Is Facebook Zucked? | Roger McNamee

Roger McNamee is a businessman, investor, musician and founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. Roger has had a front seat to the biggest developments in Silicon Valley for the last 30 years and this culminated with his time as an early investor and key advisor to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Over the last few years he became concerned with the direction that Facebook and Big Tech was taking and now spends his time educating the general public on the dangers of Surveillance Capitalism, data privacy, technology addiction and much more. Extra Stuff: Buy Roger's Book - https://amzn.to/2ySnZcm Find Roger's Tour Dates - http://www.zuckedbook.com/ Follow Roger on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Moonalice The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism - https://amzn.to/2Tm1HsU Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Most people do not realize the degree to which the choices that they're making are being influenced by people that they're not even aware of. And how, when you're going to the search results on Google, or to your newsfeed on Instagram or Facebook, they're not picking things that you like so much as they're picking things that they believe they can monetize. And this is a really important distinction, because what they're doing is they're creating a data voodoo doll. Tristan, it's a great phrase Tristan came up with, data voodoo doll. They're gathering data. We think we give them a little data. The thing you have to understand is that data that we're giving them, that's a vanishing a small percentage of what they have. Because in real life, we touch electronic systems all over the place.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Every time we use a credit card, every time we go to the bank, any medical thing generates a digital record. Our phone tracks where we are in real time. Anytime we send an email on or to a Gmail or Microsoft email account, when we use a shared online application like Google Docs or Office 365, there's a digital trail from all these things. And all of that data is available to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon. And they create this data voodoo doll. And every time you do a search, every time you look at your newsfeed, you have to in your head realize, oh my God, these guys are using that data voodoo doll to manipulate the choices that are available to me.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  My Facebook reach is declining by the second after I've had Professor David Carroll first, and now Roger McNamee joining me on Modern Wisdom. Roger, welcome to the show.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  It is such a pleasure to be here, Chris.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  Really excited to have you on today. Very timely with the release of The Great Hack on Netflix and this resurgence of interest in Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Can you tell the listeners who don't know who you are, a little bit of background about yourself, please?

• 1:52Speaker 00

  So, I first came to Silicon Valley in 1982 as an investment analyst, right before the personal computer industry began. And I was lucky enough to be part of the most important firms investing, first in public tech stocks in the 80s, then part of Kleiner Perkins, which was, became the biggest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley during the 90s, the heyday of the internet. I was in their office the day that Marc Andreessen brought in the idea that became Netscape, the day that Jeff Bezos brought in the idea that became Amazon, the day that Larry and Sergey brought in Google. I started a firm with Bono in 2003 called Elevation.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  And in 2006, a 22-year-old entrepreneur came into my office with a crisis. His name was Mark Zuckerberg. I helped him navigate the crisis and for a period of three years thereafter was one of his advisors. And that is the context for my conversation with you here today. That from 2006 to approximately 2016, I was a huge fan of Facebook. And then at the beginning of 2016, I started to see things going wrong on Facebook, which really violated my sense of what the company was about. I thought Facebook was a force for good.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And it began in the US presidential primaries in the Democratic Party in 2016. It then included issues related to Black Lives Matter, a protest group in the United States. And then Brexit happened in June of 2016. And at that was the point at which I realized that the same algorithms, the same business model that makes Facebook so great for marketers, those same tools could be manipulated and used to undermine democracy. And at that point, I started to realize I needed to do something. I started looking for allies and couldn't find any. I was finally able to persuade a tech block to let me write an opinion piece about this

• 3:59Speaker 00

  in September of 2016. And while I was writing it, more news came out, civil rights violations on Facebook, and then our intelligence agencies said the Russians were trying to interfere in the US election. So I sent the draft of the opinion piece to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, my friends.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  To warn them, I thought something was really catastrophically wrong with the product. And they were not particularly supportive. Actually, I think they treated it like a public relations problem, and the public relations problem was me. And so they tried to make it go away. And in the process, they handed me off to one of their colleagues, a guy I knew really well that I was very friendly with. And we spent three months. After the US presidential election, I go to them, "Guys, you have got to do what Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical firm, did when somebody put poison in bottles of Tylenol, the analgesic, in drugstores all over the city of Chicago.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Killed a bunch of people. And the CEO of Johnson & Johnson didn't wait for the government, didn't wait for anybody to tell them. They withdrew every bottle of Tylenol from every retail shelf in America and didn't put it back until they had invented tamper-proof packaging. And I thought, that's the right way to handle a crisis like this. If you have played a role in harming the civil rights of people, if you've played a role potentially in undermining democracy in the United Kingdom, in the United States, you have got to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, the same way that Johnson & Johnson did. And I spent three months pleading with them, "Please do this." And they would have none of it. And finally, in February of 2017, I realized it was hopeless.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  And I was faced with one of those choices, a moral choice that hopefully you'd never have to come across, but in my case I did, where I had officially retired from the investment business. I could just walk away and say it was somebody else's problem. But I didn't. For whatever reason, I realized my fingerprints were on this thing. I'd played a role. I wasn't a huge part of it, but I was part of it. And I'd done two things. I'd helped Suck keep the company independent in 2006, and then I'd helped to bring Sheryl Sandberg into the company. And those two things had made a big difference. And I thought to myself, if I'm not willing to stand up and do something about this...

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I'm not willing to do, stand up about anything. And so I became an activist. And I didn't know what that meant at the beginning, honestly. The goal was really simple, just make people aware of the problem. And I met a young man named Tristan Harris, who was coming out of Google. Tristan had been on the US news program 60 Minutes. And he had given about a 10-minute presentation on something he called "brain hacking", which is the use of persuasive technology on smartphones by internet platforms, and how you can manipulate people's attention. And a light bulb went off in my head, and I just realized that's how the Brexit thing and the US election things had happened.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  And so the two of us joined forces and set out to try to make the world aware of this thing. And the first thing we did, we caught a miracle in a bottle. I mean, it was just unbelievable. Two weeks after we joined forces was the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. TED is the, you know, it's ground zero for TED Talks, right? I mean, this 1,500 technology and entertainment and design people all in one room. We're thinking, we'll get Tristan to do his brain hacking thing there. Everybody will know. We'll get 1,500 business cards, we'll be all done. Our job will be over. So we go to TED. A miracle occurs, and somebody gets Tristan on the docket on 10 days' notice.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  And keep in mind, normally TED Talks, people prepare them for six months. Tristan's got 10 days. He goes there. He just shoots the light out. It was just amazing. He was fantastic. And we're going around to collect cards. We got two business cards afterwards. And no follow-up at all. It was completely hopeless. We're just despondent. And then another miracle occurs, and I get connected to a guy in Washington, who works for Senator Mark Warner, who is the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, which is, was at that time, the only committee at Congress where the two parties were working together. And they were the natural place to look at Russian interference and potentially to help us protect the 2018 and 2020 elections.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  And that began our interaction with Washington. And so, we go there, we have very successful meetings with him and with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was very focused on the competition antitrust issues. And that got us started. We wind up playing a role in causing the hearings to take place in the fall of 2017, in preparing Congress for those hearings, teaching everybody what they needed to know about Facebook and Twitter and to a lesser extent, Google. They kind of understood Google. And I've basically been doing this full-time, 24 hours a day, ever since. And I've written a book called Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,

• 9:25Speaker 00

  which has been a platform for activism. I continue to go to Washington all the time. I continue to deal with folks and press. And my job is really simple. There is a very, very scary thing going on, and most of us have no idea. I mean, we think we're giving up a little personal data for a service we love, right? It could be YouTube, it could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be, you know, any one of a dozen things. We have no idea that that's not what's going on at all, that these guys are building versions of The Matrix or of Minority Report. And they're not doing it because they're bad guys. They're doing it because they're engineers,

• 10:07Speaker 00

  and it's a really interesting engineering thing. Can you use massive data gathering and algorithms to make the world more efficient? That seems like a laudable goal. The problem with it is that if you convert all human experience into data, if you process it with machine learning, if you then use it to make the world more efficient, something's got to give. In fact, two things have to give. One of them is democracy, and the other one is free will and individual choice. And my attitude on this is real simple.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Maybe people are okay with that. But they don't know that's what's going on. And we need to have a conversation about it. In order for a conversation to happen, somebody's got to tell them what's really going on. And I'm one of the people who has decided to devote my life to doing that.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  We are big fans of Tristan Harris on the show. I first heard him on Sam Harris just over a year ago, year and a half ago. And we went down that rabbit hole big style after that. I spoke to Kai Wei, the CEO of the Light Phone. Have you heard of that?

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Yep, spoke to Kai. Very interesting guy. So we've been, the listeners will be familiar, I think, with tech reduction and the race to the bottom of the brainstem a little.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it's, it's really important. But the thing, Chris, to keep in mind is we keep learning new things. And Tristan and I spent last weekend, not this past weekend, but the one before together. And we were comparing notes about how far we had come. Because when we got together, we thought that the addiction hypothesis that Tristan had come up with, the one that underlies the Light Phone, that underlies all these other things, was the root cause of the problem. But earlier this year, a professor from Harvard Business School named Shoshana Suboff published a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It actually came out in Europe in the fall of last year.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  But it came out in the States in January. And it changed our lives. Because Shoshana has been studying Google for more than a decade. And she spent roughly a decade writing this book. And it is the most important work of economics, sociology in my lifetime. And again, that's my opinion, but I really feel strongly about this. That this book is to the 21st century what Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was to the 18th and 19th. I mean, it describes an economic system that is dominating the world, but about which people are completely unaware. And it names everything. It describes how it works. And the important thing to understand is

• 13:08Speaker 00

  the reason that addiction exists is because of the incentives of this surveillance capitalism, which is about Gathering all the possible data, converting all human experience into data, and then using it to make the world more efficient. And you sit there and say, again, is there anything wrong with that? And I go, it's not for me to say. But most people do not realize the degree to which the choices that they're making are being influenced by people that they're not even aware of. And how, when you're going to the search results on Google, or to your newsfeed on Instagram or Facebook, that they're not picking things that you like

• 13:53Speaker 00

  so much as they're picking things that they believe they can monetize. And this is a really important distinction because what they're doing is they're creating a data voodoo doll. Tristan, it's a great phrase Tristan came up with, data voodoo doll. They're gathering data. We think we give them a little data. The thing you have to understand is that data that we're giving them, that's a vanishingly small percentage of what they have. Because in real life, we touch electronic systems all over the place. Every time we use a credit card, every time we go to the bank. If we want to buy a home, there's a credit rating score. Any medical thing generates a digital record. Our phone tracks where we are in real time.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Anytime we have an affinity card from a grocery store, any kind of airline, all that data is captured. Anytime we send in email on or to a Gmail or Microsoft email account, when we use a shared online application like Google Docs or Office 365, there's a digital trail from all these things. And all of that data is available to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon. Now, obviously, Microsoft and Google do not sell their data. They just keep theirs. But they buy the stuff from everybody else. Facebook does the same thing. And they create this data voodoo doll.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  And every time you do a search, every time you look at your newsfeed, you have to in your head realize, oh my God, these guys are using that data voodoo doll to manipulate the choices that are available to me. They know my income, they know where I work, they know how long I commute, they know the composition of my family. Right? They know how I spend money, where I spend money. And they're not using that to make my life better. They're using that to make money. And again, we may be okay with that. But we ought to have a conversation about what's really going on because it's and my thought experiment that I want to give to everybody who's listening right now is just imagine this. What if I'm right?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  What do you wish you, what will you wish you had done? If it turns out I'm right? Because the thing about Shoshana Zuboff's book is it is brilliantly researched. It is like 500 pages of text and 200 pages of footnotes. I mean, the woman is, I mean, she deserves the Nobel Prize in economics. And I've never met anyone like her. As impressive as Tristan is, as impressive as all these other people in Silicon Valley is, she's at that level or more. And, uh, and that requires thinking. So Tristan and I have spent a lot of time trying to amplify the signal from Shoshana to make sure more, more people are aware of it.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  And, you know, the other people who circle around this thing are all looking at Shoshana like, oh my God, how did you see this? Right? Because it's so complex. It's so nuanced. And how the hell did we miss it? Well, the answer is it's these guys. There's a, there's a famous sociologist in America named B. F. Skinner, no longer alive, but he had these, this notion of operant conditioning, this notion that you could manipulate behavior of any species by changing the conditions in which you held them. But the critical element that he always said was you had to do the experiment in a way that the subject was not aware of it. And Google in particular has been really careful

• 17:32Speaker 00

  to conduct experiments in ways we're not aware. Can I give you a couple of examples?

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Fire away.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  So think about Google Maps. Now.

• 17:40Chris Williamson?

  Love it. Love it. Used it. Just did a 2,000 mile road trip across America and used it to get me from Dallas to Norfolk, Virginia via a number of major cities. So it was, in my experience there, surface level lifesaver.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Exactly. Everybody loves Google Maps, right?

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Now, let's think about the person whose drive in the morning to work is an hour long or 45 minutes and where there's more than one way to get there. There's a standard way that is the, you know, all, all else being equal, it's the fastest way to go. You take that route every day, but you check every morning just to be sure. And every once in a while, it'll say, no, not today. Today, you're going to take this really weird route.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  And maybe they say there's traffic conditions or whatever. Do you know what's really going on?

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm scared to find out.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  There's a concept, there's a concept in engineering called load balancing, which is when you have a complex system, in order to have maximum efficiency through the system, you need to balance the load and you distribute the weight or the traffic in ways that keep everything moving smoothly. The same concept applies in an airplane. It's why sometimes you have to have, put more people at the back of the plane to keep the balance right.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  So when it comes to traffic, the reality of this thing is that on any given day, some people have to go on inferior routes in order to maintain the flow of the system as a whole.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Which means that sometimes when they tell you to take that other route, it's not because there's a traffic problem. It's because, hey, it's your turn. Today, you're going to take the inferior route. Let's say you're in a huge hurry. That could be a real problem for you and you've had no choice in it because you trust Google and they've not been honest with you about, hey, today is your day. They're just saying to you, please take this other route. And you say to yourself, hey, what's the big deal in that? And I'm going, maybe there isn't one, right? So then you think about how they monetize.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Maps, or especially how they monetize Waze, right? So Waze is now the, it's the equivalent of

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  Is Waze owned by Google?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Of course, it's owned by Google. And, and so Waze, you know, it's taking all the traffic conditions for everybody and, and putting in there. And again, the goal of the person using Maps or Waze is to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. But Google's goals are actually different than that because they're load balancing in the case of Maps. And in the case of both Maps and Waze, they gotta get paid. Now, how do they get paid? They get paid for something that Shoshana describes as footfall. And footfall is getting you to go buy some, basically advertisers pay them for traffic to go by their location. So let's say they know that you like fried chicken and you're on Waze and it's roughly mealtime.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Well, they're gonna drive you past the fried chicken people who've paid them for footfall. And that may take you off the optimal route.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Now, does this happen to you every time? No. Does it happen to you some of the time? Yes. Can it happen at a time that's very unfortunate? Definitely. But here's what matters about it. Google is playing God. They're making choices for you. And because you trust them as an honest broker, it doesn't occur to you that they don't have your best interests at heart, that they're really doing this optimizing for their own business. And on those two, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal. Now, let's go to Pokemon Go. So, most people don't realize where Pokemon Go came from. In fact, I didn't know until Shoshana told me. So, Google had this thing, you remember those glasses? Google Glass?

• 21:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  So, Google Glass was a thing where you had a little screen in the corner so you could keep track of whatever you were keeping track of all the time and had a camera pointing forward. And as far as I can tell, the reason people wore Google Glass was so they could look like a dork. Right? I remember, do you remember what we called them? We called them glass holes.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  Nice, nice, yes.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  And, and it completely failed, but I want you to understand what Google was trying to do. They had been capturing human behavior for a lot of ways and they've been capturing a lot of free data, right? I mean, the reason they created Street View was that they realized that having a picture of every street and having a picture of every home was really valuable and it was un-

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

  Why is it valuable?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Well, you'll see, in a larger context, they wanna know where everybody lives, they wanna know what their place looks like. There are all kinds of ways, at some point, you can monetize that information. You know, for example, you're not likely to sell one of those little things that take old people up staircases, you know, those chairs that go up.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  Stunner stairlift type thing.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, you're not going to do that to a one-story home, right? So, you know, it's useful to have that information. But the point is, they didn't ask permission. They start driving up and down the street. They take a picture of your home and whatever's in front of it, maybe your car, maybe your kids, whatever, your dog. And they don't ask permission. But when you get to Google Glass, what you're changing is you're going from a static picture, which is what Street View or Satellite View is, right? Remember, whether you want it or not, your home is in those things, ready for a burglar to now be able to case your place without even coming to look at it. And you have no choice and no way to withdraw. So now they want it in real time. With Google Glass, the camera on the front is capturing the behavior of the user and

• 23:11Speaker 00

  everyone around them without their awareness. And they convert all that into data. So if I came up to you wearing Google Glass, the camera would capture your face. And Google has all this incredible artificial intelligence, so they don't just get a picture of you and ID who you are. They can look at the muscles in your face and make a really good estimate of your emotional state of mind. And you say to yourself, well, how do they monetize that? And the answer is, when you have enough data in a data voodoo doll, you can monetize anything. And so they captured that stuff, but the product failed. They don't give up. They're Google, right? They put it back in the lab. They reinvented it as a video game. They realized it's probably a bad idea to publish it as Google, so they call it something

• 23:56Speaker 00

  different, Niantic. They spin it out as a separate company. They call the game Pokemon Go.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Was that not Nintendo? Is that not Nintendo, or is that a...

• 24:05Speaker 00

  No, no. Nintendo licensed Pokemon to them, but Niantic...

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Ah, I see.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  The same guy who created Street View created Niantic. And he is, you know, like an apostle of BF Skinner. He's really big on operating condition. So Pokemon Go, next thing you know, there's one billion people wandering around with their phones, capturing video images of everything that they see.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  So what happened? The people think they're playing a game. But Google says, or Niantic says, "Ah, let's run a few experiments." "In this post 9/11 world, can we put a Pokemon in somebody's backyard and get you to knock on a stranger's front door?" It turned out you could. I mean, people would literally descend on homes and knock on the doors. The experiment was unbelievable. I mean, in America, you can't get people to knock on strangers' doors for anything other than Pokemon Go. So how about if we put it over a fence? Can we get you to climb a fence? People who had never otherwise climbed a fence climbed a fence to chase a Pokemon. So then they go, "Well, let's commercialize it." So they cut a deal with Starbucks, you know? "Can we get you to go into a Starbucks and buy a coffee?"

• 25:17Speaker 00

  "Yes, we can." Now, the key thing to understand is this is behavioral manipulation. And it's a billion people they were doing it on simultaneously. People are terrified about what's going on in China, right? China has a program called social credit, which is designed to use behavioral manipulation to control the whole population. But get this. There are only 750 billion people with internet access in China. Pokemon Go was a wildly larger experiment than social credit. And you can say to yourself, "Well, it's harmless." And I'm going, "Right, but it's not the end game." Now, they have a project going on in Toronto, Ontario, called Keysight. And it's a smart city.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  And they're taking everything they learned from maps and ways and street view and Pokemon Go, and applying it at city scale. They call it a smart city. But Google's going to gather data from everything. There are sensors everywhere. There's no privacy, right? Everything is turned into data, all human experience in that area. And the things run into a political problem because a small number of people came up and said, hang on, how do we influence this? Because Google had said to the city that there could be no interference from the people of Toronto in what Google was doing. In effect, they had to be protected from politics.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  They had to be protected from democracy, that they got to be in charge. They got to control the data, do whatever they wanted with it. Effectively, they controlled the public utilities. They effectively controlled all of the city services inside this development that they were going to help fund. And there would be no scrutiny, no control. Effectively, they would be substituting algorithms and artificial intelligence for democracy. Now, there's a one-year hold on that project while the city actually finally does the deliberation, while they have the democratic process to decide if this is good. My simple observation here is that

• 27:29Speaker 00

  these guys have a plan. And it's, again, it's not evil. It's just a different value system. And I believe we're supposed to have serious conversations. We're supposed to do the thought experiments to imagine what it would be like to live in something that looked like The Matrix or like Minority Report that was run by a corporation, something over which we have no control, that might not even be in the same country we're in.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure that for each of the elements of business that you've put forward today, Google acting as whichever company it may be, whether it be Waze or Pokemon Go or Facebook acting as Instagram or however they piece it together, they will have a justification for why Street View exists. Well, it allows you to see things before you get there or it allows you to be more accurate with maps or the reason why they redirect you. Well, there actually really was traffic. What is the evidence showing this other side? Have there been whistleblowers inside of the company which have come out?

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Well, to be clear, Chris, I mean, you're, the points you're making are demonstrably true. There is massive value from products like Maps. There's massive value from Waze. I'm not saying you're not supposed to like the products. My simple point here is that Google's goals are at odds with the goals of the people using the products. And the people using the products just aren't aware of that.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  My question is, how do we know that their primary directive, their primary goal is collect data?

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Well, hang on. To be clear, it doesn't have to be murder in the first degree. It could be manslaughter, right? Their goals can be perfectly honorable and still cause huge harm and that requires some kind of action by society. I believe that their goals are honorable. I just disagree with the value system that they're applying. And my point to you here is, I mean, I've said this, I think, three times already. I believe these people are not bad people, but I do think they have a different philosophy. And in the United States, they have, they have grown up as executives in an environment

• 29:55Speaker 00

  where we allowed the banking industry to destroy the economy with no negative consequences. Where we allowed a bank, Wells Fargo, to take money out of millions of accounts of consumers with no penalties. Where we essentially allow businesses to do whatever they want with no constraints. So against that backdrop, smart people are going to take any advantage they can get. And these guys are operating in a new area where there are literally no rules. And, you know, in the early days of the telephone system, operators listened into phone calls. Eventually, we decided, you know, that's not a good idea.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  We don't want the postal service to be reading the mail. We don't want like operators listening in. We are at exactly that point with internet platforms where we need to set the boundaries. And my only goal here is not to convince you that there's something wrong with Google or something wrong with Facebook or something wrong with anybody else. But rather to say, we need to decide where the boundaries are. In the United States, we have a problem right now, which we've had for a long time and it's gotten a lot worse, which is that we have a white supremacists who are going on murderous rampages all over the country

• 31:18Speaker 00

  with staggering frequency, more than one mass murder a day nationwide. And a huge percentage of these things are effectively incubated. That is, the people are activated by things they read, things that they learn and interact with on social media. Social media is playing an outsized role in a whole series of problems related to public health for children and adults, for democracy, for privacy and our ability to make choices without fear, and for competition and innovation. And in that sense, I would argue that Google, Facebook,

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Microsoft, and Amazon are like the chemical industry in the period between 1950 and 1980, when that industry was very high growth, very high profit. Why? Because they could pour their waste products, mercury, chromium, mine tailings, wherever they felt like it. They could pour mercury into fresh water, polluting rivers and streams and drinking water. They could leave mine tailings on the side of the hill to leach into fresh water in rural areas. And there were no costs, no consequences. And eventually, society realized that was a terrible idea. And we should make the people who created these toxic chemical spills

• 32:46Speaker 00

  pay the cost of cleaning them up. That is the conversation we need to have. If your system is used to undermine democracy, if your system is used in ways that lead to increases in teen suicide, massive increases in bullying, if your system is used in ways that allow disaffected people to find each other, gather, and then perpetrate violent crime, should there be some penalty? Should there be some limit? Should there be responsibility?

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And my goal here is to just trigger that conversation. We've looked at these things as though they're all separate problems. That the public health issue, you know, which would be Tristan's brain hacking and all that, was unrelated to elections, and that that was unrelated to privacy, and that was unrelated to the whole issue of innovation competition. But in fact, all of them are the result of the incentives of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. And it is this business model where our lives, our digital existence, is for sale to anybody,

• 34:08Speaker 00

  that they can know the most intimate things about us, and we have no control. I mean, why is it legal for Google, or Microsoft, or anyone else, to read our documents, or to read our emails for their economic benefit? Why is it legal for a bank, or a credit card processing company, to sell our most intimate financial details to anybody who wants them? Why is it legitimate for a mobile company to sell our location? Why is it legitimate for a healthcare services company of any kind, or a healthcare data company, to sell our most intimate health data? Why is anything about us for sale? That is the conversation I want to have.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  And, again, you don't have to agree with me, but we should have the conversation. And until we have the conversation, in the United States, people are going to be killed in shopping centers, in bars, and in other environments, in schools. And, you know, in the United Kingdom, you're going to be struggling with issues like Brexit. In Myanmar, they're going to be dealing with a genocide. In the Philippines, they're going to be dealing with death squads. In New Zealand, they're going to be dealing with terrorist attacks on mosques. You know, I mean, these are not small issues. And the critical thing is, you know, I talk to young people all the time, and I say, Roger, I'm a digital native.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  I grew up with this. I'm not worried about this. And I go, I'm not talking about how it affects you. I'm talking about how the data they get from you is used to harm other people. Think about this.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Google has so much data. What they do is they identify life events. And then look at the things that preceded it. So if you buy, they look at everybody who buys a car. And they look at like the thousand or 10,000 steps they took before they bought the car. And they compare it to everybody else, right? And they find the distinct patterns. They do the same thing with women who announce that they're pregnant. So they look at like 10,000 steps in front of that. And they find what's common. So there are certain things before you buy a car that you do that you may not even be conscious of. That don't say you're buying a car, but are just indicative of increasing probability.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Because when you have a data voodoo doll, you're not selling targeting. You're selling certainty, right? You're selling this, I have 90% confidence this person is going to buy a car. Or get this, Google knows, I believe with 90% confidence that a woman is pregnant before she knows. Think about that for a minute. I'd like all the women who are listeners to think about that for a moment. You may not know if you're pregnant, but Google may. And we ought to ask, is that okay? Because what happens is that once they know, everything in your feed, everything in your search results reflects what they know that you do not know.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  And suddenly you do not, as Tristan says, you do not have agency over your life. And I don't know that that's legitimate.

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  There's a good point there. I recently made a comment on a podcast about how much I love the new schedule send email feature on Gmail. I said, this now allows you to send an email tomorrow at 12:30 as opposed to having to be online. So it saves it in your drive and then publishes it when you want. But you are right. If I start writing to my business partner about flyers for freshers events in September, which we need to get flyers for, in the sidebar of that email, I have adverts for flyers.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  Because they are allowed to read the content of my emails. And the question of...

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Well, actually, they have asserted the right to do that. We've never actually had a conversation whether that's legit or not, because remember, they say they're a common carrier. That's how they protect themselves from legal...

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  What's a common carrier, please?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  When they say they're a platform, not a media company, to avoid responsibility for the content on their platforms, they say, "We're a platform." Which, in the parlance of the communications industry, it means that you control a pipe. And if you control a pipe, you're not responsible for it goes through the pipe, unless you know what it is, right? If you're going through and looking at it.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  So essentially, this is what makes it illegal for the postal service to read your letters, for Federal Express to look inside your packages, and for the phone company to listen, right? And so you could say that Google's and Facebook's insistence that they are platforms, not media companies, therefore not responsible, that that means that they should not be allowed.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  There's a precedent.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, there's a lot of precedent. Point is, in the United States, our Congress is, I think you could say charitably ineffective, and at the moment, the government of the United Kingdom is distracted, right? And as a consequence, getting thoughtful legislation to deal with problems like this is harder than it should be, given the scale of the problem, right? And my point to you is, you might find it incredibly convenient to have a list of people who will sell you flyers. But there are points in your life that should be private. There are moments when sanctuary is absolutely essential to our psychological

• 39:54Speaker 00

  and human well-being. And these guys are systematically stripping that away. Think about Alexa. You put Alexa in your bedroom, you put Alexa in your office, and you're trusting the employees of Amazon, you're trusting the hardware vendor, you're trusting hackers to never do anything that hurts you. And maybe statistically, you're going to be okay, but there are going to be a lot of people who are harmed really badly from just the indiscretions and the things that should remain private and are not under this model. And Shoshana Zuboff makes this brilliant point, that the imperative of surveillance

• 40:38Speaker 00

  capitals is to invade every possible domain of human existence. I mean, when you hear about Facebook doing experiments to try to create things that allow you to think instead of typing your queries or your posts, they're trying to invade your head. And you say to yourself, "Well, it'll never work." And I go, "Well, I hope not, but what if it does?" These are really smart people, right? And the critical thing is, at a point in time when we're dealing with climate change, at a point in time when we're dealing with crisis of obesity and all of those stuff,

• 41:19Speaker 00

  the best and brightest in our economy are devoting 100% of their effort to manipulating human attention and human behavior. Now, that sounds very Chinese to me, right? In China, the government is determined to manipulate everybody in order to keep them in line. And I'm going, "Well, I just think in the United States of America," and I don't know how you feel in the United Kingdom, "but in the United States of America, I think that's a very un-American thing. And our companies are doing it, and we are not conscious of it. And I just think there is something wrong with all this happening."

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Outside of our awareness.

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. One of the things that I want to touch on, I want to begin to go back a little bit further to the beginning of your story and talk about, talk about this journey from 2006 to 2016 and, and find out you were with Facebook through its, not its inception, but really it's adolescence, I suppose, and it's establishing itself in the world. So what did you see during that period? I'd also love to hear the first time that you met Mark and what that situation was like as well. I'm sure that the listeners would be fascinated.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  And then it's a, it's a funny story. So let me go there first and then you can ask the rest of the questions. Okay. So when I met Mark, he had just had his 22nd birthday. Facebook was two years old. They had nine million users, all of whom were university and high school students in the United States who were required to use their school email account. So effectively they had authenticated identity for every user of Facebook. I thought that was the game changer, that that meant Facebook would finally crack the code of social media that had eluded MySpace and Friendster and America Online and all the

• 43:18Speaker 00

  early efforts to, to bring people together online. I was convinced that anonymity allowed bad actors to pollute any environment they could get into and that all of these things had from the beginning, whenever you allowed anonymity, it always descended into a, into an ugly mess. And so I, I had not used Facebook when I met Mark because I was 50 years old and I didn't have an authenticated school email address. And so I was convinced of this without actually having used the product. This conceptually, I thought he'd solved the core problem. And one of his colleagues sent me an email saying, my boss has a crisis and he needs to talk to somebody who's been around a long time that really gets the valley,

• 44:01Speaker 00

  who can help him figure it out. Would you take a meeting? And so Mark comes to my office.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  And, you know, he looked just like Mark Zuckerberg. He's got the sandals, he's got the skinny jeans, the gray t-shirt, the hoodie, the courier bag, short curly hair. He sits down, I sit down. Now, keep in mind, I'm in business with a rock star, right? Bono. We're, we're investing at the intersection of technology and media, and we have one conference room that's set up like a living room with video game consoles and stereos, and it's soundproof to intrude its life, and it looks like a living room, right? I mean, it's big comfy chairs. We're three feet apart in these two comfy chairs. And I say, Mark, before you say a word, would you mind if I gave you the context for why I'm taking this meeting? Because, once you start talking, you'll assume anything I say is influenced by what you've

• 44:52Speaker 00

  already told me, so I need to say something before you say anything. He said, go ahead. I said, look, Mark, you know, you've had nine million revenues, you've got nine million users, but I think you have the most important company since Google, and before long, you will be bigger than Google is today. And because of that, if it hasn't already happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to come up to you and offer you one billion dollars to buy Facebook. They're going to do it right now. And everybody you know, your mom and dad, your board of directors, your management team, your employees, your friends, everybody's saying, Mark, take the money. It's a billion dollars, dude, you're 22. You can change the world, you have 650 million bucks.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Your venture capitalist will promise to back your next company, and he'll tell you, it'll be way better than Facebook. I said, Mark, I've been doing this for 24 years, and I know two things with extremely high confidence. One is, there is not one entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has ever had the perfect idea at the perfect time, twice. I am convinced Facebook is the perfect idea at the perfect time. It didn't happen for Steve Jobs, not going to happen for you.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Second thing, I don't care who buys it. They're gonna wreck it. This is your baby. If you believe in the vision, you gotta carry it out. So, you have to imagine, we're three feet apart on comfy chairs in this conference room with booth lighting, right? It's not like, it's not like a conference, it's not like a conference room. It's really like a living room with low lighting and we're right next to each other, face to face. I'm expecting, I've just laid this really heavy trip on a guy I've never met. He's 22, right? Some kind of reaction, I'm expecting.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I got nothing. I mean, he goes into these, this series of thinker poses. He's trying to decide if he trusts me. And I don't know if you've ever sat with somebody in an absolutely dead quiet room, expecting a response and not gotten one. Right? In 15 seconds, it starts to get really, really uncomfortable.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  It's like a lifetime, yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Right? At the one minute mark, I'm saying to myself, well, it's okay, because he's really showing me great respect. He's, he's trying to decide if he trusts me. At the two minute mark, I'm going, whoa, this is really creepy.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  At three minutes, I'm digging trenches in the upholstery of the chair I'm sitting in. At four minutes, I'm ready to scream, but I realize I'm in the presence of a singularity, right? I mean, there's nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life. And I'm thinking, wow, this kid is like, he's truly one of a kind. I mean, I've never seen anybody go through a thought process like this.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Finally, he calms down. And he looks at me and goes, you're not gonna believe this. And I go, try me. That story you just told?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  That's why I'm here. That exact thing has just happened. Every detail that you said was correct. Yahoo, billion dollars, everybody told me, sell the company. And I said, well, Mark, what do you want to do? Do you want to sell? He goes, no, but I can't run it by myself and I don't want to disappoint everybody.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  And I said, well, hang on. You got plenty of capital. You're growing like a bat out of hell.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  They don't have any right to tell you the dance is over. So I helped him understand how you convince people that wait a minute, when you're part of a rocket ship, you don't abort the mission just because you think you've gone high enough, right? You play it out. And the whole meeting maybe took half an hour. He goes back, he kills the deal, convinces everybody to do the right thing, which they did. And from that point, for three years, I was one of his advisors. Because imagine this, he's got a problem, right? That his board of directors wanted to sell the company, his management team wanted to sell the company. He was going to have to do some upgrading. And he didn't know who to trust.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  So I was one of the people he trusted, and so I helped with that. And the key thing I did was to bring in Cheryl. And I knew Cheryl back from when she was at the Treasury Department because she and Bono had worked together to forgive all this debt of emerging countries for the millennium. And she introduced Bono to me. And then I helped to introduce her to Google, which got her started in Silicon Valley. So we were super close. And I was convinced she was the right fit for Mark. And likewise, Mark for her. So you could imagine, I'm a huge believer in this company. But around 2009, Cheryl's on board, in place. And the thing about really successful executives in Silicon Valley

• 49:54Speaker 00

  is they rotate their mentors according to what they need. And by 2009, they had the management team that they wanted. So my role was kind of done. So I move into the background. And I'm liking the bleachers cheering along, but I'm no longer an insider from 2009.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  What was your role from 2009? What did you do? Was it just...

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Well, we were an investor. So it didn't happen right away. But about a year after...

• 50:20Speaker 00

  I met Mark. He gave us a chance to invest. And then another one that Elevation took advantage of.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Did you unload every single penny of your net worth into that to try and maximize?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  No, no. I mean, it wasn't at all obvious at the beginning what the business model was.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  I just thought with the rocket ship propelling itself towards the future, as you suggested.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not... I mean, Elevation made a huge investment in it, okay? It made as big an investment as it could. And it worked great for Elevation. And, you know, but to be clear, it doesn't work quite the way you described. That's just not how the world works.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  And again, I really liked him. I liked Mark. I loved Cheryl a lot. I was a real big believer. Now, the thing is, I'm a professional technology analyst. And there were signals along the way that not everything was right. But unlike Google, Facebook took quite a long time to get its business model right. And the thing that's a problem today didn't really begin until about 2013. So I'd been out of the company four years by the time it began. But the things that led to it and the things that caused the problem, there were signs as early as 2007, really,

• 51:38Speaker 00

  that Mark did not respect the people who used the products. That he didn't respect privacy and that he wanted to push them, force them if necessary, into a level of openness that would ultimately be really problematic.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  Can you remember the first particular signal of that kind that comes to mind? Or were there a couple of those that come to mind?

• 52:09Speaker 00

  The problem here was that I thought that he learned from the mistakes. The first one was a thing called Beacon. And you may remember Beacon. Beacon was their first effort at monetization at scale. And the notion was, if you were out in the real world and you bought something and you were a Facebook user, the person you bought it from could do a promotion on Facebook and publish it to your newsfeed. You know, you went to a sporting goods store and bought trainers, right?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  And they published in your newsfeed. But almost immediately, a disaster happened. A young American man bought an engagement ring from an online company called Overstock.com. And Overstock was one of those things that sold things at really deep discounts. So they published to his newsfeed that Mr. X has just bought an engagement ring for 95% off. And here's a picture of it.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  So the first word his bride-to-be gets that he's going to propose is that she sees this thing in his newsfeed. All of his friends see this thing at the same time. Now, nobody has any control. They have no idea this is going on. It's just started and it's a massive disaster. And I mean, we're talking train wreck of the first order. And it's the kind of thing where you would think a company would never go near invasions of privacy again.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  And I want to say that's sort of 2007 that that's going on. And so Cheryl comes in in early 2008. You know, they repackage the technology as something called Facebook Connect, which it works the same way, but it does something totally different. Facebook Connect is a very convenient way to log onto websites so you don't have to remember lots of passwords. The problem is, of course, if Facebook used it to spy on people as they went around the web, the same way that when they put like buttons around the web was all about tracking what you were doing as you went around the web. Now, Facebook resisted using that data in their advertising for a long time.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  But when they went public, the ad tool they had at the time was incredibly successful because of the growth in users. Advertisers have to go where the audience is. And so they were putting lots of ads on, but Facebook overpriced the ads. And so all the advertisers were really angry. Facebook didn't want to cut the prices. They wanted to make the ads more valuable. So they realized they had to take what they would call web data, you know, from spying on you as you go around the web, tracking you, and embed that into the ad system, which they did beginning in 2013. And that was the trigger for all the bad stuff that happened. The problem was that it wasn't obvious that...

• 55:07Speaker 00

  That it would have the negative consequences for elections or for public health or for privacy. You know, at the beginning, it just appeared as though, you know, you were getting ads that were better targeted. Right? They seemed way more relevant to you.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

  And that you can log into a new e-commerce website by saying, sign up with Facebook as opposed to having to put your credentials in.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  And you could like something out on the web and it would show up in your Facebook feed. You know what I'm saying? All these things seemed very innocent and convenient. But what we didn't think about was that literally anybody could use them. Which means that, you know, in Tahrir Square, you've got a protest organized in Egypt over Facebook and then crushed over Facebook. Because the

• 56:00Speaker 00

  forces of darkness, if you will, had way more money, way more power. And every bit as easy access to Facebook as the protesters had. And so they were able to use all these tools to identify who the protesters were. Right? I mean, because Facebook, basically in those days, you know, they had this thing. When they were first trying to figure out monetization. All they had was a large user count, but people spent like a minute a day. And then this company called Zynga came along with a poker game and with Farmville. And where people were spending an hour a day playing Farmville or playing poker. And what Zynga did that was so clever was they kind of hacked the Facebook system to get friends.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  And Facebook realized, wow, if we give app developers access to friends list, they could build these social apps and that'll make usage go way, way up. So beginning in 2009 or so, they started systematically doing it. The US Federal Trade Commission goes, wait a minute. You have to get permission from the users before you do that. Facebook goes, okay, no problem. We'll sign a consent agreement, promise to do that, which they completely ignore.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  So they continue to give access. And here's the math. They went public in 2012. They had nine million apps. In theory, all of them were eligible to get these friends lists. But let's just imagine only 1% did. I believe the number is actually higher than that, but let's imagine only 1% did. That would be 90,000 apps. Let's think about what some of those apps were.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Well, how about Xbox Live? You know, how about PlayStation, right? I mean, these are things with tens or hundreds of millions of users getting access to the friends list of all of those users on Facebook. That's everybody on Facebook multiple times over, right? So everybody stays, that's the thing that Cambridge Analytica was about. That actual thing. And that took place after the consent decree. And that's why the Federal Trade Commission just put a $5 billion penalty out, which, by the way, was a bargain. The reality is they probably, if you had applied normal Federal Trade Commission pricing

• 58:12Speaker 00

  to each violation, it was probably multiple trillion dollars worth of violations. I mean, as digital toxic spills go, it's hard to get, hard to imagine anything bigger than that, but the digital toxic spill associated with things like video game platforms was almost certainly orders of magnitude larger.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  And five billion is just the cost of business, is that the case?

• 58:36Speaker 00

  It's way, way, way too low. And it didn't mean anything to go, investors thought it was literally less than a slap on the wrist. I mean, the investors treated it like they'd just been handed a bouquet of roses by the Federal Trade Commission, thought it was terrible. And the point here is, I'm an analyst, I might have picked up signals earlier. And the embarrassing thing was, I retired at the end of 2015. And I retired because the culture of Silicon Valley had changed. If you think about it, I grew up in the era of Steve Jobs and, you know, Gordon Moore and this notion of using technology to empower the people who use it. It had the combination of the intersection of the value system of the US space program with the hippie value systems of empowerment.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  And we all believed in it. And that began to change after 2000. And I didn't initially appreciate how profound the change was. But it was really led by what are now known as the PayPal mafia, which is Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman and the rest, founder of PayPal, who were not just brilliant executives, but brilliant investors and had a set of insights about how the technology world was evolving. That they saw before anybody else and they took advantage of before anybody else. And it really was what created social media. So they did LinkedIn and Facebook and a bunch of other stuff. But they brought a different value system. They brought this hyper libertarian value system of, hey, move fast, break things, right?

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  That you're not responsible, you could disrupt without being responsible for the consequences of your actions. And that unfortunately happened in kind of a vacuum that post the bubble bursting in 2000, venture capital industry was in retreat. It turned out that that was a critical moment because suddenly you could, you know, the limitations historically of technology, we didn't have enough processing power or memory or storage or bandwidth to do what you wanted to do. Those all basically evaporated around 2003, 2004. So you could, for the first time, do global consumer products like Facebook or Google or Instagram. And these guys saw it before anybody else.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  So they got there and they set the rules and they set the culture. And at the beginning, it was like this hybrid culture, right? Where these people were doing real business and more or less obeying the rules. But the second generation companies, so now we're talking about YouTube. We're talking about Uber and Lyft and Spotify. We're talking about Airbnb. These guys basically started off with the notion that laws just don't apply to us. And that there are people out there who do not understand what's going on and we can take advantage of them. Because we're not responsible for the harm. So suddenly predatory business models become the rule in Silicon Valley.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  You know, there's a company in the nicotine business called Juul that makes vape pads. And every one of these things I had a chance to invest in. And I'm just sitting there going, wait a minute, this is the best that Silicon Valley has to offer. I can't manage other people's money if I'm not willing to invest in these things. But my personal value system didn't allow me to go there. And so I realized I gotta retire. So I retire in 2015, at the very end. Because Elevation winds up very successfully, we distribute everything at the end of 2015. And I'm free, free at last. And something happened. Because within a month, I'm on vacation with my wife and I'm looking at Facebook.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  And I see posts coming from Facebook groups notionally associated with the Bernie Sanders for president campaign. This is the very beginning of the Democratic primary.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  And they're really deeply misogynistic. And they're not the sort of thing any campaign would want its fingerprints on. You'd never put it on an official Bernie site that you were doing misogynistic things. And yet it was spreading like wildfire, like somebody was spending money to get my friends to join these Facebook groups. And I'm thinking, that's really weird.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  And really bad. You know, because I have a rock and roll band called Moon Alice, actually the second one called Do Be Decimal System. And we've used Facebook really successfully to build our fan base and to promote.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  Sell tickets and tell fans about when you've got shows and events.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and to communicate with them directly. And for them to communicate, I mean, there's a Facebook group for Facebook, but there's one called The Tribe that's just the fans. Right? And, you know, it's, so it's like, you know, I'm, I mean, I've been a true believer of Facebook, early adopter. I mean, we did the first Facebook Live of a rock and roll concert. The day the product was turned on, we had a show that night and we broadcast the whole show on Facebook Live, the first time that had been done.

• 1:03:35Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, and we did a bunch of stuff. We were the first one on, uh, uh, on, uh, whatever the one is that Twitter owns. Um, I can no longer remember the name.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I know what you mean. Yeah. It's what's called Periscope.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Periscope. But all those things came out. We missed Meerkat by like four days. But, um, but, you know, we, we were really early adopter and we'd been streaming our shows for years, right? So we really knew a lot about it. And I have four patents on live streaming, which by the way are completely worthless because of the market power of Facebook and Google. Um, I can't enforce them. But the point here is that in March of 2016, Facebook expelled a group that was using the ad tools to identify people who were interested in Black Lives Matter, which is a protest group and a completely

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  peaceful, honorable, really, in my opinion, important civil rights organization. And they were gathering data on the identify identity of these people and selling it to police departments, which is a massive civil rights violation. Now, Facebook did the right thing, right? They expelled them. But by then, the damage had been done. And that's the first inkling I got that, wait a minute, these ad tools are not benign. But Brexit was the critical thing because at Brexit, all of a sudden I realized, wait a minute, there is an asymmetry because engagement. You know, Tristan's hypothesis, right? You want to go down the brain stem. So the most basic human emotions, fear and outrage, which are part of flight or fight.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  That those are the the lowest common denominator. You can get engagement from the largest number of people by appealing to that. And it's asymmetric. Basically, people with a naturally conservative personality will be, on average, more fearful. So from a political perspective, right? It's easier to use these tools to inflame people who think of themselves as being conservative, which means you can't use these tools equally effectively across the full political spectrum. There's a massive asymmetry.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. That's something I've never I've never heard of, thought of before.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  And that asymmetry has been, didn't begin here. That's been Rupert Murdoch's model from the beginning, right? And so the Murdoch Organization has played to that on Fox and on Sky and wherever they've had control of the news agenda. And, you know, it's just, these are elements of human psychology that we can't avoid. And I didn't know all the nuances, but I knew enough to know that there was something really wrong here. And that's when I got, you know, activated to to try to do something about it. Again, in this context, I'm viewing Facebook as the victim. When I went to Mark and Cheryl nine days before the US election in 2016, it was as

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  a friend, as their mentor, to try to alert them of something that was, I thought, really horrible. And the truth is, I think that they looked at me and said, Roger, if you're so smart, where are your 2 billion active users? You know, where are your billions of dollars? Because for the prior five or six years, pretty much everything Facebook had done had worked out. And if you're as successful as they were for as long as they were...

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Human psychology, you start to think that all these things happen because you're a genius and that therefore everything you think is right. Right? They've been proving critics wrong for a long time. And so I think their visceral reaction was to just assume I was wrong. And I totally understood that, which is why I spent three months trying to persuade them. Because, I mean, I've been around this a long time. And this is not the first group of people I've seen who've had that kind of Midas psychology.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  And I didn't, I didn't think less of them because of it, right? I just thought it was a high bar to get over. And I was worried that I was no longer the right messenger.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  And, but I spent three months, I gave it my best shot. Because I didn't want to say anything publicly. Because I thought the minute I said something publicly, it was going to change our relationship permanently.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  So I didn't say anything public for a long time. I actually waited another six months after that before I said anything publicly. And, because I wanted to give them a chance to get it right. I was convinced that no one could fix these problems better than the people running the companies. And keep in mind, at that point, I think it's just Facebook. I have no idea that this is also about Instagram. It's also about Google. It's also YouTube. It's about, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, all these other companies. I just, you know, maybe it's another.

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  To interject there, what I think a lot of people at home might be thinking, and certainly one of the thoughts that's coming through in my mind, is that it looks to me, and it seems to me, like right now, litigating from top down, restricting what platforms can do, or some sort of very stringent law enforcement with more transparency, et cetera, et cetera, appears to be really one of the few cards that we have to play now. But as you've alluded to there, a much more effective solution would have been for it to be bottoms up, would have been for the people within the business, behind the business, to have got in there, nipped it in the bud early, and then redirected the business model appropriately.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Well, we continue to appeal to employees at all these companies. And Tristan does this every week. And he's still in communication with senior people at particularly Facebook and Twitter.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  The reason we do that, you may remember Uber had a massive situation where a woman came named Susan Fowler. And Susan wrote a blog post a couple of years ago in which she talked about the toxic culture at Uber. And here's the thing, the toxic culture of Uber wasn't a secret. Everybody knew about it, but the management team, the board of directors, the employees, tolerated it because the company was on this rocket ship of growth. And Susan Fowler wrote this blog post that for whatever reason shifted the perception of the employees so dramatically that over the next six months, there was almost 100%

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  turnover of the management team. It changed everything. And we looked at that and went, that's all we need here. We just need to get the right person. And it was interesting because it was serious people. First, Justin Rosenstein, who did the like button. Then Sean Parker, who'd been the first president. And Facebook completely ignores these guys. And then Chamath Palihbithia, who had been in charge of growth until 2011, does a thing at Stanford University in late November of 2017.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  And it gets publicized in early December and we're going, this is it. Chamath had hired essentially all of the people running the growth team, which is the brain hacking part of Facebook. And we're thinking, this is the guy. Well, Facebook apparently recognized that and they came down on him. And somehow, within 72 hours, he reverses his field completely and starts becoming a spokesman for Facebook.

• 1:11:28Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  And he goes on TV. He came to the UK. He was on Christiane Amanpour on CNN and he's talking about how, you know, Zuck's the smartest guy on earth and only Zuck can fix everything in society. And, I mean, not quite, but something like that. And... I'm looking at that going, wow. I mean, Chamath Palihbitya is a world-class poker player. I mean, seriously, he finished like 101st out of, I want to say 3,500 players in the world poker championship. I mean, he is no shrinking violet, the notion, I mean, he's not going to roll over because Sheryl calls up and yells at him, right? That's just, he's not that. What do you think happened there? What do you think happened?

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  I have no idea. I mean, there's been a lot of speculation. I only met Chamath one time. Zuck asked me to help recruit him when he went into Facebook. Because his office was literally directly upstairs from mine at elevation. And so, I spent an hour and a half with him. And I will tell you, Chamath's one of the smartest people I've ever met. One of the most ambitious people I've ever met. He's, he's almost the prototypical top of the pyramid Silicon Valley bro. Exactly the kind of person you would want running the, uh... Growth team. Growth, the growth team at Facebook. I mean, Zuck totally picked the right guy. And, uh, you know, so I don't know him well enough to know what really drove it, but, you know, they're, you know, you can speculate. But it doesn't, the point is, it doesn't matter.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  They turned him around. And ever since, with all that news flow, there hasn't been anybody else, other than Chris Hughes, the co-founder, uh, who's really come out and said anything. Now, Chris has been amazingly effective. He was Mark's roommate in college, he was the fourth co-founder of, of Facebook, and he has been talking a lot about antitrust, and I have enormous respect for Chris. Uh, but, think about this. According to Maitreya Sanfrantia, there have been at least 9,000 people killed in what the UN calls a "classic ethnic cleansing" in Myanmar. There are, I think, 42,000 missing and presumed dead.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  So, if they're all dead, let's assume that's 51,000 people. Not one person at Facebook has spoken out saying, "This is a moral outrage, and we need to do something about this." Not one. And I'm thinking to myself, "How can that be?" I mean...

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  How can it be? After Christchurch? I mean, Christchurch proportioned to the population of New Zealand? Christchurch is exactly the same percentage that 9/11 was in the US, right? I mean, this is a nationally traumatizing event. And nobody's got a problem with that? I'm just going, hang on. What is going on here? You know, how about YouTube? Right? I mean, YouTube recruits and trains terrorists. It poisons the minds of little children. And it's caused, in the United States, an epidemic of measles. It's got, you know, climate change denial happens on YouTube. Flat Earth happens on YouTube.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  I mean, there's been one person, Guillaume Chalot, who was an algorithms engineer, left the company and has become an activist. But no current employees have got a problem with this? Actually, they do. They spoke out quietly and the company ignored them. Right? And that's the difference between Google and Facebook. Is it Google, you've seen the employees go to management and tell them there was something wrong with YouTube. They fought against Maven, which was a defense contract. They protested at least a little bit against creating Dragonfly, which was the version of the search engine for China with all the censoring. And then they had a very, well, at least temporarily successful protest against the

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  required arbitration in cases of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct. But Google's punished the people who organized the protest and they've gotten away with that. But at least at Google, you see signs of the employees sticking their heads up and doing something. And that makes me hopeful. But Google's a really smart company, really well managed, with a lot of tentacles in a lot of places. And they're the ones who are, you know, trying to replace cities. Facebook's just trying to replace currencies, which is a disaster, right? I mean, because you sit there, you go, hang on. What makes you a sovereign nation?

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  The legitimate use of force with the military and the police and control of currency. And Facebook's go, hey, we're going to replace you on the currency part. And I'm like WTF dudes, I mean, come on, what are you thinking? That's nuts.

• 1:16:24Chris Williamson?

  So to round up, one of the things that I think a lot of people want to know and me myself.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's fine. I'll drop that. I'll drop that. That's fine. Where are we? Swan 16.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Let me blow it again.

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  Don't worry.

• 1:16:40Chris Williamson?

  I love doing a pre-record because it just means that we can, we can do whatever we want. I've got about exactly three minutes, if that's okay. I'm just gonna, I'll do it. One of the things I'm thinking, I'm sure a lot of people at home will be as well, is that we are currently a part of this infrastructure. A lot of these things are part of our lives.

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:17:00Chris Williamson?

  Are there any bits of advice? Is there anything which you can suggest to the people at home which are the lesser of few evils? Should I say?

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  No, actually, there are positive things going on.

• 1:17:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  The most important thing to understand is that Apple has decided to make protecting consumer privacy the focus of their product development, the focus of their business. And the things that they've done are huge and they're getting more huge by the day. So, you know, if you do facial recognition on Apple, that image of you, which is incredibly detailed, never leaves the phone. That's a huge deal. Siri, one of the reasons why Siri doesn't perform as well as Alexa is they do a huge amount of the processing on the phone to minimize the data that goes into the system. Apple Maps, Apple spends a billion dollars a year on this mapping product. They do no monetization at all. Do you know why it exists? So that you don't have to use Google Maps. And here's what's really interesting.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Instead of doing what Google does, which is to track every route you ever take forever, Apple, as soon as you're done with the route, snips off the place you left from and the place you're going to, breaks the rest into 10 segments and anonymizes them so they can't reconstruct your route.

• 1:18:13Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  Now, wow. So then Apple creates Apple Pay where you can use your phone to pay for stuff. The merchant, all they get is money. It's like you've just done a cash transaction, but the data leakage occurs with your credit card, particularly if you're on Mastercard.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  It it there's less data, a little bit less data leakage uh with well, the data leakage on Verizon occurs in a different place. But Apple says, okay, so we're gonna make a credit card. And the deal on this is the guy with the bank we partnered with can't leak any of the data. So if you use an Apple card, which comes out this month in the United States and soon thereafter everywhere else. If you get an Apple card and you use Apple Pay and Apple card, it is like paying cash. It is a great idea. Apple has a new thing coming out in the new operating system called Sign In With Apple. That's the equivalent of Facebook Connect or Google Connect, but the difference is it uses a random email every time you log on to a website, so they can't track you.

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Now, this is really important stuff because basically, Apple is going after a portion of surveillance capitalism. And they're going after it hard and in a way anybody can use. The other thing that's going on around Apple is that there are all these other products, and this is like DuckDuckGo for search, but also now for browsing. Uh, Disconnect Me, which blocks trackers from being sent out by apps that are running inside your phone. I mean, the Apple ecosystem is becoming wildly more secure. Where Android, the whole purpose of Android is surveillance. So the first thing is, if you've got an Android, as soon as your contract is done, move Apple, okay? Seriously, that is the best thing you can do.

• 1:19:52Chris Williamson?

  You heard it here first.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  I don't think you have to drop, you know, using the app you love. But what I would recommend you do is don't embrace ecosystems all the way in, right? If you're gonna use Facebook, don't use Messenger. Don't use everything with Google and Google Accounts. Do things anonymously, right? If you must use Google products. Now, I've been playing, I treat Google like a game. You remember Frogger?

• 1:20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  I treat Google like Frogger. I'm the frog, Google's the river. The logs of the other products, like the Apple products or DuckDuckGo or Disconnect Me.

• 1:20:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  And and my goal is to avoid using Google. I'm a musician, and the way musicians share music, if they say, if you gotta learn a song that was created by somebody else, you'll listen to it on YouTube, right? So I have a real problem with YouTube, but I haven't, I haven't done a Google search in two years. I haven't used Google Docs in over a year and um. But there's some things that, you know, this morning, somebody called me and they wanted us to do a conference call on Google Hangouts. They go, no, why can't I do that? You gotta call me.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  And my point here is, I made it into a game. And I can't really win the game. I can just stay alive a little bit longer than other people. I pay cash for a lot of stuff. Now, you say, Roger, you're paranoid. I go, I readily admit that. But my point is, I'm mostly doing it to see if it could be done, right?

• 1:21:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  Again, it's a thought experiment.

• 1:21:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  You're supposed to ask the question, what if I'm right? And the most important thing is every piece of evidence, I track every news story that goes by, I get hundreds per month. These guys haven't learned a thing. I mean, the ad stuff that they were supposedly going to protect in the context of elections does not work, right? That, you know, you see in the UK, there's this brand new story about Boris Johnson and, you know, that's, that, that consultancy that did basically propaganda on behalf of Yeltsin, or on behalf of Boris Johnson, that was,

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  you know, it was authentic because the people put their real names on it, but you couldn't connect it to Johnson and, you know, it basically went through a loophole in the new rules. I mean, there is no protection for democracy right now. And obviously, Google's still trying to push its smart cities and Amazon's going in there and taking over the healthcare industry and Microsoft's playing all these games in AI. And we don't yet have enough pressure. And so I'm just saying to people, look, when you meet a politician, get in their face and go, when are you going to look out for my privacy? When are you going to look out for my self-interest? Because there is no reason. That you can't have all the services you love on the internet without surveillance capitalism.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  The surveillance is there only for the benefit of the vendors of the platforms. And the services we love, God bless, I mean, I'm not, what I want to do, I want the next big thing to be a return to technology that empowers us. And that's a way bigger opportunity. Why do we want to only work for four companies in the whole world? It'd be much better to have an environment where you can start a company in your living room or in your basement and be an entrepreneur and do your own thing. And right now, that's getting harder and harder to do. And we don't have to be that way. We can go back to the value system that Steve Jobs called bicycles for the mind. Technology that helps us be more fit as well as being more fun.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  Roger, it's been fascinating today, a lot to think about, especially with David Carroll's episode. If you have not already checked that out, I suggest that you go and have a look. Also, what would you suggest if people want to read a little bit more? Is there one blog? Is there one Twitter account? Is there one particular webpage that you would direct them to?

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  I wish there were. The most important thing, if you have the courage, is to read or listen to the audiobook of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Failing that, the best journalist in the United States on this issue is Kara Swisher. She does a month, actually now, I guess, a bi-weekly column in the New York Times. So Kara Swisher's Twitter account is a really good one to follow. I think David Carroll's Twitter account is excellent to follow. Carol Cadwallader in the UK, relative to anything that was, you know, privately by Brexit and and Cambridge Analytica related, she's absolutely the best. But at the moment, there are not enough of us in the advocacy world to create a central hub for all this.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  God knows, I mean, I just don't have enough time in the day. And so what I would tell you here is it does take a little bit of energy, but that's okay because there are.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  You know, there's only a million of them. The rest of us are on the same team. So you can join, you can join team human and, and go for it. Okay.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  I like it a lot. Roger, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Link to Zucked on Amazon and I advise you to go and check out. It'll be on Audible as well, right?

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it's on Audible. And, and you know, the great thing is I'm coming to the UK in September. I'm going to do a bunch of events in London and you can go to zuckedbook.com if you want to see where I'm going to be. And just the thing I would say to everybody is again, it's your life. You get to make your own choices. Well, I want to make sure that you get to make your own choices. Okay. And that's what this is about.

• 1:25:26Chris Williamson?

  That's a great way to finish. Roger, thank you so much for your time. Guys and girls who are listening, if you are in the UK and you want to meet Roger, don't forget to go and check out the website. It will be linked in the show notes below, along with everything else. Please do not forget to like, share, subscribe, do all that good stuff. Roger, I hope you have a great time and I really hope that you enjoy your trip to the UK as well.

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  I hope, I hope we get to see each other, Chris. Take care.

• 1:25:47Chris Williamson?

  That would be fantastic.