00:00:09.460Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.
00:00:13.800So Adrienne, I'm thinking of this episode as part of our series doing like profiles
00:00:20.880in the gendered psychology of our new overlords, right?
00:00:23.980Like a lot of the time on this podcast, we are implicitly talking about Elon Musk.
00:00:29.540A lot of the time on this podcast, we're implicitly talking about Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel.
00:00:34.780There's like various characters who come up a lot in our like taxonomy of right wing masculinities.
00:00:40.320We've got the Dave Portnoy's and the Mike Pence's and, you know, the Joe Rogan's.
00:00:47.420And today we're going to talk about somebody who in many ways is the archetype of the creep, but who really clearly aspires to be a pervert.
00:00:59.540And that is a gentleman named Mark Zuckerberg. Sorry, I just said Mark Zuckerberg and you let
00:01:07.960out like the sigh of like exhausted defeat. Now, fun fact about me, I've thought about
00:01:14.940Mark Zuckerberg way more than is merited probably. But I've been researching and writing about
00:01:20.640Silicon Valley going on 10 to 15 years now. And for a long time, people sort of had difficulty
00:01:26.960accepting the kind of strong libertarian slash right-wing element within Silicon Valley.
00:01:32.680But that was mostly when it came to people like Elon Musk, where people sort of eventually
00:01:36.520like grokked the fact that like, well, this guy is just a straight up reactionary.
00:01:42.240Zuckerberg still might surprise some people showing up in a podcast about right-wing masculinity
00:01:46.960because he's not known as one of those famous Valley right-wingers, right?
00:02:48.320But like, there was this kind of readiness to think that both masculinity and conservative
00:02:52.660politics had very little to do with this guy.
00:02:54.380And I think it's both fascinating to look at him and to look at the way he was metabolized in regard with regard to that, because it turns out we've been historically very bad at sort of calling out far right ideas when they percolate or when they travel under a different flag, when they wear a hoodie or when they're they're offering you, you know, a vegan burrito or whatever.
00:03:13.460Yeah, like he neither seemed particularly right wing nor particularly masculine in the way that he was publicly being understood. And what has happened to him over the past year or so is interpreted as a change. But I think we will articulate how it is really just kind of a continuation of existential trends, right?
00:04:27.120And along with his mother's interest in psychology, his father had an early interest in computers and tech and was kind of a computer hobbyist, right?
00:04:35.560So Mark Zuckerberg picked up this computer science hobby from his father and was pretty good at it pretty early on.
00:04:46.800This was something the kid really took to.
00:04:48.540You know, now we are in an age where we're confronting the reality that a lot of people think of computer coding as requiring intellectual capacity that it doesn't.
00:05:00.200Like, don't get me wrong, like coding is not easy.
00:05:04.280But it's not as hard as the people who do it like to pretend that it is.
00:05:08.500But Zuckerberg was quite good at it quite young.
00:05:11.140And partly on the strength of his talent for this, he transferred from his, you know, public Long Island, wealthy suburb high school to Phillips Exeter Academy.
00:05:22.440Do you know anything about Phillips Exeter?
00:05:38.800And yeah, a bunch of famous people went there.
00:05:41.140One of these prep schools in New England that has like a bunch of presidents, you know, it's a factory that reproduces the elite.
00:05:48.880Right. And then he hopped on over to the other one, Harvard, just a few miles down the road where he famously, you know, he had he had started a few companies by this point in his teens that had like a degree of commercial promise.
00:06:05.860like he seems to have invented something called synapse which was basically just like an early
00:06:10.900version of spotify it was like a machine learning program that would shuffle through a bunch of mp3s
00:06:17.220and then pick up on patterns in the music and then suggest other music to you that you might
00:06:22.100like if you're listening to music like this so like a an early sort of way of detecting consumer
00:06:28.240preferences. And then when he got to Harvard, the sort of legend is that he went on a date
00:06:36.300that went quite badly. And when he gets home from this date, he develops a program called
00:06:42.180FaceSmash. And Adrian, could you like go through FaceSmash for us?
00:06:45.520Yeah. I mean, it was one of many attempts by young software engineers, coders, et cetera,
00:06:52.680to determine who was hot or not in the early 2000s.
00:06:56.780The same way we devote enormous amount of computing powers
00:06:59.760to generating pictures that look like, you know,0.95
00:07:02.800Leni Riefenstahl fucked a Hallmark card.0.76
00:07:05.460Back then, people devoted an immense energy1.00
00:07:08.220to like the ranking of hotness of the ladies.
00:07:12.740And FaceMash was that trained, I believe, on the Harvard Facebook.
00:07:18.520I mean, for those of our listeners who are too young to remember this,
00:07:21.320Facebook was a literal book with people's pictures in it.
00:07:25.520Facebook's only really existed at very elite schools, right?
00:07:29.680It is a marker of elite status for schools to have these.
00:07:33.700Harvard actually didn't have just one.
00:07:37.640Various different dorms and clubs within Harvard had their own.
00:07:42.780And what he did was he trolled the various websites of these different Harvard-affiliated institutions
00:07:49.500and downloaded without permission the photographs that were posted there, right?
00:07:55.740So he stole a bunch of images of non-consenting women in his peer group
00:08:01.900and put those onto this hot or not comparison
00:08:07.080that he then distributed among members of his Harvard community
00:08:11.120so that they could, you know, rank and richly humiliate their peers together.
00:08:18.280And one should say trained on a archive of social reproduction, right? Like the Facebook existed cynically, I would say, in order for people to pick a husband slash wife out of that bunch and have many, many future Harvard going children, right? This is in some way using elite reproduction and hypercharging it.
00:08:42.360Yeah. So face smash kind of goes like viral over the weekend at Harvard. It's only up for like two days or less than two days, in part because it crashes Harvard's server. So that is one reason Harvard wanted to shut it down. They also wanted to shut it down because some of these women who had not consented to be part of this humiliation ritual objected to the use of their photographs without their permission for this endeavor.
00:09:08.660So he actually gets almost expelled. There are a series of disciplinary hearings over this. During one of those, his fraternity, he's part of like the Jewish fraternity on campus, and they throw him a party in anticipation of him getting thrown out of Harvard as a result of this, you know, misogynist, like little digital experiment.
00:09:31.640and at that party that's where he meets priscilla chan the woman who he has been with ever since
00:09:38.840and who is now his wife right so like we don't know a ton about priscilla chan she's not very
00:09:45.300public or vocal but in like the subsequent months like later really over the past few months
00:09:51.400something you'll hear a lot of speculation about among like the very online liberals is like oh
00:09:58.060zuckerberg's getting divorced right his turn towards uh this kind of tacky performative
00:10:05.180masculinity is something we've come to associate with like men who have been sexually rejected by0.95
00:10:11.000their wives right yeah the implicit hope there is that like then you know priscilla chand will1.00
00:10:15.260take a bunch of his money in the ensuing divorce and then go fund liberal causes which is the only1.00
00:10:20.060way that any liberal causes get funded anymore is when a tech oligarch gets divorced the old1.00
00:10:31.340Like from what we can see of Priscilla Chan, I don't think that's her vibe, right?
00:10:36.540Because this is somebody who in college saw all of her friends and classmates get ritually humiliated and decided to go to a party for the guy who did it.
00:10:53.680And Zuckerberg does not get kicked out of Harvard.
00:10:56.100And what he does do actually is get recruited by a bunch of like insane, like the kind of character that only exists at Harvard, which are Taylor and Cameron Winklevoss.
00:11:07.260Do you know about the Winklevoss twins?
00:11:13.040They basically were already back then kind of sort of in the tech finance space, I believe, and today they're right-wing crypto grifters slash investors, right?
00:11:25.320So the Winklevoss, I'm sorry, I keep saying like they're Swiss or something, Winklevoss, like they sound like elves, right?
00:11:33.200Actually, they were rowers. They were on the Harvard crew team and they had an idea that they thought was a decent business idea, but they didn't know how to program it. Right. Their idea was basically just my space.
00:11:47.860So, like, the degree to which social networking and, like, individual online profiles that enabled consumers to represent themselves online and to connect with their friends online and, like, you know, gather information about their social world in the digital sphere, that was already, like, very well established in late 2003 when the Winklevoss twins go to Zuckerberg with this proposal.
00:12:13.400This is, like, kind of something that already exists in the market.
00:12:16.660Yeah. Which I think becomes extremely important for the Zuckerberg story down the line, right? He seems to the present day obsessed with the idea that he had somehow innovated, that somehow he had had an idea that no one had had.
00:12:30.620But in fact, it's pretty noticeable that his, I mean, he appears to have been quite good, as you say, at coding and that sort of thing.
00:12:37.860But it's very noticeable that FaceSmash aped things that already existed and that in the end, Facebook succeeds in a space where Friendster and where MySpace had already sort of succeeded.
00:12:51.600Not to say that it didn't do some things better.
00:12:54.380The rollout appears to have been extremely successful, all that.
00:12:57.180But it is to say that like he clearly thought and probably still thinks of himself as this kind of genius innovator and disruptor when in fact what Facebook was, was the best financed and best credentialed of the possible killer apps for Friendster and for MySpace.
00:13:15.740It's a little bit similar to the way that like everyone's rolling out a Twitter clone now, right?
00:13:19.460Like the name of the game is not innovation.
00:13:21.600You know, you make a couple of choices about how you set up your user base and either you succeed or you don't.
00:13:26.100And if you don't, you're Mark Zuckerberg. But it's very, very important that like, unlike, let's say, the PayPal mafia, like these guys were not really ahead of the game other than in the aggressiveness of their expansion and sort of the rollout itself, I think.
00:13:42.160Yeah. So I think that's really good information, right? Because Zuckerberg does not come up with this idea. And the idea itself is not particularly new, right? It's already a proven success of a product, but it's duplicating something that already exists in the market. The Winklevoss twins want to call it Harvard Connect or Harvard Connection. And the idea is that it would be sort of an in-house social network for Harvard University.
00:14:07.580Of which one should say there were also a bunch of these. There's the Daily Jolt and stuff like this. I went to college around this exact same time. Like there were a bunch of companies marketing this sort of a location dependent social network for college campuses.
00:14:20.860Yeah. So like Zuckerberg takes this not very original idea and steals it. Right. He tells the Winklevoss twins that he like you don't have to hand it to these guys, but they thought they were hiring this guy to develop their IP. And then he just stole their IP and they eventually sued him and got a lot of money, which they have now used for, you know, various evil schemes, evil schemes.
00:14:43.060Yeah. So he totally steals their idea, develops it into what he called the Facebook with the idea being that he was going to digitize this elite reproduction tool that he had previously used for like purposes of public misogyny.
00:14:58.820He was now going to use it for like more broad based forms of social climbing.
00:15:03.620And he promptly drops out of Harvard and moves to beautiful sunny Palo Alto because he has investment interest from a guy named Peter Thiel.
00:15:15.320Do you want to tell us about Peter Thiel's involvement with early Facebook?
00:15:19.280Well, so Peter Thiel comes out of the PayPal mafia alongside such luminaries, Elon Musk.
00:15:26.340But Thiel basically, he was the CEO of it. And when it went public, he started the Founders Fund, which I believe is the vehicle through which he started investing in Facebook. And I believe he was the first to really do that.
00:15:40.320Now, again, there is a kind of mythology around this
00:20:10.080There are also, like, lots of acquisitions that they've made that basically, I think, are either a wash or, like, sort of, like, are regarded as kind of a negative, right?
00:20:19.340I mean, the most famous one probably is the 2014 acquisition of Oculus VR.
00:27:22.920This is typical of Silicon Valley's like early 2000s, like aughts era mythos is the dropout figures contrast between tremendous wealth and great personal immaturity.
00:27:37.600Right. And boyish immaturity. Yeah. That was central to their mystique.
00:27:41.920So like the refusal to wear a suit and the adaptation instead of a adolescent casual wardrobe, right, which became itself like a real form of affectation.
00:27:54.600But that was seen as a kind of defiance of elite politesse that I think now we can see similar strains of in conservative masculinity of the Trump era, right?
00:28:08.980Like I am rejecting your norms and that itself is a sign of my power, my personal vulgarity or immaturity in the face of things that other people are taking very seriously, like large amounts of money or like huge amounts of data privacy.
00:28:24.060Right. That itself, that casualness is a sign of masculine domination.
00:28:29.940Right. So you see it going from Mark Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie to meetings where people are trying to give him millions of dollars to Elon Musk talking about the Shiba Inu meme while he's taking away your grandma's Social Security.
00:28:43.140You know, it's like the insistence on irreverence is itself a way to show personal power and exert domination over the week.
00:28:55.260But it wasn't really cast in those terms.
00:28:57.680It was cast as this, like, you know, motorcycle kind of useful irreverence.
00:29:02.960Yeah, and one should say that, like, there had been a long tradition in Northern California of a kind of a refusal of kind of button-up work cultures, right?
00:29:15.800I mean, people sort of, like, rolling their bike down the hallway, you know, the famous beanbag chair lounge where they would have their meetings, that kind of thing.
00:29:22.620But there it really was still a countercultural artifact. It was that these people had been hippies and were like, I'm not settling down into just a basic office. And there may have been tricky gender politics behind that too. But it's interesting that when Zuckerberg et al. sort of arrived, the signifier of dressing down is kind of double-coded.
00:29:42.440On the one hand, like they can they can be read as like these latter day grandchildren of hippies, basically, irreverent and unwilling to do business and capitalism as usual.
00:29:53.280Or it can be, as you say, a power move.
00:29:56.420We continue the elite without having to put on a pinstripe suit in order to represent it.
00:31:30.100Google wasn't particularly profitable before she came in either.
00:31:33.700They had a four-person ad team, and she expanded that to being almost a 5,000-person ad team, right?
00:31:40.620She had really grown revenue streams at Google and had a track record of professionalizing these tech startups and of making them extremely profitable quite quickly.
00:31:51.860And she came in and she did that at Facebook.
00:31:54.100The advertising sale revenue model was her intervention, right?
00:31:58.940She's like, OK, we're going to be big boys and make some money off of this. Right. So the domesticating rules implying mother figure was like very much a role that she stepped into. Right. And they were actually like quite intimate.
00:32:13.860It was a relationship that Sandberg's husband at the time, who has since died, described as like a courtship because Zuckerberg, who again was 23, would be over at their house for dinner like three or four times a week.
00:32:27.040And they would be speaking long into the night. And she is taking on this role where she's working for him, but she's also becoming a figure of authority and of expertise in how to be a business person like an adult.
00:32:43.860Right. Yeah. And the idea of bringing Sandberg in was that Zuckerberg was going to focus on
00:32:53.700product. Right. She was going to run the business and he was going to make Facebook a better
00:32:59.320product. Right. Which, as we have covered, isn't exactly his strong suit. Right. Yeah.
00:33:04.600And this is one place where I think we can look really closely at Zuckerberg's personal control
00:33:10.560over Facebook, the company, because most kids or young people in Silicon Valley or
00:33:17.320doing these tech startups, their dream is not to run a company for their whole lives.
00:33:22.780Their dream is to sell a company, right? You make something that proves valuable and then you get
00:33:30.520rich by selling it to somebody bigger. And that's when you can, you know, sort of exit stage left
00:33:36.760And you can use that to start another company or you can, you know, fuck off and surf for the rest of your life, you know, whatever it is that your dream is.0.96
00:33:47.700Well, but mostly what you do is what Peter Thiel does.0.99
00:33:50.240Yeah. You become a capital investor. Yeah.
00:33:52.080Yeah. And then start mucking around with politics.0.95
00:33:54.340Yeah. And then destroy democracy because you read a, you know, narcissistic software engineer's blog.0.93
00:34:02.080But what we get with Zuckerberg is like an extreme personal identification with Facebook and a continued, I think even now, majority stake in the company.
00:34:15.380This is like kind of weird in terms of corporate governments.
00:34:19.120Exactly. Like the story sort of goes from like, oh, he was so smart.
00:34:24.020He refused to be bought by this other company for this outlandish amount of money.
00:34:30.080Yeah. To like, oh, you probably should have sold at some point. Like there's this kind of personal union that you get in some of these companies. And that, frankly, I think Elon Musk is trying to sort of retroactively engineer with X slash Twitter. Right. But it is an anomaly in Silicon Valley. Most of these people are no longer involved with the companies that they've started. Many of them have been serial entrepreneurs, meaning they use that capital to start another company.
00:34:56.340or, as you say, there are many, many off-ramps
00:34:59.660and Zuckerberg is unusual in that he didn't take it.
00:35:20.120who like almost displaces him a little in that role, right?
00:35:23.660She is really involved in day-to-day operations of the company.
00:35:27.800She is really, really involved in not just their revenue strategy, but in their marketing strategy.
00:35:33.100She's really involved in their hiring and personnel strategy.
00:35:36.380You know, she is the person who, for all intents and purposes, is running Facebook.
00:35:41.420And this is also the era when Facebook, like a lot of Silicon Valley companies, has like pretty decent relationships with the Democratic Party and particularly with the Obama administration.
00:35:53.200You want to tell us a little bit about, like, Facebook's relationship to Obama?
00:35:56.220Well, I guess, I mean, Sandberg in particular, right, like through Lean In is very much connected to what we would think of as sort of a pro-business liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
00:36:07.620Yeah, you know, she worked for Larry Summers before she went to Google.
00:36:11.520She is a major donor to a lot of Democratic Party causes.
00:36:16.560And she becomes personally an avatar of a kind of like quasi-triumphalist, I think like really defanged form of aughts era liberal feminism that like really becomes personified to a lot of people in Hillary Clinton.
00:36:35.440But I think, you know, Sheryl Sandberg, if anything, is maybe like the other big avatar of this style of thinking about women's social advancement and public roles, because in 2013, she publishes a book called Lean In, which is pitched as sort of a self-help guide for women looking to ascend in corporate workplaces.
00:37:01.820Right. And Lean In is known for its prescriptions.
00:37:08.500She basically prescribes women who are torn between, say, work and family or who are encountering discrimination or harassment in the workplace to work harder.
00:37:20.000Right. And it's weird because if you read Lean In, as admittedly, I haven't done in a long time, if you read Lean In, her prescriptions are, I think, like pretty reactionary.
00:37:32.420They are all about personal responsibility. Right. But her diagnosis is not such that would necessarily like lead to those conclusions at all.
00:37:41.060right? Like she's got a pretty decent diagnosis of like sources of the wage gap. She is pretty
00:37:48.280interested in cultural factors that lead to women's diminished confidence. You know,0.86
00:37:54.960it's a little pop psychology-ish. It's very, it's like, it's a 2013 TED Talk in book form,
00:37:59.640right? It's like, well, you know, we put on little boys t-shirts at Target that they're strong and
00:38:05.500powerful and they're going to be inventors. And we put on little girls t-shirts that they're kind
00:38:09.080and pretty. And it's like, OK, well, that's, I think, a symptom of maybe broader forces at work
00:38:13.980that could be like diagnosed in a little bit of a more robust and less casual fashion. Right. But
00:38:19.220she's not wrong in her diagnosis of these like underlying phenomena. She's like, OK, well,
00:38:24.920there's cultural trends that punish women for character traits or behaviors that are actually1.00
00:38:30.920beneficial to like capital accumulation and professional achievement. And then there are
00:38:36.440these like, you know, she doesn't ignore the role of things like motherhood penalties or like lack0.60
00:38:42.140of paid leave or sexual harassment. Like she does also sort of gesture to these more structural
00:38:47.220kinds of exclusions. Yeah. But then her prescription is just like, well, work harder,
00:38:51.500ladies. And it's just like, it is like kind of a depoliticizing of a political diagnosis,
00:38:58.120which is like very strange to me, but was very, very typical of that period.
00:39:02.040It's almost as though she had a really, really good researcher,
00:39:05.180but was it Silicon Valley CEO who wanted to ask questions like,
00:39:08.460what would you do if you weren't afraid?
00:40:09.680And I think when we look at what's happened to Zuckerberg since, you know, like there's like biographies of Zuckerberg that cast him as motivated by like early sexual rejections, like the biopic The Social Network.
00:43:20.280with this massive gob of cash early on.
00:43:22.720But that's not really in it because it has to be about this lone genius. And, you know, that's got everything to do with the fact that the other person that movie is about, who also regards himself as a lone male genius, is Aaron Sorkin, the writer, right?
00:43:37.100And there is a real kind of pipeline or a real kind of symbiosis between these genius writers writing about these genius CEOs at this time and basically creating these portraits of these CEOs as almost like artists, right?
00:43:53.420Like the company is his work of art, right?
00:43:58.100The fact that there are tons of people behind the scenes steering this thing, that there are people professionalizing this, that there are HR departments that are making sure that the best people get there.
00:44:07.100That makes sure that, like, people stay out of the team's hair while they're trying to innovate, et cetera, et cetera.
00:44:14.180And what it is is like, oh, it's this lone person kind of shaping the world according to his wishes.
00:44:20.520And it's very noticeable that the people who fall for this stuff, whether it's, you know, Michael Lewis with Sam Bankman Freed or, frankly, Ken Oletta with Elizabeth Holmes or, although much more critically, Aaron Sorkin with Mark Zuckerberg,
00:44:36.220They, I think, have a little touch of that self-conception themselves. And I think it's a really central, a key part of the kind of mythologization of Silicon Valley that really subtended its political efficacy in the 2010s. And that, frankly, we're still grappling with that. We're sort of trying to get ourselves out of.
00:44:57.220right the reason why we couldn't be like oh these billionaires went right wing how fucking
00:45:01.960surprising right when at the first sign that they were it was like but it can't be right like but
00:45:07.280he's such an unusual guy he's he's so hard to play it's like no he's not hard to place he's a rich
00:45:12.200guy who doesn't want to give up his money what could be more boring than that if he owned a used
00:45:16.440Ford dealership you wouldn't think twice about it but because he's wearing a hoodie and because he0.97
00:45:20.940watched this movie about how he's a fucking genius I guess that makes it really hard to0.92
00:45:25.520hard to describe what's happening yeah i mean i think there's you've hit on a few things one is0.98
00:45:29.760the like mysticization of this kind of masculinity right the lone genius who is tortured by his own
00:45:39.680gifts like into a tragic and almost like inevitable or accidentally anti-social stance
00:45:46.260is i think like really like you know it's absolving right it sort of takes mark zuckerberg0.99
00:45:52.720out of responsibility yeah he's an asshole because because he's so brilliant not because it's in his0.99
00:45:58.100self-interest to be an asshole or not because he like doesn't particularly care about other people1.00
00:46:01.180right yeah and then there's the other thing that you're noting on like maybe a psychological level0.99
00:46:05.820which is the need for these tech innovators to see themselves as singular geniuses who have created
00:46:13.040something you know sui generis out of their mind that is creating all this value yeah which is kind
00:46:18.040of antithetical to how social media companies actually work, which is that the people who are
00:46:22.480creating the value, well, the people who are creating a value on Facebook are Facebook users.
00:46:27.700That's what the other users are going there to see. They're going to see one another, right?
00:46:31.360The people who are getting paid are merely kind of supplying like a container for that to happen
00:46:37.200in, but like, it's not the actual source of the value, right? The actual source of the value
00:46:41.260is dispersed across the user base. Network effects. Exactly. And so that is, I think,
00:46:45.800also like a contradiction in terms for the conception of zuckerberg as a genius because
00:46:51.000like he's a genius because we are right right the the source of his supposed genius is is
00:46:56.420entirely located in other people yeah maybe that's just an extension of the metaphor of like what how
00:47:01.100you talk about a company working right like actually this is a lot of people adding in a
00:47:05.440ton of value by working and it's a lot of other investors adding in a ton of value by like dumping
00:47:11.240money in and making it happen that way you know there's this like distribution of the actual work
00:47:16.520and effect and then like a concentration of credit yeah but we should note what i think does make
00:47:22.900these platforms unusual is that a lot of the labor that does make them so effective that
00:47:26.340accounts for their network effects is rendered for free and that it is often rendered by people who
00:47:33.140are very very different from the people who build the actual algorithms right who build the actual
00:47:37.060platform, and this is by now, I think a little bit of an old example, but the review platform
00:47:42.420Yelp, that was very open about the fact that like they really were trying to solicit restaurant
00:47:48.020reviews from women, mostly, I guess, moms, which they weren't paying for. But that was driving all0.78
00:47:53.820the traffic to the site. I had an interview for my book with an early employee there who said like,
00:47:59.420yeah, I mean, like power users did not get paid. Power users got spa coupons, right? And he's like,
00:48:05.380think about that like it's very obvious who we envisioned right this wasn't you know some pimply
00:48:10.82017 year old like in his mom's basement it wasn't you know a grandpa this was we were envisioning0.99
00:48:16.700a middle-aged woman who was doing this for free and of course the ability to take women's labor
00:48:22.540that is rendered for free and say well this is not really work is a really really old thing but it is
00:48:27.360the number one means of value generation for most of these social media companies facebook moms
00:48:35.160So do you want to get into what has happened to Mark Zuckerberg over the past, like, two years that has changed his public reputation?
00:48:45.400You know, before he went on Rogan and talked about the need for more masculine energy, before he showed up at Trump's inauguration and, like, ogled Jeff Bezos' wife's weird bustier, before he went into the category that he's gone into now,
00:49:01.220There was kind of a transitional period in his public image.
00:49:04.600Yeah, and I think it started really in 2016.
00:49:08.6202016, 2017 really was kind of an important year for Facebook in, I think, three ways.
00:49:14.880One was the 2016 election, a lot of people blamed on Facebook, fairly or not, whatever.
00:49:20.020And one should say, one group that seems to have thought that Facebook did have some responsibility were a lot of Facebook employees.
00:49:26.160And so this whole talk of like, oh, we're just one big family really got a couple of cracks.
00:49:31.220Because now Zuckerberg's family was like, I don't know, buddy, it feels like we did
00:49:34.940something bad here and we should probably be better about this.
00:49:37.820Meanwhile, he kind of doubled down on this bet on the metaverse.
00:49:41.780Basically, this was going to be his true stroke of genius, right?
00:49:46.040Again, doing something that for once was just entirely his bailiwick.
00:50:17.060And he had never had like a very stellar online reputation.
00:50:21.220But he really fell into what I like to call the VC trap, which is that like these Silicon Valley super rich, like go on social media and do a thing.1.00
00:50:28.820and then everyone's like, God, what a fucking dork.0.99
00:54:05.040Zuckerberg gives off enormous divorce data energy without actually divorcing, which I think is interesting.
00:54:10.960Although apparently the rumor, and this is the kind of blind item that I'm going to caution as unconfirmable, but the rumor is that when Priscilla was pregnant with, I believe, their third child, Mark Zuckerberg, during their pregnancy, took a meeting with China's leader, Xi Jinping, and offered Xi the right to name their future son, which he had not discussed with Priscilla.
00:54:32.380And Xi basically told him, like, you know, get some self-respect.
00:54:37.040Like, he was trying to get more deference for Meta's operations in China and more deregulation of his company in that market.
00:54:44.040And Priscilla was very mad at him for offering Xi Jinping naming rights to her son.
00:54:50.540And that's why he bought her that god-awful statue, that, like, weird statue portrait of her that is supposedly at their compound in Palo Alto.
00:55:00.420It's like weird. It's like kind of like she's like windswept. It's kind of like copper. It's ugly. You guys should Google it. There's a photo of her in a bathrobe sipping coffee in front of this god awful ugly. I feel like if a man gave me that, I would divorce him. But she doesn't feel that way.
00:55:16.980We should say these are all these rumors are unconfirmed. So take them with a grain of salt.
00:55:21.820Who knows? I just I like I think that that is a wonderful story. And it's a great story.
00:55:30.680I mean, honestly, if I went on a date with Mark Zuckerberg, I would fully expect there to be a big and awkward and absolutely misbegotten gesture to be part of it.
00:55:41.840Because every public appearance, including his tack to the right, I'm like, you're not even MAGA-ing right, man.
00:55:47.720Yeah, it's awkward. His heart's not in it.
00:55:49.860Did you listen to any of his Rogan interview that came out just after the election?
00:55:59.100They're about three hours. You know what somebody's told me is that it's for guys who go to the gym and they spend all their time at the gym.
00:56:05.240And what they're doing there is listening to podcasts.
00:56:07.560So this is for your leg day or whatever. And you're doing one hundred thousand pistol squats.
00:56:12.580And you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, where he complained a lot about covid era regulation from the Biden administration.
00:56:19.360He's like they wanted us to suppress free speech. And he's not very convincing at it.
00:56:24.040particularly what he's talking about is like Biden administration requests to like stop
00:56:27.300algorithmically incentivizing disinformation about COVID vaccines. But he is using the rhetoric of
00:56:34.800free speech. And the part that was really impressive to me was when he talked about
00:56:40.180his resentment at being investigated. He was investigated by antitrust and consumer protection
00:56:46.120administrations during the Biden era. And he really, really resented having his companies
00:58:11.300Which was a name that issued like this like Bronx cheer,
00:58:14.620howl of pain and disgust from Joe Rogan.1.00
00:58:17.800You know, the embodiment not only of womanhood, but of an aggressive regulatory state, of an aggressive antitrust regime.
00:58:24.940Right. She is. She is the embodiment for them of feminized regulation.0.73
00:58:29.460Yeah. So then he talks about corporate America requiring more masculine energy.1.00
00:58:36.460We should say that Sheryl Sandberg exited Facebook, or I guess it's called Meta now, in 2022, following the COVID debacle and the viral spread of misinformation on that platform during the pandemic.0.57
00:58:51.060And I guess now Zuckerberg has decided that he doesn't want any more of that feminine energy, whatever that means, in his company.0.83
00:58:58.580So do you want to talk about that remark?0.82
00:59:00.740Yeah, I mean, I think it's really remarkable if you know the companies.
00:59:05.100Silicon Valley has made very tentative steps
00:59:08.420towards alleviating the gender imbalance
00:59:10.520in the upper echelons of its headquarters
00:59:13.580over the last, I don't know, 10 years.
00:59:16.600There's a recognition that this was a problem
00:59:38.200And if you go there, right, there's the main quad, which I think used to be sort of Sun Microsystems before Facebook and then later Meta took it over.
00:59:45.500There's a massive headquarters built, I think, by Frank Gehry.
00:59:49.900And then there's a bunch of these Silicon Valley kind of office buildings that sort of got put up very, very quickly.
00:59:55.820Every time you'd go down there, it'd be a new one.
00:59:57.940And that's sort of where their like content moderation teams sit.
01:00:00.920That's where their celebrity relationship sits, especially for Instagram.
01:00:05.280That's where HR sits, et cetera, et cetera.
01:00:07.940And as people sort of leave the buses to go to these places, my observation, I mean, I haven't been there since May 2022.
01:00:15.240All the men go into one building and all the women go into the other.0.86
01:00:52.120And I think what we can understand in Zuckerberg's comment is a commitment to the same kind of projects that, like, the Trump and Elon Musk and J.D. Vance regime has endeavored to instill in the federal bureaucracy, right, which is the resegregation along racial and in Zuckerberg's case, particularly sex lines of the workforce, right?
01:01:14.360We're going to exclude women and people of color from positions of prominence, of decision making, of dignity and power.0.56
01:01:23.380And we're going to make power an exclusively white male domain.0.99
01:01:27.760Yeah. And power and prestige are concentrated where you're dealing with the data, which means the stuff that actually makes you the money, which is the stuff that, right, if you build the platform, you are important.0.51
01:01:40.620If you help moderate the content, you're not important.
01:01:43.620If you have relations with the content, you are not important.
01:04:48.920It's both, it's a biographical thing, right?
01:04:51.640But it's also deeply political, as you say,
01:04:53.680Because it was a moment that really didn't reflect, didn't have to reflect on its own gender and racial presuppositions where a lot of that stuff was sort of accepted as natural or where there wasn't an HR department at all.
01:05:06.200I mean, most startups don't have an HR department.
01:05:07.980So they couldn't say, guys, this actually violates federal law.
01:05:11.240Everyone was making too much money, right?
01:05:13.500Like if you fired the one lady you had, she wouldn't sue because you didn't want to be that girl.0.99
01:05:19.160So you would just apply to another job and get a good recommendation.
01:05:22.600And because you worked at Facebook, of course, you'd get that job and you'd make money.
01:05:26.160So basically, there was no reason for any of this stuff that corporate America has built up to adjudicate fairness, hierarchies, promotions, et cetera, et cetera.
01:05:35.180And as you say, they don't see that extremely anomalous state of affairs that was owed to just everyone pouring bathtubs full of cash into Silicon Valley.