Behind the Bastards - Part One: Mark Zuckerberg: The Worst Person of the 21st Century (So Far)

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg Is A Much, Much Worse Person Than You’d Guess. In Episode 43, Robert is joined by Maggie Mae Fish and Jamie Loftus to discuss Zuckerberg's rise in the tech world and what makes him a huge bastard.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends! I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards. The show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And today we're talking about a man who I truly believe is the worst person of the 21st century. Now, by the end of this episode, you'll either agree with me or you won't, but to join me on this journey, this odyssey, this epic quest are two of my very favorite people, Jamie Loftus and Maggie Mayfish. Jamie, you are...

You guys, you guys should introduce yourself. Very quiet. That was breathier than I was intending for the end. It was marvelous. I had to copy it. Yeah, the ASMR crowd's really going to appreciate that one. I can't maintain sexy baby for what appears to be the length of this episode. It's okay. You know what else they're going to appreciate? That was a beautiful crunch! A Doritos corn-based snack.

I better try one myself from our party size bag. We've got both blaze and nacho cheese. I have never tried blaze. I'm honestly too weak for blaze and I know it. You know, it's been a while since we talked about Doritos on the show. And for no reason that I'm willing to talk about right now, we're back into them, baby. So Doritos will be accompanying us through this journey into the heart of Markness. I love that moisture-sucking dust.

It really distracted everyone from my terrible Mark Zuckerberg story. Yeah, I did skip right over that. That's the beauty of Doritos. We can only let two more fly, unfortunately. He really blew one right at the top. Even with Doritos, nature's sin remover? I could be one over with additional Doritos. You're weak, Jamie. You're weak.

That's your forget-me-now. It's the world's forget-me-now. Rufi, you're shame with Doritos corn-based snacks. Anyway, let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg. Great transition. Speaking of marketing bad ideas, Mark Zuckerberg. That was your second. You all ready?

Yeah. Let's get into it. In the year of our lord, 2017, I made three trips into the Iraqi city of Mosul. It was, at that point, still partly occupied by ISIS, who the locals just called Dosh. I spent many hours huddled in small rooms with groups of Iraqi federal police and special operations guys. We were all hunkered down, listening for the telltale hum of Dosh's drones, which they used as spotters for their mortar teams. Now, here's the thing about being in a dangerous place like that.

After a few hours of tense anxiety, you start to get bored, and the mobile internet in Mosul was actually pretty good, surprisingly good, better than it is in Los Angeles sometimes. So, periodically, when I should have been doing literally anything else, I would whip out my phone and check Facebook. I remember one time in particular, I was embedded with a small unit of guys from the Iraqi 9th Federal Police Battalion. Things were exploding about a football field away from us, and I was Facebooking. A bomb went off nearby, and I looked up from my smartphone and realized that everyone in the room, my Kurdish fixers, my wife slash photographer, the six soldiers we were chilling with,

all of them were browsing Facebook. 100% of the room was on Facebook. Now, I'm telling you this story because I want to start this week's podcast about Mark Zuckerberg by acknowledging his genius. I'm about to spend about four hours tearing him apart as a human being, but in my opinion, he is undeniably a brilliant man. Anyone who builds something so universally desired and used has a kind of brilliance, and Facebook is objectively brilliant in the same way that, say, heroin is brilliant. So, that's my little intro.

I like it. Thank you. Let's get into this shit. A lot of digital ink has been spilled in the last few years about the sundry negative impacts Facebook has had on our society and world. I want to make it clear off the bat that while this will certainly be a part of the podcast, I tend to view Facebook as a tool and this more or less morally neutral on its own. Our goal here is not to attack the social network as a concept or make you feel bad about using it. I haven't deleted my Facebook. It's how I talk to my family. Yeah, that's how I keep an eye on my mom's confusing internet presence.

Yeah, a lot of parents sharing a lot of fake news about scary things. My mom likes memes. Oh, no. I'm sorry. That was a meme head. You know, when we were all just sharing goatsie around ourselves, I never thought my parents would wind up in that same bag, but with something even grosser. My mom started doing this thing where she'll change her profile picture to a llama, and it's some old person joke that I don't understand, and she can't explain it to me.

We do it on Facebook, and so it's like, why? Oh, the boomer of Italian. Okay. So our goal is not to focus on Facebook, but its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who, as I stated at the top, I come to believe is one of the very worst people alive on this planet. I agree. Yeah, I do agree. He's usually depicted as like a robot, like that's the way a lot of descriptions of him will take,

and I think that's unfair. I think it's unfair, and I think it's calculated. Yeah, and it allows him to get away with this shit by being like, no, I'm just awkward and weird. Yeah, I just don't get your human emotions. No, no, no Mark Zuckerberg. No, no, no, no, no, no. You get it. You get it.

So, Mark Elliott Zuckerberg was born on May 14th, 1984, in White Plains, New York. For all you astrology heads out there, I crunch the numbers. He's a Taurus, Sun, Scorpio, Moon, Virgo, Ascending. Kill him! Kill him. No, no. Kill him. chart, I think, telling and powerfully erotic chart. Now, Mark's father, Edward, is a dentist.

His mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist, but gave up her career to manage her husband's business and raise their four children, Mark, Randy, Donna, and Ariel. The business was run out of their house in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Elliott Zuckerberg went by painless Dr. Z, and his motto was, we cater to cowards. It's a good dentist motto, right? Yeah, it's pretty good. It's a little hardcore for me. I don't know if that would be the dentist's say, geez. Cowards, no, I want the dentist who fucks me up. My dentist name as a child was Dr. Pagenis, and it was still in her hands. Pagenis the dentist? He would have to say hi to Dr. Pagenis. Oh my God, Pagenis the dentist. I mean, he

must have never had a choice of what he was going to do in his life. Stay tuned next week for the surely exciting episode on Dr. Pagenis the dentist. Don't know anything else about him, but I'm sure there's an hour of content in there. So Mark grew up comfortable, shall we say? Not fuck the world rich, but very well off. Edward was a techie guy, and he trained his son in how to use the basic computer language on a natari. In 1996, when Mark was 12, his dad mentioned that he wanted a better way for his receptionist to inform him when a new patient had arrived. Mark used his coding knowledge to build a program called Zucknet. Oh, I was swallowing water during that. This is where it starts. This is where it starts.

This is where it starts into his view of the world, which is him. Yeah, him. Yeah, no point for originality on the name. No, Zucknet. And just as a heads up, I had to type Mark Zuckerberg a lot on this podcast, and I've come up with a lot of nicknames for him. None of them are good. May we rank them? Yes, please. Oh yeah, I'm going to give a power ranking going. These are not clever nicknames. I'm just going to state that off the bat. Zucknet has been described as a primitive version of AOL Instant Messenger. The receptionist was able to use it to ping Ed and members of the Zuckerberg family soon took to messaging each other with it too. Once the young Mark had his family addicted to the program, he

started fucking with them. Here's the New Yorker quote, one evening while Donna was working in her room downstairs, a screen popped up. The computer contained a deadly virus and would blow up in 30 seconds. As the machine counted down, Donna ran up the stairs shouting, Mark. Right now we're still in the zone where I'm like, that could be a fun prank. Could it be a fun prank? It could be a cute little proto hacker. Sure. I mean, not to fast forward, but it seems like he has never grows up. It does seem like he never grows up. Yeah, he's cheating on his final exam via Facebook. Yeah, you can't blame him for this yet, but given everything else, it's kind of telling. Because he can't grow a beard, you know? There's

a lot going on. He never considered that actually. He's even worse at growing a beard than Ted Cruz. Yeah. Yeah. Very smooth face. And that's the shame because after a shame like Facebook went through with the 2016 election, you would expect him to drop out of public life for a while and then come back with a beard and launch a new product. Maybe that's what he wanted to do. Yeah. But he can't. He's just like, well, I guess I'll go listen to people. With a smooth, droopy face. He didn't have a beard to wipe his sins away. And he didn't know that the delicious taste of nacho cheese Doritos could have done that job for him. Wow. What a shame. What a heartbreak. Now, We Mark's Brilliance was not all the

result of autodidactic study. When he was 11, his parents started paying for a computer tutor to help him develop his skills. A computer tutor. They had computer tutor money in the 90s. Puder tutor. Puder tutor. Good old fashioned Puder tutor. This Puder tutor did describe Mark as a prodigy. I'm sure he was. One of Mark's favorite childhood hobbies was to invite his artist friends over to the house, have them draw things, and then Mark would code video games based on the drawings. Cool. Need hobby. A try hard friend. I'm sure those were great parties. Everybody drinking way too much Mountain Dew good times. Yeah. For years, I only had a pool to offer for friendship. So I would tell the cool girls all like, you

could come swim in my pool and then they would and then they would leave. And then they might need it anywhere else. No. Yeah. We should have learned how to code. Oh, damn it. Yeah, then you'd have been raking in the friends. That's what it's all about. Now, being a precocious rich kid, Mark Zuckerberg's parents shelled out the big bucks to get him enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy for high school. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of strong opinions on it. Oh, I'm excited to hear them. For some reference, Exeter currently cost its boarding student somewhere around $46,000 a year. So Mark's parents spent roughly the annual income of an average American family on their son's high school education. Everyone who goes to

Exeter is a certified showed. You will not change your opinion of that. I've encountered so many. Now, Exeter, if you want to sponsor the show, why would be my question? We'll take your chode money. Yeah. But that would be very surprising. I mean, they would have to eat Doritos and then they would be changed forever to become good people. Yeah. Like in a 90s commercial, you bite it and then suddenly you're on a skateboard. That's what Exeter needs. Now, while Mark was at Exeter, he fell in love with fencing. I did two right around the same time. So let's not have any fencing jokes. Oh, you see how my mouth opened and then it closed? I know, I know. You're welcome. Thank you. She was five ready to

go in her mouth. I watched the joke fire back into her brain. Now, Zucky Boy did well in most of his classes, but his strength continued to be programming. At Exeter, he built a program called Synapse, which was essentially a primitive precursor to Pandora. AOL and Microsoft reportedly offered to buy the software from him and he turned them down. When he wound up in college, one of the stories people told about him is that he was the kid who turned down a million dollars from Microsoft. He doesn't care about the money. It's not about the money. Yeah. The Accidental Billionaires, the book that was the basis for the social network, makes a huge deal about him turning down the money. I think that title says a lot. The accidental

whoopsies. I think it's easier to understand. Like Mark's dad was rich as shit. He was paying $46,000 a year for his kids college. Mark's never worried about money a day in his life. So why would he give a big shit about a million dollars? He doesn't mean anything. He doesn't mean anything. It's not a clout. His mom doesn't have diabetes and can't afford her medication and stuff, which most kids, you get offered a million dollars and that because you're greedy, it's like, yeah, that'll change my family's life. But this wouldn't make really much of a debt. No, thank you. He'll go to Harvard either way. Fuck it. Yeah, he's still rich. I hate rich people so much. My deepest fear is rich people and I'm coming to terms

with that. It's totally reasonable fear. My deepest fear and my deepest resentment. It's not resentment because I don't want to be rich. I wouldn't myself and my friends not be scared about our lack of healthcare. I want that, but I don't want Mark Zuckerberg money. I just don't want anyone else to have Mark Zuckerberg money. I don't want anyone to have any money, but he's giving his money away. Also, no, he's not. Several of my notes dig into the quote unquote charity, not charity LLC work. A rich person's charity that's not a real charity. Guys, he's an accidental billionaire. Come a break. Well, it is very odd to have someone who is creating the housing crisis in San Francisco while also using a fake

charity to pretend to help the problem. I feel like the CEO of Salesforce is the only rich guy in San Francisco who's not full of shit about that and is like, no, we've created a problem. We should probably pay taxes to fix it. But anyway, Salesforce. I was like, why a real Salesforce stan over here? I know he's the only billionaire in San Francisco who came out in favor of the tax hike. Whatever, you get a point. I still don't think you should be a billionaire, but at least you're not on the wrong side of that issue. Now, Mark Zuckerberg graduated from high school and was accepted by Harvard. He joined the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, which is a Jewish fraternity, and met his now wife Priscilla Chan at one of their parties.

We started talking at a line to the bathroom. She later recalled to the New Yorker quote, he was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there. I remember he had these beer glasses that said pound include beer.h. It's a tag for C plus plus. It's like college humor, but with a nerdy computer science appeal. He was unfuckable, but it was clear that he'd be rich. It's like Priscilla, I can read between these ones. Mark could not because he had those glasses with shit typed on them. Now, Zuck quickly made a name for himself at Harvard, and that's what he prefers people to call him, Zuck. Is that his preferred nominator? That's what his buddies call him. That is a friend name. Harvard frats are not even, they're boring. The X and O billionaires

talks a lot about the Harvard frats, the final clubs and shut. I'm not going to get into that much because it's just so frustrating to talk about. The short story is call me back when you're an MIT frat. They program their own lit floors. And sometimes kill themselves doing nitrous oxide. Very true. Pretty cool. Okay, so he quickly made a name for himself at Harvard. People, of course, talked about the fact that he'd turned down a million dollars. They also talked about course match, a program he built during the first week of his sophomore year. It allowed students picking classes to see what classes their other classmates had picked. Now that sounds innocuous, right? Nothing inherently bad about that idea,

but its real purpose was to allow guys to figure out which classes the hot girls were registered in so that they could pick the same classes. Mark Zuckerberg's life does not pass the Bechtel test. Come chase me, Zuck. Zucky Zuck. Mark's next groundbreaking achievement was face smash. The accidental billionaires describes it as, quote, a website where you compared two pictures of undergraduate girls voted on which was hotter than watched as some complex algorithms calculated who were the hottest chicks on campus. Wow. Good, good, good. Once you're in the top school in the country. You really got that. Yeah, it's good to know whether you are hot or if you are hot. Well, it's glad you still get to be, you know, objectified. Well, it's fair Harvard,

not homely Harvard. True. Yeah, there was a day at Northwestern where they had one of these, like two or three days. There was one, yeah, there was briefly one at my college as well, and it was quickly shut down. Yeah. But make no mistake, I tried to figure out what my ranking was. I don't think I was on the site. I did look for my site. I also wasn't. And I cried about that. I was like, I'm not even hot enough to register on the site. I don't know if my college had one, but I was not sober enough in freshman and sophomore year to use the computer, which makes me a feminist icon. Your life passes the back door. Fantastic. You're too drunk to be a misogynist. Hot dogs. Okay. Now, the pictures on face mesh came from the Harvard Facebooks.

Now, the Harvard Facebooks were databases that each residence hall kept on the students who lived there. Most of these Facebooks were private and only accessible to people in that residence unit. Now, young Mark Zuckerberg kept a blog. And because of that, we actually have a rather deep insight into what he was thinking while he programmed face mesh. So I'm going to read out young zuckity, zuck, zuck, a zuckaloo. That was bad. But I'm going to type young Mark Zuckerbergs. Thank you. Yeah, one of those shame Doritos. Fantastic. All right. Here's Mark Zuckerberg talking about face mesh. 948 PM. I'm a little intoxicated, not going to lie. So what if it's not even 10 PM and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland Facebook is open on my computer

desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. 1109 PM. Yeah, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing. You can't ever really be sure with farm animals. But I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very tearing feel since people's rating of the pictures will be more implicit than say, choosing a number to represent each person's hotness like they do on hot or not.com. The other thing we're going to need is a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn't keep a public centralized Facebook. So I'm going to have to get all the images from

the individual houses that people are in. And that means no freshman pictures. Drat. You can like hear him petting a cat villainously. It's also funny because the way you read that, I think it's probably more attuned to how he was actually feeling. His internal monologue. Yeah. As opposed to in the film where they choose a sort of Rayman type style. They were very gently put. The movie is total bullshit. But like, yeah, it sounds like he took like a swig of off brand vodka. I think he was drinking. Mr. Boston. It was some sort of shitty beer. It was like not good beer, but not terrible beer. It was nicer than Budweiser because he's a rich kid. No, it was some weird East Coast thing, but it wasn't Yingling. Loser. Loser. I'm not disagreeing with

you there. Man, I feel like the only other way that Andrew could end would be like, also I came up with this idea called incels. I also founded another type of idea. Just going to seed the world with these ideas. Now, I do want to note that I don't think the no freshman pictures line is creepy the way Zuckerberg uses it, because I do think that he is fundamentally the kind of guy who would be bugged by building his creepy wank site off of an incomplete data set. Yeah, I suspect that's really what's going on. Yeah. He's like, I don't have all the pictures. So we are going to get into how Mark Zuckerberg got all of the pictures that he used for his creepy wank site. No. Has a hand. He stole them. Wow. What another theme. But first, I took him on a sidekick.

But first, Maggie, you a fan of products? Robert. Jamie, how do you feel about services? I live to consume. Oh, let's all first consume a delightful Dorito. Oh my God, that's so good. And then let's consume these other fine products and services that have paid us. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some

pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that

it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. We just had a quick little Dorito break while we appreciated all of the many bountiful blessings of capitalism. And now we're talking

about how Mark Zuckerberg got all of the pictures for his creepy wank site. Now, the very sensible, super reasonable privacy rules Harvard University had established to protect the pictures and data of its students were getting in the way of something Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do. It's in the way. It's in the way. It's something I want. I want to do this. He was left with only one option. Only one option. Break into those residence halls and steal the data. Now, Ben Mesrich, the bad writer of The Accidental Billionaires, suspects that that's exactly what Mark did. And typically overwrought, overwritten fashion, Mesrich envisions Mark sneaking into the residence halls like a teenage 20 version of Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible.

He admits that this is totally theoretical, but he imagines a couple fucking in the room while Mark is stealing the data like and he's hiding from them and stuff. It's super weird. It's a weird fanfic about a dorky 18 year old. He was writing it so that the Aaron Sorkin movie would be exciting. Like he was handing off literally handing off chapters to Sorkin as he finished it. Sorkin also a jode. Well, it's like when all these people believe in the inherent genius and we should praise really, really a wild circle jerk taking place here. Yeah, and Fincher and it's a perfect storm of people who are looking down on others. People who are self mythologized. Yeah, it's a lot of people who are really good at one thing and no better than

anyone else at 99 percent of things, but think they're really good at everything because they're really good at one thing. It's why engineers make up most terrorists. Wow. Yeah. That's true. Look it up. I do want to say my biggest takeaway is that Zuckerberg is smart at one thing and is incredibly stupid at everything else. Like every other person. Every other person on the planet. But like your plumber doesn't get on errors about his ability to fix a smart watch or launch a social network. He knows, no, I'm fine and everything else. I'm really good at plumbing. That's great. That's how the world works. They don't try to run for president. Yeah, I'm good at this job. I would be terrible at fighting fires. For some reason,

I'm looking at Marga Zuckerberg merch right now. I was like, I want to get a shirt with him. We'll come up with a shirt idea in this podcast. I do have in the shirt we're coming out with Hindenburg the oligarchy. Oh, okay. He's going to be one of the guys on the flaming Hindenburg. Hot plot. Right. Hashtag Hindenburg the oligarchy, everybody. They all died on blimps. We wouldn't have these problems. Very true. So I did not find the accidental billionaires to be an enjoyable read, but I have to say, I think a lot of what mes rich posits, uh, including most of this is quite plausible. I doubt anyone was fucking in the room, but the idea that Mark was basically breaking

into these residence halls to steal pictures, he got the picture somehow. That seems plausible. Yeah. I broke into a residence hall and stole several air conditioners. So not that hard. You can't just drop that. Did you need the air conditioners yourself or were you fencing them for dope? To me, I felt like I needed it. I was really hot. Ironically, broke into a bunch of Boston campuses that weren't mine, my freshman year of high school, because I was hired for the street team of the social network. So I snuck onto Harvard grounds to put up posters to be like, I heard of this movie. Heard of this movie? Make like $20. Wow. Yeah. That is a deep connection.

That is a really deep connection. I still have a mouse pad. Fantastic. You have, you have like merch. You have, I just want more. Yeah. So, uh, however he did it, Mark managed to steal all the pictures he needed to build his stupid hot or not clone. Here's what he wrote on his blog before taking it live. Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools, maybe even ones with good-looking people. But one thing is certain and it's that I'm a jerk for making this site.

Oh well, someone had to do it eventually. Will we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes. Wow. During this, he realizes that he is not a catch. I will say in fairness, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg ever had illusions about that. He didn't even need to feel like he had to write it down at any point. That's a given. He's like, what does that say? I really gotta become a billionaire. Yeah, it's urgent.

Zuckerberg launched the program and gave the URL to a handful of friends and some kids he wanted to impress. According to Mesrich, face-mash went viral without Zuck really intending for that to happen. In the first two hours, the site logged 22,000 votes. Now, that was only by like 400-some-odd students, so everyone on Harvard sounds kind of gross in fairness. Mark shut it down as soon as he realized it had gotten way, way more popular than he'd intended, but the damage was done. He was hauled in front of Harvard's deans to explain himself. He admitted he'd done a bad thing, but argued that he'd also helped expose security flaws in Harvard's systems, and he offered to help fix those flaws.

That's the rock star moment in the film. Yeah, that's how Mesrich presents it. He also states that Mark's social awkwardness and his confusion was his greatest defense, that the deans had realized he wasn't really a bad kid. Yeah, I'm going to read a little selection from that. He's just awkward. Yeah, and don't you feel bad for him. He's just actually... He wants to have sex with him.

Yeah, actually, that's Rashida Jones's, the purpose of her character in the screenplay, is to make sure that we still like him. I mean, like... Right, because Rashida Jones, like, asterisk looks at Jesse Eisenberg sympathetically. Yeah, and that like... Dun, dun, dun. Music plays in the background every time.

I think I actually found a Mark Zuckerberg shirt that I wanted. I'm going to read a clip from that chunk of accidental billionaires that describes that scene you guys are just going over, because I think it's actually grosser. The gathered deans had looked at him and listened to his stilted affectation, and they had realized that Mark wasn't really a bad kid. He just didn't think the same way other kids did. He hadn't realized that girls were going to get mad because guys were voting on their appearance. Hell, Mark and Eduardo and probably every other college guy in the world

had been ranking female classmates in terms of hotness since the dawn of structured education. Eduardo was pretty sure that someday some paleontologist would find a cave drawing ranking Neanderthal girls. It was simply human nature. No, it's not. That's... No, it's not. Treating people like a rotten tomato score is not inherent human nature.

Well, what was the first time you remember being, like, rated by someone in school? Minus fourth grade. Yeah, middle school. I remember there was a large period in my life where I was not hot, and then, like, when I became okay-looking was when someone stuck a sticker on my butt. Yeah, it was a spicy sticker from the spicy sandwiches at lunch. Oh, my God. That was my first, like, someone finds me trusted.

Yeah, but someone had to just stick a chicken sticker on you. But I remember there was, like, a hard copy circulating my fourth grade class, and it would change throughout the years. So there was, like, erase remarks. It is a real thing that people will always do forever, but empowering it in any way, and making it easier to do. I don't know that people will always do it forever. I think that boys...

Because I can tell you, I did it as, like, a teenage boy, and I did it because I grew up with media that did it too, with, like, magazines and stuff. Yeah, very true. Like, I didn't just come up with, in my head, like, oh, what if we ranked girls on a 10-point system? Like, I saw that and read that and showed on the internet, and then I did it. Face mash was something of a disaster on the surface,

but it earned Mark the attention of the Winklevoss twins. Two young rich kids who liked rowing boats and had come up with the brilliant idea of creating an app called the Harvard Connection. I think the Winklevoss twins are cute. They are objectively cute. I think they're cute. They're objectively good-looking guys.

And I used to try to play a character that was the third Winklevoss twin. He is, like, their spare tire. His name was Tripp. Tripp? Yeah, it would be Tripp. He's Tripp. He had sex with a car. I refuse to believe that both Winklevoss twins have not also had sex with cars. They haven't have money they could have bought kit from Knight Rider.

That's true. The Bitcoin brothers. Yeah, they're hot. They're hot. They're hot. And they row. No wonder Mark hated them. Yeah.

They're hot. It's the revenge of the nerd's, uh, you know, story. Yeah, a classic feminist text. It's the revenge of the nerds. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah, there was another movie. I liked it as a teenage boy.

And then watch as an adult and was like, is that, that's rape. There is rape. That's for sure rape. Yeah, for sure. Fun film. Now, um, the idea of the Harvard connection, the site the Winklevosses wanted to make, was basically a site where, uh, they wanted a site where cool guys in college could meet girls without having to meet them in person.

There was something called the fuck bus that would ferry girls from other colleges to Harvard. That's what they called it, the fuck bus. But they thought that was inefficient and wasted time. And they wanted a faster way to meet people to fuck. And that was the idea behind the Harvard connection. Now, the Winklevosses couldn't actually code. They were just rich guys with an idea for a fuck site. Mark Zuckerberg came into the picture.

Robert language. What else do you call it? And I got nothing wrong with a fuck site. If it's Gallitarian. Like Tinder, Tinder was just created so that everybody could fuck. But a site just so that rich guys can meet girls to fuck, that's gross. A site for everyone to fuck, whatever.

I got nothing wrong. I mean, it's true because it's like, it's like a selected few getting a certain like resource. Yeah. The specific idea that like, we're just so busy rowing boats and going to school. What if we had a fuck site? What if we had a fuck site? What if we had a fuck site?

A lot of rowing boats. I love going to school. If a man can row a boat, he can, I'm not going to finish that. I throw a bottle at a Harvard rower once from the bridge. In my defense, I was drunk at 8 AM. Oh, Jamie, I, oh, you can't know how proud I am with you knowing that. They look so stupid. But it's super proud.

So the Winklevosses didn't actually know how to code, which is where Mark Zuckerberg came into the picture. He initially agreed to help them with the project and for a while he emailed back and forth with them. But as time went on, it slowly became clear that Mark had no intention of actually working on their project. He was just stringing the Winklevoss twins along while he worked on his own project titled The Facebook.

Savage. Now, the Facebook was minus a few features, the social network we all know and gradually accept the existence of today. Mark did not start it on his own. At the very beginning, the ground floor level, he worked with a dude named Eduardo Saverin. Now, Saverin was a fellow Harvard student and one of young Zuck's few good friends at the school. He came from a rich family and he made like $300,000 the year before with a series of

clever investments. Mark needed Eduardo's cash to get his idea for the Facebook off the ground. The original agreement was that Eduardo would be the Facebook's business manager while Mark would handle the coding. Eduardo put in the first thousand dollars necessary to get Facebook off the ground by servers and all that stuff. With the money taken care of for now, Mark Zuckerberg was free to build the website of his dreams.

While the Facebook of today looks a lot different from the fuck focused Harvard connection website the Winklevoss twins thought Mark was building for them, the original design for the Facebook had an awful lot in common with that idea. Here's how the accidental billionaires describe the initial layout of the site. There was a picture near the top, whatever picture you wanted to add, then a list of attributes on the right side. Year you were in college, your major, your high school where you came from, clubs you were a member of, a favorite quote, and then a list of friends, people you could add yourself

or invite to join, a poke application that allowed you to poke other people's profiles so I don't even know if you were checking them out. And in big letters, your sex, what you were looking for, your relationship status, and what you were interested in. So, while Mark's vision was seemingly more complete than the Winklevoss's idea for Harvard connection, it came down to the same basic goal, getting people, namely Mark Zuckerberg, laid quote, the thing that would drive this social network was the same thing that drove life at college, sex.

The accidental billionaires is a fun book, yeah. Wow. So, but I don't think he's wrong about that. I think he's, I think he's nailing what these kids were going for. They wanted to fucksite. Congrats to everyone who was in sex in college. Yeah, I should be like, what, like, I like, I guess, like, naive is the wrong word, but I like really didn't think about sex at all until much later in my life.

I was like engaged to be married in the military in college. I was chilling. No, I don't think that. I'll forget. There's so many things I could have done. No one I knew was fucking. Yeah, me either, really, I guess. Man.

Man. Yeah. However, it's like, can't relate. It's impossible to be an 18 to 20 year old male and not be thinking about that way too much. Yeah, fair. Like, not that the focus of our media doesn't make it worse, but like, you know, your hormones as a man, like, that's when things are going fucking wild. People be horny.

People be horny. I lost my virginity to a woman, actually, now that I think about it. Brontologically. Yeah, hell yeah. Now, I could go on for a while about the juvenile nature of Facebook and his founding. They chose to hire their first wave of coders based on the results of a drinking contest, but I feel like they'll be counterproductive. Y'all get the point.

Mark Zuckerberg was a gross young adult when he first started his social network. It has gross DNA, but none of us are at our best when we're college sophomores. I hope most of you didn't do anything as nasty as steal thousands of people's data, so you could rate girls based on whether or not they were hotter than literal cows, but we all do shit that we aren't proud of at that age. I would not be declaring Mark a bastard purely on the fact that he was a sick horny nerd in college. When I was 18, I drank so much that I vomited on three separate strangers at the same party.

Three separate occasions. When I was 19, my friends and I brewed up 30 gallons of trash cider and got a crowd of strangers so drunk that one person vomited off the fourth-story balcony of the Dallas Sheraton onto a restaurant full of people. My friends and I gleefully heckled the patrons as they ran for cover. There were umbrellas on the tables, and I remember my friends shouting, those umbrellas won't save you! So, let it never be said that Behind the Bastards is a show that judges people just

for doing dumb shit when they were young. I was a shitty young person, too. Uh-huh. It's okay, test your boundaries. Test your boundaries. It's fine if you were. And if Mark Zuckerberg had changed as a human being after this, I would not be judging him based on the fact that he wanted to make a fucksite when he was 19.

That's really what is so disappointing is that it comes from such a normal play. Totally normal. It's pretty normal. It's pretty mundane. It's a pretty common place. And given the context of the time it's in, none of this was shockingly misogynistic or anything like that. Kind of like we're not woke cultured.

He's not worse. He's not like, there were definitely kids in fucking Harvard and stuff who were date raping people. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't doing that. I've never heard any accusations of anything like that. Like, he was just a normal background noise level misogynistic for the time. Horny hacker. Horny hacker.

Horny hacker. So let's get on to why he's really a bastard. I'm going to brush over most of the founding of Facebook and the sundry drunken parties that the accidental billionaires makes a big deal about. The winkle bosses are hot, et cetera. Super hot. Et cetera, et cetera. Ab's like a goddamn cheese grater.

Both of them. Yeah. The short part of it is Mark and Eduardo met a guy named Sean Parker, the Napster founder. Justin Timberlake? No. Justin Timberlake. Kind of looks like him, though. Yeah.

Justin Timberlake. At that point. Oh, right, in the movie. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean Timberlake, you know. He's a good man to have play Sean Parker. They kind of look alike.

He did great. The moment, oh. What's that famous horrible line that he says like, well, about a million dollars. Well, about a billion dollars. You know what's better than a million dollars? A billion. And then he like fade out. Yeah, he just disappears into the wind.

Yeah. Now, at that point, Sean Parker did not have much money, but he was an experienced tech entrepreneur and had solid connections in the industry. It seems like he kind of helped convince Mark to move out to California with a couple other Harvard students to work on the Facebook during the summer. Over this time, it had spread from Harvard's campus to colleges across the nation. Mark and his first employees wound up letting Sean Parker crash on their couch. The Facebook continued to grow and Mark made the decision to drop out of school and stay

in California. A choice I endorse for 100 percent of Harvard students. The Facebook wound up securing a bunch of VC money. Yeah, get out. Get out of that fucking school. Same with Stanford. Go to New York, I guess. I don't care.

The Facebook wound up securing a bunch of VC money from Peter Thiel under the requirement that it drop the V and just go by Facebook. This was apparently Sean Parker's suggestion and damned if it wasn't a good one. No one said he was bad at branding. Bad at having weddings because he had a $30 million wedding that destroyed a forest. Wow. Yeah, he had a Lord of the Rings themed wedding. And he didn't get permits and had to pay $10 million in fines.

He used bulldozers in places that you're not supposed to eat. Nerd culture is toxic. Yeah. You wanted to do your fucking Lord of the Rings wedding up to destroy a forest for it. Hire someone to... He was playing the point. Yeah. Well, he wanted to be Sauron.

He saw that as a... He made Mordor. Yeah, he didn't like it. That's the point. Yeah. You didn't really get the message it was trying to convey. A whole bunch of little Saurons. Fucking...

Jarrah Tolkien would have been pissed at him for having a bulldozer. Not a big fan of industrial construction equipment. You read the guy much. Also an anarchist. But kind of a weird anarchist. But yeah, self-declared. Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

He was a weird type of anarchist. A lot of stuff about the Catholic Church or whatever. But anyway. Yeah. Chodanarchy. No, I mean, he was like... He has a good quote, which was like, I don't think people should be in charge of other people.

Less than one in a million is capable of doing the job. Which is, yeah. I agree with that. I think I really agree with that. You live through World War I. You don't wind up a big fan of hierarchy. Now, well, Mark and the Facebook's first few employees were living in Palo Alto. They were being bankrolled by Eduardo Severin.

He had put roughly $20,000 into the company to get it off the ground. He was also working while in New York trying to sell to advertisers and stuff. Putting in his time and also the only person putting money on the line. So he's really believed in this project, really being a good friend. But his relationship with Mark got rocky. The accidental billionaires and the social network make it look like Sean Parker got his hooks into Mark and he and Zuckerberg started taking meetings with investors.

He's innocent. He just had a bad friend who influenced him. You know. Zuck innocent. Yeah, exactly. They were meeting without Eduardo's knowledge and Eduardo reacted by cutting off Facebook's assets to his money because he thought he was getting edged out of the company,

which is exactly what was happening. But Eduardo- Such a diabolical teen. Yeah. I know. Pretty gross. Now, that's what prompted them to make a deal with Peter Thiel. Since Eduardo was contracted to own 30% of Facebook,

they couldn't cut him out entirely, but it seems like their lawyers engaged in some complicated legal fuckery. We will be talking about that legal fuckery. And the other people that Mark Zuckerberg fucked over who were not mentioned in the social network because he stole from somebody else too. But first, you know what doesn't steal from anyone? What, Robert?

The wonderful advertisers who support our program and or show with their products and or services. You're right. And we're also supported. Maggie, you beat me to that delightful, satisfying crunch. How's those blazes doing? Man, I am a convert. Does it warm up a cold winter day?

Sure. I like it. I like the tingle. It's like a heater for your insides. That's a free one, Doritos people. Don't use that. Products! During the summer of 2020,

some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic

science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. That's exactly what I always say after a solid product and or service. We were talking about what Mark Zuckerberg did to Eduardo Savarin, the good friend who invested $20,000 in his buddy's idea and also worked full time

pretty much to try to make it a reality, which is great friending. You'd think that would build up some loyalty. Eduardo sounds like a really good friend. Eduardo sounds like a real one. Yeah. Let's talk about how he got fucked over. He was hot in the movie, right? Yeah. He's the guy who does not come across as a douche in the story. Yeah. I don't know anything about him.

Maybe he kills chickens or something, but maybe chickens need to be killed. I hope he got in on Bitcoin too. I think he's rich anyway, so it doesn't matter. I looked him up afterwards. Now, Mark pretended to make nice with Eduardo, and so Eduardo signed a contract that made it look like he was getting actually 34% of the company, but this was just a bunch of complicated legal bullshit. And the company was allowed based on the sort of terms of the contract

to actually dilute Eduardo's shares to weigh less than 30%, more like 10%. Savarin maintains he was cheated out of his fair stake of the company. When Mark and Sean Parker edged Savarin out, they also cut his name out of Facebook lore. It's not all that different from the stuff you'll hear about in Stalinist Russia. He was basically deleted from the company history. Now, when the social network came out, Zuckerberg attacked it for being inaccurate, but in the years since, the emails he sent to his lawyer around this time have come out.

At one point, he asked, quote, is there any way to do this without making it painfully apparent that he's being diluted to 10%? Talking about Eduardo, to which his lawyer responded, the broad categories of legal risk are a fiduciary duty, as Eduardo was the only shareholder being diluted by the grants. Again, as Eduardo is the only shareholder being diluted by the grants issuances, there is a substantial risk that he may claim the issuances, especially the ones to Dustin and Mark,

but also to Sean or a priest of fiduciary duty later on, if not now. According to Business Insider, this is exactly what happened. Quote, Savarin eventually sued Facebook over breach of fiduciary duty. Facebook and Savarin settled and he walked away with 4% to 5% of the company. That stake is now worth close to 5 billion. So again, he's doing all right. You don't gotta feel that sorry for Eduardo. But when Mark does, it's slimy here.

Yeah. Now, while the exact terms of the settlement are unclear, Facebook was also forced to reinstate Savarin's name in the company history. Mark also eventually settled with the Winklevosses and their partner in the Harvard connection, a guy named Narendra. They reportedly got 65 million. While Facebook's legal team were working on that case, they searched Mark's computer and came across the IMs he sent at the time. These IMs paint a very fun and very ugly picture of the man

previously described as just robotic. Wait, do we know what his green name was? I don't. I think Zuck. It says Zuck in the title. Oh, maybe he got it. All right. Okay. I'm sorry. So may just have been Zuck. Here is one excerpt from a conversation between Mark and a friend talking about his real plans to work on the Winklevosses social network.

This is when he was still telling the Winklevosses he was working on it. Friend, so have you decided what you're going to do about the websites? Zuck. Yeah, I'm going to fuck them. Probably in the year. But he then corrects probably in the year to year. Year. Yeah, look at that. Yeah, the year. Fuck you freaking. Yeah, I can see why they won that suit or settled.

Yeah, information that's turned up in the year since has also shown that Eduardo Savarin was not the only friend who invested in Mark's website and got fucked over. Paul Seaglia seems to have invested $2,000 into Facebook in exchange for some stake in the finished project. Now, at some point, Mark Zuckerberg clearly realized that his baby was going to be valuable. He started lying to Seaglia, claiming that the project was basically dead in the water, so that he could pay the friend back his $2,000 and cut out his interest in the business. Here's one email he sent to Seaglia in 2004 while he was in California working to make Facebook.

Paul, I'm guessing that you don't want to talk to me. But I wanted to say happy birthday and that I hope to resolve our differences. I see that what I did was wrong and I'm really sorry that I behaved as I did. Please give me your address and I will mail you back the $2,000 for your trouble. More if it will repair our business relationship. Another summer is here and I still don't have any time to build our site. I understand that I promised I would, but other things have come up and I'm out in California working during break.

I just don't want the obligation of having to answer you for not following through and I won't be able to. The first half of that email sounds like what my cousin texts everyone every time he gets out of jail. I'm hoping I can repair these relationships, regretting my mistakes. One month later, hi, again, regretting same mistakes. So really regretting those same mistakes. Cycles are a bitch, aren't they? And hey, in some fairness, I never got over the mistakes that I made at 19, because like six months ago, I was drunk in Santa Monica and I started stealing

light bulbs from the outside of bars and throwing them at my friend's feet. You taught yourself away. You're still doing it? Yes, still doing that. I haven't grown up either. But I don't have billions of lives in the balance either. I am purchasing the Zuckerberg shirt. You should, why don't you read the front of that Zuckerberg shirt?

It's a good Zuckerberg shirt. It's a picture of Zuckie programming as a Harvard student. He's got a water bottle, a wine glass and a red bull. And the quote below reads, quote, you can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life. Oh, beautiful. Now, it gets uglier. See, the problem with being a tech obsessed young person who fucks over countless people

to start your business is that a lot of the conversations that prove you to be a gross weirdo are going to come out. Here's one Mark had with a friend after he launched Facebook in his dorm room and 80% of his classmates were using the service. Zuck. Yeah, so if you ever need any info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SMS, redacted friend's name. What?

How did you manage that one? Zuck. People just submitted it. I don't know why they quotation marks, trust me, dumb fucks. That's really the core of it. Yeah, there's a scene in the social network where Zuckerberg meets two fans and they make like idiots of themselves. They like fall over each other.

And the point of that scene is aren't the people who look up to you stupid and dumb. And that's what I think Fincher is very effective at communicating with his films. And still lionizing the main character is like, yeah, his customers are idiots and let's make fun of them. Yeah, they're farm animals. They're the farm animals. They say they do the same thing in Vice, which bothered me. Anyway, I have very strong opinions about Vice.

It made me mad, but I thought it did a good job of talking about how excruble of a human he is. Why would anyone make Dick Cheney look remotely cool right now? I don't know. Maybe it's because I've been there and I've seen the consequences of it. I didn't think he looked cool, but I thought it... I think to an everyday consumer, he could seem cool. That's the, that's the fun.

You know a lot about Cheney, whereas... It's a little bipartisan. Yeah, you know that that's a good worry to have. It's like, I was reading an interview with the guy who created The Punisher talking about like who's being told that like police officers are putting it on his car and he's furious. He's like, no, he's not a pro cop character. He's making the point that our justice system is so fucked that a lunatic with a gun is murdering strangers at the street.

They're like, yeah, like awesome, right? Yeah, that's what we are doing as cops. So we just devoid of new ones. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, very frustrating. The shirt's on the way. Fantastic. Facebook received its one millionth registered user on December 30th, 2004.

It spread to high school students in September of 2005 and introduced the ability to tag people in December of 2005. In September 2006, the service was finally open to everyone anywhere in the world. The stage was finally set for Facebook's blisteringly rapid growth to the world's single most dominant media organization. During this time, Mark Zuckerberg grew wealthier and ever more influential, but he didn't grow out of being a tremendous douchebag. In fact, as we'll cover in part two,

the wild success of Facebook turned Mark from a kind of slimy nerd bro into something much, much darker. Jamie Loftus, plug your plugables. Oh, well, you can find me online wearing my new Zuck shirt at Jamie Loftus Help and on Instagram at JamieCry Superstar. They call it the Graham. They call it the Graham. I'm sorry, famous Zuck entity.

If you want to support me and Zuck, I'm going to be posting a picture of my ironic Mark Zuckerberg t-shirt on Mark Zuckerberg's platform any day now. Fantastic. I'm really, like, I'm really telling him. I'm really Zuck and excited. He'll get the message, I think, this time. Yeah, I'm going to show him.

From inside his diamond bathtub filled with Kristal. Maggie May Fish, plugables, plug. Yes, you can find me on Twitter at that name, Mays with an E, because of my dead great-grandmother. Yeah! Yeah. You can find me on YouTube. At that same name.

And yeah, I have a podcast about friendship, which you can find on my Twitter. Okay. Fantastic. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. I have a book called A Brief History of Ice where I injure my friends with dangerous ancient drugs.

Oh, that's not your review of the movie Vice. No. I am kind of frustrated that I'm stealing my name, which no one had ever used outside of my book. It's a really unique title. It's a doggy dog world. Now, you can find this podcast online at BehindTheBastards.com where all of the sources, many, many sources for this podcast

will be available. You can find us on Instagram, TheGram, and Twitter at at BastardsPod. And you can buy a t-shirt from T-Public. You can get hoodies. You can get drinks. You can get stickers. You can get a Lottie 20-millimeter cannon

branded with behind the Bastards content. If you need to knock out moderately armored vehicles. I do. Who doesn't? I think you do. We all need to shoot through police bear cats every now and then. I mean, yeah. And the T-Public Lottie 20-millimeter anti-tank gun

can help you do that. So, T-Public, great site. Let's go shopping and come back for part two, Mark Zuckerberg, the worst man of the 21st century. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,

he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.