YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger McNamee

lines on the record: 143
first: 2019-02-11
most recent: 2019-02-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was it? You were like, no. No, what I'm saying is that it actually didn't happen all at once. I mean, reaching out to Mark and Cheryl was me reaching out to my friends thinking that they were the victim. And my basic belief is that I understand how 2016 happened. I mean, were there signals? Yeah, did they miss them? Yeah. But in fairness, I missed a ton of signals too. So I think we're all fallible. We're all entitled to make mistakes. My real problem here, and the thing that really energized my activism was initially I go to Congress, we help them get ready for the hearings. We think our job is done because our goal for tristonomy is just to get a conversation started. The people in Washington said, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is just the beginning. We need you guys to keep going out there. And then when the Chamath Palahita...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The point is, I can't worry about the issues you're describing there. I believe it's really important that we talk about these issues. I have a biography that makes me credible in some of the most important circles for doing it. And the cost is very high. I've lost a huge number of relationships that really value matter in Silicon Valley. But I also realized that I was at a point in my life where I needed to stop letting technology intermediate everything.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they obviously, you talked about before. Everybody does. It's not just. I could, you know, but I had an unusual personality for what I do all the way through. And that's been both the secret of my success and always the source of the setbacks.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah, Roger. Someone said that to me, and I was like, hey, I had a stroke, really not. Stroke is not the way I want to hear that kind of thing. But it was an astonishing, very few people break away of prominence. And you were a person, you had long been a person in prominence, and they were trying to sideline. For sure, sideline you, but not in the typical way that you would think whistleblowers are, but more in the... He's crazy kind of thing.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But my point is those were the two basic choices I was offered. And people say, well, why do you still own the stock? I still own the stock because I don't want anybody to be confused. I don't want them thinking that I am an activist because I'm trying to knock the stock down. I was obviously the wrong messenger from Mark and Cher And I may be the wrong messenger for the people listening on this. But everybody needs to address the message. We need to talk about it now because with the Internet of Things and with artificial intelligence. The problems we're talking about are about to get so much worse.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, sorry. I think the reality is that's an interesting question, but I don't know how that would work operationally. I think I had two choices. I could sit back like everybody else and do nothing. Right.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to be clear, I've given away. Most of the money that I've made for Facebook and had well before I understood this problem, give it back to whom I know, but they were”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I call him up and I go, Dude, have you thought about this in the context of the election? And he goes, say more. We talk about it and we go, oh my God, he has one part of the problem. I have another part of the problem. We decided to join forces. And after that, we go to the TED conference where he gets, you know, Eli Pariser gets him on the agenda on two weeks notice. He gives this impassioned TED talk in which everybody gives him nice applause afterwards. We go around to collect cards if people want to help us out. We get two cards. Neither one returns a phone call. It's a complete wipeout. And we don't know anybody else. And after that is when miracles occur and we finally get to Congress, get to Senator Mark Wardermark.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The point was he came at a moment in time when I was looking for an ally. I learned that, okay, these people can use the tricks from magic, from slot machines, the sort of rewards thing, but also appeals to fear and outrage. Move your buttons and therefore manipulate your attention. And in manipulating their attention, they can create first habits with like buttons and notifications, and then they can create addiction in some subset of the population.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, go ahead. So we spend three months This back and forth, I finally give up and I start looking for allies. And then a miracle occurs in April and I meet Tristan Harris right after he does the 60 minutes piece. He had been a design ethicist at Google. And he was on 60 Minutes talking about what he called brain hacking. And he was an expert in persuasive technology, and he talked about how platforms, because of the instantaneous...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go on fourth, well, but I also think that was his job, okay? I believe he was given marching orders with me and presumably with you, and he followed me.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, no, I wasn't. Hang on. I go completely nonlinear. So there's only nine days that pass between the memo and the election. At which point I'm seeing, Dan, you don't get it. You're telling me that the law provides you with a safe harbor for the actions of third parties. And I'm telling you, you're in a trust business. You have got to throw yourself in the mercy of the court. You have to do what Johnson and Johnson did after Tylenol. You have got to protect the people you didn't want to.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was the partnership guy, and I was close to him. I knew him well, and that was a good solution. And I just said, look, I'll talk to Dan. We talk a couple of times on the phone, then the election happens. And I'm like, at that point.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were incredibly polite, but also a little bit dismissive, saying we just don't agree that it's systemic. But here's Dan Rose. You talked to Dan. He's your friend.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start writing it up, and I'm unfortunately really passionate because two of the three things are civil rights violations, or two of the four were civil rights violations. And I grew up in a family where my parents were really involved in that stuff. And so I take it the thing I'm involved in is violating people's civil rights. That was bad territory. So this was an op-ed. It was kind of emotional. And my wife Anne.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yuri Millner scared the hell out of me. So that's another signal that I noted but didn't know how to factor in. And by the way, this is a Russian investor. I'm just saying, this is weird. It was just that this is weird as opposed to anything else. Anyway, the fourth and final point was that housing and urban development cited Facebook for advertising tools that allowed discrimination in real estate in violation of the Fair Housing Act. So now I've got four data points. And I had a bunch of other slightly lesser ones. I come to you guys and Walt invites me to write a recode blog, a op-ed about my concerns.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I went there and I missed the signal. Okay, I was there with you and I looked at it and I'm going. I wasn't sure what they meant, okay? And what should have thrown me off was that. The scale of the people he was doing them with was too big unless he was giving something really magical. That's right. I mean, how in God's name would you get Microsoft and all these other people into partnerships unless you were giving them the magic beans? I wanted to believe, right? I liked them, right? And so, anyway, it is what it was.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if there's something about the algorithms that's giving an advantage? And keep in mind, I left in 2009. They don't really do the beginning of all of the stuff that's kind of creepy and...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's going on here? Then a month later, Facebook expelled a company that was scraping data, basically using the API to scrape data about people who are interested in Black Lives Matter. And they were selling it to police departments. I'm going, now they expelled it, right? But the problem is the damage was completely done. These people's civil rights had been trampled upon them going, ooh, that is evil. And they're using the ad tools. And then Brexit happens. The United Kingdom votes to leave the European Union. There was an eight-point swing between the final day polling and the outcome in favor of leave. And leave had been all over Facebook. Remain had not. And Leave had this incredibly incendiary ad campaign. I'm thinking to myself,”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the key thing is it was a series of things that happened. It started with the New Hampshire primary where there were these. Facebook groups ostensibly associated with the campaign of Bernie Sanders. It would be like Bay Area for Bernie and Berners for Bernie and things like that that would have these deeply misogynistic Basically, counterfactual memes about Hillary Clinton. And the thing that caught my eye was that it went from one meme shared by one person one day. Then the next day, a different meme shared by four people. The next day, a different meme shared by 16 people, which told me, because I'd done Facebook groups for Moon Alice, my band, that somebody was paying money to get people into these groups. I'm going I went and looked at the groups, the only thing they were doing with these memes.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had that experience, and my experience with Cheryl, other than the beacon thing, was also flows. I loved them both. I really liked them. I was a cheerleader. And so in 2016, when I start to see things that aren't right.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, you're data sucking. Hang on. You're completely right. I'm just saying, I had a lot of personal interaction with him. I had dozens and dozens of meetings. And he was fantastic with me. And he only asked me about things where he was prepared to take my advice. And so it was from a mentoring point of view. It literally couldn't be better.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My relationship with Mark, he was so high integrity and so high quality, okay? I mean, I really, I don't know that anybody's ever had a better relationship with him than me because I didn't go watch the social network in part because the mark I knew was different from that. And I just said to myself, you know, he was.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go into the stands and I'm a cheerleader, and I love everything. The next signal was Eli Parriser, who was at that time the president of Muvam, does a TED talk about filter bubbles, and he talks about the fact that his Facebook and Google feeds are no longer neutral and that these algorithms are tailoring to what they perceive he likes and they're trying to steer him in a direction. And he warned all of us. And I was gobsmacked. I literally ran up to meet him after the thing. The problem with this whole thing was I just assumed that once he called attention to it, Mark would look at it and go, I don't want to do that. Well, you're laughing, but here's the thing.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you didn't have any accountability at all, then when things went seriously wrong, there would be no way to hold people accountable, no way to stop a problem, nobody would speak up. There would be no incentive. Anyway, I realized it was time for me to step back. I did.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But still, you're irritated. You can be irritated, but Completely. Did you see any of the seeds of these So Beacon was for me changed my whole attitude, and I don't describe it this way in the book because it's a level of detail too far. But for this audience, it's just beacon affected my relationship with Cheryl. And I do describe what she says about it. She talks about being a team and succeeding and failing as a team, which is a philosophy she holds very deeply, and it worked incredibly well in the way up of Facebook. And my point to her was that I fear that whenever something went wrong,”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of say what you think no, no Yeah, it's the same problem we had at Silverlake. I mean, I'm. Basically, there's a certain amount of time you like me, and then after that, you know, I wear up my welcome.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you have, you know, later that year, in 2008, then you've got Beacon. Beacon was this product that Facebook created that basically followed you when you purchased stuff at retail, and then they would post on your Facebook account. And there was this famous story of a poor man who buys an engagement ring. I wrote about it, an overstock at a really deep discount, and Facebook publishes it on his news feed. That is how his fianc ⁇ finds out he's going to propose. Finds out he gets this ring for 27 cents. All of his friends find out he's humiliated. And anyway, Facebook withdrew it after a matter of months. And Cheryl and I had, shall we say, a disagreement philosophically about that. And I realized it was time for me to back off a little bit.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, her initial thought was he's so much younger and his reputation was, you know, the Winklefi, right? And so were you going to do that? And I said to her. Cheryl humor me. His mother is a doctor. He has nothing but sisters. I think he is the rare person in Silicon Valley who can work with a woman. Just take the meeting. I go to Mark. I say, I think you should get Cheryl as your COO. Mark says, well, She's at Google, it's a totally different problem. I'm going, Mark. Give me a thing that's closer to what Facebook's going to be than Google. And I said, and they went from zero to look where they are. I mean, this has got to be relevant. So anyway, it takes like two months, but they finally get together. And once they do, there is a chemistry and it really comes together.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shona was involved too, but go ahead. But my point is it was the all women's team, okay? And they created what was, I mean, the great thing about AdWords was it worked for everyone. There was nothing deceitful about it.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was She was part of a three woman team that had created the monetization in Google. And Ed Wards, I think, is arguably the greatest advertising product ever created.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We buy this little bit of stock, right? And then almost immediately after Cheryl calls me up and says, I'm thinking of leaving Google. I've got an opportunity to get a senior position at the Washington Post. And I go, Cheryl, that is insane. Okay. I mean, Google is killing these guys. Meanwhile, Mark has come to me and saying, I've got to get a different COO. And Lightbulb goes off. And I say to Cheryl, I think you should look at Facebook. And Cheryl goes, oh, come on, now he's 22. This will never work.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this book is written from the perspective of Jimmy Stewart in rear window, right? It's one series of improbable coincidences after another.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, but Bono, no, hang up. Bono was working on the Millennium Debt forgiveness program. Cheryl was the U.S. counterpart. And he wanted to find out who this guy was who was helping the grateful dead with their digital strategy after Jerry Garcia died. And that person happened to be me. And Cheryl laughs because he goes, my brother-in-law works for him. And so, I mean,”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brother in law. Mark Bodnik is the brother in law of Cheryl Sandsberg and was the way that I got to know Schamberg back in 2000, which is how Cheryl was the person who introduced Bono to me. And all of these things are incredibly.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's not even, they aren't even real options, it's this totally synthetic thing, and he needs to do a transaction, he needs to do it quickly. And he comes to me and says, will you do it? And my partners looked at it and said, look, we can't put a thing that's that touchy feely into the fund. But why don't you guys go ahead and do it? So Bono, Mark Bodnik, and I bought this guy's options. And Mark Bodnik.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I help him deal with replacing a bunch of people. I help him deal with the Winklevi, right? He has the whole crisis of that story breaking. And what happens is in the summer of 2007, one of their employees has a life-changing experience and needs to get liquidity, needs to get rid of his options.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no. At the beginning, I did it just because I wanted to meet the kid who was starting the thing I thought was the coolest idea since Google.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Peter Thiel was Peter Thiel, who was the first money into Facebook. And those people, I mean, those people had social relationships with him as well as business. For me, it was just a business thing. And he consulted me on a very specific set of things. But what was weird was at that time, those things were coming up, not every day, but certainly every week. So we were talking a lot. I was at Facebook. Almost every week for a few years”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no. This is the first one. But within six months, I think he has at least two more offers, including a second one from Yahoo. So the key thing was I... helped him understand how to communicate why he wasn't going to do it because he had a golden vote so it was the entire meeting was only half an hour but he invited me to come back To his office, like a couple days later, and that begins a three year period of what I would characterize as mentoring, what others have characterized as mentoring, where I was part of this ecosystem of people he would refer to he would talk to him? Well, the top people, I was in the second tier. The top people would have been Peter Thiel would have been Mark Andreessen and Don Graham. Washington Post.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What he said to me at the time was I asked him, I said, Do you want to sell the company? And he said, I don't want to disappoint everybody. And I said, dude, wrong. That's the wrong. Well, I think his parents and all were involved. And really a billion dollars on a 9 million revenue thing was in those days. Subsequently that became small change.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There has never been an entrepreneur who's had the perfect idea at the perfect time twice. Lots of people have had the perfect idea twice, Steve Jobs being an example. But getting the timing exactly right. That takes unbelievable good luck, and it's never happened twice. I said it won't happen to you. I think Facebook is the single best idea of this decade. If you believe in it, you got to do it.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go, look, if it hasn't already happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo's going to offer a billion dollars for Facebook and everybody you know is going to tell you to take it. They're going to tell you they'll back your next company. It'll be just as successful. You'll have $650 million. You can change the world. And I just want you to know, Mark, I think what you have here is the most important company since Google, and you will eventually be bigger than Google is today. In my mind, that would have been a hundred million users, and I'm thinking that's outrageously big. And I said, here's one thing I know. I've been doing this at that point 24 years.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Mark comes to my office. He's 22. Company's two years old. They have 9 million in sales. No real business model. They're only still high school students and college students. They don't even have newsfeed. But it's already obvious that he has the answer for social. And to me, there were two elements. One was authenticated identity. You had to have an email address from a real thing. The second thing was he actually gave you privacy control because all there was in those days was what you put into it and you could control who saw it. And I thought that MySpace and Friends during all these other things had failed because of a combination of anonymity, which both allows trolls to come in and also makes your network complexity a lot harder. And frankly, just”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's objective, basically a dinosaur? And I go, well, that sounds like me. And he goes, That's why I'm calling. So what are you thinking? Next week, week after, he says, no, how about 1 o'clock this afternoon?”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite yet. Pom comes slightly afterwards. So imagine that it's the spring of 2006. I get an email, maybe early something. I get an email from Chris Kelly, who was the chief privacy officer at Facebook. And I knew Chris just a little bit. And he goes, my boss has got a really serious problem. He needs to talk to somebody who's been around a long time.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By then it was, but you and I first met earlier than that. Anyway, so the long story short is that's 2003 and that's elevation and the following year Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, we've been through a little bit, but I mean, all the way back to you at the Washington Post. And so anyway, that leads us to a journal.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. We'll get to your irritation. I think I'm just annoying. Obviously, I was annoying. But anyway, long story short, I call upon and said, wow, I'm out of the firm. He said, screw them, we'll start our own firm. And so that day, elevation started. And then that is what leads to.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew Bono because Get to elevate. So, anyway, Bonner calls on Pointe and says, Roger, I got a deal for you. And we take it to Silver Lake and they go, we'll do the deal, but we're going to do what Bono, but not with you. And I go, what do you mean? We said, we want you out of here. I go, oh, that's cool.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT