Came to do this show you heard about the hacking of twitter, the fact that trump asked out onto facebook get his message out. Facebook got a lot of criticism for a lot of things over the years, and actually wrote a column recently questioning why Mark Zuckerberg has not fact check the president. Tell us your take on this. What is this relationship between facebook and the white house, between facebook and free speech . Im going to throw you a big question to launch you off track you first, thank you for doing this. It is good to connect with you again to some virtual see. Like a lot of things you cant just keys out in the one problem of facebook from its dna and its origins. In the case of trump, obviously he wasnt a factor in the early days. It wasnt something they talked about in the dorm room when they started it up by the time Trump Campaign got rolling in 2015, this became an issue for facebook. It was lathered on top of sort of the messy way they dealt with controversial content. It first came up in 2015 when he posted, trump posted stuff that was antimuslim. It did violate a lot of people inside facebook five the Companies Community standards. What facebook decided not to mess with that, to leave it up even though it might violate he violated the standard even the zuckerberg himself thought it did. Because it was newsworthy and they were not going to tamper with that, and thats when zuckerberg started along the path that he was made explicit right now is he believes politicians should be allowed to say whatever they want so people can judge them by their speech. Even if it is harmful speech. As time goes on this becomes tougher and tougher for facebook to defend because it becomes a bullhorn for toxic speech. Thats the corner zuckerberg painting himself in. Host its so much front and center right now because in recent months a lot of the Big Tech Companies have decided to take a different path on this. This is been a divisive issue and im curious, when i wrote my own book, dont be evil, i really focus on the loophole, the carveout from the mid1990s that give the platforms that were tiny start of entities the freedom to be conservative they wanted to become to be the town square, and not be held liable but steve, we all know as journalist these are giant Media Companies and so im curious as you really dug into this issue both in your previous book and google but on this book on facebook where do you come out . Are these guys the town square anymore or are they Something Else . How should we think about them . Guest i think that 230 gets, which is as you mentioned the regulation, the law that was passed in 1996, willie way before we had these giant platforms way before to encourage these companies. The main issue is what is one of these big platforms going to do, or any of them, going to do to Police Speech to make a safe environment for their users . I think 230 gives them the opportunity to do that and is a question of where they draw the line to do that. Zuckerberg always says hey, you dont want me to be the arbiter of the speech of what is it now, 3 billion people. No, hes not the ideal arbiter but the fact is he built this platform and is the arbiter. Hes the person who has to decide where the line is and what i will say cant be set under platform. This is toxic. Thisll make people feel uncomfortable. This is absolute or borton. Were not quite have pornography on you. Were not going of misinformation about important things like antivaxxers relation which took facebook a long time to ban or information about voting, discourage people from voting which facebook still doesnt do that great a job in fighting even though it says its trying. Or things like dog whistles, like trump quite often sends out. Certainly it makes people of color and comfortable. And makes a platform somewhat itself toxic. Its a tough line to draw but thats what he built. He asked to own up to that. I think that really is the issue, in the fact is hes that doing a great job of it because the more the band speeches expose, it just feels wrong. He is more and more difficulty denying it. Thats why hes constantly taking so many steps back when confronted with the consequences of where his decisions at a given moment. I want to come back to disinformation or and misinformation, free speech in elections the first i want to just note i love the beginning of your book because it painted this picture and you do this so well i have to say i have called you the David Halberstam of tech because you always giving right in peoples lives into details but you also painting this big picture. The picture you paint it was zuckerberg enough group would be adoring entrepreneurs, users around him, almost seeming in that anecdote to me like like d of state. This is something i always think about when i think about facebook. You get at this late in the book, this point at which you decide you want to write this, a bilge and use on one day. Now we know they have more users and the largest countries in the world in many cases. These companies, they. In particular, they almost seem like supranational entities, i think about who studied economic history, india. Did you find that and what did that mean . I definitely found that. As you mentioned i decided to write facebook the inside story when zuckerberg posted in 2015 the end of the summer that a billion people have logged into facebook, on facebook an active users in the 24 hours. Mag. As you mentioned, the total membership of facebook even back then was larger than any country. Now the login numbers are to give it any country is like they are approaching 3 billion people. When i started doing the book, he took me here to get them to sign up to give me cooperation with no Strings Attached trend what i want to hear about that. Go ahead. Guest we went to africa and youre right, he was like head of state and he came to africa from italy where of course he met the prime minister. He met with the pope. This is like what you would expect Mark Zuckerberg to do. A few months before that modi, the head of india. He came to facebook on a state visit. Facebook had a Foreign Policy and he was greeted like a liked of state and almost like some sort of god among the geeks of nigeria. Nigeria has a very active community, a type committed entrepreneurs. Him coming there blew their might. It was a surprise visit. Actually this little Startup Community where he popped in, surprise. They couldnt believe who it was. I realized later that was peak facebook. Only a few months later the 2016 election occurred and that really was the moment where it flipped for facebook and went from this repaired company. They had a lot of issues in the past that stated by them but from that point on it was not skating by. It had and all the things it did come you know, that were toxic, that cause people problems, that compromised peoples of data and privacy. That was when it flipped and the blood became an exercise in understanding how that happened. Maybe go back even more than i thought to the early days of facebook and even the childhood of Mark Zuckerberg to understand how this thing happens. Host thats faceting. For starters i can relate as an author, boy, that the testing when youre megastore change in the middle of your book cycle. You have to scramble. Tragic it wasnt in the middle of the book cycle. And always take she refused to do it and if you much in it gave me the advantage of covering facebook and interviewing that people at facebook, hundreds of interviews there while this thing was happening, while the Companies Reputation was unraveling and watching that process in real time. Host what did you learn about Mark Zuckerberg and his childhood that could inform her help us understand where the company is today . Guest i talked to his parents, and his mother told me a story which i found really resonated with the way facebook unfolded. He grew up in westchester county, not one of the more posh suburbs but a nice suburb, and the Public School he went to go didnt have a whole lot of advanced classes and had great computer program. He wanted to go to private school, take advanced classes. He was interested in the classics, and loved concerts like alexander the great. His mother really want him to go to a nearby private school where he could commute. The oldest sibling in the family was going off to harvard that year. His mother didnt want to lose two kids the same here but he heard about the program at Phillips Exeter which would require boarding and he wanted to go there. His mother said listen, why dont you just like interview the people at horace mann and maybe youll like it . He said im going to interview the people, do that for you, but im going to Phillips Exeter. He went to exeter. That reminded a lot of the decisionmaking that i learned took place at facebook through all of history where quite often something would come up, his lieutenants might bore him against it, this isnt good, good for our users. Sometimes it would take this isnt right, this is kind of wrong, morally wrong, and he would say lets go do it. Its like i thought, exeter. Were going to exeter. Host came from exeter . Guest thats we first became familiar with the program called facebook, social contacts, but the idea that when he makes his mind up, thats it. Since he has total power at facebook he controls the majority of the voting stock and even the board of directors cant overrule him. When he says lets do it, when he says exeter, they go to exeter. Host that is fascinating. Speaking of total power im thinking about this wonderful anecdote and a book about the eyes of sauron. Tell us about the eyes of sauron. Guest e particularly when he was younger he had this had become unbelievably under think that you get question and he wouldnt have to pick you would just stare at you and i think human beings have two blake a certain amount. Sort of the issue i help, right . He seems to defy that sometimes when he looks at you and stares at you. A lot of people told me he had the same problem, roger describes it at length in his account. The first automated in 2006 i asked him softball questions about facebook, how many students are enrolled, et cetera, and he would just look at me. He wouldnt answer the question. I thought whats going on . , in the Twilight Zone . He got better at minimizing that over the years but every so often you get that stare. One of his lieutenants, andrew bosworth, known as boz, described to me the eye of sauron. Host thats really something. You mentioned roger, he was also sorts of me. I encouraged him to write. I connected it with andrew wylie on that. Its interesting its interesting because when i first met roger, he was going out into the media. Roger is for those who dont know, a veteran venture capitalist. He was a seat and best of lots of big important Tech Companies and he was an early mentor to mark. An elevation at the stake i think was it through elevation . Guest the elevation past and roger invested personally. Host thats right. Roger benefited greatly from it in a way initially that his company did not. Host its interesting. He was out talking against his own book at that stage to the media and saying look, i became concerned pre2016 about what i was seeing on facebook. I felt there was something wrong. He apparently wrote a letter to mark and sugar. This is sort of like your kindly uncle coming to you and say hey, i think were little bit of problem. Apparently according to his telling they went very corporate pr on him very quickly, shut him down. Its hard for me to metabolize how someone can get that information from a trusted figure and not take it seemingly more seriously. In your reporting what conclusion did you come to about this . Guest because facebook really downplayed the degree to which roger was an influence, edited look into this. Its interesting, and i did roger is a more accurate account of the degree of his influence in facebook then maybe some of the media appearances he did. To have him describe this, zuckerberg is main mentor, which i dont think if you get into the wall he wouldnt claim is overblown. I did find some of the stories he tells are true. Facebooks first privacy officer chris told me he did connect roger with mark and he did have a meeting with him when yahoo was trying to buy facebook, and he did have a role but not the sole role but role among others in helping connect Sheryl Sandberg the facebook. But by the time he was complaining he had faded from the picture turkey was not a regular advisor. Basically theyre getting a letter from someone who was maybe important in the early days of facebook but now wasnt someone who they were in close contact with. They felt comfortable sloughing off his concerns to stand rose stand rose to these specific things he was complaining about were under discussion at facebook at facebook it already decided that it was going to not do anything about misinformation that was circulating in 2016. It wasnt a new thing he was bringing up. It was something they already had made that decision, a destructive decision i believe and roger was right to call it out, but it wasnt like roger was sent to something you dont know about. It was something they knew about and already decided not to do think about. Misinformation was happening during the election that by and large help trump and hurt clinton. Host why do you think, i mean, going deep on Sheryl Sandberg, what made them make that decision . Thats a big decision particularly, i dont know if there is never or libertarian liberal or libertarian, to say were not going to think about it . Guest you have to reconstruct the frame of 2016. Three things are happening. With the election on facebook. The first is that trump is using facebook in the way it is supposed to be used, almost better than anyone else has in history. Bosworth mentioned earlier he told me he was in awe of it. This later came out in in a mee should would be during the course of the book that it was beautiful. Essentially the Trump Campaign played Facebook Like a stradivarius, where the clinton people played like a cardboard of banjo you find industry. The Trump Campaign accepted and embed from facebook that help show them the ins and outs of how to use. They made a bigger bet on it and they did thousands of fans every day. Sometimes hundreds of thousands, and whereas the Clinton Campaign did not use well at all. That was part one. Part two was this misinformation. Evil found that they could make money people by circulating fake stories from publication the did exist that made clinton look bad and sometimes criminal like pizzagate were supposedly she was running a child trafficking ring in the pizzeria in washington. That would get people to go to some page where there would be, a financially motivated campaign. And the third was russian involvement. This i dont think have as much exposure to users as the Misinformation Campaign but there were hundreds of thousands of people who saw this stuff and super disturbing that the russians were using facebook to help metal with an election. This sort of unrolled the facebook really late and he really didnt come across it until after the election and we can talk about how they treated it then. The second thing, there was a big debate amid facebook and one time this meeting i described, and weekly meeting and the person really was running that meeting this guy named joel kaplan was ahead of the d. C. Operation, the lobbying operation, and his dna was he was republican. A lot of people in the Washington Office felt that he felt his job was to carry water for the republicans. He had a a very close relationp with cheryl. Used to date are in college. Cheryl was fully back from tough time she had to recover from when her husband died, a terrible tragic situation. She was back then but i think things have shifted where people who took responsibly during that time including kaplan were pretty much operating with more authority and he won the argument that they should really think about the misinformation. He said that would be like tilting the Playing Field to help when candidate by removing misinformation. That was wrong. The idea is that plainfield was tilted by the misinformation and leveling it by taking it out. But he won the day and the rest is history. Host lets talk about the revelations post 2016, the cambridge political scandal. You could deep and that as which was interesting. How did you view all those characters . Guest the Cambridge Analytica was an amazing story in and of itself. I undertook , like a story, the chapters, and was in a way a comedy in some sense of airs on facebooks part but there were like crazy characters involved, and led it to what became the biggest scandal in that narrative in facebooks history. You could argue whether other things that facebook it were more damaging but this is a one to get the most traction. I believe that scandal really happened not in 2018 when it was revealed for 2016 during the election or 2014 when Cambridge Analytica got the information, maybe 78 million Facebook Users, but in 2010 when facebook gave away information about users to developers. That meant when Facebook User signed up to use some survey or an application from a thirdparty that ran on facebook, they would give that developer or the maker not own information of the person who signed up but that persons hold social network, all their friends. You could argue the user signs up for a servant is responsible because the clicks off or she clicks off on some little boilerplate saying going to look at your information i think it would of information on a persons friends had no idea this was happening. People at facebook, again, they complained to zuckerberg. They said this is too much. We shouldnt do this. Zuckerberg went ahead and did that anyway. That api as it is called, the way to dig into facebooks databases opened up in 2010. They close that loophole in 2014 but by then Cambridge Analytica could get access to that because this one researcher from Cambridge University figured out you could get that information by doing this seemingly innocuous survey. Thats how the information fell into the hands of one of the biggest funders of the far right come first ted cruz and then donald trump used it in the election. Host are you worried that facebook could have an effect on november . Guest facebook is going to have an effect in november. Host let me put more dramatically. Are you worried that they could be impacted donald trump . Guest well, again, which parts of it are going to be used . I think Biden Campaign is going to use facebook better than the Clinton Campaign did. They are not going to dismiss it like that. They know what happened in 2016 but the Trump Campaign has a big head start in already collecting the data from 2016 and building on over the last four years. Now facebook has indicated they are considering cutting off political advertising. If that happens thats going to be a giant when was the Trump Campaign because they have this big lead that the Biden Campaign could never close if they stop the campaign. Host heading off political advertising or labeling it, this is all part of a deeper conversation which i think its into an economic conversation about these firms about the black box. The fact theres incredible information symmetry and of the site of these thats something i could look at him at all but because reminds me of the Financial Sector in 2008 in 20e youve got these large entities that all the information and the person on the other side of the transaction does not have the same amount of information. Adam smith 101, markets dont work properly or fairly it does not equal access to information, a shared understanding of the transaction and a value of what is being exchanged. How do you think about that . Lets start to delve a little bit into the possibly coming regulation of these firms and how it might play out. Guest right. Zuckerberg says a lot, its not money that motivates me. Though i think obviously facebooks finances are important. I think he sees it as a way that facebook can continue to grow and retain its users. Thats whats important to him is basically dominating the social media space in the same way that Augustus Caesar dominated in his era. To do this host thats a lot of domination. [laughing] guest he likes that. He in his meetings by saying domination. The advertisement is with facebook makes its money. There was a famous moment and zuckerberg first testified before congress and orrin hatch that i do understand computer of money. How, you make billions of dollars . He said, we run ads. Facebook says these ads are good for people because we know a lot about you and we can show you relevant ads which are things that you like to see and can be of service to you. In some cases that happens. Youll be on facebook and they will send you an ad for something that is tailored to the things that you like that you wouldnt have known about otherwise and you might buy it. But they also know so much about you that advertisers can use that information to probe your weak points, to manipulate you. That is something people dont want, but is part of facebook. Thats when things run into problems, and with people learn about that they become alarmed about it. Thats the way the Trump Campaign used facebook in 2016, at a think thats the way political advertisers in general would want to use facebook, if they feel that youve got an underlying bias, they are going to exploit that to try to maybe get some fear in you to vote for the candidate. Host i want to pull pool te lands way that can connect a few different thoughts lyrically and technologically. I sometimes feel when we talk about 2016 and monopoly power intact and evolution of Silicon Valley from the mid1990s onward all roads lead back to Sheryl Sandberg. And she remains, i wouldnt say a teflon figured she has taken some come come into some criticism but boy, is she good at not being in the spotlight, and yet i know from reading a close reading of your first book, she was right there in the middle of developing ads. That was the golden goose that created and help to monetize targeted advertising and billy was the sort of bases of what we might now called surveillance capitalism. She then took that the facebook, helped perfected there and so i have to say i am rather cynical when i hear her in particular, get up and these many congressional testimonies and say gosh, when did confront with this but that latest scandal we couldnt possibly know. We did the best we could. Anybody who is read your book or frankly chief economist of google, how information rules is a a playbook for this is all there. She would be blaming sheryl moore . Guest certainly she was a major participant in that, and particularly in the Business Model. I found someone who was with sheryl the day of her orientation. When you go to facebook the process is you attend this meeting and usually for many years it was chris cox who was and now is again i think facebooks chief product officer, an early employee who i think is a person who would probably take over facebook if Mark Zuckerberg left as ceo. He gave a speech to inspire people. When sheryl was on the onboarding session and it was unusual come here is the person coming into the the chief operating officer who is a new employee orientation, the astor to say a few words. She talked about how facebook at present been about discovery because it wasnt like google where you expressed your content to search for something. Say, i want to buy this in this category and google would know that because you are searching for and be able to get it much more targeted ad. She thought facebook would go there, they could know enough about you if they had enough data to do not only the brand advertising they were doing before but advertising for thinking. Thats what she built with things like the like button and other things which got more and more information about not only your behavior on facebook but your behavior throughout the web. As you searched through the browser that information would be reported and facebook wound up buying other databases to get a more complete picture of you. She definitely had a hand in that. She was the person in charge of lobbying washington. They made a deal, mark and sheryl, early on that she would take charge basically things zuckerberg did what to do. Those included that kind of lobbying washington policy stuff and the Business Model which sheryl took over. Definitely she is responsible for big chunks of facebook and i think zuckerberg is responsible. Eventually he admitted this probably was in error of not monitoring that stuff more closely. Because when things went awry in that realm and a lot of things were talked about during the election were in that category, it was below his radar. He wasnt able to marshal the resources to fight that when beginning to faster. Host interesting. Sheryl of course was formerly chief of staff for Larry Summers was the biggest Economic Advisor within the Clinton Campaign, the architect of a lot of the regulation of the Financial Sector and what was in Financial Sector and what is really been done tech sector which is a a t of okay, lets just keep the market open, but the big get bigger. Its great for america to have more giant software companies. Yet there was at a metalevel not a lot of awareness that all right, but everybody, or not a lot of admission might say. Not everybody can be a software developer. He cant have an economy where youve got come facebook isnt the best example but like a whatsapp where youve got multibilliondollar valuation and 19 employees. Burger flippers at the end. That conversation particularly to get a Biden Administration seems to be coming to the floor. You go back and look at some of the regulatory battles that facebook has weight with the ftc in 2011. So far it seems that the Tech Companies in general have been able to promise yes, we will be better and go off and maybe to get their hands slapped, i pretty much do whatever they want in terms of getting big, stepping on competitors, buying at the competitors before they can be, real threats. How is that come to play out in the future, do you think . Guest i think the 2016 election which turned things to facebook and they went into a reputational swan dive after that, and it took them a long time to really understand what was happening. In 2017 was also the year all this was happening while people were criticizing facebook more intensely that he went on this pretty tone deaf tour of the 50 states, and host you go on that within . Guest he was traveling i did connect with him on a couple of points in the two were and had a long interview in kansas with him i think. Towards the end in the fall. That was a moment not just for facebook but facebook dragged down the whole tech sector within because facebook became the poster child for wait a minute come look at all the power of these companies have. But we do about this . We dont like this. Whats called text flash really got under way because of that. That was the motivating factor in that and thats why the regulatory forces that youre talking about are pretty serious now both on antitrust side, the ftc side, and the congressional side, the people looking closely about doing something about the power of the Tech Companies, including facebook. Host just today in the last couple of days we had a a bunch of really major transatlantic rulings around tech. The European Union is trying to get apple to avoid tax dodging an island. They were not able to push that case through. We just had safe harbor which is a sort of data sharing between the eu and the u. S. Thats off the table now. Some of this, you know, simmering war about how were going to do extracted semantic, some of this is down to this particular administration but it begs the existential question of how tech is going to work and what values around governing technical degree. It seems like we are kind of what i call try polar world we of the u. S. , europe and china may be going in different directions, who one of the major advantages of these firms has been the Network Effect, has been the ability to crossborder antiwear, grow exponentially. What is this new more fractured world mean for them . Guest its the challenge. Facebook is very concerned about tiktok. I think if facebook were not constrained not only by antitrust concerns but that geopolitical situation, it would be doing all it can to buy tiktok. They want to release their own version of it. Theyve had mixed success in trying to emulate competitors. They had Better Success than buying competitors than integrating them into the facebook family. It is a problem for facebook, but when you got such a big chunk of the worlds population, like you say, there is this Network Effect that is very difficult to dislodge. Host its interesting, i am remembering about a year ago a century and which i think it was a reuters report that went up after Mark Zuckerberg left the desk and looked at his notebook, and he was being asked if anybody asks you about china and a breakup of facebook and just say we are the u. S. National champion, we need to be kept big in order to compete with those chinese giant. Do you think that is fair . Guest i think its an argument that place, could play to that audience, but i think it shouldnt affect the way we look at facebook. We shouldnt say facebook should be allowed to say get away with more because we are worried about china. Host interesting. I want to ask you a few personal questions about candid your process on the book, how you report. Made a good start with the fact, think is that it took you a year to get permission to do this in the way you did. What was that like . Guest so when i undertake a project like this come and it didnt very similar thing with google, i think you get the best information by talking to your subjects, and talking to them quite a lot. I found that really useful in the google book. I wanted the same access in this facebook book. Access meant that they would give me free reign to talk to anyone i wanted to in the company, and the able to use it for the book. No Strings Attached with that. They didnt get to approve anything in the book. It didnt get to read the book until it was already printed. Things like a week or two before the book was released to the public that i let them see the whole thing. I did pack checked the book. I promised i would fact check it, which i wouldve done anyway. Hired several Fact Checkers to make sure that we were not making errors, things i said people said, the actually said. And it was a question of saying, i would like you to trust me, and this is something you should do not just for me but because you are so important. You owe it to history, and apart because maybe that resonated at that bar because ive been covering facebook for a long time and had a Good Relationship with them, with zuckerberg, with sandberg, with elegant who was the head of policy, who actually do work with on a google book, but they said okay. Host what was the most surprising thing to learn . As someone whos been deepened his top four decades really. Guest its interesting how facebook is shaped so much by zuckerberg personally, and how well he managed to channel himself the route his company. I dont know if you visited facebook, the campus, but you go there and theres a whole lot the buildings. The main big buildings come first it was a quartermile long and now theres jew at mac at a think a third soon. Theyre all connected on the roof. It feels like youre walking outside, in the garden because the foyers on the roof. Theres all these posters very orwellian almost and is this thing called the Analog Research log. Slogans, many thanks taken frm zuckerberg says. It has this cultlike aspect to what is able to get across what he wants to about the whole company. It is a culture to itself. The model for a long time was moved fast in break things. They realize at a certain point the break things probably didnt play well, so they changed it to move fast stable infrastructure. Host very catchy. Guest yeah, yeah it really was the way the did operate. It literally refer to code, like move fast and if you took down the code base, you could just reboot it because with the new web tools that zuckerberg grew up with. He understood it doesnt really matter if you have a bug in the code because unlike with microsoft word, for instance, you dont have to wait months for the new version. The new version comes every 15 minutes. But metaphorically, you could argue that they did move fast and break bigger things. Some people say democracy. I think maybe thats an overstep but they definitely had discourse. Host its interesting because move fast and break thinks is in some ways in the postcold war its the antithesis of what business itself was seen to be going. A lot of talk now about moving from world in which companies all about efficiency. Companies like Facebook Like the apex of that. Its all about being frictionless, very few employees, growing extremely quickly thanks to technology. Were now moving into a conversation about resiliency which is everything from really good Corporate Governance and some people have questioned the government the facebook and whether zuckerberg should have so much power, to the social corporate compact too, how should the wealth the vast wealth of these companies be shared . What would you say to that . Whats the conversation in facebook about that . Guest i think what is startling is the depth of the conversation within facebook about that. For the first Time Facebook finds itself, particularly zuckerberg and his decisionmaking, is at odds with substantial chunk of the employees. It used to be the idea of a leak coming from the weekly q and as that Mark Zuckerberg did, you could ask anything and he would be very frank with his workforce about what he thought and what was going on. A leak would be unthinkable. That wouldnt happen. And now its routine. He has to assume that anything he says not only might be leaked but a tape of the whole might be leaked. That actually happened. It got to the point where recently some of the employees did a virtual walk out. Had to be virtual because they were working from home. They stopped working in protest of the policies that zuckerberg had about political advertising. Thats unprecedented in that company. I think that is probably bigger than regulators, bigger than competition. That is a worry for zuckerberg. He is a longterm they data. He thinks ahead. He spent a couple billion dollars for a Virtual Reality, because he thought that was going to be the competitor in ten years from now. He wanted to own that technology. So if he doesnt get the best engineers, the best ai people come best everything, he cant fulfill that vision. He cant compete in the years to come here just to be very worried if he loses his workforce, and they feel facebook isnt a good and more place to work for. Host thats interesting. A lot of critics have said its not as you say its not regulators or even the marketplace that will curb these companies but the employees because its all about, and these firms is all that Human Capital and you can get the best engineers to work for them. There was a piece recently by sam, a former vp of product incumbent at facebook, and he told some interesting ideas about this common battle between the Virtual World and the physical world. And this is sort about the transition we are now going through in the covert era kind overnight. We knew we were going to much more digital, much more virtual company, was made up of intangibles and not think you could touch and feel. But that is not happen overnight. These two worlds come with different governing principle and seems a facebook is a really good encapsulation of that. Its about decentralization, although ironically also centralization in the sense he has have this very powerful leader at the top. Its about being transnational, its about kind of the opposite of the mainstream political conversation were having a which is very much about the nationstate. What does facebook tell us about where the world is headed . Guest i think, thats a great question. I think as you say, the virtual aspect come when youre on facebook you are, in this Virtual World. People talk about their friends and your social network now is something that is not based necessarily on people who spend a lot of time with physically in the same place with, and you may even have Close Friends that you have never met because they are part of your network on facebook. As facebook tries to expand the ways you come in contact with that in your virtual becomes your world, as you say it is sort of key depth for this age where youre not supposed to leave the house much. Thats important. You mention Something Else in terms of governance. Facebook is trying to respond with that by doing things like the Oversight Board which is forming, or in certain limited cases this board will have the ability to overrule the ultimate decisionmaker Mark Zuckerberg on content decisions. You know, what individual piece of content can come up and come down and the board might even be able to make a suggestion if adopted about facebooks policies. This remains to be seen. Its been a long time for this board to actually be set up and start making its rulings. I think around the time of 2018 cannot long after came analytically, zuckerberg start think about governance, i had like nine conversation with him during the course of the book. At one point it was brought up hes thinking about governments can ask him about that. He had done a lot of thinking about it and he is a sponge for information. He would be going back to people who are experts on governance and gathered them for dinners and his house or had conversations with them. So he could learn more about that. I think hes trying to think ahead of the curve on that as well. Host interesting. Where you think facebook is headed in terms of going into other industries . We havent seen them tied to develop their own currency with libra which i frankly think in concept is a great idea but it wouldnt trust facebook to be data that i would rather see some coalition of some global Central Banks to invest but its interesting because its pushing the boundaries of where we are going. Facebook may not be the right player to write it. What else are they going that we should be watching . Guest i think you know, commerce and currency. They havent given up on the idea that theyve had to scale back. They really tried to ram that through their crypto currency idea in the face of incredible skepticism about the company. They tried to say where setting up his mutual organization, literally in switzerland. Almost symbolic of neutrality that we are not going to be in control of it. They created it and the people who were going to take advantage of it was. I think Virtual Reality is going to be very important for facebook as time goes on. And we are all waiting to see what people are saying is inevitable, the idea of getting information through these lenses which bring the Virtual World literally right up to our eyes. As more and more of what we do becomes virtual come facebook wants to be right in the center of it. Host steve, well have about four or five minutes left, let me ask you a couple final questions. This conversation about children and social media has taken off in recent years. Facebook is i think, kids think its a little oldfashioned now. A lot of kids do. They have moved on. Whatever theyre using. Should we worry, and do you worry, about the effect of these technologies on kids brains come on their socializing . I had an interesting conversation once with the teenager who said i was throwing a Birthday Party for my dad and i kind of wanted to be private but then if the like if i didnt put a video on facebook or on my other feeds it wouldnt be real, it wouldnt exist. Its a fascinating way in which the change the nature of reality. Guest right, right. Facebook as you mentioned is sort of known as the social social network. Instagram, which facebook purchase, at the time that offered a billion dollars to this Little Company and its one of the great bargains of all time. It still super popular among younger people and influencer culture, still at the center f it. As you say unmute isnt real. Lets take a picture of it on instagram. Its tough to tease out how much of the rest of the feet of these Big Companies and how much of it is, i wouldnt call it a natural evolution, but an inevitable evolution of this kind of Technology Come in in tubing. If it wasnt a facebook founder by Mark Zuckerberg, i think it would be Something Like it founded by someone else. The idea was in the air. He just managed to do it better. The ubiquitous internet, high connectivity, mobile devices, these things just begat the kind of social networks that we have now and the kind of products we see with instagram and Whatsapp Tiktok and other things. These will be part of our lives anyway. We are on this course and is a sort of my subject, way before facebook started i had been writing i guess for decades now about this transformation of the digital world, the way humans live. This is one piece of it but its massive. Its redefining who people are. So to me this facebook book is just one chapter of the bigger story which i is the story of her time of this giant transformation, and ive been lucky to get a front row seat to this major change. Host you really have, indeed. I try not to use social media to much fun going to give your book a thumbs up. It really was terrific. Last thought, anything i have asked you, anything you want to leave readers with . Guest well, what i i tried to do in the book was to tell a story. To me theres just a great story to this very unusual person. Developing something in his dorm room and very quickly accelerating it. When zuckerberg says hey, you cant blame us because how could we anticipate this in a in a dm room . In six months it was a Silicon Valley thing being advised by some of its best minds. But how that used the force as i talk about, the internet, phones, everything to accelerate to be such a presence in our lives whereas some impulses he had which mightve been considered idealistic and other impulses which mightve been considered to be took him to a place where he is in the way a stranger in a strange land, and is the object of really intense criticism. I finished the book with a couple interviews with them i did that we got to a level of candor that it a dr. Tedros has gotten too before. I use the stupid i discovered that hed used in 2006 outline facebook and he had destroyed notebook but he managed to get copies of pages of it. I bound up showing him his own work envisioning facebook. I feel the kind of melted when he saw it. I have a copy on my phone come to go back in the days when things were simpler. We had a Small Company with nothing but dreams and now the reality he has is much broader but more complicated. Host steve, maybe eyes of sauron pass you over. [laughing] guest they are still on the turn what i fear they still are on you. Its been great to talk you. I hope to get to do it again sometime. Thanks so much. Guest thanks a lot. Great questions. Hes always going to findways to hide their communication one way or the other. This leaves all the rest of us in a more vulnerable state. So im concerned that policymakers really should look at the whole picture when theyre making this choice mit Research LatestDaniel Wisner tonight at 8 pm eastern on the communicators on cspan2. Weeknights this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2 andtonight its a look at president ial history. First using eisenhower examines her grandfathers dwight eisenhowersleadership style and the important decisions he made during his presidency. The next former second Lady Lynn Cheney chronicles the leadership of the first five president s from virginia washington, jefferson, madison and monroe and historian aj pain in 1948 president ial election. Watch tonight beginning at 8 30 eastern and enjoyable tv this weekend every weekend on cspan2. [music] youre watching tv on cspan2 every weekend withthe latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service brought you onyour television provider. Tomorrow is election day november 3. Stay with us to learn who the voters voters elect to leave the country in which parties will control congress. Live coverage on Election Night starts at 9 pm eastern and continues through the washington journal 7 am eastern. Join the conversation, your experiences as the