Ireland had given Apple unfair tax advantages and that this went against the interests of the EU as a whole. Apple was ordered to pay back 15 billion euros to Ireland. The Irish government didn’t accept this. They challenged it before the court, along with Apple. They won their appeal.

But then the commission had another opportunity to appeal and they won. All I’m saying is these things go on potentially for a long time and the speed of change of technology means that we can’t wait for a five year investigation of one individual company. However, the good news is the commission is prepared to act. And you may recall that in late 2025, they issued a decision against

X, Musk’s company. So they had started four different investigations against X for infringements of the Digital Services Act. The first one that came up for decision was about the so-called blue tick that he introduced, which was in the commission’s view, a completely fraudulent thing that was designed to give the impression of quality control when actually anybody anonymously could go in and buy a blue tick.

JOB (37:51.271)
So their decision was that this infringed the DSA and that the X company should pay a fine of 120 million euros. Okay. Do you recall what happened afterwards? JD Vance immediately starts haranguing Europeans on social media, on X as it happens mostly, saying that this was

Eric (38:08.127)
No.

JOB (38:20.03)
completely against the spirit of free speech that they were trying to also attack American tech companies because they were far better than Europeans and much more competitive in these spaces. None of this was true, but this was another act of bullying and attempted coercion by the Trump administration. And what they want is the destruction of the Digital Services Act. Remember that image?

at the inauguration almost exactly a year ago with all the tech titans lined up behind Trump. To me, that was the image of 2025. And it goes back to D’Ampley’s book, The Hour of the Predators. So that was the first instance of a big test of the DSA. Now, 120 million euros, as you know, and your viewers know, is literally nothing to somebody like Trump.

At its potentially most effective, the EU has the capacity to issue fines of 6 % of global turnover of the big tech companies. Now for X, that doesn’t really matter because we’ve no idea what the turnover is since Musk actually bought it. I would much rather it was 6 % of the total wealth of the individuals who own the majority share in these companies.

Eric (39:37.678)
company.

JOB (39:47.367)
For companies like Apple and Metta, it’s very different. Six percent of their global turnover, we’re talking really serious fines that might be implemented. So that was the first case and an important test case. But there are three more actions against X where decisions, I think, will emerge in twenty twenty six. And they’re going to be another battleground in this.

increasingly adversarial relationship between the EU and the US. Remember, JD Vance came to Europe, his first trip as vice president in February of last year, and lectured the Europeans about freedom of speech, insulted them, humiliated them. All of this is reflected also in the national security strategy that came out at the end of November 2025.

The language about Europe is much harsher than anything about China or especially Russia. So I think there’s an understanding of this in Europe and the DSA may also be used as part of this anti-coercion instrument that, for example, President Macron wants to use and which EU leaders will be discussing this week in Brussels. So the DSA is a very powerful tool.

Eric (40:53.112)
Yes.

JOB (41:15.506)
potentially to put manners on these tech companies. But my argument is that they now have so much power that even the DSA may not be enough to tame them, that we may need other instruments. And I think the way things are going, it is not inconceivable that X will be thrown out of the European Union broadcasting landscape. You may recall that

When Russia attacked Ukraine for the second time in 2022, one of the first things the EU did was to ban or tea Russia today, the propaganda television arm of Putin’s operations in Europe. Now, I think there’s every case to argue that Musk’s behavior has been so outrageous that X2 should be banned.

And if that were to happen, notwithstanding that there’ll be another crisis between Washington and Brussels, I think it would send a clear signal to the other tech titans that whatever you’re doing in the United States where there’s no regulation at all anymore, you cannot do this in Europe. And that’s what I hope the commission does in the months ahead.

Eric (42:36.034)
That is.

Eric (42:40.974)
Until that happens, European consumers of news, like American consumers of news, are left pretty much on their own to figure out what to believe in their news feed. You have been a powerful proponent of media literacy. What does that mean to you? What does critical media literacy look like in practice?

JOB (43:09.374)
It means that we have to insert into the curriculum, the education curriculum, beginning at the lowest level where six and seven year olds start going to school, threaded all the way through high school and university, a critical media or digital media part of the curriculum.

This is something that mostly has never been taught in our school system, I think on either side of the Atlantic. But governments now, I think, are increasingly aware that with all of the direction of travel that you and I have discussed, with the trends being what they are, that you have to insulate your society and make it more resilient to these kinds of threats.

Because if we reach a point where deep fake videos feature regularly within elections, then it becomes impossible to hold an election that has any integrity at all. We had a presidential election in Ireland last year. Our president is entirely ceremonial. However, we for the first time, we saw a deep fake video

making an appearance in that campaign. Now, as it happened, it was a really bad, badly constructed one, but the technology is getting better all the time. So I think that is absolutely essential that every government of a democracy has got to include in their curriculum teaching on source materials and how you spot

obviously fake sources from sources that are bona fide, even if those sources may be very different ideologically. mean, this is one of the first things I try to teach students in university because unlike me, I was trained in a different era. When they go looking for information, it’s electronically almost exclusively. And very often they take shortcuts.

Eric (45:13.059)
Mm-hmm.

JOB (45:36.879)
instead of doing the detective work that research necessary, real research necessarily entails, there is no more frightening phrase in the English language, it seems to me, than I do my own research. That’s a sure indication that people have gone down the rabbit hole. And let me just give you a couple of short examples. I’m not talking about the people with a reading age of 11.

In the last couple of years, I’ve had so many instances where people I know or encountered who are really well educated. So people with advanced master’s degrees are now believing the worst kind of bullshit and are becoming entrapped in this kind of mire. So I had one encounter in Bulgaria a few years ago.

with a Bulgarian guy who was the best man at my friend’s wedding. And he works in Germany, very successful businessman. And he’s spouting all of these conspiracies. And I’m trying to sort of rebut them with reason and asking questions, completely oblivious, just nothing was getting through. Then a few weeks later, I met somebody who…

had actually a master’s degree from my own university and believed every conspiracy going. In fact, the first thing he said to me was about the so-called plandemic. I knew immediately that we were off to the races then, and I just couldn’t get through to him. And at some point when in our conversation, and he was a very nice guy, but I said to him, Nick.

You’re beyond a place where I can reach you. You’re beyond a place of reason now. And he said, he was smiling and he said, no, John, it’s just your opinion against mine. And I said, but you do understand that mine is based on 35 to 40 years, deep reading around these issues. Yours is based on some random thing you read on the internet five minutes ago. Those are not the same things. It’s gone on and on like that.

Eric (47:54.838)
And his response to that was

JOB (47:56.932)
The last one came actually last summer, again, really well-educated friend of mine who watches Joe Rogan on a very regular basis. And it just happened the day we met, the Guardian newspaper had a big spread on a group of scientists who had criticized Rogan, not for the first time, for misusing, deliberately misusing their work.

to claim that climate science basically either wasn’t real or it was deeply flawed. And so I said to my friend, look, here is the evidence that the scientists are saying clearly Rogan is lying to his audience, including you. If you had a friend in your life who you knew was lying to you on a regular basis, wouldn’t you end that friendship? And he said, no, no, can.

think for myself, I go in and I choose to listen to some things on Rogan and then I, I’m not as interested in other things. But the point is he has no capacity now to weigh up knowledge. None. Because most of his reading comes from Facebook and from other sources of that kind. So that that but when that’s becoming a problem in our universities, what hope does our society have more broadly?

when the best educated amongst us are falling for this stuff.

Eric (49:25.31)
Let’s, for a final question, let’s spin that out a bit. What hope do we have? Are you pessimistic? Are you cautiously hopeful when you look out five to 10 years? Does the assertion of regulation, say by the DSA and the infiltration of media literacy training start to reverse these trends or have we gone too far?

JOB (49:53.543)
I’m hopeful. I am a classic European, wet liberal and optimism is almost built into my DNA. So yes, I am, despite all of these systemic challenges. If we can get the education part right, and there’s a lot of good work and interesting work being done on digital media literacy.

If we can manage to tame the big tech titans through regulation, I think that will be really important. And I think it’s also interesting to understand some of the more recent trends where at least across some jurisdictions, young people seem to be sort of rebelling against the smartphone and coming to an understanding about all the damage that

either in actuality or potentially is being done through this constant presence of the smartphone in people’s lives. Even as something as insignificant as when the family sits down to watch a movie in the evening, that you have a lock box and everybody’s phone goes into the lock box for two hours. There are measures that people can take. I know myself that I read less than I used to 15 years ago.

because all of these distractions are permanently available to me. But I have trained myself in a way to go back to reading so that it is the kind of principle thing that I do outside of work. But you have to be incredibly disciplined to do that. I think we also need prompts at school and from public policy.

Eric (51:27.64)
Yes.

JOB (51:49.766)
to ensure that the worst of what you and I have described doesn’t happen. A lot of this, think, will also depend on what the world of artificial intelligence actually produces. I think it’s still far from clear that AI is going to be the kind of nirvana that many people predict in different sectors.

It’s certainly going to present and is already presenting enormous problems in terms of basic citizenship and the kind of issues that we’ve been talking about. But human beings have this extraordinary capacity for adaptation and this resilience, similarly, where we do learn from our mistakes. I think this is one of the most important

patterns of modern history that we are capable of course corrections, whether it’s in politics or geopolitics on one side or in domestic context tackling issues of this kind. And sometimes it takes something that’s really outrageous. For example, the controversy about GROC and the nudification of children.

I know in Ireland, other European countries, this caused such outrage that I think people are finally beginning to face up to the really deleterious impact of so much of this. that combination of education and regulation, but also self-awareness and this capacity to

do changes in your own life. All of that, think, will contribute to this effort to stave off the worst.

Eric (53:48.396)
All right, John, let’s leave it there that human adaptability, resilience, and in the end, after trying everything else, the reemergence of common sense and social welfare will win the fight of man against AI. John O’Brennan, thank you so much for your time today and your thoughts and the amazing perspective. Thank you for bringing so much to the table. Really appreciate it.

JOB (54:15.578)
Thanks, Eric. Great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

 

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jan 22 2026

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