Facebook Whistleblower Fears Zuckerberg More Than Musk | PBD Podcast #888

Mark Zuckerberg is the only voice that matters when it comes to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is making the case for putting super intelligent AI in the hands of everyone. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. Do you think Zuck is evil? I worry about Mark a lot more. I worry he burns the candle at both ends. People around Mark are there because Mark wants them to be there. They make Mark feel good. They tell him whatever story they need to tell him that lets him be able to accept the way the world is. And that's not good for any human being. Zuck announced yesterday that he may be leaving California because of the wealth tax that Ro Khanna, Newsom, others may be pushing in the state of California, and it's already something that's on the ballot that may take place. The deal that the board cut with him this morning is shocking. He's made it so that over the next eight years, he can cash out tens of billions of dollars and still maintain complete control over the company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. Negative motives long term. Do you worry about this much power to Zuck or Elon? We don't need AI any smarter than the AI we have today for it to be incredibly disruptive. The only reason we are not seeing more chaos right now with the level of AI we have right now is just because people aren't trying. So I appreciate you for coming down. My pleasure. We just watched your movie, the movie that's based on your story with The Social Reckoning. I think Mikey Madison plays you. The movie was very interesting on what happened with Facebook. And even the guy that played Zuck, who's a very well-known actor, he was in The Judge. He's been in a lot of different movies. Yeah, he crushed it. And my favorite scene was the scene where they're challenging him to get ready for the hearing. And they're getting under his skin. And they brought Bill Burr that was really getting under his skin. Very interesting movie. But before we get into the whole story, something just broke that I think is a good idea for us to start off with. So yesterday, New Mexico, because of the Cambridge Analytica story that happened, in 2018, which we had Brittany Kaiser on the podcast, I think like eight years ago, she talked about it. Their order to pay $25 billion penalty to New Mexico. Same time while that happens, the next day today, I think nine hours ago, story broke, WSGA, that Zuck announced yesterday that he may be leaving California because of the wealth tax that Ro Khanna, Newsom, others may be pushing in the state of California. And it's already something that's on the ballot that may take place. I think it's a proposition 40 that they're announcing. So then the board came out and they tried to give them a new agreement, eight years, 20 billion, still keep the control. Maybe talk about the importance of those two happening at the same time. I think it's more than 20 billion. So the thing that people should be aware of. So one of the reasons why Facebook is so unique is you have one person, Mark Zuckerberg, who has 60% of the votes to control the company. So in most big companies, like even Google, which is one of the most concentrated companies in the world, you have two people who have most of the votes. Three, if you tack on. I think for anyone who's ever been married or in a relationship, once you even have a second person who you have to negotiate with, it really, really pulls you back to reality, right? Mark Zuckerberg is the only voice that matters when it comes to Facebook because he has those voting shares. The deal that the board cut with him this morning is shocking in that they basically came in and said, OK, so right now we have these A-class shares, which most people have. We have B-class shares where you get 10 times as many votes. And then we're going to do the C-class shares where everyone who has an A-class share is going to get 10 times as many votes. And then we're going to do the A- or B-class share is going to get one of these C-class shares that have no votes. And the reason why this matters is it means Mark can now progressively sell half of his fortune and not lose any control of the company. And he tried to get this deal all the way back in 2017, and the shareholders blocked it. They were like, no, no, no, you either get to be the king or you get to be rich. You don't get to be both. But the fact that he is now basically taking the money off the table because he didn't ask for just enough to pay his 5% wealth tax, he's made it so that over the next eight years, he can cash out 10% of the money. He can cash out tens of billions of dollars and still maintain complete control over the company. Yeah, and so this was even though he only owns 13.6% of the shares, right? Is this the old Peter Thiel structure of the founder shares where you get four times the amount of votes per? 10 times the amount of votes. It used to be 10. Is it four times now or still 10? I don't know what the current best practice is, but in his case, it's 10. At that time, it used to be 10. Yeah. Jake. Okay. So Zuck still has those shares. So they are also active. So they're asking him to stay near the headquarters because of the AI in California. They don't want him to leave. Do you think it's going to go through? Because they're allowing him to take $20 billion off the table. They've already done it. You have to remember. So because he controls the company, the Chan Zuckerberg entities, the things that hold these votes today, they already voted on it. Like there's not going to be a big shareholder vote. This is done now. So this is not, it's going to happen. This deal is broken. This morning. It's done. He's staying in California. He's not leaving. Yeah. So Zuckerberg. He's not leaving California. Eight years. To be near the headquarters. Yeah. Because, you know, I think it was yesterday where Sergey Brin announced that he saved $15 billion by leaving California to Miami, but lives in a $174 million house. So the timing of all these stories that are going on. What do you think about the wealth tax? Do you think it's a good idea? It doesn't, as like an applied math person, it drives me a little crazy from the perspective of like, it doesn't raise that much money. Right? Like think of how disruptive it has been. I mean, we're in California, um, a 5% wealth tax does not cover like almost any of the gap on like a 10 year basis. Um, so I think it's been, um, very harmful in terms of the level of disruption it's caused for how little benefit it got. And my understanding was they never expected it to get this far. They thought it was just like a negotiating ploy. Um, and then your tactic, like, Hey, if you guys don't do this, we're going to tax you. Um, and yet it all ran away from them. Oh shit. So you, that's what I've read. Got it. So even though it was, if you guys don't listen to us, we're going to attack them. And then. This was around December of 2025, I want to say, when I first heard about this, that was a 25 or 24, it could have been 25 where they need to get this many votes and they actually ended up getting the votes. Uh, and so it ended up being on the ballot and by June or something that had hit a certain number. So, so do you think for somebody who is there with a lot of billionaires that are, you know, the Holland podcast talking about this a lot, Shamad was very vocal about this, which is not really a 5% tax. It's really close. It's closer to an eight to 10% because if a lot of my money is tied to stocks, I have to sell my stock appreciation and I have to sell the assets and then, you know, me leaving could hurt the job market. So you're not fully supportive for it. Well, I think the issue is like the, the, the gap it's meant to close is issues around health premiums, right? So they have these health obligations for public employees. Um, so in California, there's very lucrative public pensions, public health obligations. This is for teachers, firefighters, nurses. These are, these are people who do hard jobs. They're important for society. At the same time, because the budget of California has been mismanaged for decades, right? This is not a problem that happened in the last year or two. This is a decades long problem. Um, it's only giving me a liability that is going to explode more in the next 20 years. Um, a wealth tax may plug the hole for one or two years, but it is not a sustainable solution. And so given the level of disruption, um, I think it is very attractive to go after billionaires. Like it's easy to be like, Oh, just take it from them. Um, but it's not going to address the larger issue, which is that California's budget is in a really, really unhealthy place, especially when we look forward 10 years. How did they get to a place like that? You're a math person. How did they screw it up so bad? I used to live in California 24 years. So I think a big part of it is it's always easy to say we will catch up in the future. Right. Because remember, states don't get to run deficits. Um, they have to, they, they can only accumulate so much debt. They can't declare bankruptcy easily. Um, they can't print more money like a federal at the federal level. We can print more money. Um, so if you say, uh, get cheaper salaries today because you, you can promise someone a pension in the future, you can be like, Oh, it's gonna be fine. We're gonna be able to, we'll be able to catch up with it in the future. But those obligations come due eventually. And if you haven't planned for it over time, then you get stuck with someone else gets stuck with the bill. So let's go to the story. You, you're in Silicon Valley, you're doing your thing, your career oriented, you high school debate, you, you, you were known for that. You did great. And then you're at Facebook and suddenly you get to this point where you're like, Oh, this data with Instagram that's coming out on how it's harming young girls. And I think we need to tell the public about this. Maybe walk me through the story of what happened before you released the 20 something thousand document. So in the, like January, 2019, I get this email from Facebook saying, Hey, have you ever considered working at Facebook? Um, where were you at that time? Uh, where was I at the time? I think I was, I think I was on a, on a break. So like I was looking at, um, like I was thinking about doing a startup, like, you know, it's like one of these things in Silicon Valley. Like sometimes you leave a thing and you're like, Oh, I'm going to take a few months. And just I wouldn't want to do next. And, um, the, uh, I get this email from Facebook and they're like, have you considered working there? And I wrote back, I had to reread my old email when I wrote my memoir and I maybe wrote a less polite email than I should have. Um, but I was very curt about how I would never work at Facebook. Um, in the email, yeah, I was like, I would, the only thing I would ever work on on Facebook is misinformation because like in 2016, um, I had a friend go like way off the deep end. Um, so he had been like a Bernie Sanders supporter and, um, Bernie lost the primary and you shouldn't have. So that's part of what happened. You should have beaten Hillary. It was very weird what happened there. He was the DNC and, um, and so he was sufficiently upset about what the DNC had done and all the other weird things that happened around Hillary, um, that he, uh, was looking for comfort online. And, uh, over the course of six months, like he just disconnected from reality, right? Like the last conversation I had with him, um, was like after the 2016 election. And he was talking about things like George Soros running the world economy. Like, it was just like, and we couldn't even have a conversation about, was this a conspiracy theory? Because he was so disconnected from any kind of news source that had a connection to reality. And the, so I say, like, the only thing I'd work on is misinformation. And they come back to me, like, we have a job for you. We have this thing called civic misinformation. And so I assumed, being it's 2019, my, with, like, this very U.S.-centered, you know, I'm a normal Silicon Valley tech person. I don't really think of the rest of the world. I'm just thinking about Silicon Valley. I show up expecting to work on the U.S. 2020 election. Like, you know, getting things, you know, locked down, maybe information operations, foreign interference, that kind of thing. Oh, no, no, no, no. I find out the thing I'm going to work on is all misinformation beyond third-party fact-checking. So third-party fact-checking is like Hunter Biden laptop, right? It's like journalists get paid to go write fact checks, and Facebook decides what can and cannot be said. Well, imagine only 300 stories get fact-checked a month. Like, it's very, very few. What do you mean? So Facebook talks this huge game about how these fact-checkers are the thing between you and chaos. And yet they're only fact-checking a few hundred stories globally every month. This is in 2019? This is in 2019. UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence, into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity. Enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com slash work. UKG, HR, pay, and workforce management. Buy stocks to sell before the end of the week. You might be missing the opportunity of the year. If you're not being positioned right now, the market says now's the time to go all in. Real traders still hear the noise. They just know when to stop listening to it. Find and research opportunities to figure out how to do it. Get your strategy with thinkorswim trading platforms from Schwab. Discover features like robust charting, nearly unlimited customization, and built-in risk management technology. Plus, get 24-7 support from real trading specialists. That's Schwab Trading. Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Shop Black Friday Appliance Savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases, like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal. Or upgrade your laundry room with the ultra-fresh Vent System Plus Front Load Washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday Appliance Savings with fast, free delivery at the Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S.-only C-Store online for details. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best coverage. Converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel. Right in one spot. And turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. So, at that time, they don't have a way of fact-checking stories automatically? These are manually fact-checking? Oh, yeah. They're paying $3,000 to a journalist to go and research it and write a little thing and be like, No, the Pope did not endorse it. No, the Pope did not endorse Donald Trump. Got it. Yeah. $300 only? Yeah, a month. A multi-multi-trillion dollar company. Yeah. Interesting. So, but there's a bigger problem, which is, like, billions of pieces of content are produced over the course of a month. And in places like Myanmar, places like Sri Lanka, places like Ethiopia, you know, African countries, Southeast Asian countries, Facebook isn't just, like, a thing we go and, like, look at pictures of cats on. It is the internet. And I had been completely oblivious to the role of Facebook. I had been completely oblivious to the role of, like, how Facebook had evolved in some of the most fragile places on Earth. So, here I am, never having really thought about the idea that algorithms could cause violence. Because, remember, part of why I got this job was I used to run the recommendations, the algorithms, for Pinterest. Like, what's the most dangerous thing that comes out of Pinterest, right? Like, maybe make a bad dinner. Like, maybe make some fashion choices you shouldn't have made. Like, what's the most dangerous thing that comes from this algorithm, right? So, I get to Facebook, and I'm sitting down every day with these researchers who are going into these places and watching civil wars happen because of misinformation. So, fast forward a year later, and they dissolve the whole part of the company I work in. The civic misinformation. The civic, no, no, civic integrity as a whole. So, I'm on- Misinformation is under that. Misinformation is under that. But by the time that happens, I've already been moved between three separate projects because inside of Facebook, things are so chaotic. People are regularly reassigned every six months. That's cultural. That's cultural. So, you know if I'm doing this, I only have six months here. Yeah. And why do they do it that way? I think part of it is a lack of, like, conviction. I think it's like, I think it's a little bit like when, so when you don't have, when you don't have market constraints, right? Like, when you have to make profit and you have a 10% profit margin or a 5% profit margin, you have to constantly work on execution. When you get 35% profit margins because you've locked in with a monopoly, you get sloppy. Inside of Facebook. Inside of Facebook, they know the reason why their company succeeds is because your friends are there. Like, your friends aren't going anywhere. You're locked in. Anything can happen. That's what they think. Yeah. Okay. Um, and is it, is it sometimes companies move positions within six months because they want to make in more all around person so they can move you up in better executive position? This is the wild thing. So because the company is so flat and so static. So remember the one voice that matters inside of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He has 60% of the votes. The next tier under him are people are there. Yeah. Because they make Mark feel good. The next tier under them are basically the same people who've been there for five years, right? Like the people who are running the company are the same people who've been there since day one with Mark or came in five years after that. So there's very little movement above, um, like maybe you'll get promoted once or twice, but the company is flat and static because there's nowhere to go. Now, would you say that the way the employees look at Mark is he loved, respected, liked, feared, or trusted? How do the employees view him? So within the part of the company I worked at within, um, I think there was kind of, um, an acceptance that Mark was in charge, but it made things kind of chaotic. So I'll give you an example. Um, maybe three months before I joined, there was a situation in India. So Modi is the prime minister of India. He had started making comments about Muslims that, um, uh, referred to them as like insects or rodents, like language that is, um, other rising Modi, like Modi. Yeah. Um, and this is actually making these public comments on Facebook. Um, and these. These are considered precursor comments to ethnic violence. Like when you start talking about an ethnic group in your country as like vermin, um, this is like on the, the steps. Documented. He said these. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is their feud with Pakistan and what they have. Maybe he's also like a Hindu nationalist. I mean, this is a big part of his political power. Um, when people study how ethnic violence happens, you first start out with this kind of like de-legitimizing language and you go from there. So this conversation came about being like, oh, interesting. He has started doing these things. What does Facebook do? If he starts posting, you should kill the Muslims. Like, what do we do? Like, this is a reasonable question. Um, and so a task force was formed. So 40 people spend six months trying to figure out at what point can you not allow a national leader to post on Facebook? Like what is, what's the, what's like the threshold where you're like, okay, we're not going to let him coordinate a genocide on our platform. Right? Like what is that bar? Um, cause I think everyone agree there's some bar who knows, like we can have a conversation about where's that bar, but probably like calling for the deaths of the Muslims in India is probably. Um, and, uh, so they all agreed all 40. So, so yeah. So at the end of six months, you know, they've talked to people in ads and public policy and government relations in the, there's literally a genocide group inside of Facebook. It's called social cohesion. Um, all, all these different people, people, PhDs, they write a proposal. They come to one final thing. They present it to Mark on like a Friday. He says, I don't like this. I can do better. He goes home. He writes a policy. He comes out and he announces it on Monday. How, how would that make you feel? Like, if you know that like 40 people have like hashed this out and argued about it and like consulted people inside the company, outside the company, figured out a thing that they all can agree to over six months and your leader goes, Oh no, no, I can do better over the weekend. What's his better? Uh, well, the, the challenge with his was it wasn't implementable. Um, so he said, we will never censor the voice of a politician. And the only problem with this is in some jurisdictions, your local dog catcher is an elected position. Do they count as a politician? I mean, they're an elected official. And how did he qualify that? Did he say if it's a world leader, if it's tier one, tier two, elected official, that's it. Yeah. And so the problem was, and part of the reason why this policy was not suggested originally was like the advertising team doesn't know who the dog catchers are. Right. There's like in the United States alone, there's hundreds of thousands of people who have elected jobs. Right now, what percentage of the three and a half billion users on Facebook are from India or from India? Oh, great question. Um, can you pull it up? I'm curious because, uh, I would say. I would say, "Hey, we have to be careful with the clients that we have any users that we have in India. So I'm thinking selfishly now to see maybe that's what it is. I don't know. So I know only 11% of users spoke English when I left in 2021. In India, only 11% of users on Facebook spoke English? Yeah. Then that's a big part of it. It has to be India if that's the case. Okay, so in the 40 people that were a part of that, you said the cohesion, social cohesion group. So that was one of the groups was social cohesion. And how did they react to Zuck saying I can write it better? Yeah, so my boss, so he's the head of civic integrity. I can't tell you exactly what social cohesion did, but I can tell you what my boss did. So my boss called together all 200, 300 of us into a big conference room, big auditorium, and showed us pictures of an MRI of his spine. This is your boss? This is my boss. So imagine you're sitting there and everyone knew this policy was coming. They knew it was a big deal across the order. I didn't even work on this policy and I knew it was coming. So when the news came out that Mark had written his own thing and announced it, and he called us all together and my boss gets up there and he starts showing us MRIs of his spine. And we're all like, what is going on here? Like, is he going to quit? Like, and he's talking about how he worked so hard that he hurt his own back. You know, like how much he's given for his company, how much he's sacrificed and like how dispirited it is. He's showing this to you guys? Yes. How many people are in the room? There's like 200 people in this room. Oh, so this is a heavyweight. This is a heavyweight. And he reports directly to Mark. He's like one step down. And, you know, he's up there talking about how much he has personally sacrificed for this mission, right? Like he's showing us his spine. And we're all like, God, he's going to quit. Like this is, there's only one way this talk ends. At the last minute, he's like, but no, we must fight onwards. So like people were really devastated by having it be like, like we've just told you there is a risk of people dying at like a huge scale. And to be clear, within two years of that, you had the ethnic violence in Ethiopia that was fanned by social media and like half a million people died. So when was this with, by the way, it's 12 to 13% of users are from India, around three to 400 million people are from India. So when was the date of Modi making the comments? It's like April, 2019. April, 2019. So if we go April, 2019, Trump is president, right? And Modi and Trump are somewhat close. They did an event together. I don't remember when the event was. And they had a big formal state dinner. Right. I remember there's something, and there was also a live event that they were together. I can't remember what it was. Maybe it was after that. So that's, if that happens, elected official, if they say anything, they can't be removed. How much longer after that did Facebook and Zuck agree to remove Trump off the platform? After January 6th. After January 6th. So were you there to see what was behind the decision making of feeling comfortable to remove Trump? So by the time that decision came down the pipeline, I had already been moved. So I was telling you, like I never thought I would work on ethnic violence. Within three months of getting that job, they moved us back back into the United States to focus on misinformation sent to targeted groups because police officers, it had been found that Russian foreign interference, like Russian foreign, like information operation kind of thing was sending targeted misinformation to police officers. And within six months of that, I was on to a different sub project. And three months after that, I was on to counter espionage. So by the time January 6th came up, I was working within threat intelligence on counter espionage. Just because like I told you, like, Facebook is chaotic. - Six months. - Constantly moving you around. - So now, were you, but I'm sure the entire company's talking to each other. When that decision was made, did you guys know that was gonna be the decision? 'Cause you guys were the second to ban him, right? I don't think you were the first. Trying to see who was the first that banned him. I think it was Twitter that banned him first. And then it was Google, then you, YouTube, then you, one of those. I don't remember how it was. But what was the internal decision? Was it, oh shoot, Twitter just did that. Let's follow the lead. Or was it, you know, this is what we're doing. No matter what Twitter and others do. - All I saw, so I only had visibility at the level of like, I was within the group of people that was getting updates. But I was not like in the war room itself. Like remember, this is a virtual thing. 'Cause it's still during COVID, like everything's still locked down. All I do know is I documented what protections were on at 10:00 a.m. on January 6th, and what protections were on the next day. So we had a list of maybe, 35 to 40 different little knobs you could turn on Facebook to make it like less viral, less heated. This is not like specific ideas. This is like, how should the platform perform overall? In terms of those 35 to 40 knobs, where they were set on election day versus on January 6th, because all of the measures had been turned off, like it was back running at 11:00, 12:00, right? At 10:00 a.m. on January 6th, maybe 20% off. 20% of those had been turned on. By January 7th, all of them had been turned back on. So people had just like been asleep at the wheel. Like people had not been paying attention to it until there was actively rioting happening in DC. - Do you think it was a right move to remove the president off of Facebook? - I think given the circumstances in that moment, like he had many opportunities to say, go home, like deescalate, and he chose not to. I think in at least that localized moment, it was an appropriate decision. I think I'm very cautious on whether or not hard actions, like exclusionary policies are appropriate. Like that has never been, like a big part of what I brought out was on how content moderation doesn't work, right? Like the concept that AI can save us in that way is just a lie. But I think in moments where you actively have leaders leading to like fanning the flames of violence, it is appropriate in the short term. - So short term for you would be what? 24 hours, 48 hours? - Probably a week or two. - A week or two, but let them back in after a week. - I think that in software engineering, we have a concept known as progressive back off. So if you have a situation where like, let's say your server's not responding. So you're asking the server to send you something, you might first ask every minute, then you might ask every two minutes, then you might ask every four minutes, then you might ask every, you progressively go longer and longer. You can imagine waiting a couple days and seeing what they do, because maybe they need a timeout for a day or two or a week. And then if they come back and they're like, hey, I was really wound up. Like it was clearly not the right thing to do to attack the capital. That is a very different thing than saying you can never come back again. - Yeah, so I think if you want to go back to the timeline, Twitter did it first on J6 account, they suspended for 12 hours and then removed three tweets. And then Facebook and Instagram followed suit for 24 hours. And then Snapchat, indefinitely suspended Trump's account. And then Facebook and Instagram extended the suspension, lasting at least through the presidential transition. And Twitter became the first of three, these major platforms to announce permanent ban of Trump's personal account. And in January 13, Snapchat made its ban and then everybody else followed suit. And how long did the ban last? Was it two or three years? I feel like it was a couple years that he couldn't get back on. - Yeah, I don't think that's appropriate. - To not keep him on for that long. - Permanent bans are not appropriate. - Period, for people or for elected officials? - I think for people. Like I think this idea, like I think right now we have this notion in our society that like there are good people and there are bad people and that denies the chance for growth and change. - So take the two extremists politically, let's just say, some would say Hassan Piker, America deserved 9/11. Or Nick Fuentes, you know, he says what he says. You're from the position that let them speak, let the audience decide for themselves. - I'm of the position that you can give people timeouts, the idea that that person doesn't change, that they're not gonna be different in a year. They're not gonna be different in six months. Like I think it's one of these things where we're saying like, hey, we have, you have to have rules in social spaces. Like there's a saying, if you create a space that bans witch hunts, the problem is it becomes full of only witches, right? We need to have rules, but the idea that people don't change or they don't grow, that excludes a future. And in the United States, we have this idea that we can cancel people forever. Like we need to have consequences, but we need to have the idea that like someone can come back and say, I'm a different person. And so an indefinite ban doesn't give you an opportunity to grow and change. - Would you consider yourself a freedom of speech absolutist? - That is a very inflammatory phrase, right? So there's this question of like, let's say you do see something like an ethnic violence incident, like Myanmar. Are you really telling me that the, so we know now that the Myanmar East government sent governmental officials, people in their military to Russia to learn how to run information operations on their own people. They came back, they triggered an information operation. They built it for years saying, let's kill the Muslims in our country. I think it is appropriate for Facebook to cut off that speech. Like, I don't think your tool, I think private entities have a right to say, I don't have to be part of killing someone else. At the same time, I don't think it's appropriate to, I think people need to be more uncomfortable than they are today, right? - Due to free speech, hear what people are gonna say, make up your own mind. - I think it's a question of, we don't get to grow and change if we are not challenged. And this idea that there are ideas that are too dangerous for us to talk about them, that is a great way to stop having ideas. Like we need to be able to, like the, so my husband likes to say that we have a very traditional marriage in that it used to be people were married to people who didn't agree. Like you'd have a Republican married to a Democrat, almost never happens anymore. And I would say both my husband and I are political orphans. Like we are part of the large number of Americans who don't really associate with either party. But we definitely don't agree politically either. Like we're both like very opinionated people in our own different ways, but we can have arguments and learn from each other. And I think that is one of the greatest gifts that the world has. The idea that you can be exposed to an idea that challenges you and makes you think and you both grow and you both change. So maybe let me restate what I'm thinking you're saying is when it comes down to violence, that is- Calls for violence, yeah. Calls for violence. I think reasonable people can say, I don't have to participate. I don't have to platform you. So reasonable people would say, I understand if Facebook or Twitter or somebody takes them down, okay? Now, the suspension for Trump, I think the only one that still has it is Snapchat. They still haven't lifted it. Twitter's lasted one year and 10 months and he came back November 19, 2022, I think a month after Elon bought X. Facebook was two years and a month, 763 days. Instagram, same day. YouTube was two years and two months, a month after the other guys did it and Snap still hasn't lifted it. So you would have only kept them off for one week. Now, let me ask the- I would come and see what he does, right? Because if he comes back after a week and he starts delegitimizing the election again and calling for violence, then you have to be like, okay, now we have to go for two weeks. Like, are you actually acknowledging that you lost the election? Where was the part where we called for violence? Because I think a couple part of it was, I remember when they called for violence, they called the police. There's a clip of Nancy Pelosi talking to her daughter. I don't know if you've seen it in the car or not. It was like, you know what? I called them off, you know? She was like, whoa, why are you guys even documenting this? So Nancy Pelosi didn't want to send the security in and, you know, BBC and some of these guys got sued because of the way they cut the clips to manipulate and showed that Trump said this and yet they didn't show the whole clip. So they lost the lawsuit. Even to the point where the CEO of, I think BBC had to step down if I'm not mistaken. The lady, you remember, am I saying it correctly? Please fact check me. It was either the editor-in-chief or the CEO of, it was a lady that stepped down and she quit and she didn't want to say anything about it. So now that we look at the story that some of it was the media manipulating what Trump really said, does your position change with that or does it stay the same? So I want to be real clear. I have not looked in great depth at what Trump did on the day of January 6th. I can tell you in great depth what we knew inside of Facebook was going on in terms of like the much larger thing that drove January 6th was not Trump it was that a group of people actively weaponized Facebook. So for example, the most prolific inviter to stop the steel groups, one person invited 300,000 people to stop the steel groups. Or for example, we had groups of people. So in Facebook, you are not allowed to found two groups or three groups where you have to say the same eight mods, same eight admins who own the group and they all have basically the same name. And the reason for that is if I get you to join those three groups, I can send you three times as much content. You had a small number of people who founded 20, 30 groups each and flooded people's feeds with content. And one of the things that I have a huge amount of empathy for the people who stormed the Capitol that day is a lot of those people said the exact same thing. They said, my feed was full. It was completely full of content. I know exactly. So I'm saying that like, that I can't tell you the great details on exactly what Trump did, but I'm saying that if there are calls for that, and so I'm not going to be able to defend Facebook's policy. I'm not going to be able to defend Facebook's policies on what were the exact words that I did. But you have to realize, I mean, that was a moment that divided America in a big way. So can you go back to the previous chat, GBT, when you pulled it up? So this is the one. So the top two BBC executives resigned over the controversy surrounding that the BBC's misleading editing of Trump's January 6th speech. They resigned before Trump formally filed his lawsuit on November 9th. So the BBC director general, Tim Davey, the broadcaster's highest ranking executive and Deborah Ternes, the CEO of BBC, because they manipulated the clip. And can you ask what they did? Because it was a, he put a, this is it. So if you watch this, I'm so glad you're seeing this. If you go for it. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. That's BBC. And I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We're going to walk down. That's a. Do you have the sentence after that? Can you pull up what he's. There's a longer format of this clip. I also think, if you could ask ChatGPT, like, can you give context on like, what were the public statements that Facebook said were why they did this? Because like I told you, I'm an information operations person. I don't deal with individual pieces of content. But what's important is to go back and. Look, they made a movie about your story. And what you did with Facebook. And the person that starred, played you, was an Academy Award winning actress. And it was a. So this is a massive story. It divided a lot of people that went through this. And it kind of takes me back to. And we're going to do that. Because I want you to see exactly. And I want to see exactly what the speech was afterwards. But I want to do a key, tiny. Just, you know, just remind you. When I came forward, I left Facebook in May of 2021. Right? Like I started. Most of my whistleblowing happened in April, May of that year. The reasons I came forward didn't involve January 6th. It involved systemic. Instagram. Well, no. It involved systemic weaponization of platforms. So I worked within threat intelligence. And like every day, the thing that I worked on was China and Russia and Iran and North Korea actively weaponizing the platform. Yeah, but the part that's very important on what you're saying, I totally get that. But you started off when I asked the question from you, you said you saw a friend of yours after Hillary Clinton did what she did to Bernie and they kind of bullied him out. I wanted to see a Bernie against Trump. That's what I wanted to see. Yeah. Because I think that's the message we all wanted. Like, so then your friend went from there to Soros and all the stuff that happened. And which, by the way, some of the stuff with Soros makes sense. There's some real investigation that's done. This is not the. Totally. You know, he said in an interview with LA Times that I fancy myself as a god. I don't know a lot of people that say stuff like that. So my friend said he funds violent revolutionaries and like. I was a Cold War studies minor in college. Like, the revolutions that he was referring to, like people did things like hold flowers in public squares. The idea that like if you are having a revolution where you have people basically doing civil disobedience is a violent revolution. Like, it's things like that where like. The guy is not allowed in his own country, Francis. Soros is not allowed in his own country. Think about. I mean, he had some restrictions where his own country is like, we don't let this guy come back here because of how divisive and manipulative he was. So overly involved in the political process. Overly involved in funding some charities that are going and creating havoc in streets and protesting and riots that become chaotic. And he needs that noise to kind of do what he does. Yeah. What is this one here? Oh, is this? Okay. Anyone you want, but I think right now we're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only the. Only the elected electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will be soon marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. This is very different than what the news play 24-7. And they brainwashed us. And because of the way they cut the clips, they silenced the president. He in his speech says peacefully and patriotically. So you can see how a lot of people could be confused with this. Sorry, can you scroll back up real quick? It's like, I'm just interested. Oh, I can't really see what it stands for. I forgot for integrity. UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Learn more at ukg.com. Work, UKG, HR, pay, and workforce management. Buy stocks to sell. You might be missing the opportunity if you're here. You're not being positioned. Now might be a good time. My guy says now's the time to go all in. Find and research opportunities to fit your strategy with Thinkorswim trading platforms from Schwab. Black Friday is happening now at the Home Depot. And we've got just the tree for your style, space, and budget. Keep it merry and bright, then make it yours with ornaments and trimmings for every holiday style. With festive favorites starting at just $49, shop for the perfect tree at the number one Christmas tree retail. Find the tree that feels just right with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Exclusions apply. Visit homedepot.com slash price match for details. Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot. Switch to Shopify. Are you reading in the bottom? I'm reading in the bottom, yeah. So, I want to be clear. So, it's one of these things where I. I think one of the things that is captured well in the movie is that Facebook. So, one of the things we learned from Sarah Wynn Williams' book, so she had a book called Careless People that came out maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago. So, Sarah Wynn Williams has been basically banned by Facebook. So, they sued her for $200 or $300 million. It's like, it completely silenced her. But she came into the company right when Arab Spring was going on. Right? So, similar period of time in terms of, like, Facebook is right in the middle of violence. Whether or not we want to connect them or not, we can have a conversation on that. But I think one of the things the movie captured well was back in Arab Spring, back on January 6th, they didn't think they were going to have the ability to influence anything. Right? Like, they're in terms of Facebook. They're like, we're a place for connecting people. Like, we're. Oh, it's much bigger. Right? And so, it's one of these things where I think on January 6th, because there wasn't the kind of thoughtful preparation. So, the point of having a task force of 40 people go and talk to elected officials and talk to the advertisers and talk to all the different stakeholders is that you can have a plan for what to do if shit like this hits the fan. But if you say, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't need to do anything. Like, we can just be, you know, for example, if we say we're going to be free speech absolutists, I hope you actually have the conviction to be a free speech absolutist because otherwise you're going to make a no-brainer. It's an emotional last-minute decision. And in the end, what happened on January 6th was nothing was done until he got scared enough that he did something. Who? Mark. The only person whose decision happened. But even he was brainwashed. Yeah. Even he was brainwashed. And do you really want a single person making these decisions? Him? Zuck? Yeah. Because that's what happened. Like, Trump got taken down because at some point Mark got scared enough. So, instead of him, who would you have rather be making that decision? The government? Or how would you have set it up? In your eyes. I think in my ideal world, we have social media platforms that are less centralized, right? Because right now, this is a private company. It has to do whatever they want to do with our public places. They'd be less centralized. They would be more democratically governed, right? Because right now, there's lots of things about Facebook that the reason why it could even be weaponized is because it was optimized to grow and for virality and for maximizing the number of advertising impressions you look at. If you have smaller places that are more. More run by the people who actually use them, you have less systemic risk. And then it matters less whether or not a single person is saying something inflammatory on them. Yeah, but where I'm trying to go with this is maybe your friend was right. Maybe your friend in 20. By the way, is he still in the same position today? No, yeah. He is where now? He's more independent libertarian type? He moved to. He left the Bay Area for Indiana with some people who. I don't want to say he got. Some very politically extreme people. He ended up meeting a lovely woman. He ended up going back to church. He has a farm now. They have ducks. He lives a simple life now. And I called him when I did 60 Minutes because I knew that I had talked about him on 60 Minutes. And I was like, hey, I want you to know I talked about you in the abstract. No name, just the story. No name, no, yeah. And he was like, I'm actually fine now. I met this girl and many people who go off into the fringe is the thing that brought him back was people. Oh, no question. But where I'm trying to go with this is the following. So I'm still a registered independent until today. Okay, just so you know. I went from a Democrat to a Republican to a registered independent myself. I think Bill Clinton was a good president. And I know, oh my God, I can't believe you say this. Take Monica Lewinsky and all the other stuff out. Not a fan of his wife. But I think Bill was a good president. I've met him. You know, we've had our conversations. Say that again? Economy degree. Yeah, him and Newt worked together and he was. He was willing to go talk to the other side. I think I like that. I'm good with that. I wish we did more of that. Oh, yeah, fully, fully. But a part of this we have to ask how we got here. Yeah. I think the part that I saw a lot of people who were liberals who left to become independent libertarian and then they voted Republican is what they thought happened with Russia collusion. Then they're like, oh, shoot, Hillary was behind it. The $35 million dossier. I didn't know this thing here. She's, what a great woman. Then when you go and say, okay, maybe COVID, you know, COVID, you better get the shot and all this stuff. And then Bobby Kennedy, who's a guy that's a, last time it was Kennedy, he's been a left, you know, he's criticized Trump, all these guys. He then goes there. So it's like, wait, am I forced to take the shot? And then the last one was, is when you saw guys like Elon. Elon was always on the left. Elon was always a liberal supporting a bunch of different things. Rogan. Totally. How did these guys all of a sudden say, wait a minute, you're trying to brainwash me by, you know, keeping information and manipulating me through media, I'm not going to play this game. You lost me now. Yeah. It doesn't mean Rogan's a hundred percent Trump guy. And they canceled lots of people. So a lot of people were turned off by the amount of manipulation and brainwashing. And I also think even Zuck was in the middle of it and he's like, ah, I don't know if I'm part of this. So do you think there was a little bit of credence of all the manipulation that media did that some of the people on the left left? I think, I think for a number of those people on the left, it wasn't just this question of like, are there ideas that are okay or not okay? And I, to just repeat again, a big part of what I brought out was about how Facebook claimed that they could tell you what ideas were good or bad and they could take the bad ones off. And that was all a lie. I cannot do that. And we can talk about why, but it just doesn't work. But the, the place that we were at as a country in 2020, like very much was like a very black and white lens. Like there were good people and there were bad people. Right. And I, the, the, the, the, the channel that was left available that you had to walk to be a good person got smaller and smaller and smaller. And I think one of the good things that has happened over the last couple of years is that the space of range of what is acceptable behavior is wider than it was in 2020. And you know, even, even what's her name? AOC has said woke 1.0 was crazy. And I think that kind of intolerance, that level of moral purity that they expected from people or they would cancel you. Is a very, very exclusionary thing. Like it's very hard to constantly be in this prison of behavior and say, like, if I do anything outside of it, I may be canceled forever. And one of the things I worry a lot about kids these days is kids are terrified of being canceled. Like they're terrified of doing the wrong thing and ending up on the internet and having everyone tell them they're horrible. And as a result, their lives get smaller and smaller and smaller because they're always on stage. So maybe walk me through when you were having a meeting with wall street journal and you're like, ah, should I do this? Should I not? I don't want to do it. I know what you're asking me. Maybe, you know, I should. And then all of a sudden you're like, I have all the documents. I took all the pictures. I'm coming out. I think the world needs to know what was that process? Sure. So when I originally came to Jeff, my main issue was I, we, we had done internal research where we had talked to political parties in Europe and they had said, Hey, we are intentionally running different political positions post you changing the algorithm. So the idea that a private company can make a decision about what information we get to see or not see, and that public entities, public political political parties are saying we don't give voters the same options because of choices you made in, in, in Menlo park. That seems like a thing that the public had a right to know. So initially that was my big focus was saying like, Hey, they know what's going on. They're not telling people our elections are being influenced, even in the options that get to choose. I worked with Jeff. We always try to leave this part slightly ambiguous. I've been told by my lawyers not to give too many details exactly on timeline on a variety of things. But the vast majority of what I brought forward, um, came out in just the last few weeks. So it was one of these things where, um, I cared a lot about these questions on platform design and algorithms and like how content, uh, censorship AIs work, that kind of thing. Um, in the last couple of weeks, that's when we started grabbing things like the stuff around kids, you know, the stuff on teen mental health. I knew that I had no business case to touch that. Like I worked on foreign governments interfering in the United States and interfering around the world. I had lots of reasons, reasonable business cases to touch that information. I never worked on kids' mental health beyond like child predators. Um, and only then like as in, in the larger threat intelligence framework. Um, and so when we started grabbing that kind of information, I assumed Facebook would catch me. That's when it happened. That's when I assumed they would, well, they never caught me. Like we got all the way out the door before they, they ever realized it. Like I, I take it. Ever get close. Even the other girl that sat right across from you, she kind of had was with that scene where she comes and she tells you, here's the chip that that ever happened. It never happened. That never happened. So that's just movie. That's okay. Got it. So were there other people involved internally trying to help? And no, just, just just you. Yeah. And nobody did anybody like, you know, nowadays with HR softwares, you can, everybody wants to know sentiment. They want to know, you know, like almost a minority report to find out we're about to lose Francis and based on email communication, you know, she's probably 90 days away from quitting and she's hit tier one crisis mode for the company. Let's have a conversation with her. did anybody approach and say you seem very unhappy so i i think i had that moment in my first six months at facebook so when when i was working on ethnic violence like like more hands-on when i was working on people targeting americans with these targeted misinformation campaigns um the level of seriousness that the the company bought brought to it i was very concerned that not enough was being done because remember i am watching things like i have friends who work on the ethnic violence team and they're getting depression and having to talk about going on medical leave like it's that bad right people are feeling suicidal because like the company is is like the reality you learn inside the company versus like what you can do the gap is so big right um during that period of time that's when i kind of clued in that you it was unacceptable to be unhappy inside the company right like they made it very clear that like you were not allowed to be negative and so after about six months in i realized oh if i want to continue working on facebook and that's like around when you're not allowed to be negative and so after about six months in i realized oh if i want to get hit and i was like oh i don't want to lose my job um you cannot visibly ever be unhappy with the company and so at that point i kind of like strained strained up and flew right like i i i was just you're being fake i i would say i chose what to focus on right and and the the good thing was that i had gone shifted at that point because remember you they move you around constantly um so you never get very deep in any one thing at that point they had moved me on to um modeling how much influence anyone on the platform had so like at that point we were trying to identify who not just elected officials like let's say you are a labor organizer can we identify that you have effectively power on facebook would you guys give a score to that person we would give a score to like almost like that back in the days there was a website called clout yeah if you remember we kind of were calculating clout scores for everyone and you have that on the back um we we we we made a prototype of it um i got moved off on to threat intelligence um uh towards the end of that summer so we made a approach to having a prototype that like was actually quite interesting like and it's private it's yours not public it's no yeah so it was we put it in place because facebook treats influential people differently than it does average people in what way so one of the big revelations i brought out was a program called crosscheck so facebook had been public about the idea that this thing called crosscheck existed they had never disclosed the details of like how you got on crosscheck so you you probably are on crosscheck given the amount of influence you have on on on the internet um so if you're on crosscheck if you're a celebrity you're like a big old celebrity you're elected politician um facebook will not apply any of the content moderation tools to your content you will end up in a human queue that will take days so by the time by the time someone actually looks at your content you have already gone all the views you're going to get probably 80 90 of the views you were going to get anyhow but no ai 24 hours plus no yeah yeah back then i was taking 70 you know three days yeah and this was a huge problem like i'll give you an example there was a brazilian soccer player he was a brazilian soccer player he was a brazilian soccer player he was a who um sexually assaulted a woman and she came out and accused him and he turned his fans on her like basically actively called for them to go after her and because he was in this special queue it took days for them to get to his content and like she she got uh death threats she got people show up at her home like all kinds of stuff happened because uh he he could call for violence against her and no no by the time a human looked at the content it'd been days and days down the road right so so there's this question which is facebook has these different programs in place to protect say a local politician a state-level politician if we don't have data sources that can tell us this is who needs protection we have to figure out on our own who needs protection because some of the other things are things like making sure you have an extra recovery phone number or like we make sure you turn on two-factor authentication because you're more likely to get hacked you know the the intention of that project was to make sure that you the people who needed protection got protection so on the back end did you have the highest cross track score on influence for people was trump number one who was elon ranked so so i my focus was not on people we already had data on so we trump would already have been under like one of our major federal federal politicians there were like 35 different lists that might be how you'd get on cross-track protection if i'm in a room i could see the ranking of who's the most influential to the least yeah that kind of you could for the prototype that we built and you probably see it moving like this right it's like but we we only focused everyone who already had protection we filtered them out because we're like oh you're already protected so we focused on everyone beyond that and so um for example um i remember one of the people in our top 10 was a a national medal of freedom winner right like she's she's uh uh she's gone returned more than like a million acres of um uh native american land right she's very very influential but she is not elected official um those are the kinds of people who we didn't know about until we mined them for influence did you reach out to them or you just watched them they didn't know you're doing this you're just watching them so my specific job was just to find them because there are other parts of the company that provide them with perfect protection because i'm just a data scientist figuring out like can we find the people with influence so that then the parts of the company that give them special treatment can give them special yeah because i remember something happened with facebook where guys who were making 30 40 50 hundred thousand dollars a month with facebook revenue that was coming and all of a sudden it split yeah and you know to a fifth and a lot of people that were relying on that income they lost it i don't know what the event was but it was a lot of people that were relying on that income was so so that that's a that's a huge deal like most um online news sources had this happen to them so you remember this one this happened this happened uh maybe 2021 2022 right facebook came and said we are no longer going to uh prioritize the news and so all these online news sites suddenly lost all their traffic and revenue and revenue yeah yeah traffic is revenue was that intentional i think facebook um one they knew that they were facing in some countries like canada for example um canada has put in place laws that say hey facebook like your business is built on distributing the content of of people who who who who didn't pay like if you want there to be a news ecosystem you have to give at least a little bit of funding to the news sector um i think facebook looked at them looked at the australians and basically said um we're just going to distribute less news because we don't want to risk having um governmental interference in the future so when you were going through um uh blowing the whistle on facebook and you're dealing with jeff jeff you know he's a known guy in this space i hope i'm saying he's much more competent than what the movie it was they made it seem like he's a dummy yeah i gotta defend him okay that's good to know because i was not convinced you're gonna be that guy and be as dumb as they made him out to be not dumb but it's like oblivious yeah that's what i'm saying so he knows what he's doing so while you're going was it did he at all tilt you did he at all influence you to go like did he say something like hey you're about to change the world you're gonna be on everything do you want to take this or was he kind of like encouraging discouraging you sure you want to do this what role did he play so um ukg is the workforce operating platform with unified hr payroll and workforce management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work powered by people first ai and decades of labor data ukg turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing pay compliance and productivity enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens because when work works everything works learn more at ukg.com slash work ukg hr pay and workforce management buy stocks to sell you might be missing the opportunity if you're not being positioned now my guy says now's the time to go all in real traders still hear the noise they just know when to stop listening to it find and research opportunities to fit your strategy with thinkorswim trading platforms from schwab discover features like robust charting nearly unlimited customization and built-in risk management technology plus get 24 7 support from schwab.com from real trading specialists that's schwab trading learn more at schwab.com slash trading right now when you buy more carpet at the home depot you save more for a limited time upgrade your carpeting with the top brands and save up to 15 off installed carpet projects installation starting at just 69 cents per square foot let us get you started with a free measure purchased by december 6th for installation by christmas offer valid november 12 2026 through december 6 2026 base price for standard installation only excludes traffic master and stock carpet for licenses see home depot.com slash license numbers life is all about making decisions sometimes you make questionable ones like buying a new tv that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job then sometimes you make great ones like protecting your home and auto with progressive you get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage get your quote today at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states when it's time to scale your business it's time for shopify get everything you need to grow the way you want like all the way stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet track your cha-chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities take your business to a whole new level switch to a new level switch to shopify start your free trial today handcrafted across five italian factories with builder technology underfoot it may be the most comfortable shoe you will ever own introducing the all-new flb shoe finished in new chocolate leather made to move built to work To endure. Designed to impress. i never intended to come forward publicly so like that decision was made like six weeks before the first wall street journal article maybe maybe six maybe four weeks before the first wall street journal article came out um so he definitely um he definitely uh counseled me against coming forward publicly but like when we were in the thick of it um i like i never really wavered on that i was going to provide him with materials the question was like were we like when we started out like i think i probably never expected to work with him for more than a month or two um and like i never thought we would bring out 20 000 pages of documents right like i never thought we would end up being the reason why 47 states sued and won against facebook you know like i never saw this future in front of us um but he uh was really one of the things he told me that i was very very grateful for and i've always carried with me is he's always said you can stop anytime you want to like you owe no one anything like this is not you you're like at some point it's not fun anymore don't like you don't have to be a public whistle so that happened yeah that happened that that was there ever a flirtatious moment between the two of you or no he's he's married oh he's married i didn't know that and and the thing that i think is so sad about the movie um is so the place we actually met so we didn't he did not live in a hotel he lives in oakland um his wife is a garden designer and we i don't know if you've heard of him he's a garden designer and he's a garden designer and we the place we actually met most often um in san francisco was um uh his wife has built this glorious garden like they they rescue cactuses like they go down to like um like joshua tree and like like people will say like i'm going to cut this cactus down for my front yard because anyone wanted they will go and rescue cactuses so they have like these giant cacti and like uh trellises with flowers and it would never look realistic on camera but like that's where we met rescue cactuses yes you can rescue a cactus how do you because it's not going away how do you rescue so like um uh if a cactus like lays on the ground it can like put down roots so you can like take an arm off a cactus and replant it oh it's wild yeah it's pretty wild yeah yeah so so imagine like the place that so i'm it's like cold in san francisco it's like dreary foggy and you get to go to nice sunny oakland because remember the the rich used to have their summer homes in oakland because it's sunny and more pleasant i don't know that yeah um so you know um and so um that's where we met wow okay yeah and so the when when you're at a point you're like i'm going public with this and you know i'm gonna go and i'm gonna be on camera and they're gonna see my face they're gonna know who francis hagen i'm gonna be doing that no did you get any weird calls did you get any weird visits did you get any weird texts did you get any weird people wanting to talk to you or no so no one knew who i was until the day of 60 minutes right so we um the only people who knew who i was was was like the wall street journal so they knew my name um and the that that scene where the like the francis hagen character comes in and like meets all the wall street journal people like that actually happened that did happen um i the um my my um my lady as mean as she was so so his actual editor is a dude um and and i actually was he a jerk no he's wonderful okay um so you're just being diplomatic no i'm like like i i was i was telling jeff like i thought it was the a little sad because like his editor was like as much like part of the team almost right because like we'd have to call him and defend what we were doing and he was like i was like i was like i was like i was like we were doing right because like we'd call him up and be like we found this thing it's you know and and the job of an editor is to be skeptical right and the job the editors be like did you really is that really true like how can you prove that is that and so um having someone who is skeptical and is like the wall you bounce things off of is how you have better ideas and so i i i feel like the that role is missing from the movie interesting and and your experience now with wall street journal leaving them what's your level of respect and credibility for their approach and things i thought they did a really good job um the the one thing where um i think they um i don't know what happened on the inside um but i think they got a bunch of pressure because um there were like 11 stories all done ready to go and after the first say week came out they were like oh we can't publish anything more for a while like one of the big places of conflict was um jeff had he had a team of like four journalists journalists who were like oh we can't publish anything more for a while and they had fleshed out these giant stories that were out of the files and by the time we had to open things up to the rest of the press consortium um he was he was like chomping at the bit like he wanted to be able to publish these stories and i don't know what's happening inside the journal that they held him back because he could have been the one who broke more big stories than he did but they didn't let him actually push out the door until sometimes weeks or months later some of those stories was there anything that was left out that was left out i mean the fact that the press consortium published lots more stories um there is all this question of scale right so the wall street journal has a certain level of staffing and they have a certain focus and so there's going to be stories that are relevant say only in poland so for example um there was a couple of stories around um politically influential people that came out of some of these questions these cross-check documents that those stories are not going to get published by the wall street journal because they don't care about polish politicians um but the paper out of you know warsaw is going to publish them got it so now they did come out i think when that was going out facebook came out and says you weren't a senior executive you worked there for less than two years you never attended decision making meeting with c-suite executives you acknowledge it during your congressional hearings zuck said your allegations were false i think he responded publicly on october 5th 2021 he rejected the allegation that facebook knowingly prioritized profits over user safety then facebook said she wasn't an expert on instagram's effects on children andy stone emphasized that hey vegan uh hadn't personally worked on instagram child safety research zuck said most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted his response was that francis and interpretation failed to acknowledge the company's extensive investment in safety and research zuck says your accusations unfairly characterized thousands of employees who genuinely care about protecting users uh these are some of the things that he took do you agree with him on what he said what i find so funny about the um the like we don't agree with this thing is one of the things that came out from the lawsuits against the company about instagram was an email from adam masseri to mark zuckerberg and a couple of other c-suite folks about instagram and child safety they came out uh the email happened like one or two weeks before um the first story was published in the wall street journal and the reason why this timing is so interesting is we gave them three weeks to do um comment right like the wall street journal was was cautious enough impaired enough that they didn't give them three days to do comment um they gave them three weeks so sometime between when they were tipped off that these stories about kids and instagram were coming a week or two later adam sarah writes to mark and says in order for us to actually do what we claim we're doing publicly to protect kids we need another 45 people working on kids and the cfo writes back there's no money to do that this is documented this is documented this is an email that came out through the court cases and they have since claimed oh no no we actually did fund that later on but like the email came out and they said oh no no we actually did fund that later on but like the email came out and they said oh no no we actually did fund that later on but like the email came out and they said oh no no we actually did that we have like we don't allegedly how all this got funded is via verbal commands um there's no paper trail saying this ever did get funded but adam sarah said in order just to do what we say we're doing publicly it would take 45 more people what is it for the people that don't know adam's role how much oh so he's he's the head of instagram he's the head of instagram yeah okay and so on the findings for instagram with specifically young teenage girls what patterns did they notice um so there's a i would say there's a range of things that i brought out and there's a range of things that we know now from the court cases so what initially kicked off a lot of the storm around instagram and kids was um a series of um focus groups that facebook ran um with teenage girls where they ask them questions like when you feel bad about your body does instagram make you feel worse um and that's like where the famous stat of like 65 said it made them feel worse or 35 or whatever um and what has happened since then is that we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this um and we've had a lot of people who have been affected by this much much larger scale studies have been leaked so this man named arturo behar who is uh was the first engineer on safety at facebook way way back in the day like 2009 2010 he left the company when he had kids like basically retired um came back when his daughter was 14 so he she and him like to fix up cars together and she made an instagram account about fixing up cars and when he looked this guy yeah or to obey her he's wonderful um uh when he came back to work for facebook he was a facebook so he she she started posting on instagram about the cars he looked at the comments and it was a bunch of middle-aged men talking about his 14-year-old girl's body and he's like how is this possible like she's talking about this car she's fixing up how is she getting sexually harassed like why is she getting sent lewd photos that she didn't ask for they must not know like that was his immediate response like you know when i was at facebook they cared about safety they must just not know this is a problem so he returned to instagram around the time that i was coming for as a whistleblower so he joined maybe a year before i came for as a whistleblower and at the same time that facebook was making these public statements saying this is not what's happening to kids on the platform he was running surveys of a hundred thousand children on the platform so this is 13 to 15 years as an insider he's an insider yeah he's running the studies right at the same time and the results that are coming back are things like one in eight girls between the ages of 13 and 15 let's be honest kids lie about their age on instagram so this is like 10 year olds one in eight girls between 13 and 15 said they received an unwanted sexual message in the last seven days so he's sitting there being like wait they're saying publicly like nothing's wrong and i'm asking a hundred thousand children so i'm getting real responses on like are you getting bullied are you seeing violence has violence been committed against you like like what like he's seeing the raw data and then the company's saying publicly nothing is wrong and that's why he came forward as a whistleblower how much of that investigation did you guys on the inside like the workers the executives how did they handle instagram with their own daughters did they just question you can't you my daughter doesn't my daughter's not on instagram what did they do with their personal lives so at the time that i came forward just like 2021 uh so this is this is i think part of the systemic problem of instagram and facebook which is in silicon valley people have kids a little bit older facebook was founded by a bunch of 19 and 20 year olds when you add those two facts together it means that even at the time that i left the company which is 2021 mark's eldest child was nine adam seri head of instagram's oldest child was nine so they could say publicly like seriously my children are not on these products because they're not old enough ignoring the fact that like 30 of seven to nine year olds are on social media um today adam seri says my kid is on social media because she's like i don't know 14 now right i don't know how they use the products with their own kids though do they put time caps do they look at their kids phones do they um use other kinds of of software to supervise their kids on on on their devices i don't know how much of the onus do you put curious for you as an insider how much of the onus do you put on parents versus facebook the platform so one of the really big challenges with these these ads is that they're not on social media they're not on social media apps is i think you can safely have kids on social media but it requires a level of oversight from parents that not all parents have the time or energy to execute or technical sophistication right um it's things like you know you have to sit down with your kid at least once a week and look at their feed with them and talk to them about it right and that's an awkward conversation like how many 14 year olds want to show their mom their instagram feed none of them none of them right um or you have to do things like you can't let your kid charge their phone in their bedroom at night because they're not going to go to bed jonathan high talks about yeah huge huge huge huge huge lever you have but that means you have to fight with your kid every night to make sure their phone stays in your room to charge so you have a two-year-old daughter when she's 14 are you going to let her be on instagram and i'm assuming instagram will not be instagram in 12 years given the rate of how things are changing um will she be on some on the internet she'll almost certainly be on the internet um i'm assuming even in the next five years we are probably going to have like ais that ride along with her and she's going to be on the internet and she's going to be on the internet along with kids in a much more active way um and i think that um is going to really change how we view children on the internet if she was 14 today would you let her be on instagram no i would not let her be on instagram when would you let her be on instagram somewhere between 14 and 16 like i'd have to know the kid i don't know if i'm if i'm even doing it my oldest son is 14 about to be 15 he's still not on instagram i to give you give you context on like why it's so important for parents to have really awkward conversations with their kids about these technologies is the things that kids do online they they they don't stay online and one of the things that is happening at higher and higher rates is um sextortion so 14 year old boys get messaged by supposedly very gorgeous women um and uh lured into situations that i'm sure you're dangling again then boom next thing in school there was a movie that did this disconnected i don't know if you haven't seen him no uh can you type in disconnect or disconnected you know who's in it from uh uh that's the one disconnect disconnect movie is the the sister walks into the room the brothers is about to commit suicide because a girl he's in love with in school the three bullies that were bullying him send a picture of her as if it's her profile yeah and they send a private part picture of just any girl naked without the face on her says if i send you mine will you send me yours he sent his with him in the picture the boys released it in school the next day yeah and and wanting to commit suicide and a sister found him. It's terrifying. But that depiction in that movie, I think every parent needs to watch this movie. So to me, my challenge becomes. And in One Step Worse, now they're doing it with AI so that your kid might not even expose himself and they'll generate a photo and say, hey, see this photo with your face on it where you're doing something that seems. What do you do about that? I think one of the questions is who should have access to your children? One of the things that has been a big change that has happened as a result of the kids' lawsuit is one of the things that came out from. And this is really sad. One of the things that came out as a result of the kids' lawsuits was when we talk about the algorithm on Instagram, there's not one algorithm. There's a bunch of algorithms. So yes, there's one that picks out your posts, but there's also one that suggests hashtags to you and there's one that suggests people to you amongst other things that it suggests. The one that suggests people to you, one of the ways it prioritizes who it suggests to you is based on what friends. You have accepted from that list before. So if you are a 55-year-old guy who likes 13-year-old girls, the algorithm will continue to show you more 13-year-old girls. And it will show you not just 13-year-old girls, it will show you 13-year-old girls who actually accept friend requests from 55-year-old guys. Stop it. Yes, because those are the highest probability. Till today? So now it doesn't because of the lawsuit. So now kids are opted into private accounts by default. Oh my God. Because should your kid get shown to some random stranger. Till when was it doing that? Depends where in the world or you were. Like it's one of these questions of Facebook complies with local laws. So if you have a country that says kids get private accounts, you have more private situations. I think we can thank the Australians because the first beginning to close down those holes didn't happen until Australia threatened to ban social media for under-16s. And that's only like two years ago. What if Florida do? Florida made a decision. DeSantis said something about under-16 you can't be on social media. Can you find out what. I think they appealed it. Who appealed it? A metadata. And they won? I don't know. I don't know where it is in the current state law. Florida state law. Oh, good. Under-14 are banned from creating, holding social media. 14 to 15 teens are allowed to have accounts only with parental consent and targeted platform. The law applies to social media. That's awesome. Yeah, Florida. DeSantis drove this. So you support this. So I believe we can design social media that is good for kids. We do not have a system of incentives in place right now that encourages companies. I can stream to actually comply. Can I ask you a weird question? Who do you think politically protects young teenage girls more, conservatives or liberals? Ooh, great question. Because even Jonathan Hyde was asked this question. I wonder what you say about this. Well, right now it's kind of wild. So like, for example, the Kids Online Safety Act is the main piece of legislation at the federal level that is in the Senate. You know, it has over 75 co-signers. So it's like both are probably going to. Republicans and Democrats are supporting it and yet it gets stuck in the House, right? And I think so far we have seen more right-leaning states be willing to step up and take action. So I think Utah, Florida, and Texas have all done things. So when you look at just the legislative history, definitely the right has done more to protect kids online than the left. I think they understand better that kids, that the internet is not an unadulterated, like it. a pure good, right? There are lots of dark quarters to the internet. And one thing that's really complicated is, like I said before, I don't believe we should just exclude children from the internet. At the same time, we have not seen these tech companies being willing to do the changes they need to do to make these places safe for kids. So when you have a conflict like that, are you more biased towards action or are you more biased towards continuing to negotiate with these companies? And I think states like Florida have said, we're not going to negotiate anymore. We're just going to put this in place. We're not going to put our foot down. If you're not repositioning right now. Learn more at schwab.com. Slash trading. Right now, when you buy more carpet at the Home Depot, you save more. For a limited time, upgrade your carpeting with the top brands and save up to 15% off installed carpet projects. Installation starting at just 69 cents per square foot. Let us get you started with a free measure. Purchase by December 6th for installation by Christmas. Offer valid November 12th, 2026 through December 6th, 2026. Base price for standard installations only. Excludes Traffic Master and Stock Carpet. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license. Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. When it's time to save, scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the world. way you want like all the way stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet track your cha-chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities take your business to a whole new level switch to shopify start your free trial today would you support your life i think i think i think until and i think until we see these companies being willing to make changes i think one of the only ways to protect kids is banning so so let me ask a different question to see how you so let's just say you get hired by disney and you're working with bob eiger or chapek or even the newest guy that they have josh or kathleen kennedy let's take any of those executives you're working with and you see a pattern with disney all of a sudden coming up with all these lgbtq characters in cartoons they've never done this before first time ever a character in a disney cartoon or movie said i am gay was 2019 i just had bob chapek on here a month ago and we talked about this if you if if a francis hagen is working at disney and you're noticing the pattern of the more lgbtq characters you put in cartoons to meet your esg dei score is increasing the influence of kids identifying as gay or part of lgbt not as an not as an adult but as an eight-year-old nine-year-old 10-year-old 12-year-old do you find that inappropriate or do you find that inappropriate or do you find that inappropriate do you find that inappropriate do i find it inappropriate um so the the question is are are they depicting adults that are are no they're targeting kids to tell them you may you you may be yeah no no maybe i am lgbtq sorry sorry can like who is the who are the characters they're putting like one of the parents in the disney movie is gay or like no one of the young kids are gay yeah uh not adults at all and girls kissing girls young girls kissing girls i think i like girls i think i like boys i think for for children's media um like it's all a question on like what age range are you targeting like i don't think in movies targeting four-year-olds you should have eight-year-olds kissing like that kind of thing but that's just you know my personal bias like i don't think you should say i think we sexualize children too much in our culture that's one of the major um unfortunate things that has come out of instagram is we no longer have tween spaces like it used to be we treated in depictions of media kids who were 12 to 14 differently than we did 16 year olds and now all the 10 year olds want to be 25 years old right so i think i i don't have enough context on the disney thing of like who this queer character is um i'd want to see like what what what are the what's their rationale why are they including let's just say they're doing that let's just say you're doing that you're so let's uh politically i try to see where you're at politically i think you're you got a libertarian side to you i'm an anti-statist yeah i fear the government yeah yeah i think you're you have a libertarian side to you you're a crypto person you live in puerto rico so you probably don't like high taxes covid got you to leave california you probably want the freedom too much control you don't like again i'm speculating but at the same time we love our kids you love your kids i do as well and you're all about education that's great you have supported aoc in the past i've i've i gave i have given money to rand paul or not rand paul um original paul ron paul ron paul oh really okay so came to google way back in the day yeah you know he he raised like six million dollars on myspace in 24 hours and oh four he holds the record it was crazy yeah yeah so so i have you there right which means uh uh i think if we had mint romney today we'd all be really happy with mint romney wow because think about it like if we if you had to choose between any of the politicians that are currently on the national scale and mint romney never thought you would everyone was everyone would pick mint romney mint romney think back think about like how like like think of how much chaos there is today if you had to choose between the chaos of today and mint romney how many americans would choose mint romney i think a lot of americans would choose mint romney over trump and i wouldn't i i never was mint romney in the last two years i'm like god what if we had mint romney your husband's doing something to you let me tell you i don't know what conversations you guys are having just because maybe it's my maybe it's maybe it's my maybe it's my like so i went to harvard business school so i'm like i'm a practical person like like i get that vibe from you i get that vibe from you so so to me like i try to be i i have you know i run multiple businesses and we have employees that come from many different backgrounds the part to me was don't manipulate like the bbc stuff when the ceo had to step down he never said what you claimed he said and you got sued and you have to pay money to trump which is embarrassing don't contact um facebook and google and twitter and say hey don't release the new york post story about hunter biden laptop that would have made a difference in the election or else they wouldn't have gotten involved that never happened elon buys twitter they do the twitter file it's by matt taibbi and you know barry weiss and all these other we realize yeah the biden administration and then zuck comes out and zuck says they would call me and say this if he said that on the i think it was a rogan podcast and all this stuff and then to me then it was the lgbtq stuff why are you so concerned whether my kids are going to be gay or not if a person's gay they know they're gay leave them alone they'll become gay later on in life you don't need to try to impose and then stats came out recently that the number of teenage girls identifying as lesbian has the highest drop off in the last year and a half and a half years and a half years and a half 12 months why do you think that is well because finally trump came in it's like hey stop with all this stupidity disney lost 200 billion dollars in valuation nike just went from 261 billion to 50 billion dollar valuation you know netflix has flatlined a little bit with all the different things that they try to do and maybe common sense is like leave the kids alone no my kids don't need to be targeted by 55 year olds that are liking 13 year old videos and i think that that that part a lot of people on the left that were common sense and the ones on the right maybe someone's on the left that's pro-choice and i'm pro-life okay great but we can agree on these certain areas i think that's the part that i had uh and maybe a lot of americans had problems with why are you trying to make cartoons and movies towards kids leave them alone so i'll give you an example of like you know where where the things in terms of interventions on social media that like i think are have interesting opportunities that like they're not in the discussion so one of the documents that i brought forward um out of facebook was an experiment where they said hey there are some people who even though they disagree politically they're really good at talking to people who are different than themselves right like we can look at it like so this is one of the things that i i think most people are not aware about facebook facebook had a score for every person is that the cross check program no this is a different program so is this who's the most reasonable and willing to talk uh so imagine for every one in the united states we have a score of where we think we you fall on the left to the right so everyone has that i would assume facebook has that for everybody yeah so they have they have they have that at least for the united states i don't know if they have it globally uh the imagine we look at and we say interesting you are on the left you're on the right but you're really good at getting positive comments from people different than you huh um so during covid there was like an epidemiologist important data to have isn't that interesting so there was an epidemiologist for example during covid they got famous for being able to talk to people on the right so she was on the left but she was an epidemiologist i don't remember her name but she got famous on youtube because she was willing to take people seriously and meet them where they were and like have open conversations right so let's say in general we can look at the data and say hey there's some people who are able to get people who are different than them to put likes on their posts or get them put comments on their posts and they comment back and like very clearly they are connecting with people different than themselves if you say you know what that's a really hard skill and it might not show up in likes and research maybe the hardest skill um what if we when we see this pattern taking place we just presume your content is a little better on average and we give you a little tiny boost what happens to the ecosystem as a whole it turns out when you make just that one change you say hey people who are good at talking people different than them let's give them a little tiny boost you get less violence you get less hate speech you get less misinformation right so there's a lot of these things where we don't have to go in there and pick individuals topics and say you can't talk about that you can't talk about that but we can come in there and say hey like maybe we should not um prioritize things that have super long chains of free shares and maybe we should reward people who can talk to people different than themselves there's a bunch of these things where these are systemic interventions and the question is who has the right to know they exist and who has the right to chime in on of all the different ways we have to solve these problems which should which should be the tools in our tool chest that we go to that may be the most important data that i would want i mean that's a for any marketer for anybody running for office um different demos who to target for facebook to have that kind of data it's scary it's powerful it's super powerful and and is it fair to assume that both google and youtube and twitter has access to that as well how different would they be than facebook yes so so it requires you to have enough staff to actually go and check right and one of the challenges right now is when where you look at where the money is within the industry uh 75 cents of every dollar uh that's 75 cents of every dollar that's in the industry that's spent on advertising for social media goes to instagram facebook or youtube um 90 90 cents of every dollar of profit goes to instagram facebook or youtube so anyone who is outside those three platforms is working with much much less money to to do anything so twitter because they run so thin thinly i bet they don't have that data just because they don't have someone who's gone and computed it um the question is does facebook still do that today because it's possible how much does it cost to do this by the way is it a big cost no just did you need to staff someone on it and develop the model like a person like a person yeah a person someone has to go and like spend a month or two and you don't think will do that i mean And Elon's got the engineers from Tesla to transfer over there. So the question is, is it a priority for him? If he's involved in elections, massive priority for him. Don't you think? Didn't he just give like $185 million or something to, I don't know who it was, Tallarico or massive amount. If you're given that kind of money, you better have the data on the back end to believe that maybe Tallarico has a chance of losing, that Paxson can beat him, or else why would I put my money there? So I would assume he probably does. We just don't know. Do you think Elon buying X was good for society, that at least somebody from the other side owned one of the big social media platforms? I think Twitter was slowly falling apart. One of the things that is good about Elon buying Twitter is he is just better at technology than most other people are. And I think Twitter was going to be in a situation where there's a chance they would have gone bankrupt or they could have gotten bought by someone even worse. Think of Yahoo buying Tumblr. I remember that. What did Yahoo do to Tumblr? They kind of ran into the grid. Well, I think Yahoo was one of the people that they were saying could potentially buy Twitter. I see those kinds of things. People who are even worse at technology than Twitter. So I think the fact that Elon bought it and it is still alive today, that is an asset to the world. Because we do need discourse. And Twitter plays a role. This is going to make a lot of people angry. Twitter plays a role for conversation that it is not filled in any other space today. And so the fact that it is still a going concern, and I think will be a going concern going into the future, I think that is a positive thing. I think the fact that he fired all of his safety people on the pathway to getting there, that caused, like, Mark has been very open that he fired his safety people because Elon was able to and nothing bad happened to him. He brought a few of them back because he realized he needed them. I don't know if you know the stories. Like, ah, I messed up. Hey, can you come back? But in the case of Mark, after I came forward and said, hey, you're not investing in non-English safety. Like, only 11% of users speak English yet. Like, you spend half the safety budget on English speakers. Like, you're clearly only doing this to look kind of okay in the United States so you don't get regulated. Like, you have to care about people who Facebook is the internet for. What percent, when you say 11% is only English speaking, what percentage of the revenue Facebook gets is from English speaking customers? I'm sure. Because then you have to target the English speaking customers. If the other guys are not buying, why would I target them? Well, I think the issue is like, and this is one of the things I raised in the filings, was Facebook went into places like African countries, Southeast Asia, when the internet was just being born, and said, if you use Facebook, we will pay for your data. If you want to use anything else, you're going to have to go pay for your data yourself. And understandably, alternatives to Facebook did not emerge. Right? So Facebook is a much, much larger share of the internet in those places than anywhere else because Facebook came in and made sure that competition did not take place. So the question is, if you have a situation where people, it's harder for them to leave than on the internet, in the English speaking world, and you're treating them worse, what are your responsibilities, especially when you have something like Myanmar take place? Right? So that's the question. The question is, you intentionally took on this extra responsibility by killing your competitors, or making sure they weren't born. Should you have to deal with the mess you created? And so the situation was, there's 3,000 languages in the world. Facebook was choosing to use content, they didn't even have people who could get messages. Like when the Myanmar genocide happened, one of the big things the UN flagged was that there was only one person in the entire company who even spoke Burmese. So as people were getting shot, or like as these messages were going out, they didn't even know. - What a heavy job. - I know. - This is a heavy job. - Yeah, it's wild. - Do you think Zuck is evil? You think he's an evil person? - No, I don't think he's evil. - Same with Elon. You don't think neither one. It's just, what do you think Zuck is? You think? - And I think Elon, the difference between Elon and Mark is actually really, really important. Like I've watched videos of like Elon hanging out at SpaceX. You know, like when they recovered, when the missile touched down and didn't blow up, right? Like you could just see him interacting with his employees. Elon is a much more fully formed adult than Mark is. - What does that mean? - Mark became CEO when he was 19 years old, right? He has been surrounded only by people that he chose to be around. - Interesting. - Since he was 19 years old. - Interesting. It's a heavy burden, by the way. - It's a heavy burden, right? And they say, you know, power is the ultimate drug. In the addiction community, they say, the age at which you start using is the age at which you stop emotionally maturing. So if you dry out when you're 35, you still solve problems like a 19-year-old, right? And, you know, when we look at the emails that came out through the court cases, or just his testimony, I'll give you an example. When Snapchat started doing augmented reality filters, this is like, I'm a cat, that kind of thing. And it rolled out augmented reality filters. And one of the filters that rolled out was one that let you simulate plastic surgery. So it let you mark up your face as if you were about to get plastic surgery. And understandably, people wrote it and said, do we really want 13-year-old girls imagining themselves being marked up for plastic surgery? Like, do we want to normalize the idea that you should get plastic surgery for small children? And they went and were like, okay, we're going to go talk to experts. So we'll bring them into a child psychologist. We'll consult outside people, inside people. They paid like 20, 25 experts to give their opinions on what is the impact of making this accessible to kids. Across the board, on the inside and the outside, they said, even if this wasn't bad, and it is bad, it's a really bad look for us to be promoting this. And it goes up to Mark, and Mark says, I think it's patronizing to restrict access to kids. And when he got confronted at the court case, so he had to give testimony, they asked him, do you still think, now that you know, all the more that you know, because this happened in like 2019 or something, do you still think it's inappropriate to like not have this be available for 13-year-old girls? And he goes, I still think it's patronizing, right? - His position didn't change. - He doesn't, he's not in circumstances where he grows. - Does that tell you he's a true believer? Or does that tell you it's just money? Because that doesn't tell me it's money. That tells me he really believes in that position. - Or, I mean, like, or, so like there's others. - Could be a blind spot. - Yeah, I think it's a blind spot thing. - So, so I'll give you an example that they came out with new augmented reality glasses recently, right? And the day after the day of, there's this interview with them where this journalist is like, hey, I noticed you now have augmented reality glasses that don't have a camera. So for context for your listeners, there's a lot of people who have been calling these things creeper glasses, right? 'Cause like people have been taking pictures in locker rooms and, - By the way, just so you know, I don't like it when I see some guys that are, you know, you're wondering, hey, what, what do you, what are you doing? What are you recording? What are you? - Yeah. - And people are covering up the light on them, right? So the journalist was like, hey, I noticed you now have ones that don't have a camera. Is this 'cause like you heard the feedback that like people are really freaked out by these? 'Cause like people will attack other people in public for wearing these glasses. 'Cause like they're so, they don't, they feel, their privacy is violated so much. And he goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no. They're just so much cheaper. Like you save like 140 bucks if you don't put a camera in them. And like people, there's always been people who want the cheapest option. And like, there's so much lighter if you don't have a camera in them. And like, they look just like normal glasses. So either no one told him how upset people are, or he doesn't care. And we just don't know. And that's part of what's like so scary about him dabbling in like frontier AI stuff is, you know, I think the public's been pretty clear about how big an impact the creeper glasses have had. - What do you think the long-term, if we were to analyze, and I mean, we're not psychoanalyzing these folks, but negative motives long-term, do you worry about this much power to Zuck or Elon? Do you worry or do you think it's all positive? - I worry much less. So I worry. I worry about Elon's wellbeing. Like I genuinely think Elon really tries, like again, this is probably a controversial opinion for some quarters. Like Elon has invested so much in trying to advance things. Like he did electric cars 'cause he cares about the environment. Like it's very clear, right? Or like he has done more for internet access than anyone in the world, right? There are more people through Starlink. Like I think Elon genuinely believes and he has a history of executing. And yes, he is a showman. And he oversells things and it takes him a lot longer to do things than maybe initially promises. Lots of businessmen have that problem, right? I worry he's also probably surrounded by people who don't give him enough bad news. But I worry about Mark a lot more, right? And part of that is Elon has to deliver. Like he doesn't own 60% of the voting chairs. He doesn't get full control. He has to negotiate with other people. And that means Elon stays grounded in reality. Much more than Mark does. The people around Mark are there because Mark wants them to be there. Like that keeps you from getting to grow and be a fully fleshed adult. - Who are the top three heavyweights at Facebook, at Meta? If something were to happen to Zub, who would be the three heavyweights that could replace him? - Could replace him? I don't know now. The shift to AI, like what is Facebook now? Like is the future of Facebook AI or is the future of Facebook social media? - They don't have a choice but to go to AI. - Yeah, I think they don't. I think there's a very good chance that the lawsuits are going to be so lucrative that they're going to have to split the company at some point. - Do you think that'll happen? - I think that'll probably happen. - They were trying to do that a few years ago, right? Who was it? Elizabeth Warren was presenting that? I don't know who it was, but it was- - That was a breaking it up. That was like- - WhatsApp and Instagram and all this stuff, yeah. But you're saying even bigger than that. - 'Cause if the AI part of the company is like the part that has a future, right? Like you could imagine a situation where they say, okay, we will sell off the social media side of the company and Mark will continue to have full control over his AI side of his company. Like with the new stock deal that he got just today, he can take out tens of billions of dollars each year and not lose any control over the company. He would still pay the 5% tax. He would still have to pay all that money. That's a one-time thing. It's not every year. Yeah, but that's still a lot of money for the guy, right? I get it. But right now, he can only sell shares if he loses control. Do you think this wealth tax is going to pass? Do you think that's probably most. I mean, if they're having these types of talks, it's probably high likelihood that it's going to pass in California. Yeah, I try not to follow California politics anymore. It's. They're very intense. I live thousands of miles away. I don't. It really is intense. Talking about AI. So we have Jacob Coxon on here. He's the guy, the fellow from Anthropic, that he was there for a few weeks. He was three years at OpenAI. He says, I think I'm resigning today because I'm worried about what's going to happen to safety. Do you have a similar position with AI? So I think the focus on the danger of AI five years from now is really misguided because we don't need AI any smarter than the AI we have today for it to be incredibly disruptive. We don't need AI smarter than today to run information operations at a scale beyond anything we ever saw in 2016. We don't need AI smarter than today to hack computers in really devastating ways. I think there was a bunch of websites that were out over the last few days because of a huge hacking. The PAP, the code, and massive. This happened in the last 24 hours. Massive. The reason the lights are on right now is because no one is trying to turn the lights off. The reason the water is flowing is because no one is trying to turn the lights off. Because no one is trying to turn the water off. But we invade Iran. Will the water stay on? Really invade Iran. Not the current dabbling thing we're doing right now. That is the thing we should be talking about is what are we doing to harden cybersecurity? What are we doing to get early detection on bioweapons? Are we investing in broad-spectrum antivirals? Definitely not enough conversation on that. The idea that the AI is going to wake up and kill us all, I feel like there's a lot of things in that space where it's like, I haven't heard plausible war games. It's like, is this a suicidal AI? At least as of our level of automation today, they kill us, all the lights go off for them too. And so I think it's good that we are talking about technology having a downside, but we need to be doubling down right now on the things we can control because the danger is right now. It's not from the AI waking up five years from now. So you don't give that much credence to the fear porn? I think the. Focusing on the apocalyptic five years from now distracts us from doing things we need to be doing right now. But doesn't that create urgencies? Like, hey, let's go because shit could happen in five years. You don't think the urgencies are there yet? I think we should be saying, hey, like I think the much more pressing thing is like, so a week or two ago, Axios leaked a story about the big AI companies war gaming, like red teaming situations around like the lights going out and like the banks getting hacked and that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So that is the thing that people should be asking lots and lots of questions about right now. Like what is the federal government doing to make sure that the federal government is safe right now? I don't think enough. Like that's the thing we should be terrified by right now. Not like, will the AI wake up and decide like to snuff us out in five years? Because that is a problem that's going to happen two months from now, not the hypothetical five years from now. And when we talk about things that are like apocalyptic, it makes us freeze. You know, when we get too scared, we stop acting. Like it takes away agency. Like there's a lot of people who like when you get apocalyptic, like so like all the talk on the pause, for example, right? Like talking about the pause at length versus talking about what are we doing to harden cybersecurity right now? Those are two very different conversations. Tell me more. Right? So I am a Cold War studies minor. So I have an engineering degree as my primary. I have a Cold War studies minor. I focused on civil disobedience against civil defense. So back in the early 1960s, late 1950s, we used to, we used to roll play nuclear war, right? So we'd like New York state, for example, pass law saying once a year, we are going to simulate having a nuclear war. If you do not go into the shelters with everyone else, we can ticket you. Like that level of like, we're going to roll game. - This is actually a thing New York did? - Yeah, yeah, real thing New York did. - What year was that? - Wild. - Was that back in the day? - 1954-ish to like 1962-ish. So 1959, this woman is having like a crisis of conscience. She's like, oh my God. And I just had a baby. Like she's 21. Cause back then people had lots of babies at 21. I don't want to raise my child to live underground. I cannot do this. And she gave, put a roast in the oven for her husband. Cause she assumed she was going to get arrested. Cause that's what they did to people who did civil disobedience back then. She left her baby with the husband. They went in the shelter. She went out and sat on like a park bench and nothing happened. It was like very anti-climactic. But the next day she opens up the newspaper. And this woman named Janice Smith is sitting on this, like a park bench in front of city hall. And there's like big police officers looming over her. She's holding her infant. She's got a toddler on the bench next to her. Like that, that, the idea that that was a new story, like a single person saying, I'm not willing to go underground was a new story in the New York times. It shows you how different the circumstances were. Right now, the talk on the pause says, hey, those people, the people who say, hey, the people who started those protests right then, within three years, they got a partial test ban treaty, right? Like they organized and like they started with like four people and the next year they had like a hundred people. Next year they had a couple thousand people. By the early 1960s, we had a partial test ban treaty. We did not have a full test ban treaty. The reason we had a partial treaty and not a full treaty was we banned tests in space, tests in the air, tests on land, tests in the water. We never banned them underground. We didn't ban them underground for another, I don't know, five years, six years, because we invented a technology called Fourier Fast Transforms. So you might have heard of FFTs. - 48? - Fourier. - 48. - Yeah. - Fast Transform. - FFT, yeah. You use them every day. So your video right now uses Fourier Fast Transforms in its codex, right? Like it's a way of basically extracting out waveforms and things like that. We didn't ban nuclear tests underground because we couldn't tell if it was an earthquake or if it was a nuclear bomb. We don't ban things unless we can confirm that the thing is actually not happening. So when all the nuclear activists are like, these people cared, they knew the world was going to end. Like that's why we have to ban, that's why we need a pause right now. We did it before for nuclear weapons. No, we didn't. We didn't ban it until we had the ability to confirm that cheating was not taking place. And right now, tons and tons and tons of mental bandwidth is going into we need to pause and not into, we need to be investing way more in cybersecurity. We need to be investing way more in broad spectrum antivirals. You know, these are the things that we have to be doing the work on right now. And that's why we're having those conversations because we were talking about the pause. And the pause isn't even what we did with nuclear weapons. - Wow. - Drives me crazy every time I hear about it. - Cybersecurity. - Yeah. - Huh. - 'Cause it's one of these things where like, I'll give you an example. We roll back in time to 1999. Like I'm old enough to remember Y2K, right? We realized we were running the world on software from the '70s. And we didn't, we had literally said, well, it's going to take a year or less to need four digits to have time. Like we can just do two digits for the year, right? So like '95 instead of 1995, right? You know, we invested huge amounts of effort, like tremendous amount of efforts across society to rewrite tons and tons and tons of software to make it so we can do Y2K. We should be having that level of crisis about AI and cybersecurity right now. And instead we're talking about the pause. - UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI, and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Learn more at ukg.com/work. - Buy stocks to sell before the end of the week. - You might be missing the opportunity of the year. - If you're not repositioning right now, the market says now's the time to go all in. - Real traders still hear the noise. Plus, get 24/7 support from real trading specialists. Learn more at schwab.com/trading. - Black Friday is happening now at the Home Depot. Exclusions apply. Visit homedepot.com/pricematch for details. - Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. - When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want, like all the way. the way. Stack more sales with the best converting check. on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Switch to Shopify. Who is actually spearheading that conversation? Is there somebody out there that's saying we should be paying attention to this instead of the pause? So I think the situation, like if you were going to go talk to people who are doing activism in this AI space, I think what they would say is, sure, getting hacked sucks, right? Like, yes, how much websites is going on is bad. But like, if the thing that we're talking about is the extinction of humanity, it's more important to talk about the extinction of humanity. And I think the main issue right now is like the plausibility of what is that scenario. And so I think part of why we're going to not talking about those kind of like brass tacks, like we have work we need to do right now to deal with AI. That stuff is less sexy. It will cost money. And if you are a nonprofit who has to go raise money from donors, it's a lot easier to raise money on, I'm going to save humanity from the apocalypse. And so I don't think there's enough voices right now that are talking about the, you know, not sexy, like, let's make sure all the systems are hardened. But if you're the enemy of the system, you're the enemy of the system. If you're the enemy, is that how you would attack? Would you go collect even warfare change, right? We didn't know Russia is going to destroy Ukraine. Now we got these drones that we make, we got a half a million. I'm going to hit your, you know, warhead. I'm going to hit your ships. I'm going to hit and you can't move. So what do you want to do? I'm the smaller guy. And then Iran had their drone. So you kind of realize warfare has changed. It's not what we thought it's going to be, right? So are we not paranoid about the right things? Where the way the enemy or in Iran or China or Russia or somebody would attack? Us will be the power grid or we, you know, how would they do it? You know, if it's drones that threw us off and now you got Palmer Lockett, that's building what he's building. Have you had him on your podcast? No, we're having a conversation about going and seeing how he makes the drones. He's fascinating. He's fascinating. Yeah. Um, I, I, I, um, I think it's fairly public knowledge that people assume that if we were to say attack, uh, if there was a conflict between Taiwan and China, like China probably would attack American infrastructure, right? Like, I think one way to think about it is historically strategists have talked about the world as being land powers or sea powers. So a sea power is like England, you know, they're completely defended by the ocean all around them or a land powers like Russia, right? Like Russia has no clean boundaries. Um, so sea powers don't have to invest a ton in their military. Um, they are in their armies. They invest in their navies, right? Like they're able to focus on things like trade because they can reach anywhere. As long as they keep that maritime defense, they can have security within their society. They can have stability. A country like Russia, because they have porous borders, they are constantly having to fund the military. They have to have very different kinds of social structures. The United States has historically governed itself as if it is a maritime power, right? We were protected by the oceans on the sides, Mexico and Canada have not invaded us since like the 1800s, right? Um, the, we need to understand that we are no longer a maritime power, right? In a world where China can attack the homeland through cyber things, we are vulnerable in a very different way or where they can run an information operation and sound like they're a person from Iowa, right? Like back in 2016, I kind of rolled my eyes at the Russian foreign interference stuff because like they weren't nearly as effective as like the Macedonian teenagers who were running like, um, uh, for-profit AdSense fake new sites, right? Like they had way more, um, way, way, way, they were way, way more, uh, warm bodies that were working on that than the Russians were. And the Russians all sounded like Russians today. You can run the same influence operation and run it through Claude and you sound just like you're from Wisconsin. You sound just like you're from Washington. You sound just like you're from Minnesota, right? We are now vulnerable in a way that we haven't, haven't been vulnerable in 200, 300 years. Do you think a country like China has been thinking about this for decades, way longer than us because the way they control power is different than ours, where they have so many Chinese nationals or spies within different parts of our ecosystem that they know exactly what's going on in America? When I was at, um, uh, Google, uh, this, this wild thing took place, which was, um, uh, China hacked, um, I don't know if it was like 50 of the top hundred. It was like 50 of the biggest companies in the United States. And only two of them realized they were hacked. So Google realized they were hacked. And one other company that I don't know the name of realized they were hacked. And the level of, of intrusion that China did to get into Google was they clearly had spies inside the company that got the employee directory. They, um, uh, figured out who is in charge of the single sign on team. So this is like the team that basically controls access to things. They figured out who the guy's wife was. They had her sent him a link with like a photo album so that he clicked on it. And this is the classic, like, don't click on links. You don't know. So even, even this Googler clicked on the link from his wife. Cause why who's, who's that hypervigilant, right? Installed some kind of malware on his computer. It's stole his credentials, which shouldn't matter. They must have run basically a whole data center for a month to crack his credentials. And they used his credentials to log back into Google and plant all the stuff that happened. Right? Like that was the level of intrusion that they could do. And this is like in 2011, what damage did they do? Um, does it extract information or actual damage? They, I know that we had a fire drill where we changed all the passwords that were in the code base in like less than a week. So like imagine hundreds of Googlers, all responsible for like basically changing how access controls are done throughout the code base. Cause I think the whole code base was stolen. Um, and this is like back in 2011. So imagine what they're doing today. Was, uh, Sheryl Sandberg there. Was she, was she there? Sheryl was in, was in sales. So she was not like a technical thing. Yeah. Um, but I think she had already left her Facebook by 2011. Got it. Um, interesting, but this is the kind of thing where we should assume that China has people embedded in every major institution. Did they identify who were the internal people working at the, I I'm sure, I'm sure they weren't able to figure out who was the one who gave it over. Even with that fingerprints weren't left behind. Cause if you have an employee directory, there's a lot, remember how I talked about how, when I was at Facebook and I was getting documents, there are documents where I felt confident. This will never raise a red flag because I work on issues around societal violence. Right. But the second I looked at a document about kids or made a search about kids, I was like, oh, I must be on the list now. Right. Like they must be watching me now. Um, there's so many people who have a legitimate business reason to contact that person that just cause he looked up his name in the employee directory. It doesn't mean like it would be almost impossible to figure out which Chinese national in the company is this. If that was the case back in the days, how much worse do you think it is today with anthropic open AI, all these other companies? Uh, I think, I think given the geopolitical significance of AI and the conflict between China and the United States, I'm sure there are people inside those companies. I don't know for, I, I don't have evidence, but given the level of, um, severity of these situations, like, I don't know how you would prevent it. So let's just say if somebody works over there and they know that there's Chinese nationals that are working and releasing information back as a whistleblower yourself, what would you tell them? Let's just say they're watching this right now. Like they know. Like they, they know that they know that their specific coworker is a national spy. Um, the, uh, well I would, I would encourage them in that situation. Like they should go talk to security inside of anthropic cause like anthropic, I guarantee you would love to find the Chinese spies inside of anthropic. Tell me why. Why? Because that's it. They're, they're, they're engaged with competition with the AI companies in China, right? Like the number one thing that's threatening the valuation of anthropic, right. Is, is the AI models out of China. So they wouldn't want to know more than anything else. Got it. Last couple of things before we wrap up, tell me about, you know, uh, w we heard about Nicole Shanahan, you know, she's like, oh, I was partying at this, uh, you know, the burning man and all the, what, what is this, what billionaires partying at this burning man? What is that all about? Yeah. Um, so burning man is, um, uh, how would you describe burning man? I've seen the videos though. It's kind of, it's, it's funny. Um, so, um, I, I w I was a ranger at burning man. So, uh, burning man is an arts festival. It's, um, a self, um, a self-created city that is built in the Nevada desert every year. And there's a great documentary called the man will burn that's on HBO. Now I highly recommend it. It's about, uh, the years of COVID when they shut down burning man, because even when the org did not go run burning man, the community of burning man went and recreated burning man. Yeah. And in 2021, did they get arrested? Did they do anything? Um, I, they did not stop the, the, the, they were warned. They were warned. Like you might get arrested on the way in, but no one stopped them. Like 20,000 people showed up and like, how many people typically show up? If it was a non COVID, it's like 75 to 85,000. Oh, so they still have 20,000 people show up. Very impressive. And what, what is it? It's art. So it's, so people build a city. So it's like a Crescent safe shitty city and people bring large art installations and there's lots of interactive art. So for example, you might have a camp that, uh, serves, um, uh, bacon to everyone every morning. So after you've been out dancing all night and you're hungry and something salty would be delicious. Imagine walking down the street and someone just gives you some bacon. Right. Um, but, um, so both my husband and I, so even before I met my husband, this is what it looks like. It looks like that. And that's 75,000 people, 75,000 people. Are they partying? Are they hanging out? Are they talking? There it's a huge range of things. So it's everything from, um, like my dad really wants to go and volunteer for their airport. So they run the third largest airport in the state of Nevada for a week. Um, cause so many planes come in and out. And my, my dad wants to go and like, uh, he, he used to fly small planes. So he like really, a lot of PJs, but these are money people that are going to this. This is there's, there's everyday people go to this too. So this is like a Woodstock. How different is it from the Woodstock was, was chaos um there's a lot there's for for how decentralized and disorderly this is there's a lot of order so like you know you have individual camps that might be 50 people who self-govern their community um there's uh if you notice there's like very clean streets right so someone goes out there and lays out all those streets and puts street signs up and there's porta potties that get cleaned every day multiple times a day um so it's going to be dusty it's like chaotic it's not it's not um going to you know uh hawaii and going on vacation on the beach um the dust is a very alkaline so it reacts with your skin so like you have to like rinse your feet with like um vinegar at the end of the day because it'll hurt your skin otherwise so it's it's not easy but it's like really really fun and interactive what is it business is being done deals are being done a lot of deals a lot of deals get done there's a lot of marriages that happen after destruction burning man's orgy dome is back in 20 what is the orgy dome i i the the is that a naked lady in the middle that is definitely you a woman with less clothes actually there's a lot of people in there with not very many clothes on is this a family friendly yeah no it's fine it's it's so um and uh go a little bit lower in the story what happened oh windstorm how funny so the orgy dome blew down orgy dome serves anywhere to eight to ten thousand seven seconds okay expose sexuality but after 50 miles per month seven person board of directors went to work after burning man ended trying to find a replacement for damage 4 000 square foot structure oh my god ten percent of attendees make their way through the orgy dome over the course of a week can you imagine seven thousand people through it through it what did it say ten percent at the bottom says over ten percent of all burning man attendees make their way through the orgy dome holy shit okay so that's like seven thousand people so it's kind of like what is the other thing that happens in palm springs there's another one that they do coachella coachella yeah right so coachella has way less infrastructure um so like like people there's i know people who go just because they like building like domes like every year they go and they put up a three-story dome it's not a concert like coachella so some people go just for the music they like to go and they'd like to dance there's people who are are artists and they bring their art and present their art there's some people like um my my husband's father he used to run a camp that just fed artists so his his contribution to the playa was it takes a lot of um energy to put up art they'd show up and they'd drive around a little golf cart and they'd hand out free food to the artists as they set up their art right that was his art and then what's the thing that they do that they burn something at the end so if you if you pull up the man so every year they build this this effigy called the man um and they they light it on fire um as like the last the second to last event of the thing this guy yeah they every year laying on fire they have fireworks they have explosives full full full pyrotechnics um but you should watch the documentary it will do a much better job i have to go watch it i have to go watch it very uh interesting but my my it turned out so i didn't know my husband until i met him in puerto rico so we had both lived in san francisco two blocks apart we had both been burning man rangers so like the boy scouts of burning man so like let's say you go to burning man and you have you've been watching youtube videos for 10 years you're very excited about this um you show up you set up your camp you walk out of the playa and you see all these fantastical things all day and you come back at 10 p.m and you realize you have no idea where your tent is this is like a real thing that happens how messed up you are just because of how hard is it to find it a bunch of other people set their tents up while you're gone you got distracted you're actually one street over who knows there's a lot of reasons you might not be able to find your tent it's like 75 000 people's worth of tents right so it's is it drugs sex exhaustion maybe you didn't eat enough maybe you're dehydrated um there's a lot of reasons that you cannot find your way back to camp um but like the job of the rangers is like when you've been looking for your tent for two hours and now it's like midnight and you still can't my job is to find your camp my job is to walk around and find your tent and at least make sure you have like a place a safe place to sleep that night and is there a fraternity is it like a fraternity oh my god i go to the burn i'll see you next year is it that kind of a fraternity so people do have like camps that they belong to year after year after year that are like um like they're like uh their fraternal order like they say i've camped with this camp for a decade um the rangers are in some ways like that it's a public service organization um our way of giving back to the playa is by taking care of other people you know very cool yeah you know they brought it up i'd never heard of burning man this is the first i know about uh you know back in the days and when i was younger we would go but the thing that the billionaires that go they the thing that they are famous for these things called uh pay to play so burning man is supposed to be self-sufficient like the whole point is you bring in your own water you bring in your own food coachella you can buy your food right you can take an uber into coachella so this is truly a byo whatever yeah you're gonna haul your ass all the way out there um and often billionaires fly in they don't drive in they often have other people who come in earlier and set up set up all their stuff and so there's this question of is that level of of accommodation is it is it aligned with like the values spirit of of burning man i guess it doesn't right because you don't really do anything you don't really you weren't involved in the dirty part yeah yeah what how did you contribute to it um i really enjoyed this yeah talking to you and i truly appreciate you making time is there anything you want folks to go is there an article site is there somewhere they can follow you uh so i'm i'm i have a sub stack so there's uh francis on sub stack um i need to do i need to do some form of social media i i'm that understandably i'm not a big social media person um the i think one thing i would leave leave folks with this if you have kids um the number one thing i can leave you with is even if you are skeptical that social media is in some way harmful for your kid the thing i most hope you take from today is at least go and do a little bit more reading on the dangers of social media for kids because i think there's a lot of parents out there who feel like i have no option but to give my kids a phone you can still give your kids a phone and be able to provide them with other supports and so you know jonathan heights book the anxious generation i think is a really important read for parents um and just if i can leave folks with a little ray of hope of being like please look into how your kids use technology don't assume it's neutral um because uh we are actively waking up to the consequences of this over the last um 10 years well i fully support reading that book i read it last year and it changed a lot of different uh patterns in the way we're already very involved with the kids but it gave you systems i really like the way he teaches and i think he's got another book coming out here soon as well but uh francis thank you so much for your time this was great yes take care everybody bye-bye-bye-bye handmade in portugal their craftsmanship is a way of life for those who move through life differently from sunlit decks to nights that never need an occasion every detail is considered to be a part of one's life and that's why we're here today thanks so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time bye-bye every step effortless crafted from fine suede and built with builder technology designed to move with you because true luxury isn't about being noticed it's about how you feel when you arrive the flb icon loafer made for the life you've earned right now when you buy more carpet at the home depot you save more for a limited time upgrade your carpeting with the top brands and save up to 15 off installed carpet projects installation starting at just 69 cents per square foot let us get you started with a free measure purchased by december 6th for installation by christmas offer valid november 12th 2026 through december 6th 2026 base price for standard installations only excludes traffic master and stock carpet for licenses see homedepot.com slash license numbers are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up it makes your day sometimes even your week want that feeling month after month well new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to progressive save hundreds cue your happy dance get your quote today at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states the secret society of semi homemade listen up sam's club has pre-made dishes for a thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours all while tasting suspiciously homemade come join us sam's club individual oven times may vary choice hotels get you more of what you value comfort in it's calling your name save on the stay oh and free waffles are yours to claim book direct at choice hotels dot com holiday drinks are now at mcdonald's like the new red bull frosted cranberry energizer it's red bull meets cranberry flavors topped with cold foam and sprinkles made to charge your holiday spirit now at mcdonald's