Episode 57: Mark Zuckerberg

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Weird Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrienne, I'm thinking of this episode as part of our series doing

like profiles in the gendered psychology of our new overlords, right?

Like, a lot of the time on this podcast, we are implicitly talking about Elon Musk.

A lot of the time on this podcast, we're implicitly talking about Donald Trump, Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel, there's like various characters who come up a lot in our like taxonomy of right-wing masculinities.

We've got the Dave Portnoy's and the Mike Pence's and you know, the Joe Rogans.

And today, we're going to talk about somebody who, in many ways, is the archetype of the creep, but who really clearly aspires to be a pervert.

And that is a gentleman named Mark Zuckerberg.

Sorry, I just said Mark Zuckerberg and you let out like the sigh of like exhausted defeat.

Now, fun fact about me, I've thought about Mark Zuckerberg way more than is merited, probably.

But, you know, I've been researching and writing about Silicon Valley going on 10 to 15 years now.

And for a long time, people sort of had difficulty accepting the kind of strong libertarian slash right-wing element within Silicon Valley.

But that was mostly when it came to people like Elon Musk, where people sort of eventually like

grokked the fact that like, well, this guy is just a straight-up reactionary.

Zuckerberg still might surprise some people showing up in a podcast about right-wing masculinity because he's not known as one of those famous Valley right-wingers, right?

He's not Mark Andreessen.

He's not Peter Thiel.

He's not David Sachs.

He's not Elon Musk.

He's not, he's not, he's not.

And then the other thing is that, you know, his gender sort of didn't seem to figure into it quite as much until recently, seem, right?

So I think that this is a very good thing for us to delve into him because looking at Mark Zuckerberg, you look both at the way gender was woven into the Silicon Valley ecosystem all along and the way this wasn't noticed, right?

I think if listeners are like, huh, why are they talking about Zuckerberg?

Or if you would have asked yourself that question a year ago, I think it's worth interrogating that question.

I still get requests sometimes from media to sort of talk about like what changed for Mark Zuckerberg, right?

There's this idea, like, oh, here's this wokester who basically went to the right.

And it's like, I don't know what to tell you.

Like, I mean, sure, he didn't talk like this five years ago.

But like, was he there for a wokester?

Are you kidding me?

Right.

But like, there was this kind of readiness to think that both masculinity and conservative politics had very little to do with this guy.

And I think it's both fascinating to look at him and to look at the way he was metabolized

with regard to that, because it turns out we've been historically very bad at sort of calling out far-right ideas when they percolate or when they travel under a different flag, when they wear a hoodie or when they're offering you

a vegan burrito or whatever.

Yeah, like he neither seemed particularly right-wing nor particularly masculine in the way that he was publicly being understood.

And what has happened to him over the past year or so is interpreted as a change, but I think we will articulate how it is really just kind of a continuation of existent trends, right?

Or possibly a return to form.

This might be a place where we kind of disagree a little bit.

All these Silicon Valley guys are followers, right?

And Mark Zuckerberg is no different.

And I think he may have found a different tribe for himself.

He's just a very, very dedicated follower of other people.

And there may have been a moment when he did think of himself differently.

It's just that that in some way was the put on.

That in some way was the camouflage.

There was plenty of data on who Mark Zuckerberg was and how he thought politically for the last 15, 20 years.

Well, I think let's get into it.

Yeah.

I'm going to do your basic biography of Zuckerberg, okay?

He's younger than I thought he was.

He's only 40.

He was born in 1984, grew up in Long Island, had a bunch of sisters, kind of like secular to reform Jewish parents.

His dad was a dentist, and his mom was a psychiatrist who dropped out of the workforce to raise her kids.

And, you know, along with his mother's interest in psychology, his father had like an early interest in computers and tech and was like kind of a computer hobbyist, right?

So Mark Zuckerberg picked up this computer science hobby from his father and was pretty good at it pretty early on.

This was something the kid really took to.

You know, now we are in an age where we're confronting the reality that a lot of people think of computer coding as requiring intellectual capacity that it doesn't.

Like, don't get me wrong, like, coding is not easy.

I can't really do it, but it's not as hard as the people who do it like to pretend that it is.

But Zuckerberg was quite good at it quite young.

And partly on the strength of his talent for this, he transferred from his, you know, public Long Island, wealthy suburb high school to Phillips Exeter Academy.

Do you know anything about Phillips Exeter?

Of course.

That's the one in New Hampshire, correct?

That's at the very bottom.

I think it's right over the Massachusetts border.

Yeah, right across the state border.

It's immense.

It is prestigious.

It is wealthy.

And yeah, a bunch of famous people went there.

One of these prep schools in New England that has like a bunch of presidents, you know, it's a factory that reproduces the elite, right?

And then he hopped on over to the other one, Harvard, just a few miles down the road, where he famously, you know, he had, he had started a few like companies by this point in his teens that had like a degree of commercial promise.

Like he seems to have invented something called Synapse, which was basically just like an early version of Spotify.

It was like a machine learning program that would shuffle through a bunch of mp3s and then pick up on patterns in the music and then suggest other music to you that you might like if you're listening to music like this.

So like an early sort of way of detecting consumer preferences.

And then then when he got to Harvard, the sort of legend is that he went on a date that went quite badly.

And when he gets home from this date, he develops a program called Face Smash.

And Adrian, could you like go through Face Smash for us?

Yeah, I mean, it was one of many attempts by young software engineers, coders, et cetera, to determine who was hot or not in the early 2000s.

The same way we devote enormous amount of computing powers to generating pictures that look like, you know, Lenny Riefinstahl fucked a hallmark card.

Back then, people devoted an immense energy to like the ranking of hotness of the ladies.

And FaceMash was that trained, I believe, on the Harvard Facebook.

I mean, for those of our listeners who are too young to remember this, Facebook was a literal book.

with people's pictures in it.

Facebooks only really existed at very elite schools, right?

It is a marker of elite status for schools to have these.

Harvard actually didn't have just one.

Various different dorms and clubs within Harvard had their own.

And what he did was he trolled the various websites of these different Harvard-affiliated institutions.

and downloaded without permission the photographs that were posted there, right?

So he stole a bunch of images of non-consenting women in his peer group and put those onto this hot or not comparison that he then distributed among members of his Harvard community so that they could, you know, rank and ritually humiliate their peers together.

Yeah, an august start.

And one should say, trained on a

archive of social reproduction, right?

Like the Facebook existed cynically, I would say, in order for people to pick a husband/slash wife out of that bunch and have many, many future Harvard-going children, right?

This is in some way using elite reproduction and hyper-charging it.

Yeah, so Face Smash kind of goes like viral over the weekend at Harvard.

It's only up for like two days or less than two days, in part because it crashes Harvard's server.

So

that is one reason Harvard wanted to shut it down.

They also wanted to shut it down because some of these women who had not consented to be part of this humiliation ritual objected to the use of their photographs without their permission for this endeavor.

So he actually gets almost expelled.

There are a series of disciplinary hearings over this.

During one of those, his fraternity, he's part of like the Jewish fraternity on campus, and they throw him a party.

in anticipation of him getting thrown out of Harvard as a result of this, you know, misogynist,

like little digital experiment.

And at that party, that's where he meets Priscilla Chan, the woman who he has been with ever since and who is now his wife, right?

So like,

we don't know a ton about Priscilla Chan.

She's not very public or vocal, but in like the subsequent months, like later, really over the past few months, something you'll hear a lot.

of speculation about among like the very online liberals is like, oh, Zuckerberg's getting divorced, right?

His turn towards

this kind of tacky performative masculinity is something we've come to associate with like men who have been sexually rejected by their wives, right?

Yeah.

The implicit hope there is that like then, you know, Priscilla Chan will take a bunch of his money in the ensuing divorce and then go fund liberal causes, which is the only way that any liberal causes get funded anymore is when a tech oligarch gets divorced.

The old Mackenzie Bezos.

Yeah, may she live forever.

Call us.

Like from what we can see of Priscilla Chan, I don't think that's her vibe, right?

Because this is somebody who in college saw all of her friends and classmates get ritually humiliated and decided to go to a party for the guy who did it.

Yeah.

That's not a woman inclined to feminist solidarity, right?

Anyway, back to our timeline.

Zuckerberg does not get kicked out of Harvard.

And what he does do actually is get recruited by a bunch of like insane, like the kind of character that only exists at Harvard, which are Taylor and Cameron Winklevoss.

Do you know about the Winklevoss twins?

Of course.

All right.

Tell us about the Winklevoss twins.

So, I mean, they come from money.

They basically were already back then kind of sort of in the tech finance space, I believe.

And today they're right-wing crypto grifters/slash

investors, right?

So the Winklevoss, the Winklevoss, I'm sorry, I keep saying like, like they're Swiss or something, Winklevoss, like they sound like elves, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, they were rowers.

They were on the Harvard crew team, and they had an idea that they thought was a decent business idea, but they didn't know how to program it, right?

Their idea was basically just MySpace.

So like the degree to which social networking and like individual online profiles that enabled consumers to represent themselves online and to connect with their friends online and like, you know, gather information about their social world in the digital sphere.

That was already like very well established in late 2003 when the Winklevoss twins go to Zuckerberg with this proposal.

This is like kind of something that already exists in the market.

Yeah.

Which I think becomes extremely important for the Zuckerberg story down the line, right?

He seems to the present day obsessed with the idea that he had somehow innovated, that somehow he had had an idea that no one one had had.

But in fact, it's pretty noticeable that his, I mean, he appears to have been quite good, as you say, at coding and that sort of thing.

But it's very noticeable that Face Smash aped things that already existed, and that in the end, Facebook succeeds in a space where Friendster and where MySpace had already sort of succeeded.

Not to say that it didn't do some things better, the rollout appears to have been extremely successful, all that, but it is to say that like he clearly thought and probably still thinks of himself as this kind of genius innovator and disrupter when in fact what Facebook was was the best financed and best credentialed of the possible killer apps for Friendster and for MySpace.

It's a little bit similar to the way that like everyone's rolling out a Twitter clone now, right?

Like the name of the game is not innovation.

You know, you make a couple of choices about how you set up your user base and either you succeed or you don't.

And if you don't, you're Mark Zuckerberg.

But it's very, very important that like, unlike, let's say, the PayPal mafia, like these guys were not really ahead of the game other than in the aggressiveness of their expansion and sort of the rollout itself, I think.

Yeah.

So like, I think that's really good information, right?

Because like Zuckerberg does not come up with this idea.

And the idea itself is not particularly new, right?

It's already a like a proven success of a product, but it's duplicating something that already exists in the market.

The Winklewoss twins want to call it Harvard Connect or Harvard Connection.

And the idea is that it would be sort of an in-house social network for Harvard University.

Of which one should say there were also a bunch of these.

There's the Daily Jolt and stuff like this.

I went to college around this exact same time.

Like there were a bunch of companies marketing this, sort of a location-dependent social network for college campuses.

Yeah.

So like Zuckerberg takes this not very original idea and steals it, right?

He tells the Winklevoss twins that he like, you don't have to to hand it to these guys, but they thought they were hiring this guy to develop their IP, and then he just stole their IP.

And they eventually sued him and got a lot of money, which they have now used for, you know, various

evil schemes.

Evil schemes, yeah.

So he totally steals their idea.

develops it into what he called the Facebook, with the idea being that he was going to digitize this elite reproduction tool that he had previously used for like purposes of public misogyny.

He was now going to use it for like more broad-based forms of social climbing.

And he promptly drops out of Harvard and moves to beautiful sunny Palo Alto because he has investment interest from a guy named Peter Thiel.

Do you want to tell us about Peter Thiel's involvement with early Facebook?

Well, so Peter Thiel comes out of the PayPal Mafia alongside such luminaries as Elon Musk.

Yeah, our new overlord.

But Thiel basically, he was the CEO of it.

And when it went public, he started the Founders Fund, which I believe is the vehicle through which he started investing in Facebook.

And I believe he was the first to really do that.

Now, again, there is a kind of mythology around this because Teal is a big Girardian and he's big into this idea of mimetic desire.

And it's like, well, you know, he recognized that people want to see each other and want to want what other people want.

So this is a huge advertising vehicle, et cetera, et cetera.

I always have trouble with that narrative because, like, again, these kinds of sites did exist.

And you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to be like, oh, wait, if people spend a shit ton of time on this thing, we can probably sell them some products, right?

So there's a lot of sort of ex post facto mythologization here, where there's a lot of people sort of pretending like no one that ever thought about this before.

It's like, no, there were tons of these products out there.

What TL does seem to have recognized, TL was part of, and PayPal was part of that move in Silicon Valley that really took the lesson of scaling from the busts of the first dot-com era.

And he realized that basically this thing couldn't just be a college phenomenon.

This had to be bigger.

I think this is something that sort of comes with the move to Palo Alto, this idea that we're not making a product for college campuses.

It might start there, but really this is for everyone.

Yeah, I remember around this time,

like 2004, 2005, I had booked on high school.

And it was a big deal if somebody's older brother had a Facebook account because they had a.edu email address.

And by the time I was out of high school, high school students and indeed all of our parents could and did have Facebook accounts, right?

It expanded through the market very quickly.

I think it's also interesting to note that a lot of things, this started off in the early 2000s as being coded for and chic

because it was both elite and young.

Yeah.

And Facebook's like share of the market, at least in the like flagship Facebook product, has really moved down market very quickly.

Now it's like old and not particularly elite people who are telling you about how Hugo Travez stole the 2020 election.

You know, it's just like

its generational tilt has absolutely inverted.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't want to undersell innovations that came about, you know, what just today meta was then Facebook.

But it's very noticeable that since basically 2012, the company has mostly subsisted by acquisition.

That is to say, bought WhatsApp.

And Instagram.

And these are their money makers today, right?

Like the hot influencer you follow.

I mean, you might mostly watch them on TikTok now, but they're still on Instagram.

Your aunts, they're on WhatsApp.

And your grandma's on Facebook.

And your grandma dead, you know, it's basically, I'm not saying yours specifically, but.

No, my grandma is dead.

And she did have a Facebook.

Yeah.

Like RIP.

But like they really expanded globally when they bought WhatsApp because WhatsApp is like one of the primary ways that people, particularly in the third world, access the internet.

Uh, but you know, it's not, it's not very big in the U.S., it's very, very big everywhere else.

And then with Instagram, it like really retained its big share of the youth user base.

And, but now even Instagram is just trying to keep up with TikTok, right?

It's just like copying their product with, you know, the worst version of TikTok, which is Instagram Reels.

Yeah.

It has not innovated in a while is what we're trying to say.

Like, you don't have to hand it to this guy.

Like, he didn't have the idea for Facebook.

Somebody else did.

It wasn't a very original idea to begin with.

And then every other good idea that has emerged or like meaningful long-term innovation in the social media technology space has come from somebody else, right?

He bought Instagram.

He didn't invent Instagram.

He bought WhatsApp.

He didn't invent WhatsApp.

And now his company is just running after TikTok, trying to keep up and mostly failing.

So this is like, this is also a critique of Elon Musk.

He's actually not much of a programmer.

What he is is like a really ruthless and kind of careless manager and bought a lot of other people's companies after they started them and they invented their products and then like got a ton of financing.

Something sort of similar is happening with Mark Zuckerberg, right?

He isn't really an innovator.

He is an acquirer.

Yeah.

And we should say, We've just listed the ones that sort of are maintaining sort of the brand.

Facebook also has maintained popularity in parts of Asia and Europe, I believe.

So

it does have a user base, what we're describing as kind of the uniquely American, I think, situation.

At the same time, there are also lots of acquisitions that they've made that basically.

I think are either a wash or like sort of like are regarded as kind of a negative, right?

I mean, the most famous one probably is the 2014 acquisition of Oculus VR.

Do you remember Oculus at all?

No.

Ah, they build VR goggles.

In fact,

I have been to the Facebook headquarters to try it out.

I tried it out before it ever came out.

Really?

Yeah.

I fell over a trash can while doing it.

That wasn't totally my fault.

They were like, watch out for the trash can.

I'm like, plonk.

Anyway, so that happened.

I got a free burrito out of it.

It was cool.

Yeah, so there's Oculus.

There's Onavo, which is, I think, a web analytics company.

I think there's another messaging service that they bought.

I think it's called Beluga, right?

So it's not that they were extremely brilliant in their acquisitions policy.

They were kind of indiscriminate.

It really felt like, you know, the way Yahoo kind of started flailing and just buying anything that sort of had a pulse, there was an element of that at Facebook as well.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're in this moment now, like 2004, 2005.

Facebook has rapidly expanded and its valuation is kind of exploding in this way that's very speculative.

It reminds me of like 19th century like money panics, right?

Because like people are bidding on advertising on Facebook.

They're bidding on like ownership stake in Facebook at prices that are not actually borne out in terms of what Facebook is generating in revenue because Facebook isn't really generating revenue.

Facebook isn't actually bringing in a profit.

It's just got this skyrocketing value.

Could you like explain to me a little bit how that works?

Because I have to say that this part of it is sort of opaque to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's what most of Silicon Valley was at the time, right?

It was the promise of huge growth, which was something that the VCs liked and that people kept pouring money into.

Basically, the whole thing was premised on constant expansion.

And for a long, long time, the actual making of the money was going to happen later, right?

They were like, oh, we'll defer that.

We'll get to that part.

And that was sort of the way business was done in Silicon Valley at the time.

And then they did start making money when they introduced the algorithmic feeds and all that kind of stuff.

And that's exactly, I think, when most people started leaving the platform because it was fucking unusable and weird.

And that's when your uncle showed up to get radicalized.

They didn't start making money until they hired a VP from Google.

a little lady by the name of Cheryl Sandberg.

So I think we're going to get to Sandberg in a second, but I want to take a brief detour and talk about Mark Zuckerberg as the sort of platonic ideal of the Silicon Valley like avatar of the dropout.

Could you like tell me a little bit about the dropout figure?

Because it's a prominent theme in your book from, I want to say like 2018, 2019, what Tech Call's Thinking?

2020.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

It's a really great book.

Adrian's a really fun writer.

So everybody should read what Tech Call is Thinking.

It came out from FSG.

And it's quick and hilarious.

And I think very useful to have in your back pocket as we now are governed by these fucking people.

tell me about the dropout, Zuckerberg and the dropout figure.

Yeah, so the dropout, that's the first chapter of the book.

I should say it's a book that is by now five years old, and I wouldn't really change a word.

These people have largely borne out what I said about them then, none of it positive.

And yeah, the dropout figure has, of course, held a certain fascination in the tech industry for quite some time, right?

Steve Jobs famously dropped out.

So did Bill Gates.

But really, with the Zuckerberg generation, it sort of becomes dirigur.

The Instagram guys like drop out of Stanford.

Everyone sort of has to drop out of something.

The thing I point out in the book is that you can't drop out of anywhere.

If you drop out of, you know, Cal Poly.

no one gives a shit.

No, you have to drop out of Stanford.

Yeah, if you go to Stanford, got to go to Harvard, got to go to maybe not even Yale.

Does anybody drop out of Yale?

I feel like Yale creates like these guys lawyers.

Yeah, you leave for the vice presidency once Amy Chua says you're ready.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you basically have to drop out of a highly credentialed institution.

And to me, that is the secret sauce of this entire figure, which is to say it is anti-elitist or pretends to be anti-elitist in the sense it's like, I didn't need a fancy college degree.

I learned everything I needed, you know, coding, et cetera, et cetera, just by myself.

You both get the imprimatur of the elite institutions and you get the sort of like, I don't know, like transgressive frisson of having rejected them, right?

You get the best of both worlds.

Yeah.

This in spite of the fact that, of course, the dropout, as I say, say, was a pretty common figure at the time.

That is to say, this was also a well-trod path.

If you made billions be Mark Zuckerberg, you didn't come back to Stanford, or in this case, Harvard.

Potato, potato.

But of course, a lot of people left these places and came back if the company they set up didn't work.

So it was basically more of a semester abroad.

And the stories from the early years in Palo Alto is that basically these guys from Harvard just decamped.

for the West Coast, set up essentially a frat house and just started a company, right?

Like they were continuing college

while sort of very, very publicly kind of turning their back on it.

And I think that's really, really important that in some way it's a fake radical gesture, the dropout, or at least that kind of dropout.

I mean, I think there are...

absolutely legitimate reasons to drop out of American colleges, I should say.

I think that these people were not particularly courageous.

And the way that figure was sort of imbued with this mystique was really, really troubling and was really a sign of what was going wrong with America's and the world's relationship to Silicon Valley.

If you want to see where this goes in terms of how absurd you can make it, it's when you get to the scammers, right?

Your Elizabeth Holmes's.

Elizabeth Holmes, my favorite.

I think more people should defraud like Henry Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger, yeah.

Like, why weren't more women putting on blonde wigs and awugging him out of his money?

I appreciate this.

I like women in male-dominated fields, like totally fake startups that don't contribute anything.

But she's dropped out of Stanford famously.

Yep.

And had a really interesting way of framing it, right?

Like this was a biotech company.

And she said,

I'm paraphrasing, but like, I just thought university didn't have anything to teach me anymore.

Now, when it comes to coding, who knows?

I don't really know.

That might even be true.

Feels like when it comes to biology and medicine, a medical school would have a damn lot to teach you.

And you probably shouldn't drop out if you're going to be making medical devices.

There's actually a pretty good one at Stanford, a pretty large, good medical school.

I'm told.

I'm told.

Was Sam Banwin Fried also a dropout?

I'm actually unsure now.

He didn't go to Stanford.

He grew up at Stanford because his parents did and do teach there.

He went to MIT.

Yeah, but did he drop out?

I don't know if he graduated or not.

No, he actually graduated like a chunk.

Oh, wow.

Congrats, MIT.

This is typical of Silicon Valley's like early 2000s, like aughts era mythos is the dropout figures contrast between tremendous wealth and great personal immaturity, right?

And boyish immaturity.

Yeah.

That was central to their mystique.

So, like, the refusal to wear a suit and the adaptation instead of an adolescent casual wardrobe, right?

Which became itself like a real form of affectation.

Yeah.

But that was seen as a kind of defiance of elite politesse that I think now we can see similar strains of in conservative masculinity of the Trump era, right?

Like, I am rejecting your norms, and that itself is a sign of my power.

My personal vulgarity or immaturity in the face of things that other people are taking very seriously, like large amounts of money or like huge amounts of data privacy, right?

That itself, that casualness

is a sign of masculine domination, right?

So you see it going from Mark Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie to meetings where people are trying to give him millions of dollars to Elon Musk talking about the Shiba Eno meme while he's taking away your grandma's social security.

You know, it's like the insistence on irreverence is itself

a way to

show personal power and exert domination over the week.

But it wasn't really cast in those terms.

It was cast as this like, no, you know, motorcycle kind of useful irreverence.

Yeah, and one should say that like there had been a long tradition in Northern California of a kind of a refusal of

kind of button-up work cultures, right?

This existed at Xerox Park.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, people sort of like rolling their bike down the hallway, you know, the famous beanbag chair lounge where they would have their meetings, that kind of thing.

But there, it really was still a countercultural artifact.

It was that these people had been hippies and were like, I'm not settling down into like just a basic office.

And there may have been tricky gender politics behind that too, but like it's interesting that like when Zuckerberg et al.

sort of arrive, the signifier of dressing down is kind of double-coded.

On the one hand, like they can, they can be read as like these latter-day grandchildren of hippies, basically, irreverent and unwilling to do business and capitalism as usual.

Or it can be, as you say, a power move.

We continue the elite without having to put on a a pinstripe suit in order to represent it.

No bless with no oblige, you know?

Exactly.

So this brings us to late 2007.

Zuckerberg by now is still in, I believe he's still under 25.

He becomes a billionaire at 23.

And he is one of the wealthiest men in the world already.

And he runs a company with tremendous valuation and no revenue model.

It's just like not bringing in money from its actual users, right?

So he gets introduced to a Google executive named Cheryl Sandberg, who is 15 years his senior at a Christmas party and decides to hire her for a role that he hadn't previously had or been searching to fill, which is Facebook's chief operating officer.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about Cheryl Sandberg?

Yeah.

So all I know about her is that she came up through Google and represented kind of the opposite end end of the Silicon Valley spectrum, it seems to me, right?

Like Google had a far more corporate culture by that point.

And it was seen, I remember the hiring, I was in Silicon Valley at the time, hiring was seen as a necessary maturation process for the company.

Yeah, like mom's here.

She's going to make you clean up your room if we want to like hone in a little bit on the gender politics.

But like,

Sandberg, credit's where it's due, she was very good at knowing how to make money off of advertising, right?

Google wasn't particularly profitable before she came in either.

They had a four-person ad team and she expanded that to being almost a 5,000 person ad team, right?

She had really grown revenue streams at Google and had a track record of professionalizing these tech startups and of making them extremely profitable quite quickly.

And she came in and she did that at Facebook.

The advertising sale revenue model was her intervention, right?

She's like, okay, we're going to to be big boys and make some money off of this, right?

So the like domesticating rules implying mother figure was like very much a role that she stepped into, right?

And they were actually like quite intimate.

It was a relationship that Sandberg's husband at the time, who has since died, described as like a courtship because Zuckerberg, who again was 23, would be over at their house for dinner like three or four times a week.

And they would be speaking long into the night.

And she is uh taking on this role where she's working for him but she's also becoming a figure of authority and of expertise in how to be a business person like an adult right yeah and the idea of bringing sandberg in was that zuckerberg was

going to focus on product, right?

She was going to run the business and he was going to make Facebook a better product, right?

Which, as we have covered, isn't exactly his strong suit, right?

Yeah.

And this is one place where I think we can look really closely at Zuckerberg's personal control over Facebook the company.

Because most kids or young people in Silicon Valley or doing these tech startups, their dream is not to run a company for their whole lives.

Their dream is to sell a company, right?

You make something that proves valuable and then then you get rich by selling it to somebody bigger.

And that's when you can, you know, sort of exit stage left and you can

use that to start another company or you can, you know, fuck off and surf for the rest of your life, you know, whatever it is that your dream is.

Well, but mostly what you do is what Peter Thiel does.

Yeah.

You become a capital investor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then start mucking around with politics.

Yeah.

And

then destroy democracy because you read a, you know, narcissistic software engineer's blog.

But

what we get with Zuckerberg is like an extreme personal identification with Facebook

and a continued, I think even now, majority stake in the company.

This is like kind of weird in terms of corporate governments.

Exactly.

Like the story sort of goes from like, oh, he was so smart, he refused to be bought by this other company for this outlandish amount of money.

Yahoo for $1 billion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To like, oh, you probably should have sold at some point.

Like there's this kind of personal union that you get in some of these companies.

And that frankly, I think Elon Musk is trying to sort of retroactively engineer with X slash Twitter, right?

But it is an anomaly in Silicon Valley.

Most of these people are no longer involved with the companies that they've started.

Many of them have been serial entrepreneurs, meaning they use that capital to start another company.

Or as you say, there are many, many off-ramps.

And Zuckerberg is unusual in that he didn't take it.

So Cyril Sandberg comes in and if Facebook has been sort of like metonymic with Zuckerberg himself, right?

If his personality has sort of merged with the identity of the brand, Sandberg is the first person who like almost displaces him a little in that role, right?

She is really involved in day-to-day operations of the company.

She is really, really involved in not just their revenue strategy, but in their marketing strategy.

She's really involved in their hiring and personnel strategy.

You know, she is the person who, for all intents and purposes, is running Facebook.

And this is also the era when Facebook, like a lot of Silicon Valley companies, has like pretty decent relationships with the Democratic Party and particularly with the Obama administration.

You want to tell us a little bit about like Facebook's relationship to Obama?

Well, I guess, I mean, Sandberg in particular, right?

Like through Lean In is very very much connected to what we would think of as sort of a pro-business liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Yeah, you know, she worked for Larry Summers before she went to Google.

She is a major donor to a lot of Democratic Party causes.

Yeah.

And she becomes personally an avatar of a kind of like quasi-triumphalist,

I think, like really defanged form of Ottz-era liberal feminism that like really becomes personified to a lot of people in Hillary Clinton.

But I think, you know, Cheryl Sandberg, if anything, is maybe like the other big avatar of this style of thinking about women's social advancement and public roles.

Because in 2013, she publishes a book called Lean In, which is pitched as sort of a self-help guide for women looking to

ascend in corporate workplaces, right?

And Lean In

is known for its prescriptions.

She basically prescribes women who are torn between, say, work and family or who are encountering discrimination or harassment in the workplace to work harder, right?

And it's weird because if you read Lean In, as admittedly, I haven't done in a long time, if you read Lean In,

her prescriptions are, I think, like pretty reactionary.

They are all about personal responsibility, right?

But her diagnosis is not such that would necessarily like lead to those conclusions at all, right?

Like she's got a pretty decent diagnosis of like sources of the wage gap.

She is pretty interested in cultural factors that lead to women's diminished confidence.

You know, it's a little pop psychology-ish.

It's very,

it's a 2013 TED Talk in book form, right?

It's like, well, you know, we put on little boys' t-shirts at Target that they're strong and powerful and they're going to be inventors.

And we put on little girls' t-shirts that they're kind and pretty.

And it's like, okay, well, that's, I think, a symptom of maybe broader forces at work that could be like diagnosed in a little bit of a more robust and less casual fashion, right?

But she's not wrong in her diagnosis of these like underlying phenomena.

She's like, okay, well, there's cultural trends that punish women for character traits or behaviors that are actually beneficial to capital accumulation and professional achievement.

And then there are these, like, you know, she doesn't ignore the role of things like motherhood penalties or like lack of paid leave or sexual harassment.

Like she just also sort of gesture to these more structural kinds of exclusions.

But then her prescription is just like, well, work harder, ladies.

And it's just like, it is like kind of a depoliticizing of a political diagnosis, which is like very strange to me, but was very, very typical of that period.

It's almost as though she had a really, really good researcher, but was a Silicon Valley CEO who wanted to ask questions like, what would you do if you weren't afraid?

Who was her researcher?

Do we know?

I have no way of knowing this.

I have no way of knowing this at all.

But that's what it is.

Like Adrian, every now and then, will just like drop these little tidbits of his insider intel because he's been in Silicon Valley for like 15 years with like the kind of casual proximity to these people that comes from working at Stanford.

That's true.

And I feel like I've got my nose pressed up against the glass, just like fogging it up, asking for gossip all the time.

Yeah, like the time I hired Peter Thiel.

You did not hire Peter Thiel.

All right, that's for another episode.

Let's just keep going.

Let's just solder through this, okay?

But yes.

So like she becomes an avatar of what we think of as sort of like the superficial inclusion of the late Obama era.

And for Zuckerberg himself, she is not just this kind of like corporate feminism, she's also sort of a mom figure to him.

Yeah.

And I think when we look at what's happened to Zuckerberg since, you know, like there's like biographies of Zuckerberg that cast him as motivated by like early sexual rejections, like the biopic, The Social Network, from 2010, where he's played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is just like so Jesse Eisenberg.

Like every Jesse Eisenberg character is like so neurotic that he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you know?

Yeah.

Who also like plays him as like borderline Nick Asperger-y, which like the real Mark Zuckerberg isn't at all.

The real Mark Zuckerberg is kind of affectless.

Yeah.

He's always very calm.

He never betrays emotion.

He is very practiced.

He reminds me of Hillary Clinton, actually, a little bit.

And like, I mean, Hillary Clinton will like display these flashes of rage, which is actually what I like about her most.

But like most of what she says is like so,

it's very lawyerly.

It's like practiced, it's workshopped, it's focus grouped, it's usually kind of contentless.

Yeah, it's HR speak, you know, and that's kind of how Zuckerberg talks.

He talks the way your like new boss's boss from the private equity company that just bought your employer talks about how you're all a family and we're gonna like move forward for innovative solutions.

And then you're listening to this and like suddenly it dawns on you that what he's actually saying is you're all being laid off, you know.

Like, that's um, it's like it's very, very polite and very, very euphemistic delivery of like actually pretty insane and like brutal content.

That's the Zuckerberg style, yeah.

And that's that's not how he comes off in the social network, but the social network like invents this woman who dumps him in order to like attribute all of this subsequent evil to like frustration and like sexual rejection and that sense of wounded masculinity.

I think if we're looking for his like current evil turn, the reaction is less at like wounded virility in that sense of social rejection.

It's more about like reacting against a mommy figure, like reacting against somebody who told you what to do, who had the audacity to be a woman and assume a degree of authority over you.

Possibly.

I mean, I think the other thing is, frankly, both with him and Elon Musk, it's masculinity plus time.

This is a guy who,

right,

it's not a type of masculinity that I aspire to or that many people aspire to, but the kind of nerd genius.

And I mean, I think Eisenberg nails that part of it.

Like, I think

as an image of Mark Zuckerberg, that movies are quite interesting.

It's a form of masculinity and it's tied up with this kind of lone genius mythology.

And what Sheryl Sandberg represented for him was the fact that it wasn't his thing, right?

And it's the funny thing about the social network that it's so critical of Mark Zuckerberg, but it credits him in this one big way, right?

He's the one who holds it all together.

He's the one who has the vision.

And Peter Thiel's barely in that thing.

He's like glimpsed through glass, like one brief moment, there's an actor representing Peter Thiel.

And you kind of think, I hate to hand it to the guy, but like, definitely this company wouldn't be as huge as it was if he hadn't sort of come along with this massive gob of cash early on.

But that's not really in it because it has to be about this lone genius.

And, you know, that's got everything to do with the fact that the other person that movie is about who also regards himself as a lone male genius is aaron sorkin the writer right

there there is a real kind of pipeline or a real kind of symbiosis between these genius writers writing about these genius ceos at this time and basically creating these portraits of these ceos as almost like artists right like yeah the company is his work of art right he's a tortured genius yeah yeah the fact that there are tons of people behind the scenes steering this thing, that there are people professionalizing this, that there are HR departments that are making sure that the best people get there, that make sure that people stay out of the team's hair while they're trying to innovate, et cetera, et cetera.

That kind of all drops out.

And what it is, is like, oh, it's this lone person kind of shaping the world according to his wishes.

And it's very noticeable that the people who fall for this stuff, whether it's, you know, Michael Lewis with Sam Bankman-Freed, or frankly, Kennel Kenneleda with Elizabeth Holmes, or although much more critically, Aaron Sorkin with Mark Zuckerberg.

They, I think, have a little touch of that self-conception themselves.

And I think it's a really central, a key part of the kind of mythologization of Silicon Valley that really subtended its political efficacy in the 2010s.

And that, frankly, we're still grappling with, that we're sort of trying to get ourselves out of, right?

The reason why we couldn't be like, oh, these these billionaires went right-wing.

How fucking surprising, right?

When at the first sign that they were, it's like, but it can't be, right?

Like, but he's such an unusual guy.

He's so hard to place.

Like, no, he's not hard to place.

He's a rich guy who doesn't want to give up his money.

What could be more boring than that?

If he owned a used Ford dealership, you wouldn't think twice about it.

But because he's wearing a hoodie and because he watched this movie about how he's a fucking genius, I guess that makes it really

hard to describe what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's you've hit on a few things.

One is that like like mysticization of this kind of masculinity, right?

The lone genius who is tortured by his own gifts, like into a tragic and almost like inevitable or accidentally antisocial stance is, I think, like really like,

you know, it's absolving, right?

It sort of takes Mark Zuckerberg out of responsibility.

Yeah, he's an asshole because he's because he's so brilliant, not because it's in his self-interest to be an asshole or not because he doesn't particularly care about other people right yeah and then there's the other thing that you're noting on like maybe a psychological level which is the need for these tech innovators to see themselves as singular geniuses who have created something you know sui generis out of their mind that is creating all this value yeah which is kind of antithetical to how social media companies actually work which is that the people who are creating the value well the people who are creating a value on facebook are facebook users that's what these other users are going there to see they're going to see one another, right?

The people who are getting paid are merely kind of supplying like a container for that to happen in, but like it's not the actual source of the value, right?

The actual source of the value is dispersed across the user base.

Network effects.

Exactly.

And so that is, I think, also like a contradiction in terms for the conception of Zuckerberg as a genius.

Because he's a genius.

Because we are, right?

The source of his supposed genius is entirely located in other people.

Maybe that's just an extension of the the metaphor of like how you talk about a company working, right?

Like, actually, this is a lot of people adding in a ton of value by working.

And it's a lot of other investors adding in a ton of value by like dumping money in and making it happen that way.

You know, there's this like distribution of the actual work and effect and then like a concentration of credit.

Yeah.

But we should note, what I think does make these platforms unusual is that a lot of the labor that does make them so effective, that accounts for their network effects, is rendered for free

And that it is often rendered by people who are very, very different from the people who build the actual algorithms, right?

Who build the actual platform.

This is by now, I think, a little bit of an old example, but the review platform Yelp, that was very open about the fact that they really were trying to solicit restaurant reviews from women.

mostly, I guess, moms, which they weren't paying for, but that was driving all the traffic to the site.

I had an interview for my book with an early employee there who said like, yeah, I mean, like, power users did not get paid.

Power users got spa coupons, right?

And he's like, think about that.

Like, it's very obvious who we envisioned, right?

This wasn't, you know, some pimply 17-year-old like in his mom's basement.

It wasn't, you know, a grandpa.

This was, we were envisioning a middle-aged woman who was doing this for free.

And of course, the ability to take women's labor that is rendered for free and say, well, this is not really work is a really, really old thing.

But it is the number one means of value generation for most of these social media companies.

Facebook moms.

It's where all the money is.

Yeah.

So

do you want to get into what has happened to Mark Zuckerberg over the past like two years that has changed his public reputation?

You know, before he went on Rogan and talked about the need for more masculine energy, before he showed up at Trump's inauguration and like oggled Jeff Bezos' wife's weird boostier, before he went into the category that he's gone into now, there was kind of a transitional period in his public image.

Yeah.

And I think it started really in 2016.

2016, 2017 really was kind of an important year for Facebook in, I think, three ways.

One was the 2016 election, a lot of people blamed on Facebook, fairly or not, whatever.

And one should say, one group that seems to have thought that Facebook did have some responsibility were a lot of Facebook employees.

And so this whole talk of like, oh, we're just one big family really got got a couple of cracks because now Zuckerberg's family was like, I don't know, buddy, it feels like we did something bad here and we should probably be better about this.

Meanwhile, he kind of doubled down on this bet on the metaverse.

He basically, this was going to be his true stroke of genius, right?

Again,

doing something that for once was just entirely his bailiwick.

And it crushed and burned so hard.

He was trying to get out from under the weight of you just had the most ruthless MySpace clone on offer and that's why you succeeded.

Well, no, the metaverse was going to be Mark Zuckerberg's chez d'Euvre.

It was going to be his big masterpiece.

And all they did was sink unbelievable amounts of money into this and no one wanted it.

No one went there.

Everyone hated it.

It looked like shit.

People at Facebook were embarrassed by it, really, really bad.

And he had never had like a very stellar online reputation, but he really fell into what I like to call the VC trap, which is that like these Silicon Valley super rich like go on social media and do a thing.

And then everyone's like, God, what a fucking dork.

And then they're like, what?

Why would you say that to me?

Right.

Like everything Mark Zuckerberg did, from the weird way he put on sunscreen to every new pursuit this extremely bored 30-something took up.

People were just like showering memes and jokes and ridicule on him in a way that, you know, couldn't have felt particularly good.

And then there was the fact that he essentially was starting to age out of the kind of professional youth that sort of had been his banner, right?

Same way that Elon Musk still pretends that he spends all his day playing a video game that he appears to never have played because, you know, he's fucking busy raiding the treasury, right?

The same way Zuckerberg sort of seems to have found the aging process, which is admittedly just shitty, just straight up shit, very, very hard to deal with.

And so it started going into sort of like the MMA territory, the weird kind of supposed bout with Elon Musk that was going to happen and then didn't happen, et cetera, et cetera.

Right.

Elon Musk challenged him to a cage fight.

And Zuckerberg replies, like, anytime, man, because Zuckerberg was like kind of ostentatiously, there's a weird amount of press around this in the sense it made me think he tried to like launch this publicly himself and that he was doing a lot of like violent martial arts training.

Yeah.

He was like appearing at public contests and in like crowds at professional MMA fights.

And like, I think he just hired Dana White or one of the MMA executives to work at Meta.

That's right.

So he got into this like real like theater of masculine domination stuff.

And he got like a weird like midlife crisis look.

He like grew his hair out a little.

He used to have this like Julius Caesar haircut that was very square and short.

Yeah.

And he grew out his hair.

And unfortunately, it kind of looks like my hair now.

It's like kind of this like shaggy.

Oh, it was tragic.

It was tragic for me.

My joke was Molly Dealer, but I'm so sorry.

Now that I know it's yours.

He also wears like oversized like hip-hop looking t-shirts and like a big gold chain.

He looks like, you know what?

He dresses kind of like Billie Eilish.

Oh, yeah.

It's just like everything's a little oversized.

They're birds of a feather.

He's not dressing his age.

So there's definitely this post hoc rejection of the fact that he is now 40 years old.

Yeah.

And so given that you started us with our famous canonic distinction between perverts, creeps, and priests, it is very noticeable with both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that their midlife crisis kind of eschews the one kind of royal road through the midlife crisis, which is a younger woman, right?

Like there is a, I mean, like Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has plenty of younger women.

He's impregnating everybody who's ever worked for him.

He's impregnating.

He's sexually harassed that woman on the plane, allegedly.

You know, I don't know.

Elon Musk has plenty of weird sex stuff going on.

His weird pro-natalist thing, because Elon Musk is in his mid-50s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like all the women who are giving birth to his children are not in their mid-50s.

Yeah.

Like he has a harem and he built them a like a commune in Austin.

Where all the good harems are.

Yeah.

No, I

reject this characterization of Elon Musk.

There's not one younger woman.

They like they are, and they are largely kept out of his public persona.

Like Jeff Bezos has Lauren Sanchez, who looks insane.

Yeah.

And that's very clearly a younger younger woman, you know, second wife.

But Zuckerberg is still with Priscilla.

Yeah.

Zuckerberg gives off enormous divorce dad energy without actually divorcing, which I think is interesting.

Although apparently the rumor, and this is the kind of blind item that I'm going to caution is unconfirmable.

But the rumor is that when Priscilla was pregnant with, I believe, their third child,

Mark Zuckerberg during that pregnancy, took a meeting with China's leader, Xi Jinping, and offered Xi the right to name their future son, son, which he had not discussed with Priscilla.

Wow.

And Xi basically told him, like, you know, get some self-respect.

Like, he was trying to get more deference for Meta's operations in China and more deregulation of his company in that market.

And Priscilla was very mad at him for offering Xi Jinping naming rights to her son.

And that's why he bought her that god-awful statue, that like weird statue portrait of her

that is supposedly at their compound in Palo Alto.

Real, real healthy healthy stuff.

It's like weird.

It's like kind of like she's like windswept.

It's kind of like copper.

It's ugly.

You guys should Google it.

There's a photo of her in a bathrobe sipping coffee in front of this god-awful ugly.

I feel like if a man gave me that, I would divorce him, but like, she doesn't feel that way.

We should say, these are all these rumors are unconfirmed.

So take them with a grain of salt.

Who knows?

I just, I like, I think that that is a wonderful story.

And that's a great story.

What if it was true?

I mean, honestly, if I went on a date with Mark Zuckerberg, I would fully expect there to be a big and awkward and absolutely misbegotten gesture to be part of it.

Because every public appearance, including his tack to the right, I'm like, you're not even MAGAying right, man.

You're just...

Yeah, it's awkward.

Burt's not in it.

Did you listen to any of his Rogan interview that came out just after the election?

I've been 10 minutes.

I couldn't.

It was awful.

I forgot how long Rogan episodes are.

How far they were.

They're about three hours.

You know what somebody's told me is that it's for guys who go to the gym and they spend all their time at the gym.

And what they're doing there is listening to podcasts.

So this is for your like day or whatever, and you're doing 100,000 pistol squats.

And you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, where he complained a lot about COVID era regulation from the Biden administration.

He's like, they wanted us to suppress free speech.

And he's not very convincing at it, particularly what he's talking about is like Biden administration requests to like stop algorithmically incentivizing disinformation about COVID vaccines.

Yeah.

But he is using the rhetoric of free speech.

And the like part that was really impressive to me was when he talked about his resentment at being investigated.

He was investigated by antitrust and consumer protection administrations during the Biden era.

And he really, really resented having his companies be subject to regulation.

So and you can tell that like, I mean, they have the whole hearing on tape.

He sits there in a suit and a tie and he looks unhappy.

He doesn't look pissed at all.

He looks unhappy.

He looks physically ill being there.

And he looks like a schoolboy who got called into the principal's office, basically.

And I think that that's exactly it.

He felt disrespected by this.

And one should say that like people might think, well, then it's not just about gender.

Well, it is about gender because Silicon Valley has long thought that regulation was basically the nanny state.

trying to sort of tie down the strapping masculine energy of these companies, right?

If only we could unleash the untrammeled power of this company, but they tell us that if you tell someone they have diabetes, they should have diabetes.

These Washington homos, right?

It is entirely about gender.

It's all about like thwarted masculinity.

It's not about femininity specifically, it's about thwarted masculinity.

Well, it's also about the feminization of rulemaking and authority, right?

The feminization of the regulatory state.

And care.

Yes, and care, the sense of being responsible for others.

These are understood as whining, unfun,

feminine impositions on masculine joy.

You know, on Rogan, the only person Zuckerberg complained about by name was Elizabeth Warren,

which was a name that issued like this Bronx cheer howl of pain and disgust from Joe Rogan.

You know, the embodiment not only of womanhood, but of an aggressive regulatory state, of an aggressive antitrust regime, right?

She is,

she is the embodiment for them of feminized regulation.

so then he talks about

corporate America requiring more masculine energy.

We should say that Sheryl Sandberg exited Facebook, or I guess it's called Meta now, in 2022 following the COVID debacle and the viral spread of misinformation on that platform during the pandemic.

And I guess now Zuckerberg has decided that he doesn't want any more of that feminine energy, whatever that means, in his company.

So, do you want to talk about that remark?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really remarkable if you know the companies.

Silicon Valley has made very tentative steps towards alleviating the gender imbalance in the upper echelons of its headquarters over the last, I don't know, 10 years.

There's a recognition that this was a problem for a while there, and there were some attempts made, right?

And Sandberg, I think, did push for a lot of that.

At the same time, you wouldn't walk into the meta offices in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, I guess they are.

It's functionally its own city.

You know, it's like it's a very large place.

Yeah, it's huge.

And if you go there, right, there's the main quad, which I think used to be sort of Sun Microsystems before Facebook and then later Meta took it over.

There's a massive headquarters built, I think, by Frank Geary.

And then there's a bunch of these Silicon Valley kind of office buildings that sort of got put up very, very quickly.

Every time you'd go down there, it'd be a new one.

And that's sort of where their like content moderation teams sit.

That's where their celebrity relationship sits, especially for Instagram.

That's where HR sits, et cetera, et cetera.

And as people sort of leave the buses to go to these places, my observation, I mean, I haven't been there since May 2022.

All the men go into one building and all the women go into the other.

Exactly.

Yeah, all the men go earn engineering salaries and all the women go earn content moderation HR salaries.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I mean, it's not 100%, but that has definitely been my impression every time I've been there.

And it's always noticeable.

It's visually noticeable, right?

You don't walk into the meta headquarters thinking that you're in some kind of daycare.

It is a heavily masculine place.

Maybe not as much as some other places where it's really uncomfortable, but it really is noticeable still.

Or it was when I was last there three years ago.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: This is called the sex segregation of the workforce.

Yeah.

And I think what we can understand

in Zuckerberg's comment is a commitment to the same kind of projects that like the Trump and Elon Musk and J.D.

Vance regime has endeavored to instill in the federal bureaucracy, right?

Which is the re-segregation along racial and in Zuckerberg's case, particularly sex lines of the workforce, right?

We're going to exclude women and people of color from positions of prominence, of decision-making, of dignity and power.

And we're going to make power an exclusively white male domain.

Yeah.

And power and prestige are concentrated where you're dealing with the data, which means the stuff that actually makes you the money, which is the stuff that, right, if you build the platform, you are important.

If you help moderate the content, you are not important.

If you have relations with the content, you are not important.

There was an ad up by 101.

It's not a meta ad, but it was a different company that Long had to ad up, grab them by the data.

This was after 2016.

I would encourage our listeners who haven't to, if you're ever in San Francisco, like look at the billboards along the 101 between the city and Silicon Valley or like when you're going over the Bay Bridge, because it is like the most dystopian set of advertising that explains so much about our terrible world.

But it's all shit like that.

Yep.

And so I think the idea that data is feminized and that those who wield and control and wrangle it into submission are, you know, the true studs and that they deserve all the esteem and all the money and the stature within the company.

It's how a lot of these companies were always structured, although I think, again, there have been efforts made by people like Sheryl Sandberg to ameliorate that somewhat.

But like, that's what I was saying when I was saying that Zuckerberg really didn't change.

If anything, he returned to something, right?

Like this was set up in the structure of this company and he framed it on Rogan as a return.

He framed it as a restoration, right?

And it's the same way that like Elon Musk sort of thinks he's restoring something at Twitter, right?

All of this is about this kind of Silicon Valley libertarian notion that there is a natural hierarchy of people.

And if it weren't for the nanny state, if it weren't for those Nanbi Pambi liberals, if it weren't for the social justice warriors and the feminazis, et cetera, et cetera, naturally white men would be at the top of that picking order, right?

Just like they were in the good old days of 2003.

You know, we talk a lot about like the conservatives imagined past, right?

And this like prelapsarian fantasy of white male dominance in like the quote-unquote state of nature, right?

Which is always like actually a very carefully created by policy era that they're reaching back to and usually misremembering.

And I think for a lot of people, like the shorthand for this era is like the 1950s, right?

Yeah.

Like that's when there was segregation and women weren't allowed to have good jobs and they were all housewives stuck at home with their abusive husbands and their shitty kids, right?

And that was like, that's a fantasy, right?

But But sometimes the era is much more recently, right?

Yeah, it's 2002.

Yeah, like Zuckerberg's imagined past is the early aughts when, you know, Facebook was 15 people who all lived in one shitty house in Palo Alto where they were doing beer pong and nobody ever told him what to do.

Yeah.

In its own horrible way, it's, it's almost a little touching, right?

You know, it's like you or I going back to our college and being like, wow, I can't believe it's been X many years.

Like they're getting older and they're sad about it.

Like, I get it, Elon.

I get it, Mark.

Don't take us down with you.

You know, you don't have to destroy democracy just because you're getting older and others have the impertinence to be young.

But that's what it is.

It's Musk bringing a mattress into the Twitter headquarters, right?

Like cosplaying startup.

It's both, it's a biographical thing, right?

But it's also deeply political, as you say, because it was a moment that really didn't reflect, didn't have to reflect on its own gender and racial presuppositions, where a lot of that stuff was sort of accepted as natural, or where there wasn't an HR department at all.

I mean, most startups don't have an HR department.

So they like couldn't say, guys, this actually violates federal law.

Everyone was making too much money, right?

Like if you fired the one lady you had, she wouldn't sue because you didn't want to be that girl.

So you would just apply to another job and get a good recommendation.

And because you worked at Facebook, of course you'd get that job and you'd make money.

So basically there was no reason for any of this stuff that corporate America has built up to adjudicate fairness, hierarchies, promotions, et cetera, et cetera.

And as you say, they don't see that extremely anomalous state of affairs that was owed to just everyone pouring bathtubs full of cash into Silicon Valley.

They don't see that as like anomalous.

They see it as the golden age that they want to return to, the natural state of affairs.

You can't be young again, but you can make everybody else miserable about it.

Yep.

That might be a good place to wrap up.

Thank you for coming along on this like depressing ass journey with me, Adrian, into life of one of our worst guys.

Yeah, just straight up sucks.

Anyway,

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In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

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Our producer is Katie Lyle.