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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasts. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. Why Sophie Sophie is angry at me for that opening. This is the podcast where we talk about all the things you didn't know about terrible people. And we laugh sometimes, too. We're talking about Mark Zuckerberg. This is Part 2, so you shouldn't need a normal intro. You're listening to Part 2. You saw in the title. This is Part 2. You know what? You know what's going on here. My guests, as always on podcast about Mark Zuckerberg are Jamie Loftus and Maggie Mae Fish. How y'all doing? Oh, we're nice and warm from part one, baby warm from part one, and from the delightful internal heating effect of Doritos Blaze. No, I feel the furnace deep in my belly and right next to my uterus, which is nice. The powder is coursing through my veins, clogging my bloodstream like a diet any second. Not clogging. Enhancing, enhancing. Now, oh, God, that was a good dorito. Is there a bad dorito? No. No. No, there's not. Fantastic. All ready to talk about marzec some more marzuq Marzouk. It's Mike Marwin, 44. Welcome to marwin. Welcome to marzec for someone who gets beaten by a Facebook hate mob, which we'll be talking about in Part 3. Like everyone. So the bloom is well and truly off the rows of Facebook in the wake of the 2016 election. Criticizing the social media company has become so common as of articles declaring that young people have increasingly left the service behind, that it can be very easy to forget just what a darling Facebook was in its early days. True, I was a tech journalist in the wild and woolly era of 2010 when Facebook was cracking new number milestones every couple of months. I remember when they hit half a billion and eventually a billion. We would all write articles about Facebook. This many people are on Facebook. This is how much time they're spending. Look at all this great stuff now. There was a lot of excitement about what Facebook might mean for the future back then. For most of the tech media, it lasted right up until the election. I found a Business Insider article from 2015 that illustrates this pretty well. It's titled The Fabulous Life of Mark Zuckerberg. To give you an idea of its tone, here's the line from the introduction. The Harvard dropouts current net worth is at about 33.4 billion, putting him at #16 on Forbes ranking of the world's billionaires. Here's a closer look at the life of the simultaneously. Down to earth, yet extravagant CEO. Now, with this report's opinion that no one worth $33 billion can never be considered down to earth, but hey, maybe I got some sour grapes. It is interesting to me that this seems to be a carefully concocted marketing ploy used by Zuckerberg. The first big book about Facebook's founding, the book that was the basis for the movie The Social Network was titled The Accidental Billionaires. This is something he wants to push. Yeah, they stumbled into it. Oops. I wound up with more wealth than most of Africa. Oops. Oopsie. Toodles. I can't be doing wrong if I'm this successful. If it was, if I just missed your magoon my way into a pile of money the size of the Sears Tower. I can't even grow a beard. Guys, I'm just gonna keep making fun of it. There's not actually as much cash in existence as I have in my bank account. Mark Zuckerberg? Wow. Yeah, now the Business Insider article, with all of its flawed and fawning pros, still provides a decent little look at Zuck's early life. It makes a point of really, really going into Mark's bonafides as a legit, smart guy that he. Seems to be very sensitive about his intelligence. I could the size of his intelligence. Interesting. Fun fact, Maggie. I could. I could taste the anger in your voice really like it was. It was almost like a Dorito. Styles compulsive, yeah. Of the things that I've noticed, like just having immersed myself in Zucker Ness, he is extremely protective of the idea that he is a genius on all things and not just Facebook. So, I mean, he's not in Mensa, he's not like Jamie, how's that **** threat on Facebook? Love Facebook. To be fair. It's where they spread all their hate to each. It's it is the platform that they need to have to do it. So they earned it. They paid $75 to take a test on a Sunday, so. Ohh, IQ tests are a *******. Almost as terrible as Mark Zuckerberg, but that'll be for our Stefan Molyneux episode. I'm going to read a quote from that Business Insider article about how smart Mark Zuckerberg is. Wasn't just a computer nerd, though. Zuck loved the classics, the Odyssey, and the like, and he became captain of the high school and the like. Yes and yes. Picture of the writer being like, what's the second book? What's the second book? Second classic book? Well, and there was an article that I read that was like, he loves the Greek classics, you know, like the end, which is. Classic. Yeah, there's a Latin classic. It's actually Roman propaganda written by Virgil so that he could make the case that Octavian had like a deep connection to like Roman history. Like it was literally a propaganda novel to rewrite Roman history in the image of Octavian after Octavian destroyed the ******* Republic. So, you know, the Greek classic, the Greek classics, the Greek classics, like this Roman propaganda novel, I hate Harry Potter culture, but there is a very like, like a disgruntled huffle puff. 522 Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, like he wants to be in anywhere else. Mark Huffle Burg now? Article goes through some of the cushier US worthy details of Zuckerberg's charmed life since starting Facebook. For example, here's what it says about his wedding to Priscilla Chan. Green days, no green days. Billy Joel Armstrong performed, and Mark designed. Priscilla's Ruby ring himself performed at their wedding, and he designed a ring. And the accidental billionaires makes a point of when it's talking about, like, the place that everyone at Facebook lived in when they were all first moved to California, that they were always playing Green Day because they're so into punk rock. They're like guys. You heard of this record called Dookie, Dookie? Wait, what? What era? This has to be like post American idiot. It's got to be right. It was like 2005. Exciting. How exciting. Real exciting. Time to be a Green Day fan. Yeah, God. Now the few details about his life that Mark lets out into the public sphere are carefully curated. He's one of the many Silicon Valley CEO's who takes a token $1.00 a year salary. You'll always hear that. Of course, that number ignores what he makes in stock, and it ignores expenses like the $610,454.00 Facebook spent in 2014 to charter private jets for Mark and his friends. The Business Insider article and many other Prozac pieces I have read make a lot of hay out of the fact that he doesn't drive a fancy. Are instead preferring a Volkswagen GTI that only costs $30,000. Now, if you've got that kind of money Mark Zuckerberg has, I don't think you should have it. But if you got it and you're going to buy a car, you're an idiot. If you buy a car that anybody can buy did get a ******* blimp like that Google guy, at least be cool. Yeah, it's even more sussed to get a right like, hi. Hello, fellow kids. I am just like you. I drive Volkswagen like you, right? I was like, are all Volkswagens. You have to tape the gas back on. The trans drops out. Where are the bodies? Yeah, Zuckerberg, they're somewhere. Now, while Facebook was expanding and the world was falling in love with Mark Zuck, there were signs that everyone's favorite new technology. There were signs that everyone's favorite new tech billionaire was maybe not the nicest dude to be around. Noah Kagan worked for Facebook for nine months in 2005, back when the company was first starting its meteoric rise to world dominance. Kagan later wrote an ebook that touched on his experiences there. In it, he recalled Mark Zuckerberg pouring water on an engineer's computer after a product demo that he thought looked like, quote, ****. Here's a quote from Kagan's book. Well, I don't remember the feature we were working on. Engineer Chris Putnam and I had spent almost a month building something we thought Mark would love. He walks to Chris's computer and we demo out the product to mark. Mark thought it was ****. I know so because instead of giving product feedback, he screamed, this is **** redo it through water on Chris's computer and walked away. All of us stood around in shock. Kagan also claims that zuck's, like far right gang leader Gavin McGinnis, has a distinct fondness for samurai swords. George, Ohio. Lord God, with that, we get it now, dude. I remember my first sword guy. It was before I had the language to identify a sword guy, and I was like, well, I know I feel unsafe, but there's more to it than that. Yeah, it's more than just a general unease that I have. Also, feel bad for this? Who could so easily kill me with this storm with his samurai sword that he bought for $45.00 at a gas station? Yeah, about a stand for it. And bought a stand for always buy a stand. Yeah, well, they need you to they need to see it. You got to display *** ****. Yeah. Yeah. What, is he gonna hide it? No, no, no, no, no. He's like. I want you to know exactly what I'm like. Yeah, I'm like this what I would use to kill you. I know I look like this guy, but I'm also this guy. Now, are you guys ready for the samurai sword story? Yes, it's good. Pretty good. It's pretty good. This is like when Gaddafi had his astronaut short story. This is the Mark Zuckerberg of that quote. He'd walk around with a samurai sword fake threatening to attack you for bad work. Where the hell he got that samurai sword? Who the hell knows? Luckily no employees were harmed while I was there. He'd come around and pretend to cut you. Joking. If you take down the site, he'll chop your head off. You have to remember you have a 23 year old Uber nerd running one of the fastest growing sites on the web. As mature as he could be, he was also still immature. He had some great motivational lines with love, he'd say. If you don't get that done sooner, I will punch you in the face or I will chop you with this huge sword while holding a huge sword in hand. But with love guys, oh, it's just like a lovingly like, it's like a loving. I'm going to cut you with this sword. Wow. Men in their 20s should have businesses just really great at a lot of sense. Well, The thing is that he has stunted his growth. Like he doesn't realize this because he's living his own life, but from an outside perspective, you cemented yourself as a 22 year old. Inept at talking to people and connecting with people and you've stopped your life well, as he learned from his later colleague, he should just lean in to that image and just go for it. We didn't choose the pile of ****. Next paragraph starts with Sheryl Sandberg. Let's get to it. I do want to share one story about me when I was 23 years old, just for fairness, so I'm not judging Mark for immaturity. I vomited down an elevator shaft in between the shaft and the wall because I had to puke. I was super drunk and I knew, OK, I have to puke somewhere. If I puke in this elevator on other people, that's going to be bad. But when the door opens, I can bomb. Like that? That's innovative thinking. I didn't want to hurt too many other people, but I realize now, as a sober man, I really ****** with some repair. That weekend for no. Again, not a good person here, but better than Mark, which is a low bar. Yeah, and also you learned which not. That's. That's not good. OK, actually. Actually light bulbs. I am still a ruined ruin of a human being. Santa Monica light bulb bandit. But I don't. I don't have a business. Sophie manages the podcast for Good Reason. In 2008, Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg, the author of Lean in and generally as slimy as a bucket of capitalism queen go oh hashtag girl boss. Oh my God, like girl Boss narrative is my favorite. There's a great podcast y'all should listen to. It's not our network, but it's great. It's called the dream and it's about MLM. And it talks about an MLM that's all based on the hashtag girl boss leaning ****. Super, super. Interesting. Yes, women can also destroy the world. Yeah. Yeah, us too. We can eat the planet too. Yeah, we can. Go. Ah, guys here. Women are running the CIA now. I did #feminist **** sides. Yeah, ohh listen, give us a chance to buy into this power structure we water board with Lacroix now. But we still waterboarding tons of people. We're like, we're guys gals. We still waterboards yeah, listen, listen, I actually get along better with guys than I do with girls. It's really, it's really weird. No, actually. I'm like guys I know. Like, I'm gonna sound like one of those girls, but I actually, like, think Mark is really nice, and you just, like, kind of misunderstood. You know what I, like, agree with that. And let's shun all other women that disagree with us. They're kind of like ****** girls. Yeah, like we should hire them anyways. This podcast will not go into nearly enough detail on Miss Sandberg, but we will talk about her in the in the future. Yeah. At the time, Sandberg's job was to be the adult in the room at Facebook, to reinsure the investors and the world that this browy frat robot, suddenly harvesting data from millions of people, was being managed by competent, thoughtful human beings who would act responsibly with the great power placed in their hands. Sheryl Sandberg does at least a very good impression of a human being. She does a really good job. It's what's the new dictator is a woman with a smile on her face. One of her, you know, yeah, always a white woman with a with a white woman. This woman and a big smile. The frontline interview, one of the representatives that they sent. That's basically all she did was smile and say, Oh yeah, we know and we know and we're listening and we're listening. We know we ****** ** we're listening. Corporate feminism by soap yeah. Yeah. Now in 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed, that infinitely scrolling thingy that has replaced the way roughly 40% of Americans get their news. The timeline was programmed with a distinct preference for. Controversial content. By virtue of the fact that people were most likely to chat about things that made them angry or scared, they were also more likely to share articles that angered or scared them. Spanked, spanked, spanked. Alright. Did you ever ***** like in high school? Like the sky dance? You know what? Scott is my favorite genre, but I've never been to a show or danced. I felt like for sure you had, like, busted. It was not a rude boy. No, but I streetlight manifestos maybe my favorite band. ******* fantastic band. Yeah. It's not too late. It's not too late. Never too late. Never too late to ***** Thomas Kalnoky, if you're listening, sponsor the show. I don't think you have any money because you're a musician. You're great. Hey, if you're listening, give us five stars on iTunes and we'll give you. We'll give you some money. Yeah. Dorito. Send us here. You might feel like you could probably use the help. So, uh, when the newsfeed launched, Facebook also made a change to its privacy policies in order to make the news feed work better. Yeah, here's The New Yorker quote unless you wrestled with a set of complicated settings, vastly more of your information, possibly including your name, your gender, your photograph, your list of friends would be made public by default. Now, that New Yorker article was published in 2010 after some of those unpleasant chats between Zuckerberg and his friends about all of his weasel behavior. You know, after all those chats and stuff went public, like this article came out. The author of the article is a guy named Jose Antonio Vargas, and he's a good journalist, I think. I think it's a good article. He spent some time with Zuckerberg. And when the subject of privacy came up, this happened. And I'm going to quote the entire bit from the article because it's fantastic privacy. He told me. It's the third rail issue online. A lot of people who are worried, and this is Zuck talking. A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep. We make and turned it into as big a deal as possible, he said. He then excused himself as he typed on his iPhone 4, answering a text from his mother. We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we believe this is the right thing to do. Zuckerberg and I talked about the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they're interested in men or women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check if I said on Facebook that I'm a man interested in men. All my Facebook friends, including relatives, coworkers, sources, some of whom might not approve. Of sexuality would see it. So what did you end up doing? Zuckerberg asked. I put men. That's interesting. No one has done a study on this as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out, he said. We didn't create that. Society was generally ready for that, he went on. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about about society being more open, and I think that's good. Then I told Zuckerberg that two weeks later I removed the check and left the boxes blank. A couple of relatives who were Facebook friends had asked about my sexuality, and at that time at least, I didn't want all my professional sources to know that I am gay. Is it still out? Zuckerberg asked. Yeah, it's still out, he responded with a flat. Huh? Dropped his shoulders and stared at me, looking genuinely concerned and somewhat puzzled. Facebook had asked me to publish a personal detail that I was not ready to share. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting bit of insight there. That's a crossroads for for little Zack, Zack. And I think it points to how stupid I think he is that he can't think of other situations until they're in his fate, like until his face is shoved into it. And also seems like a very like straight white guy attitude of just like, I mean, I think we come up against this all the time. It's just like stuff that truly didn't occur to him, like, not even. At this point, just like I just. Yeah, I still prioritize my money over your privacy, but that sucks, dude. That's like a lot of what he says. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, now I found this particularly fascinating in light of a Daily Beast article I read back in 2015, how Facebook exposes domestic violence survivors. The article is, as you'd expect, about a bunch of people whose abusers were able to get in touch with them and start harassing them again because Facebook required those women to use their real names to start Facebook accounts. Quote of the major social networking services Facebook alone requires users to use an authentic name listed on an acceptable form of identification, such as a driver's license, a passport or a bill. Linkedin's user agreement asks for a real name but does not specify. May require documentation. Twitter, Instagram, and as of 2014, Google Plus all allow pseudonyms. Has also been an issue for transgender people and sex workers as well as sex workers a lot of people get who mark never considered and because almost everyone working at Facebook was another white guy was not there because you never prioritized. Yeah, and this will be a problem that will crop up when we start talking about the genocide being enabled by Facebook, but it's an issue when you run a company this big. That impacts the lives of this many people. And you don't hire folks specifically to be like, oh, I'm a member of this particular community, and this might be an issue for, say, gay men because you, Mark Zuckerberg, don't realize that this is the thing we have to deal with. Yeah, it's an online nation, and he thinks that he can be the leader of it without caring about any of the people in it. What don't you learn about the world as the son of a wealthy dentist who goes to Harvard? We're getting right. You're right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. He's woke. He knows extremely well. Yeah. There. It is crazy that. I mean, you would think the 2nd that you have this wide of a reach you would prioritize getting people with different perspectives in or. It's almost like your product will turn on you. Yeah, well, it's the ego that he has that he is unwilling to confront and hide that all cost he plays the philanthropic or the like. I care about the people when? Join my book club. Yeah. Doing my book club. Let's learn together. Let me listen. Let me go across the world and listen. So you'll let me for President? The only book club I'm interested in joining, Maggie Jamie, is the Doritos book club, Ohio. What is it this month? It's actually tribe by Sebastian Young. Our fantastic book. Oh, wow. Really good book about PTSD. Burritos recommends it, too. Thank you, dorito. That's a good suggestion. Yeah. Ads. It's ads time. Oh, OK. That's what that was a lead into products. Products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. And we're back talking about podcast products, services, Facebook. All right, let's get back into it. For the most part, up through the early aughts, Mark Zuckerberg's brand in most of the world remained quite strong. He was the genius who changed the way the world communicated, and he seemed like such a humble down to earth guy. In 2010, he was even given a guest star role on The Simpsons. He played a bit part. Lisa is trying to convince Nelson to stay in school rather than drop out to focus on his business. They meet Mark Zuckerberg at some sort of Expo thing and he goes on a little rant about Hall of the all the great innovators in the tech industry dropped out of school. Which is true. Now I'll say this thing. This is another example where it's really easy for a guy like Mark if you were a coder. What do you need to go to college? Well, Jamie's a hacker and you're happy and always. But yeah, it's the same thing. Like as a writer, you can go, you can get a writing degree and get a journalism degree, but you could also just start writing. And it's the nature of the business that if you get stuff published, that starts your career too. It's not like that for everybody. If you're an electrician, you kind of got to get some training, you're a surgeon, kind of got to go to school. That's why we're in Faker profession. Yeah, that's why we're in professions where you can be faker. In my experience, you someone could be like, so you have a degree in journalism and you go and then they're like, sounds good. Yeah. You'll never look at journalism. No. OK, good. Then you're clearly a journalist. So anyway, little rant there. Now, 2010 was a time in which Zuckerberg and his ideas were the toast of Silicon Valley. And what did Mark believe? In 2010 he sat for an interview with TechCrunch. They pressed him on the matter of other people trusting him with their data. Quote. When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website? And then the last five or six years blogging has taken off in a huge way, and all these different services that if people sharing all this information, people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information in different kinds, but more openly and with more. People, that social norm is just something that has evolved overtime. We view it as a role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is, to reflect what the current social norms are. I'm not pushing society, I'm changing Facebook to adapt to the changing social norm of selling your data to company. Well, The funny thing I've now realized that Zuckerberg says a lot. Like, you know, like I want to bring the world together, but that is code for I want the world's information, I want every single person to be on my website so I have their information. Have their contacts. I gotta steal all of your Facebook. It is weird to me like how long? And I don't know at what point this occurred to you. It took me a long time to figure out what the concept of data mining and big data was and like what it meant because when I was in college I was like, well who would want my data? I don't have any money. Like all I have is student debt. Like who cares if they have my data because I have nothing to hide and I have nothing, so who cares? And I wrote I was a copywriter for big data companies for six months, would write 10,000 words a day about big data and still couldn't understand why I'm like. Who gives a **** unless you have money? But now I feel like now it's very easy. But this was like five years ago. I had no ******* clue. Yeah. And it was my job to know, so I didn't. I'm out of my job. It didn't make we all. You're a true journalist, all right? Yeah. No, I I do say there's a great frontline documentary. You just look up frontline Facebook on YouTube. It's all up there that there's a journalist on there who's, like the first person to, like, request a copy of his data from Facebook and realized how much was being logged. Another good journalist. Solid play, cause again, I was the same way. I didn't pay any attention to what was happening. I did not care no one iota. There was **** going on. Yeah. And when you're taking, like, I don't know, like, especially in that era, that was super asinine, where you're like, you've got bumper stickers and there's you're taking quizzes all the time and you're like, well, what would people do with this information? And now I can't watch bandersnatch without being like, they're taking my opinions on Frosted Flakes. That's what's good. Yeah. Yeah, right. TV's now gonna sell me personalized ads. Well, and I I do think Netflix is making a big mistake with, like, focusing on like, uh, this. Many people watched the ******* bird box movies. Like, well, yeah, it's successful as Black Panther. No. Because nobody had to pay. Yeah. Yeah. No one would have seen for $7.00 at the box office making money. Netflix. Yeah, yeah. 45 million people saw cumulative 18 minutes of bird box where they were cooking, checking their phone and pooping. And what are the rules of this world? Why? They put birds in a box, guys, and I think that that makes it worth our time. I do think that that quote from the TechCrunch interview maps out marks ideology pretty well. The world wants to be more connected. His only job is delivering that connectivity and as long as Facebook is connecting more people faster, he does not need to worry about anything else. This was mapped out even more eloquently by the company motto based on a quote by Mark himself. Move fast and break things and unless you are breaking stuff, you aren't moving fast enough. Now the title of this episode, Part 2, is move fast and the title of part three is break things. About that little genocide, little buddy. I live my life, haha, yeah. Nothing touch other people have ended their lives now. Ohhh. Now, it is important to understand that at every level, Facebook the organization is programmed to work this way. I'd like to quote from a great CNBC article with the revealing title inside Facebook's cult like Workplace where dissent is discouraged, employees pretend to be happy all the time. Solid title. It sounds like you're one of those really long, Fiona Apple. Oh yeah, like, ooh. You're about to tell me a lot of stuff, Fiona. I'm ready. Quote employees feel pressure to place the company above all else in their lives, fall in line with their managers orders, and force cordiality with their colleagues so that they can advance several former employees like in the culture to a cult. This culture has contributed to the company's well publicized wave of scandals over the last two years, such as government spreading misinformation to try to influence elections and the misuse of private user data, according to many people who work there. During this. They say Facebook might have caught some of these problems sooner if employees were encouraged to deliver honest feedback. She can't deliver honest feedback if you're moving fast and breaking show, well, you can't deliver honest feedback with a ******* Cortana. Yeah? Well, and also, why would you tell someone? I think this product that we're about to launch might break something? If you're part of half of your job is to break things right, you're encouraged to right? And Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook employees rate each other and then managers give them final grades that determine whether or not they'll be promoted, fired, or given raises. Never learned a lesson. Never. Ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever. I've quoted Bojack horseman once before in this show, but another one of the truest ******* things that show ever pointed out. One of the characters is an agent saying that the age in which you get Rich is the age in which your growth is forever stunted. So if you're rich at 20, you're 20 forever. Yes, that is very true. 100% accurate. Buy a shirt at public so I can stop aging at age 30 and buy my own blimp. That's reasonable. Yeah, that's a good age to stop. Yeah, still optimistic and sure enough when I have a light bulb fight after this. The light bulbs. Steel and spirit. Not keeping the light bulbs. I just like the way they shatter when you throw them at people. That's better. You're right. You're right. It's way better. I'm not taking these light bulbs. I don't want them. Cricket. Cricket. I don't need your judgment, Maggie. Robert, do you do this in groups or or solo groups? OK, yeah, it's a fun. I'll come along next time. There's this could go a lot of if you're doing it alone, it's like just drunkenly throwing light bulbs and strangers. No, I throw light bulbs at people I love. Ohh, that's how you show it's a show of affection. Yes, this sounds fair. Just like at the ground next to them. So it like, it's like a little puff. It's fun. Like firecracker. I didn't do this to be judged. OK, I'm not. It's gonna be a great behind the best you can, be unethical and still be illegal in my life. What if I prefer to be ethical but illegal? Right. There you go. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's the right course. Yeah. Treat people well. Break the law. Laws aren't people. Yeah. Now. So employees rate each other, managers give them final grades at determine whether or not they be promoted, fired, or given raises. These grades are issued by quota, so managers are pressured to underrate perfectly good employees just because the quota of good employees has already been met. It sounds like a stressful mess. The article goes into substantial detail about the review process. This quote in particular stood out to me. Quote these twice yearly reviews encourage employees to be particularly productive around June and December, working nights and weekends as they race to impress bosses before reviews which are typically completed in August. In February, it's especially true in December, the half Facebook predominantly uses to determine which employees will receive promotions. This rush causes employees to focus on short term goals and push out features that drive user engagement and improve their own metrics without fully considering the potential long term negative impacts on user experience or privacy. Multiple former employees said. Move fast, break the world. Wow, it sounds like a guy that's too dumb to run a company. Sounds like 20 year old. Shouldn't have much responsibility. Yeah, he was. He was stunted at like at like age 20. Yeah, at age 20, something like that. Man, learn something all the time from that show about the sad horse, about the sad horse, depressed horse show. The depressed horse show has some has some truth in it. It's true. Yeah. And horses are inherently sad. You never see a horse. Yeah on land and like looking happy. Never seen a horse dying. Yes, me too. Ohh no sad this was the same horse. Out there holding hands were like we killed a horse. Yeah, Jamie Loftus and I murdered a horse and have a light bulb. Not gonna believe how we did it. In our defense, the horse started it. Yes, yes. Very sad horse. So Mark Zuckerberg has never wasted much time worrying about the consequences of his actions. He's more of an ask questions later kind of guy. And as he aged into a tech Titan, Mark Zuckerberg remained pretty cavalier about people's privacy. This would all come to a dangerous head for the first time in 2007 with a Facebook product called Beacon. I'd like to quote from a book titled, Appropriately Enough, Move Fast and Break Things. Which is a really good book about all of these monsters. But not just zombies. All Silicon Valley gross, yeah? This was essentially an alert system that told your friends you had purchased something on a partner site. It was built as an opt out system, so you had to actively tell Facebook each time you didn't want the site to broadcast your purchase to all your friends. It was a total disaster from the outset, but Zuckerberg was so confident that he knew better than his users that he refused to turn it off for many weeks while the PR disaster escalated. Eventually he relented and posted a mea culpa on his blog saying we've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them, despite Zuckerberg's regret and a payment of 9.5 million for a class action. Suit over beacon. Many who worked with him feel he doesn't really understand privacy, Charlie Cheever, one of his key programmers, told Kirkpatrick. Who's some guy. I feel that Mark doesn't believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy is a stepping stone to radical transparency. Wow. He the way he put out that press release is the same way he talked to the guy that he ****** over. Like, I am so sorry I did something wrong here. I did something. So go away. Stop looking away. Thing to me, yeah, never has. I've always been rich and always will be. Yeah, we'll have it resolved within the year, parentheses year, year. Yeah. Now, radical transparency is a buzz term mark brings up whenever he needs a high minded ideological justification for doing precisely whatever the **** he wants in 2012, whatever the **** he wants included ******* with peoples emotions. Just to see if that was possible. Here is a quote from the hilariously named PNAS Scientific Journal. And it's PNAS, but what else could I call it? It's their hard penis journal. It's a very serious scientific journal. The big the big swinging **** of science. Which way is it *** **** of science? We all got slapped with science and swinging **** on this one. You don't go with the swings, you're gonna get slapped. Here's penis. Oh no, no, I'm nice. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the news feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts. When negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that the emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive scale contagion via social networks. AKA, we used Facebook to see if we could make people sad. You know, we can anywhere. It works now. The researchers who carried out the study had previously studied real life social networks to, you know, just study the same sort of emotional contagion but with, like, actual groups of friends. You know, your buddy sad, she calls you, he called. And, you know, you get sad too. This is the way people have always worked. They then went to Facebook to see if the social network was down to play Guinea pig with its users. Facebook totally was. They and their researchers found, quote emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. In other words, they proved that emotional states like anger or hopelessness could be spread via Facebook. Facebook proved this by determining what kinds of content got pushed to the timelines of each of its users, effectively manipulating their emotions just to see if it was possible people got angry, Facebook responded with faux regret, and Mark Zuckerberg kept pretty quiet about this whole thing. But if you followed the guy's history and intellectual development, you can understand why an experiment like this would be pretty in line with his past behavior. Yeah, it's just another like woman versus cow situation. It's like. If one girl is deemed unhook, then other people will agree on hot and right, and then we'll just reshape what is hot. Yeah, yeah, so that's fun. What else is fun is products, also services, consumable items that you can spend money on and then have in your home. The big swinging **** of capital being of the swinging ***** or one, the hanging labia. Hanging labia, heavy labia. Ohh women CEO, so seem to love other women and care about people if you want to support the heavy swinging labia that support this show by these products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the build to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. 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My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. Maggie may fish just said something through a mouthful of Doritos. I did. I'm about to do the same. Ohh man. Better than us swinging labia. Hmm. I'd rather lick these. Hmm. Yes, yes. In June 2013, while Facebook was in the midst of playing with their users emotions, Glenn Greenwald published an article to the Guardian based on Edward Snowden's releases. The article revealed that the National Security Agency had been given access to huge amounts of data from Facebook, Google, Apple and several other major Internet companies. When Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Glenn Greenwald's article, he said frankly the government blew it and lamented that the state had done a bad job of protecting privacy. Pretty bold. Pretty bold. You know why swing? You know what? Just because it's so bold. I'll give him that one. I'll give him that one. Yeah. Now in March of 2015 the Guardian broke what would turn out to be a critically important story. Millions of Americans personal data had been harvested through a Facebook app without their knowledge and handed off to a little company called Cambridge Analytica. In an interview Mark Zuckerberg gave with Recode in 2018 he swore that as soon as Facebook was alerted to the harvesting of their user data by Cambridge Analytica's Alexander Cogan quote, we immediately shut down the app, took away his profile and demanded certification that the data was deleted, however, further reporting from the Guardian. With the Facebook didn't suspend Kogan or Cambridge Analytica until March of 2018, like two or three months before the interview in which Zuckerberg swore they banned his *** back in 2015. Now I'd say it has been proven beyond much doubt that Mark Zuckerberg's attitude about the value of other people's privacy has not changed much since the days when he stole people's pictures to build an app where kids could vote on which of their female classmates was hotter than a cow. Thankfully, we know how Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook top brass really feel about the value of their users privacy. Last year, the British government released an enormous cache of internal company emails to the public. The data included this bit from 2012. I'm going to quote Recodes fantastic coverage, and Kara Swisher with Recode has done some of the best reporting on Mark Zuckerberg and the best holding of his in the in the front line. Was that her when he's sweating like, yeah, great, great, yeah, really good **** in the tech industry of the tech journalist. She's like, she's she's solid, excellent. I'm going to quote recodes coverage. In 2012, Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook charged some outside developers for accessing and collecting data on users through the company's APIs, software that allows Facebook to share data with other apps. If we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, that makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using the platform, Zuckerberg wrote. He suggested that developers could offset these charges by spending money on Facebook ads. Now, Facebook said they didn't actually go through with that, but the fact that Mark Zuckerberg himself suggested doing the same thing Cambridge Analytica would do three years later suggests he probably was not that much offended by the concept. Mark published a Facebook post to address this and other revelations. Quote like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas. Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continue to provide the developer platform for free and developers could choose to buy ads if they wanted. This model has worked well. Other ideas we considered but decided against included charging developers for usage of our platform, similar to how developers pay to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. To be clear, that's different from selling people's data. We've never sold anyone's data, but it kind of sounds like that's exactly what. This book did. Here's Recode quote in some cases, Facebook granted other businesses like Netflix and Lyft special permission to access information that other companies didn't have, so they didn't sell data directly. But people who paid Facebook a **** load an ad dollars got access to more user data, which they didn't pay for, but they got access to because they were paying more money to Facebook. Which is different from paying for data because a lawyer can argue that when you lay it out like that, it makes perfect legally distinct from selling access to. People's data, and I'm sure it is in a court of law until it's proven, not hopefully. Until the laws need to be made to make the distinction clear. Yeah, to make it a crime what they did. Which I think is it. Ethically, it's like a crime in the hearts of any decent person. But anyway, yeah, well, we know how Zacky feels about ethics. You know how he lives his life. Ha ha. So that article also revealed that companies that Facebook found threatening to their bottom line had their access to user data restricted. Quote When Twitter launched the video service Vine in 2012, Facebook cut off access to its friend graph. That meant users who signed up for Vine with their Facebook account couldn't see and connect with all of their Facebook friends inside Vine and ability that would have theoretically helped vine create a network much faster. Yeah, I don't feel that sorry for Twitter either, but you know. That's crap. God, I mean, imagine. I mean. And Vine still managed to happen. Yeah, in spite of it all. Yeah, the Paul brothers. You know what, though? Vine is how Alex Jones finally flamed out. And I'm. I'll always be grateful for that. It was binding when he was on Capitol Hill shooting people. Yeah, that was very sad to see, huh? In a good way it was. It was a fun day. That was a fun day watching the news. Yeah. Now the emails that have been revealed make it clear that sucks. Issue was never with the selling of data. He doesn't give one **** about that. He didn't seem to care a lot about the fact that he wasn't able to charge people to steal his customer's data. In another e-mail Zuckerberg sent in 2012, he complained that quote not charging still means people were overuse and abuse our API's and waste money for us. I think we should implement some kind of program where you have to pay if you use too many of our resources. So by 2015 there was a lot of shady stuff out in the world about Mark Zuckerberg, but the lion share of the coverage of the man and his brain baby was still unfailingly positive. And that 2015 Business Insider article that I keep gleefully quoting is only one example of a big fat pile of similar content. Articles about Mark during this. Tended to emphasize his casual dress and down to Earth personality. Many included a quote from Tyler Winklevoss stating that Mark is the poorest looking rich guy he's ever seen since Tyler. Like **** and he looks like the guy who fixed my toilet the one time that the rich person plumber wasn't available. Yeah. Here's another quote from that fantastic Business Insider article. But despite his billions, Zuck seems incredibly down to Earth. Through that, he holds regular town hall style Q&A sessions where he chats with regular people from all around the world. I want to show you guys a shot from one that took place in May. Maggie, I think you're the person to describe this. You just want a clip of me crying. There, he's just a man of the people. Man of the people. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, God, he's just beating people to. He knows our struggles. Someone's doing a Shaka. So what's your for sure? Doing a shock. I did read during this time, he was, like, posting on Facebook about all his meetings. And there's a post where he realizes in real time that slavery still has lasting impacts and, you know, really got to watch him grow. Yeah. Yeah. So really, how many of those people do you think are wax statues? Just one Mark Zuckerberg. I will note that there are not very many black men in the audience, but one of the few is right next to me. The ones that, yeah, I don't know how they asked that in the room, but somehow they got him to come to the front and surround Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, 2015 would be Mark Zuckerberg's last full year is being seen as mostly a good guy by the outside world. The 2016 election brought questions of fake news and Russian propaganda being spread through the social network. I've wanted to ground these episodes as much as possible on Mark Zuckerberg the man before we get into the terrible consequences of some of his actions, because the fact of the matter is that Facebook. Say tool and a tool someone was going to build at some point. There is no version of network humanity where we don't end up with something like this at some point. But Mark Zuckerberg is the first guy who got it right, and as a result, his personal characteristics have had a huge impact on how this colossus has impacted the world. Now tomorrow in part three, we're going to discuss exactly how Facebook a Mark Zuckerberg production has changed our world. Throughout parts one and two we've talked about him moving fast, and part three, we're going to talk about what he broke. So everybody. You know, ready? Let's do it. You got you gotta plug a pluggable. OK ohh dear. Well, you can find me on Zuckerberg platform. Instagram at Jamie crazy superstar. You can find me on on Jack's website, at Jamie's help. And listen to the rectal cast on Tim's platform. Yeah, that's a lot of man's names. A lot of the Internet. Yeah. You can also find me on all these male dominated spaces on Twitter and Instagram. Maggie fish? Yeah, you can find me inside of any bag of Doritos you buy because they're, in my spirit, resides. Hmm. Haunting. You could find us on on the gram, on Twitter, at at ******** pop. You can find us on the Internet at behindthebastards.com do that. We're on every Tuesday. We sell T-shirts on teepublic. We sell cups. We sell posters. Stickers. We sell. They're not technically living sentient beings, but they've been engineered to serve you and they don't have any legal rights yet, so it's fine. So yeah, all of that on T public. That sounds on the up and up. On the up and up, right? Yeah. Episode tomorrow. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey y'all, it's Caroline Hobby hosted get real with Caroline Hobby interviewing the most fascinating people in Nashville and beyond. I talked to artists, I talked to the wives of artists. I talked to women entrepreneurs who have created businesses, who are moms, who juggle a million hats and do it all. Each episode will leave you inspired, feeling like you can accomplish your own dream and calling. Listen to new episodes of get Real with Caroline Hobby every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from love country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. You love country music, you can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan, country music or you can call in anytime you like. I want to talk about this, Hulk Hogan called in. He's like Chuck the hulkster. I love your podcast, Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to. Podcast.