Mike Isaac
Appearances
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The New Zuckerberg
I think, based on people around him that I talked to, just based on my experience over the years, that really, this is a strong word, but I think it traumatized him, honestly. Like, this becomes him in the public eye, and I think that bothered him, and there's no real way to escape it.
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The New Zuckerberg
So in a way, yet another sort of origin story of first the press comes after me, now the film industry is portraying me as this sort of conniving billionaire figure. I'm never going to get a fair shake sort of thing.
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The New Zuckerberg
I think that's right. For him, it might not be super clear cut, but it definitely evolved over time in these very public moments. And like, if the movie, it would be one thing if the movie weren't good and popular. And this is the exact worst case scenario for him because it was both of those things.
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The New Zuckerberg
There's these issues that as he grows up under the spotlight, you know, he goes from early 20s to mid 20s. Yeah. He starts figuring out things that he might start to care about. And often that's through the filter of friends and people around him.
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The New Zuckerberg
From what I've heard, what people I've talked to, there was this earnest view of the world, or at least of Washington, where if I can go in and explain my views to these people in Congress, I will be able to have a sort of rigorous intellectual debate. And like, maybe we disagree on things, but we can sort of have that discourse.
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The New Zuckerberg
There are obviously he has enough paid Washington folks around him who find that idea absurd, but they're not going to tell the boss you are wildly naive and you have not come to the level of cynicism that you need to engage in Washington. But I think that that probably explains the early years of some of these initiatives.
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The New Zuckerberg
Immediately, there's this slew of articles basically pointing at Facebook, saying this has to be the reason that Donald Trump was elected.
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The New Zuckerberg
You know, it's funny now because like this is still seen as like an aberration in democracy. Right. There's no way that the American people could have elected Donald Trump. This had to be manipulation from foreign governments. This had to be the spread of disinformation across Facebook. And like, look, those things did happen, do happen. Right.
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The New Zuckerberg
But that was like the only way people could accept that this happened in their minds.
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The New Zuckerberg
All the guns turn on Zuckerberg and Facebook on both sides of the aisle. The Republicans were already going after him, but the Democrats are now looking at him. So he has no friends.
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The New Zuckerberg
This was, I would say, the period where they were trying to fix it, and I think in an earnest attempt. Now, there's limits to that later on, but I think this was like the, okay, we messed up, how do we fix it sort of period.
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The New Zuckerberg
I think he saw it as a kind of penance that he had to do and say, like, look, I'm going to come, I'm going to explain myself in good faith again because that's what we're doing, and I can point to the literal billions of dollars and many thousands of people we've hired to fix this problem, and then you will all understand, of course. And what happens instead? They do not understand.
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The New Zuckerberg
Or look, they may understand and they don't give a shit anyway. You know, like it's the level of cynicism of Washington. Like, look, I'm not saying Zuckerberg is right. I'm not saying he came to the Hill with the correct point of view. But I think to the degree that I'm aware of his mentality, he thought that going and explaining what they were doing would solve some of these problems.
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The New Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg's like sort of pithy response. That becomes a meme in Silicon Valley or at Menlo Park where his headquarters is. They make little stickers that say, Senator, we sell ads. Making fun of Congress and that senator in particular placed them all over their laptops and stuff. It's like this moment of kind of almost contempt because...
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The New Zuckerberg
You're supposed to be having this, you know, high-minded, elevated discussion. And instead, these people he doesn't even want to talk to show up completely unprepared in his eyes to give this level of questioning.
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The New Zuckerberg
There's so much political theater going on in any congressional hearing. And a lot of it is, if you watch any one of these, one senator or one congressperson will get a couple of minutes to yell at a CEO on their pet issue and carve that up into...
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The New Zuckerberg
30-second soundbites than they can then distribute to their constituents on social media to prove that their congressperson is worth being in Congress, right? So the goal of a hearing a lot of the times is not to get anywhere substantive. It's just to flog someone in public.
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The New Zuckerberg
So COVID hits in 2020. Everyone goes through crisis mode. Obviously, the tech industry has to reconfigure how it works. People are being forced indoors and flocking online to these different websites like his and record numbers.
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The New Zuckerberg
I had this one phone call with him on the record where he's like, yeah, we're just fighting to keep the lights on over here because people are on Facebook and Instagram and all this shit like in record numbers, like their servers are on fire.
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The New Zuckerberg
All day, every day. Yes. This is also the days where either we don't know a lot about COVID and how the spread of it works or what the virus does or what the vaccine does or what the cure is or whatever, right? And like Zuckerberg says later that he starts getting really hammered by the Biden administration.
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The New Zuckerberg
I mean, on a really base level for him and for Priscilla, I think there's part of it where they're like, we are billionaires trying to give away all of our money to you and you're still giving me the middle finger. What is that about, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
Like there's a lot of how are you being this ungrateful or spiteful or like me clearly trying to do what I think is the right thing and still not, like I can't win sort of thing. I try to be a correctly behaving selfless billionaire and you say that instead it's all me being manipulative or trying to make this work to my ends. So why even try in some of these regards?
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The New Zuckerberg
As CZI, their philanthropic arm, sort of grows in Dobbs came and struck down Roe v. Wade, there were folks inside who wanted to make a strong stand against that and focus on giving money to abortion aid across different states in the country. And there was a moment where Priscilla internally sent a memo saying, our mission is not to focus on this. We need to focus on other things.
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The New Zuckerberg
Like, basically any... Throw a dart at the dartboard of contentious social issues of our time. And they were like, we do not want to touch that shit anymore. Let's focus on... STEM and science and cancer research and eliminating all disease is the thing he likes to say, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
And that, I think, is the thing they shifted more toward as they had to worry about, you know, does this put a political target on our back?
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The New Zuckerberg
when internally people were speaking out about it obviously but like what would happen would be some employees would go after other employees for saying you're not speaking out in the way i would like you to right or you're not being vocal enough you're not tweeting about it you're not posting about it or whatever and i think any reasonable person could have a discussion whether you think that's okay or not right like i think that's fine to argue
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The New Zuckerberg
But it ended up in this really contentious point inside of Facebook where, you know, the company endorsed it at one point, but what are the limits of that? Where should they intervene and say, you're not allowed to say this anymore?
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The New Zuckerberg
And Zuckerberg in particular, I think, it bothers him to be like, okay, well, do, and I'm putting words in his mouth, but do the wokest sort of have the right to tell me what I should or shouldn't be saying publicly? I...
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The New Zuckerberg
And this is the thing that sort of bothers me now about the way he's talking about coming clean or going back to their roots on speech and stuff like that, is it almost feels like he's casting himself as a passive participant in his company and the way it's run, right?
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The New Zuckerberg
I think it bothers me because it just feels conveniently passive in retrospect, especially for his posturing now, if that makes sense.
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The New Zuckerberg
You are the Wizard of Oz, man. Like, come on. Like, yes, the way you put it feels 100% more honest to me, or at least something that I would accept as an answer, whether you agree with it or not. I think that's reasonable. And I think he's probably not alone in that point of view, right? I think there's probably a lot of people who... may feel differently than they did three or four years ago.
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The New Zuckerberg
But I also think that is where we meet the other reason he's doing this positioning now, which is the rise of Trump.
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The New Zuckerberg
Oh, man. Too long ago, as far back as 2010, when I had graduated into the financial crisis and got a job doing tech reporting where I had no idea what I was doing.
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The New Zuckerberg
This was like a heady time in the tech industry. Now it seems like crazy long ago, but this was before Facebook went public, before Twitter went public. The questions people were asking around social media was, is this going to be another MySpace? Which now is like ridiculous in retrospect, but like it very much was this thing where people were curious if this was going to be a fad or not.
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The New Zuckerberg
Mark had not done a ton of these giant on-stage interview things. Like, his handlers knew that he was uncomfortable doing press, hated doing press, and tried to keep him in a contained, protective environment. But they were starting to get attacked for privacy stuff, and he had to, as CEO, defend himself in public.
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The New Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg is sitting there, and one thing he... I'm not sure if he's ever publicly addressed this, but privately, and it's been written in some books, like, he just has a sweating problem when he gets nervous. Like, he just starts... perspiring when he's all in his head, when he's got cameras all over him. I actually relate to this. I have this similar thing in person.
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The New Zuckerberg
Like, now I just sort of say, hey, by the way, I'm going to start sweating if I get nervous, and it diffuses it. But he definitely did not have the ability to acknowledge it. He just sort of, like, goes into anxiety mode and melts down.
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The New Zuckerberg
And I think he, obviously he's like mortified. And like, it goes horribly on pretty much every level for him because of the optics.