YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Levy

lines on the record: 129
first: 2020-02-24
most recent: 2020-02-24
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

“Personally, I like him. I enjoy talking to him. But I'm clear-eyed about his shortcomings. He's done a fantastic job. He's built a network that's never seen before in history. It's an amazing accomplishment. And in some ways, he's been an amazing CEO and to people on Facebook, an inspiring leader, but he's made huge mistakes. And a lot of people have paid a price for them. So I think that it's very much a mixed bag. And, you know, this book, Facebook, The Inside Story, gives it all.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and her frustrations came out. It got to tears. And she... It's incredibly frustrating with her what's happened there and frustrating that she's culpable to some degree.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. She sort of missed the Barbara Boxer window to run for Senate. And then this other stuff happened. And now, you know, she really has to fix this. Cheryl believes that if you work hard enough, you're always going to get an A+, right? So she wants to work to fix what's going on now. I ran out by her. At one point our interviews were last a half hour, an hour. And I really wanted more because Cheryl's very good at putting up a facade. You've interviewed her a lot of times. You know this. And I felt, I want two hours with Charlotte, really, because the second hour you interview somebody, things happen, right? And she finally granted me two hours. And in the second hour, I ran this theory by her and she actually said that maybe if Clinton had won, she would have taken a job in that administration. She said she didn't want to be president.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and first she promised Mark five years. And the IPO came just sort of towards the end of that. It wasn't time for it to get out. And it was a lousy IPO. And so it wasn't quite time to leave yet. And then very tragically her husband died. And that kept her there. So she sort of missed the war”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark will stay at the company. Cheryl, we haven't talked about her much, but. I'm not so sure. I always have this theory with Sharol that she wanted to get into public office.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't know. Look, my expertise, I told the story. I don't think that Facebook's going to go away in the next two years. I think that for the next two years, I think they'll probably be okay. I think it's the longer-term things that are going to bother Mark.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it can't. It has a harder time innovating at such a size and wasn't the most innovative of all companies comparatively. They're dinged deservedly for borrowing other people's ideas quite a bit of the time. So what do you think is going to happen in the next two years Give me an answer, Stephen Levy.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the way a danger to Facebook would be is forget about breaking up if it just can't buy what's going to be the next challenge, then.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they were ill prepared to deal with it. And it was ironic because even though as young as Mark was, he grew up in a different world. He grew up in a web world, which enabled him to destroy the PC people who came before him. But he was helpless when it came to mobile. He had to be actually taught the mobile way of thinking. And he got that pretty quickly and survived the challenge. And that's why he bought Oculus because he felt, I want to get ahead of the curve and get the next thing. So he believes that he's going to survive the next wave, which will be some sort of abnormal virtual reality thing.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook app. Right. They'd also like Instagram ads, which is interesting. It reminded me quite a bit of the Gates jobs thing. And I think no matter what, someone told me a long time ago, when Jobs died, it was the greatest thinker in tech in the world, like the greatest, most creative person in tech died today. And when Bill Gates died, it was going to be the richest man in the world died today. And he always bothered him. And since he's done philanthropy and everything else, so that will change is the last line when he dies. But it was a jealousy of lack of creativity. But I want to know what, I want to finish up, what do you think is going to happen here? So things just die or not. Like they're big. They're powerful. What can they do? What would you do if he would listen to something you would do? Like they're not inviting me onto that content board anytime soon. What would you do? What would you tell him?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he felt that he wanted originally Instagram operated on its own, but then he wanted Instagram to help Blue, the main Facebook app. And he said, what are you doing for us? And, you know, he slowed Instagram down by piling ads on it. Even so, people like Instagram better than they like Facebook.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's what Mark was afraid of. And one reason, the main reason really the Instagram founders left is that I talked a lot, the Instagram team, is they felt that Mark was actually jealous of Instagram”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the way these companies die is that people find something else they like better. Right, so ultimately it's going to be like the product and what people do, which determines the future of Facebook.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone owned it. Yeah, I agree. But it was. They lift a lot from Snapchat. I always call them. Well, this one was so called Evan Spiegel Facebook's chief product officer because he has such good ideas and they don't. But where does it go? What happens here, especially with regulatory scrutiny, with consumer backlash, even though their numbers continue to be large? There is a feeling like it's not anecdotal. Most people I talk to are frightened of them more than love them. You know, certain people, it's less so with an Uber. They're like, I love the product. It seems kind of hurting the drivers. But I've never, an Amazon same thing. Love the product. They're kind of big. There's not as much acrimony towards a company as this company. It seems like, including in Washington.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no. Their idea was that once the idea came up, it was like a thing which was so fundamental that everyone owned it.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Well, you know, and Acton told me and said, This is my sin. He's doing penance by funding some private messaging service. Yes. But so the idea is get rid of the founders and bring it into Facebook, no more independence, and we're going to be one company. And the action is really going to be on this private messaging. And the money engine is something that they basically stole from Snapchat, the stories thing. And they're big.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah, yeah. But I think the same thing happened with the Instagram founders, the Oculus founders. They were all promised some degree of independence. And this was like a carrot that he gave to them along with the huge evaluations of the companies he spent. He just reached his pocket.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, I had an on the record interview with Brian Acton. And it was very clear that he despises Mark Zuckerberg. I would say that's common.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that one thing, and I sort of noticed this maybe a year into the research around 2017, early 2018, is that they were doing somewhat of a pivot to de-emphasize the newsfeed or move on beyond the news feed to what they're now calling, because Martin quite explicit with it. Private messaging and to merge all the Facebook properties into one closely knit family and part of it was getting rid of all the founders of those companies. Now I get the detail.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you do now as Facebook, and yet you're never done better at Wall Street? Never been, the ad business has never been better, but there are problems everywhere. And then on top of it, you have to keep creating beautiful businesses that people want to use.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's ever forgiven about his early days. No. A rock discussion. No, it's a lot of backwards narrative. There's a lot of backwards narrative going on. But what was interesting about it was the conflation of page and free speech, the muddling of it, the wrapping in this First Amendment thing, and the idea that they're the public square in some way. There's nothing public about this company. It's private and privately run by one person. And so what are they going to do, Stephen? Let's finish up with that. This idea of they're worried about attacks on all sides. They've got some amazing competitors, not so many of the small companies. They're facing regulatory scrutiny, much deserved, as is Google, as is Amazon, and to a lesser extent, Apple and Microsoft, but I think they're probably out of the line of fire. They've got issues around addiction and social anxiety that I think people are going to start very clearly linking them to. I think that's only an area that's going to get bigger.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, he said in that speech that one reason they did Facebook was to give people a chance to express themselves on the Iraq war. Let me tell you, I read every single interview that Mark has ever given about his early days of Facebook. I've talked to him multiple times about myself. No person has brought up a rock discussion. No,”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What has influenced that this free speech paid speech? I literally almost stood up during that speech and said, you need to go back to school if you need to understand what free speech actually is. And I know it's been a big, like this has been an important part of Facebook from the beginning, but it's very haphazard. They make decisions all the time on speech. Right.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the answer is no. Right. Facebook still has maintained. But I think there are certain things that Facebook might be shamed into changing the policy. And my own personal view, and I wrote about this in Wired, is that in terms of the ads thing that you're talking about, where politicians can lie from ads, I think there's actually a chance that they're looking for the oversight board to get them out of that dilemma.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customer. I'm more than a little skeptical about that board. Right. I think that I actually sat in on one of the workshops that they had where they said we listened to all these people. We talked to 2,000 people or whatever it was. And they set up the board. I actually, one thing I am surprised is this. Disputes, these individual cases, but if something happens that Facebook had said, this piece of content should be taken down. And sometimes they go straight up to Mark and Charles, all the really important ones, like the terror of war picture and whether Trump should be censored. That goes up to the top. In this case, the board can absolutely overrule them. The big question is, can the board overrule policy?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oversight board. Oversight board. You know, it could be good. I'm guessing it won't be because they will not get real power to really change things at the company because it's owned and operated by one person. Do you have hopes for that? Do you have hopes several different people have left like Elliot Trigg, who's a tough customer?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I get that. I continue to believe they have not learned their lesson, and I think I'm hoping, you know, I wrote a very positive piece about my book and get the lesson. Yeah, but they won't. The content board, for example, is really interesting.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would come out with Libra, a cryptocurrency, right? This is their closest seeming to come. So basically, in those clashes, you know, if you take things like data, dating in Libra, In those clashes, the impulse to keep going and to keep growing still overwhelms the other stuff. No, I think, and, you know, call me Stockholm syndrome. They have done more to protect users. They have to because they got more oversight now.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, Mark, don't you think it's a little much for everyone's talking about Facebook as a terrible privacy offender to come up with a dating app to get more information about people's dating lives? And he just said, well, you know, we have to move. And then after a few minutes, he returned to it. He said, GD, you think it's a bad idea?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this conflict. So I interviewed him, I think was 2018, right before the F-8, and he told me I was going to spend half his speech talking about how sorry he was for all the things that Facebook had done and how they're going to win the trust back. And the other half is going to say, all the new things we're doing. And one of them was like a dating app. Dating. And I said, Mark.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what you've seen in the last couple years is now that there's this conflict. There's two views there. On one hand, we've got to win the trust back. We've got to win the trust back. On the other hand, they still have the feeling that if we don't keep moving, we're going to be dead. Right? Like they didn't take off some of all the signage in the sun campus when they took it over as a message that all these companies can go away, right? And the mobile experience will go away, by the way.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think they've gotten the message? I think they absolutely haven't gotten the message. They use words like unintended, didn't mean it. To me, so much was so dead frigging obvious that it's exhausting to hear those excuses anymore.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know your conclusions Well, I think you could find it just as any storyteller that gives his or her view of a subject from the story itself. Clearly, this effort to connect the world had turned out to have huge problems that were unanticipated, in some cases, you know, when the warning signs came up, they just went straight past them, straight past the barriers. Certainly it was unknown what would happen there. Let's face it, look, the world is like a mean, evil place in sharing doesn't make people better necessarily. And this is something that I think it took a long time for Facebook even to admit that that's a possibility.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, or maybe I'm missing it. Well, from an engineering sense, they've calculated, hmm, yeah, people, you know, we've done some wrong things. Mistake. We must fix these things. I guess the larger is, what's fundamentally wrong with Facebook that these things sprang up? Tell me. And that's what...”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he cut him off. You couldn't get their buses either. So talk about that. Am I wrong in that it's now solidified into a very stubborn, we're not wrong kind of thing? Well, look, maybe I'm missing it.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complaining and Tim doesn't give him an inch because of something really egregious that Facebook did by they had this, quote, privacy app, which actually was a spyware app. Yeah, he cut them off. Yeah, they cut him off. And it literally happened during the day that they were announcing great earnings. It was like a godfather split-screen situation on one hand. We're saying we're making all this money. And on the other hand, people of Facebook couldn't work on new products because Apple cut off the internal app.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, Mark does try to convince Tim Cook of otherwise. He has gone to Tim Cook. And I report this in the book and complaining about Tim's criticisms of him.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, Zuckerberg. The responsive Facebook, instead of saying, wow, one of the most important figures in the industry who's had such accomplishments really has, maybe I should call them and have lunch with him, was to attack him. And I was noticing the talking points when he was speaking in front of Congress were all anti-Apple, which I was sort of like, that's what you took away from what he said. Like that really, this idea of victimization, of being attacked, and we are misunderstood. Maybe I'm missing something.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Stephen Levy. He's written a book called Facebook, The Inside Story. He's a well known technology journalist. I've known him for many years. Have the critics piled on too much? I am one of them. And I still find the company to be very obstreperous about what it's doing. And I think the most recent two examples I would use would be Mark's speech at George Showman, which I attended around free speech. And his persistent feeling of victimization, this I'm going to be what I want now. I'm like, you've always done what you want. Like that was to me this recent speech. I'm going to be honest because everyone just hates us anyway. One of the, what's interesting is when you see people at Google or other companies, they have some, even if it's false, it's a sense of like, oh, okay, like, okay. And one of the things that I found really striking and then I'd love you to answer this is when I did an interview with Tim Cook about this, when I said, what would you do if you were Mark Zuckerberg? He said, I wouldn't be in his position, which was a dick.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the head of policy. But he had to leap the fence and write to Marx people, to people, product people like Chris Cox, and saying, hey, this is happening here before, and this is after the election. They'd even take a big crisis meeting about the fake news on Facebook.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he gave away the oversight to Cheryl on that point. And in order for some of the things. Had to sort of leap the fence. He reported to the general counsel who reported to Cheryl But he wasn't, I guess reported then to Elliott who reported to Cheryl.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happened because the rush forward. They weren't watching that. It was a complicated, perfect storm that led to the stuff being ignored that was Cheryl's side of the company. And for a period, Cheryl was not there 100%. She was quite understandably grieving the loss of her husband. She turned over a lot of the operating on her side. She pushes back on this to the people running it. Some of them were according to some people who work with them, very sensitive to the Republican side of the election. And things went on and weren't stopped when they could have been identified sooner. And now Facebook admits that. But at the time, they could have done better.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You see, I guess maybe this is where my stockhold syndrome would kick in. But I don't believe that they don't care. I think that they are blinded by the competitive side, by moving fast. And that's what led them to this. During the Russian thing, when it came that they were exploited and pawned by Russia during the election, when that stuff came out, I talked to any number of people who said they were sick to their stomachs when they saw what happened on the platform.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With All right, you wrote that virtually every problem that Facebook confronted during its post election woes have been a consequence of two things, the unprecedented nature of the mission to connect the world and the consequences of the reckless haste to do so. I think you would add another one, which is a lack of ability to understand consequences or to care about them. I've now come around to they don't care about them more than they couldn't see them, because I think one of the excuses early on was, oh, we didn't, how could we have known that? That's their excuse. And I'm like, because you're an adult and a smart person and you can, everyone understands consequences if I do this, then this.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and when it happened, they had to scramble, right? So these things move fast and break things was originally a term to refer to writing code, dealing with the infrastructure, the idea that with the web you could pull out, push out multiple versions of Facebook in the same day. And if you crash the program, it was like a badge of honor among the engineers to cratch the site for a little while and then they bring it back up. But it came to be done as the way they moved in a policy sense, the way they moved as a company. So that metaphor of doing that on the code really characterized the way the company moved in general.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I talk to the people who did Facebook Live, and it wasn't until really like late in the process that even someone said, well, what if people commit suicide on this? They called me.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, what happened was that the things that Mark wasn't interested in were policy things, the things that preserving privacy, what was the things that the content on Facebook and places around the world was causing terrible things to happen, people were getting killed in riots in the extreme. And it wasn't like Facebook wasn't being warned. I talked to people who warned Facebook. Marie Russell, who Marie Russell you've spoken to, she told Facebook what was happening in the Philippines. And they sort of brusted it over. They went to Myanmar without anyone who could speak Burmese.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, is this a good thing or a bad thing from doing this book, spending so much time for him? And then the next part I want to talk about where it's all going, is this a good thing or a bad thing from your perspective?”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I mean on one side? Right, but it is startling when you walk the walls and you've been there to see these posters out there. And they are all in some way channeling Mark. And I talked to Molly Graham, Don Graham's daughter who worked there. And it was her job at one point to sort of codify the Facebook values. And she just said, all I had to do is look at Mark and see what Mark was saying.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I saw it, I was like, oh dear, this is a problem. Or maybe not. You know what I mean? On one side, it's good because you can control everything on the other side. They're not going to see it coming.”
2020-02-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Steven Levy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT