Is Facebook Zucked? - Roger McNamee - #093

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Roger McNamee. He was an early investor in Facebook, an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg for three years. He was the person that brought Sheryl Sandberg in. Essentially, he's had a front row seat to everything which has happened at Silicon Valley for the last 30 years, and that culminated with his time at Facebook. Over recent years, Roger became increasingly concerned with the direction that Facebook and other tech giants were moving in, and he's finally decided to write a book about it and obviously come on Modern Wisdom. So expect to learn an awful lot about the inner workings of Silicon Valley, what tech companies are really trying to do with your data and his predictions for the future. If you enjoy this episode, you have to go check out the one I did with Professor David Carroll about the great hack a couple of weeks ago. And I'd love to hear what you think. It's an issue that appears to be polarizing a lot of people. Some of them saying it's all tinfoil hat stuff and others saying that we are at the edge of the apocalypse. So get at me at ChrisWillX on whatever social media you prefer. And also, if you're enjoying these episodes, please rate the show five stars on wherever you're listening, iTunes or Stitcher, Spotify, wherever else you're tuning in. It will only take you a couple of seconds, but it massively helps the show move up the rankings. So thank you very much in advance. But for now, please welcome Roger McNamee.
My Facebook reach is declining by the second after I've had Professor David Carroll first and now Roger McNamee joining me on Modern Wisdom. Roger, welcome to the show.

**Roger McNamee** (2:03)
It is such a pleasure to be here, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
Really excited to have you on today, very timely with the release of The Great Hack on Netflix and this resurgence of interest in Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Can you tell the listeners who don't know who you are a little bit of background about yourself, please?

**Roger McNamee** (2:18)
So, I first came to Silicon Valley in 1982 as an investment analyst right before the personal computer industry began, and I was lucky enough to be part of the most important firms investing first in public tech stocks in the 80s then part of Kleiner Perkins, which became the biggest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley during the 90s, the heyday of the internet. I was in their office the day that Mark Andreessen brought in the idea that became Netscape, the day that Jeff Bezos brought in the idea that became Amazon, the day that Larry and Sergey brought in Google. I started a firm with Bono in 2003 called Elevation. In 2006, a 22-year-old entrepreneur came into my office with a crisis. His name was Mark Zuckerberg. I helped him navigate the crisis, and for a period of three years thereafter, he was one of his advisors. That is the context for my conversation with you here today. From 2006 to approximately 2016, I was a huge fan of Facebook. Then at the beginning of 2016, I started to see things going wrong on Facebook, which really violated my sense of what the company was about. I thought Facebook was a force for good.
It began in the US presidential primaries in the Democratic Party in 2016 It then included issues related to Black Lives Matter, a protest group in the United States. Then Brexit happened in June of 2016 If that was the point at which I realized that the same algorithms, the same business model that makes Facebook so great for marketers, those same tools could be manipulated and used to undermine democracy. And at that point, I started to realize I needed to do something. I started looking for allies and couldn't find any. I was finally able to persuade a tech blog to let me write an opinion piece about this in September of 2016 And while I was writing it, more news came out, civil rights violations on Facebook, and then our intelligence agencies said the Russians were trying to interfere in the US election. So I sent the draft of the opinion piece to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, my friends, to warn them I thought something was really catastrophically wrong with the product. And they were not particularly supportive. Actually, I think they treated it like a public relations problem, and the public relations problem was me. So they tried to make it go away. And in the process, they handed me off to one of their colleagues, a guy I knew really well that I was very friendly with. And we spent three months. And after the US presidential election, I go to them, guys, you have got to do what Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical firm, did when somebody put poison in bottles of Tylenol, the analgesic, in drugstores all over the city of Chicago, killed a bunch of people. And the CEO of Johnson & Johnson didn't wait for the government, didn't wait for anybody to tell him, they withdrew every bottle of Tylenol from every retail shelf in America and didn't put it back until they had invented tamper-proof packaging. And I thought, that's the right way to handle a crisis like this. If you have played a role in harming the civil rights of people, if you've played a role potentially in undermining democracy in the United Kingdom and the United States, you have got to throw yourself on the mercy of the court the same way that Johnson & Johnson did. And I spent three months pleading with them, please do this. And they would have none of it. And finally in February of 2017, I realized it was hopeless. And I was faced with one of those choices, a moral choice that hopefully you never have to come across, but in my case I did, where I had officially retired from the investment business. I could just walk away and say it was somebody else's problem. But I didn't. For whatever reason, I realized my fingerprints were on this thing. I'd played a role. I wasn't a huge part of it, but I was part of it. And I'd done two things. I'd helped Suck keep the company independent in 2006, and then I'd helped to bring Sheryl Sandberg into the company. And those two things had made a big difference. And I thought to myself, if I'm not willing to stand up and do something about this, I'm not willing to stand up about anything. And so, I became an activist. And I didn't know what that meant at the beginning. Honestly, the goal was really simple. Just make people aware of the problem. And I met a young man named Tristan Harris, who was coming out of Google. Tristan had been on the US news program 60 Minutes, and he had given about a 10-minute presentation on something he called brain hacking, which is the use of persuasive technology on smartphones by internet platforms and how you can manipulate people's attention. And a light bulb went off in my head, and I just realized that's how the Brexit thing and the US election things had happened. And so the two of us joined forces and set out to try to make the world aware of this thing. And the first thing we did, we caught a miracle in a bottle. I mean, it was just unbelievable. Two weeks after we joined forces was the TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada. TED is the, you know, it's ground zero for TED Talks, right? I mean, this is 1,500 technology and entertainment and design people all in one room were thinking, we'll get Tristan to do his brain hacking thing there. Everybody will know. We'll get 1,500 business cards. We'll be all done. Our job will be over. So, we go to TED. A miracle occurs and somebody gets Tristan on the docket on 10 days notice. Keep in mind, normally, TED Talks, people prepare them for six months. Tristan has got 10 days. He goes there. He just shoots the light out. It was just amazing. He was fantastic and we're going around to collect cards. We got two business cards afterwards and no follow-up at all. It was completely hopeless. We're just despondent. Then another miracle occurs and I get connected to a guy in Washington, who works for Senator Mark Warner, who is the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, which was at that time the only committee at Congress where the two parties were working together. They were the natural place to look at Russian interference and potentially to help us protect the 2018 and 2020 elections. That began our interaction in Washington.