Factually! with Adam Conover - Is Facebook Finally Dying? with Julia Angwin

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Meta is on the decline. For the first time ever, they’ve shown a decline in active users. They’ve lost ungodly amounts of money on projects that have gone nowhere. They’re burning cash to participate in an AI race that’s also destined for failure. Could their stranglehold on our society finally be loosening? And what happens when they lose their grip entirely? This week, Adam is joined by Julia Angwin, an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and New York Times opinion columnist. Her new book is called On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Find a copy of her book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Faxley. I'm Adam Kanover. It's a thrill to have you on the show again. You know, I hate Mark Zuckerberg, and I hate him with my whole heart. For nearly 20 years, Mark's suite of bullshit distraction apps have made our world and specifically my life worse, starting with Facebook and then Instagram and WhatsApp. His empire, now stupidly called meta, has sapped all of us of our attention and our data, distorted our politics and turned Zuckerberg in one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.

But good news, there are now signs that Zuck has reached the pinnacle of his power. For the first time ever, META saw its daily active users decline across its properties last quarter. And this comes on the heels of the company wasting $80 billion on its metaverse efforts. Again, these stupid efforts they named the dang company after and tens of billions of dollars more to develop AI models that lag way behind their competitors. And these are just a couple of the many indicators we have that meta might have already peaked and is now on the decline. So what is the case that meta might be failing

and what, most excitingly, might a meta-less future look like? Well, to answer, we have one of the very best tech journalists working this century on the show today. Her name is Julia Angwin. She's an award-winning investigative journalist author and New York Times opinion columnist. Her recent piece there is headlined, Mehta is Dying.

It's About Time, wonderful title. And by the way, she also is a new book coming out now on courage about how to fight authoritarianism in your daily life. I know you're going to love this interview before we get to it. Or just want to remind you if you want to support the show and all of the amazing conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com. Adam Kahn over five bucks a month.

Gets you every episode of this show ad-free. And now let's get to this interview with Julia Angwin. Julia, thank you so much for being here. It's great to be here. I'm thrilled to have you in person. You are making the case that META is dying as a company, and yet they made $200 billion last year, and they have $3.5 billion users.

That's close to half the people on the planet. So what is the case that the company's dying? Yeah, I mean, look, it's not obvious on the face of it based on the numbers you just gave. But the thing is that the fundamentals are eroding underneath them. So they're losing users for the first time. They're cramming more ads per page. And they most importantly are burning money.

So they spent $80 billion on their ill-fated metaverse adventure. They're $150 billion into their failed AI adventure. They've promised Wall Street. They're going to spend another $115 billion this year. So the amount of money they're spending on failed projects actually has Wall Street worried that they can't sustain this level of spending. Wall Street is actually worried now. Yeah.

Surprisingly, their profits are great. And like you said, they have most of the people on the planet. But if you go on a wild spending spree, you can actually spend so much money to hurt your business. Why spend that much money on, you know, the metaverse, first of all, and now on AI, if they're already making $200 billion a year? I mean, that's an unfathomable amount.

That's like a governmental amount of money to be making. Oh, many governments would be quite happy to have that. Yeah, the thing is, the only way you can do that is if you have no accountability to share shareholders, right? So Mark Zuckerberg, when he set up this company, he put in this interesting structure, which means he can't be fired. Yeah. And so. He like owns, like they've done an IPO, but he owns like the voting shares. Yeah, he was like these super voting shares that give him like more votes than other people.

So he really controls the face. of the company. And so there's really no accountability for him, except for the stock price, perhaps, but ultimately the board, it doesn't have the power to remove him. And so he can do what he wants. And what we have learned about billionaires

is weirdly, there's something that happens in their brain where they stop making good decisions when they have too much money. Have you noticed that? I have. But what is his motivation to spend the money then? Like if my analysis has always been that, you know, he's, he has to always be chasing the next thing to like please Wall Street to like, oh, there's something new coming. There's something new coming.

Sort of like an even stupider version of Elon Musk saying we're going to Mars all the time or whatever. There's always this big promise over the horizon. And the metaverse was, you know, sort of a scam on the investors in the public. But if he can't be removed anyway, like, why do these things? Does he believe in them? I mean, most likely I feel like he does actually believe in them. But I think more than anything, what you see at this level of billionaire behavior is that because money is no longer the object, it's all like street cred with the other billionaires, right? And so he just wants to be cool.

And they all have AI stuff. And he's not doing good in AI and he wants to be in the cool AI kids club. Is that really the motivator? I mean, that makes intuitive sense for me. like as a comedian, I'm surprised by how often I'm doing things with other comedians as my audience in mind, even though that doesn't directly relate to my income or to my, you know, public stature. But for some reason, that sort of just sort of peer group opinion is like weirdly important

to us. That is really what it is? I mean, look, I don't know. I'm not his therapist. But I would say I have been covering him and his company since it was found. and I would say that like he he started it, if you remember, rating hot girls on campus. So it was very clearly an attempt to be cool from the beginning, right? So my theory holds up, at least historically.

I never thought of that as being an attempt to be cool, but I guess to put yourself in proximity to the hot people and put yourself above them to be the judger of the hot people. You try to catapult above the whole hot. competition to like God above the hot people, right? Right. Oh my God. I never thought of it in those terms. Well, is there something that's apart from the overall problems with AI?

Is there something about meta's plans for AI that are particularly stupid that are making it not work? Well, I think one thing to think about with meta and AI is that meta is a consumer-facing business, right? their main business is Facebook and then Instagram and WhatsApp. And so these are consumer products that are free and their business is advertising. What AI is shaping up to be is an enterprise software business. So basically businesses selling to other businesses. So if you look at OpenAI and you look at Anthropic, they are really geared towards getting

businesses to buy their products. And selling to an enterprise is a totally different business. there are very few businesses that have actually done both well, right? Either you're a consumer tech company or you're a business to business tech company. You can see Microsoft is a really good example of that. They started business to business. They have tried endlessly to be consumer. But the reality is whenever they have a consumer product, is anyone using Bing?

No, right? Not without any coercion. Xbox is always up and down. Like it's sort of an also ran in video games. Yeah. They just have never really cracked the consumer code. Look at Google, started off consumer, probably the best at transitioning to business in the sense that they got so many people to use Gmail that companies just basically had to adopt it, right? Yeah.

So, but ultimately most companies are in one lane or the other. And so the thing about the meta-AI ambitions is it kind of isn't the direction the market's going right now. That, I think, is what makes me very skeptical about their success. Also, by the way, they did a two-year bid to reinvent AI around open source. I don't know if you know this. Their initial whole thing was this thing called Lama. It was a model that you would install the entire AI model on your desktop so that in theory it was actually kind of a cool idea, which was they didn't have your data, right? So you know how when you enter something into chat, APT, they take that data.

You would own it with Lama. But it turned out nobody wanted to download onto their desktop, this gigantic AI model. They took up a whole bunch of computational resources. It makes a computer all hot. And also it sucked. Like their answers were bad. It never really met the benchmarks. So they scrapped it.

And now they're trying to build a new one. And so they've already done like a massive failure. And now they're pivoting to what they're called a closed model, which is most of the other models. And Mark just spent two years evangelizing how we're going to open source AI and like it's democratic. You know, this is the democratic option. trash talking clothes models and now it's like boom actually we're going to do the clothes model and we're a couple years behind everyone and we're a consumer company in a b to be space so he's basically been like failing at massive cost for over half a decade now like the metaverse is about five years and then you know before that they were doing other shit uh how how is it legal for him to be not removable like isn't part of the point of a public company that, you know, it's, it's democratic in structure to some degree that like the shareholders do in fact own it and have control over it. Isn't there some

amount of regulation of this? Like, how was he able to set this up? Yeah, this was a structure that was sort of pioneered by the media companies, Rupert Murdoch actually and the big media barons. And it was established around this idea that media companies, companies were special because they needed to be insulated a little bit from the market because they were in like the pure business of First Amendment speech, you know, press. And so I think the ancient justification for it was like these press barons kind of need to have some autonomy to operate, especially against adversarial government pressure, right? Like the government wouldn't pressure them through to do things and they could withstand the market pressure.

as well. It is obviously morphed, like a lot of things in our economy, you may have noticed, have also morphed into more corrupt versions of their original state. And so now I think it's hard to make that argument, especially because, you know, the thing about Facebook and Instagram is that their whole position is that we're not press, right? Like that we, everyone else is just publishing and we're a platform, we're totally neutral, which by the way is not true because they absolutely pick winners and losers. Of course they didn't. And but they're kind of having it both ways, right? Like they want to be like a media property when it comes to the ownership structure,

but then not when it comes to the liability for and taking responsibility for what you choose to promote. So this is specifically an ownership structure that was set up for media companies, like around when? Okay. Now you're going to get me a little bit beyond my knowledge here, but it is definitely, that's where it's most often used that I know of. Is there no like, you know, shareholder revolt? of any kind or I mean like if I was look I've got a index fund retirement fund so I have probably some small amount of ownership of Facebook right but if I was like some larger investor at one point at some point don't you go like what the fuck is going on with this company you know

that he's burning literally hundreds of billions of dollars and it's always on these projects that are comically either behind other companies or I mean the metaverse was it hilarious it was so funny from the get, from the jump. There wasn't a moment. Like, I feel like the Metaverse was the moment when the tech press started calling out, you know, these plans for the first time. Like they were reporting, oh, Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, but there was this undercurrent of like, but this is clearly bullshit. I mean, look at it. And, you know, I think there's been a big flip towards skepticism since then in tech journalism.

but like because it was so laughable, like, how is it possible that nobody has any levers? Well, I think the thing is that honestly, they've been getting away with it, in part because the rest of their business has been cranking, right? So during the pandemic, when he was really pushing hard on the metaverse was also when a huge amount of advertising shifted online. So there was a huge bump. And so Facebook and all the tech companies did really well. in that period, right? A lot of viewership shipped moved online,

a lot of advertising money. And so then, and that's continued, honestly. So for a long time, they've been able to mask a little bit of the underneath erosion that's going on.

Then the reason I wrote this piece was because it reminded me of AOL. So I'm old enough that I covered AOL back in its heyday. And I remember they were so big and they bought Time Warner. Right. But I knew as the reporter at that time at the Wall Street Journal, I was the beat reporter.

My only job was to cover AOL. So I was just all over their business all the time. And I could see the underlying erosion that was happening. It was very similar to what I saw with meta in this most recent earnings report. And that's where it would have triggered me. And I was like, oh, I've seen this movie before where like suddenly you see the users go down just a little bit. And like not enough to freak anyone out. But the thing is, you have to remember that the way they work so hard to make sure those numbers never go down means that by the time,

the market sees it, they've been holding their finger in the dike for a long time. And then when you added that, so what that means to me is that most likely, right, Facebook is eroding pretty quickly and you're not adding Instagram or what's enough to catch up, right? And the other thing about that is that Facebook is where most of the ad dollars are still on Facebook. Instagram is catching up. What's up?

Not so much. And so then you see, I looked at the ad numbers and I was like, Oh my God. They're adding so many, the cramming so many ads on each page because as your user numbers go down, you have to put more ads to get the same revenue. Right. And the number in their filings was they increased the number of ads they're showing to a single user by 27% in one quarter. Wow. And that is when I was like, all the alarm bells went off.

And I was like, okay. So the thing is, you can light money on fire when you're just, when you're printing money, right? And they were in the printing money business. And it was good times. But now they're letting on money on fire and their fingers in the dike, right? And so that's the problem, right? Sorry, I'm mixing my metaphor is the water and the fire. No, no, that's bad.

You've got money on fire in one part of your room and then the other part, you got your finger in a die. You can't put out the fire because you don't have water. It makes, it added up perfectly for me as a set of images. Yeah, so they're like, I mean, you're conjuring this image of Mark with his house is falling down around him and he's like trying to hold it all together, right? There's disaster after disaster. I mean, I've heard people anecdotally just say, oh, like everything on Instagram is an ad now.

Like the public has felt it. Yeah. When you put 27% increase in ads on people's pages, they feel it, right? Well, what's funny is, you know, I deleted, fully deleted my Facebook account probably about five years ago. And actually, they had a, I remember they have a very good export feature that. Let me export everything. Yes. Right.

And so I didn't feel like I. lost anything at all my photos at all I like literally all my like you know wall posts that people had made so um I fully delete the Facebook account have never once felt like I'm missing anything yeah ever since right no one has ever said did you see the thing on Facebook no one has ever said can I get in touch with you you're not on Facebook how do I get in touch with you right um and I feel all smug about that except the thing that I am stuck on is Instagram yes I'm I am on there probably most often used app on my phone I'm constantly trying to do delete it or put restrictions.

Yeah. I literally have hired an assistant, a social assistant to help me post stuff because posting on there is such a fucking pain in the ass. Like it's multiple steps. And that's because I have to constantly be posting for my job. And yet I am still find myself on there. You know, the messages I get on there are important for my career. Yeah.

And so I feel trapped on the platform. And often I think that that is like the main trick that they pulled was somehow trapping us on these platforms that we hate. A, how did they do that? And B, how much, how much worse can they make them before that no longer works, right? Because there must be a breaking point. Like eventually, there was a reason I quit Facebook in the first place. Right?

And maybe, you know, can the same moment happen with Instagram? Yeah, I think if you had talked to your earlier self, I don't know about you, but I think a lot of people would have said 10 years ago they felt trapped on Facebook. Yeah. Right. And so it did eventually get to that breaking point. I don't know what it was for you. For me, it was, I mean, the just disgustingness of the ads. Do you know what I mean? You know how it got to that point where they were like ugly toe fungus ads? And you were like, I just don't want to see this. And then every post was just some sort of outrage bait, you know? It wasn't even like your friends anymore. You couldn't even find your friends anymore. It was just all this like outrage on your page. So they basically, in the words of Cori Doctuary, they insidified it so much. that even though it cost us quite a bit to leave, right? Like some of those friends you really don't know how to connect with other ways, we did leave, right? And so I think we're in a moment where like that's what,

unfortunately, I think the finances are going to lead to the future of Instagram being. But I will say this. I think there's a better future possibly out there for us. I'm a big fan of like this idea of decentralized social networks. I don't know if you're on blue sky or mastodon, but like those, of that is that we're all going to be on our own local servers and then you could just, if you don't like sort of like the amount of ads or whatever, you would move to a different

Blue Sky server. This hasn't happened yet. So just in case you're wondering why your experience isn't like that. I mean, I know that it's supposed to be like that. But, you know, Blue Sky and Mastodon have been selling that for about five years now. And like Blue Sky's users are going down. I mean, I saw a chart that I think their daily active users is like 700,000 people and like slightly declining, you know.

So that's not, and Mastodon is, you know, no one said the word Mastodon to me in a couple of years. I have an account. I go look at it once a month or so. Yeah. So, I mean, is that something that is going to catch on? Yeah. So, I mean, I agree with you, right? Like, I'm on all these platforms and I also see what you're seeing.

I guess what I'm saying is I think we have the technical means to build a better feature, whether it ends up being these ones. I think that I think there's a general feeling right now that like social media is not serving us. There's basically everyone I know is putting restrictions on or deleting their apps, et cetera. And we're all kind of exhausted by it. Yeah. And so I just think we are moving into another era, right? I think it's unclear yet what that era is going to look like. Well, I guess the way you put that made me have this question.

You said, well, we have the technical ability to build these decentralized things, you know, better systems. But the problem has never been technical ability. Like Mark Zuckerberg famously has not really that much technical ability. He's like an okay programmer or was at some point. But Facebook famously has never like developed its own like amazing product. There was no iPhone, right? There was no like incredible algorithm of any kind.

He just like buys other companies, steals other people's ideas and makes worse versions of things. With the exception of the original Facebook, which was a. better MySpace, right? Yeah. I remember that first moment of like, oh, getting Facebook and being like, oh, this is like MySpace, but it just works a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more effective. You can tag friends in the photos. That's all good.

But then very quickly, it became like a worse thing. And yet it is a company that has 3.5 billion users and $200 billion. So like, what is the thing that has enabled them to get this far or enable Mark to get this far, despite being manifestly bad at all the stuff that a tech company is supposed to be good at. Well, I got to say, my first book actually was a book about Myspace. In 2009, I published a book called Stealing MySpace. And it was actually about the takeover battle for MySpace between News Corp and Biacom. And it was a fun story.

But I'll tell you that the reason Facebook won was actually one, specific thing. So actually, like, first of all, Facebook, it's true, wasn't very technically innovative, but you should have seen the code at Myspace. Those guys were just club kids. They did not know how to code, right? Oh, I mean, that, that site was like a spaghetti site. Yeah, a spaghetti site. So, so first of all, Facebook was just like a better version. But the thing they did, which we've all forgotten, is the innovation that they had was the newsfeed. Do you remember you had to go to everyone's page on MaySpace and check to see their updates? And that actually, I sort of believe Facebook has been writing that innovation for all this time because

actually that's our whole life now is feeds, right? Everything is feeds. Yeah. And they invented the feed. That's like, okay, that's like the Google search algorithm of Facebook. It's like the Google search algorithm. Okay. So they invented one thing that we hate now. Yes, we hate. We are victims to the feed because, you know, we used to basically program our feeds. We chose who to follow and then that was in our feed. And then they took that away from us. And now our feed is stuff that they program, right? So we're actually in this weird era where like we don't control the remote control anymore. Like in the TV, you would choose your channel. They choose the channels.

We like gave away the remote control to our entire information ecosystem. Hey, how much of your personal data do you think is online? You know, it's scary to hear, but it's probably a lot more than you think. Our whole world is online even if you think you're not. And that means all kinds of your data, including email addresses, phone numbers, names of relatives. It all exists out there on the internet just waiting to be. grabbed by anyone looking to exploit you. And that is why I simply have to recommend Delete Me. Now, I'm going to be clear about this. I use Delete Me for years before they ever advertised

on this show. I, in fact, I believe they started advertising on the show because I mentioned on a different podcast how useful the service was. They heard it and they were like, oh, let's sponsor your show so you can talk about this more. I'm like, hell yeah, let's do it. So here's how it works. Did you know there are people out there who make a living just off of trading your personal info. They're called data brokers and they are serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of names, addresses, and other personal info to anyone who's willing to cough up the cash. If you want to take your name off the menu, you really need to check out, delete me. They're teams of experts diligently hunt down your personal info, remove it from the internet and keep it gone, keeping

you and your loved ones safe from bad actors. And you know, as the world gets more wired, there has been an uptick in online harassment, identity theft, even real-life stalking, all because because of this easily accessible information. So why take the risk? You, your family, and your loved ones deserve to feel safe from this kind of invasion of privacy. So check out, Delete Me, not just for your security, but for your friends and family too.

And get this, you can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeletme.com slash Adam and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's JoinDleetMe.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. Folks, live shopping on What Not is exploding. According to What Not, the number of sellers making over $1 million on Whatnot has doubled in the last year. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full-time or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge. You're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in your door.

Well, What-Nought flips that. On What-Nod, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. What-Nod is the largest dedicated live shopping plan. platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses and anyone can sell, whether your business is big, small, or yet to exist. People selling on What Not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. What Not buyers aren't just browsing. They're actively engaged and

coming back. You go live, show off products in real time, and turn. what you love into real income. So download the What Not app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search WHATNOT, What Not in the app store and start scoring amazing deals. You know, Summer completely upends our routines and how we eat, doesn't it? For me, summer somehow ends up being my busiest season and I find myself running out of time for basic tasks like shopping and meal planning. You know, I've been trying to eat a high protein diet because I've been weightlifting.

more lately trying to get swole for the pod, you know, and I've actually been able to keep up with my protein intake thanks to Hungry Root. Think of Hunger Root as a personal shopper and meal planner rolled into one. With over 50,000 chef-crafted recipes and over 1,000 grocery items, the variety never gets old. Many recipes are ready in just 15 minutes and there is always something new to try. And you don't got to seek out the new stuff. Hunger Root keeps getting more personalized by learning your tastes and dietary needs over time. It knows what you actually want and it keeps refining what you get. At this point, I genuinely don't think about grocery shopping or meal planning.

It just happens for me. And that is huge because I am running around all summer. Whether I'm out all day for work or for fun, I can come home and know that there is something to whip up that will be quick, delicious, and personalized to me and my diet. And I know that you are going to love hungry root as much as I do. For a limited time, get 40% off your first order. Plus get a free item in every box for life.

Go to hunger root.com slash factually and use code factually. That's hunger root.com slash factually and use promo code factually to get 40% off your first box in a free item of your choice for life. I remember the first time I was scrolling Instagram and they started doing suggested posts from people I didn't follow. And then there was a little thing in the hamburger menu that was like snooze suggested posts for a couple days. It would let you...

Just let you have to keep doing it. Yeah, because they didn't want you to do it. And I was like, oh, you're letting me do this for now. You're not going to let me do this forever. If it's currently just for 30 days and then less. And now I don't know if they let you do it at all. I don't think you can. No.

And people don't like it. You know, you're looking at things that you don't want to see. You're looking at things that don't appeal to you. Well, this was TikTok's innovation. They were like, actually, forget it. We just control the feed. They didn't even do this fake, like follow people, whatever, right? Like, oh, yeah.

And so. Well, you can follow people, but on TikTok, it manifestly means nothing. It literally means nothing. Like, you know, I do it just to make people feel good. I'm like, I have one point, one point five million TikTok followers. And it does not matter. It affects, I could have zero and the same number of people would see my stuff. Yeah.

Exactly. So TikTok orders are like the final, it's like the final boss moment of the feeds. Yeah. They're like, you control nothing, friends. But TikTok is. another really good example of Zuckerberg doing this because, you know, when Instagram introduced reels, every time they introduce, we've got stories now, we've got reels. To me, it looks pathetic, right? Okay, you're ripping off a main feature from a competitor. And they do it worse than the

competitor. Like, and yet I find myself using it more. So I'm watching reels because they're shoving them in front of my face. When I finally remember, okay, let me go to TikTok instead. I have immediately such a better experience. So much better. It's not like TikTok is amazing. No, but like, it's so much better than. Yeah.

It has, the thing that TikTok algorithm has is like some amount of the joyful serendipity of the early internet of, oh, I'm looking at something very, how did this come on my feed? Who made this? Where did it come? It's got some kind of like juiciness to it that it still feels like it's giving something, means something genuine. And reels, I don't know why.

Every time I'm on it, I'm like, I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. And I post stuff to, people watch my stuff on reels. And yet that's where I find myself. And I'm like, they fucking did it to me again. And I don't know how. Like it's like Zuckerberg is like the kid in your high school who you hate. And you're like, why am I at this kid's house all the time?

How did I end up over here again? Yes. You know? Correct. because he started reading the hot girls. It's one of those things where, you know, it's like with Donald Trump where you're like, he's so bad at so many things.

He's so stupid. And yet he must be good at something because here he is. And here we are, right? Like Zuckerberg must be good. So what is the thing that he's good at? What he's good at actually has been, like you said, first of all, he had one innovation. in the news feed and points to him or whoever came up with it there.

Because that has transformed the world. And also, he is good at taking bets, right? Like, he bought a lot of things. When he bought Instagram and when he bought WhatsApp, people were like, oh, you overpaid. Like, that was such a crazy bet. That was the best things he ever did, right? Yeah. And he also bought a lot of other things that failed.

So he's willing to fail. So the thing is we're kind of in this weird crazy thing where it's classic tragic figure where those are that that's his strength and his greatest weakness because right now he's really failing right on things that are going to maybe bring down the company and yet that is his special sauce it's kind of sad don't you feel a little poignant about it I there is something very sad about him and another piece of it is that he puts himself in the middle of it so much like one of the things that you know I made a video a couple years ago about the metaverse and one of the things that was really striking about that failure was he was like making himself

the Steve Jobs of the Metaverse. Like he was in every video and it's like him going, you know, I'm trying to learn Mandarin. And here's how I'm doing it. And his little robot avatar arms and everything is so terrible. So cringe. Like I'm here I am in blah, blah, blah. And like he's trying to integrate his life and his family. They shoot in his house and stuff.

And a lot of it makes you ask, like, why does he think that anybody would be interested in him? Why is he the mascot? Surely other people at the company must be like, hey, let's just hire Snoop Dogg. Yeah. You know, like Snoop Dog will do it. Yeah. And there's a million people who will do it. People don't, like, look up to.

I mean, even like Tim Cook, people have fond feelings for more. But like, everybody hates Zuckerberg. Yeah. He's nobody's idol. why does he put himself in front all the time? There's plenty of other tech CEOs who are that size who would just say, I'll just hang out in the background. Yeah.

You know, Peter Thiel is like not like in front of everything all the time. That's a different story, which we can talk about. But I would say like this is a founder problem, right? So the founders always think it's all about them. And Tim Cook is a professional manager. Steve Jobs did put himself in the middle of everything. But we loved it because he was Steve Jobs and he brought us great things. And he was a great showman.

Bill Gates did put himself in the middle of stuff back in the day. Now, of course, you know, whatever. But a lot of these tech companies have moved to their second generation of professional management. So his behavior looks also a little dated, right? This is sort of how it was in the beginning when all the kids were running it. But it's kind of like the grownups have arrived. Where's your grown up?

Yeah. He's been doing this like transformation famously going on like Joe Rogan last year and like, you know, being like, I hunt elk. I do it like this, which is also laughable. You know, like even Rogan's sitting there, look at him like, what the fuck is up with this guy? Yeah. It's kind of sad.

I mean, let's talk about this finding that the reason they have more they found liable for harming children through social media addiction. There's a lot of talk about this case about like whether or not this was actually going to harm the company or whether it was a landmark case or not or whether this was the verdict that like they wanted in some way. What was your analysis of it? I think it's a really big deal because basically, as you probably know, there's this law that provides the company's liability, like immunization from liability or any content posted

on their site. So every time that anyone has tried to accuse any of these tech companies of harm, because like their kids saw a post that encouraged them to do a bad thing, the company say, we're not liable because everyone who writes on this is third party. It's not our content, right? Even though they were amplifying it, they were promoting it, but they have been able to get away with it because of this law, Section 230 that allows them to be immune from liability.

Well, this law made sense in the early Internet, right? Because it was like, okay, you got a message board. You have some big platform. If you're going to sue somebody, you should sue the person who wrote the thing, not the platform. It was sort of like part of the structure of the underlying internet. Now these companies are so big, though, and are clearly controlling what we see. It doesn't really make sense anymore.

Right. Well, I mean, going back to my remote control analogy, now that they control the remote, like, they're in charge. So what's this argument about how you don't have any control anymore? You chose to put this post there. I didn't choose. I didn't even follow this person, right? Right.

So that, but that hasn't kind of filtered out into the courts that much. So this latest round of lawsuits is kind of an end run around that immunization. So this is tort law, which is totally different. It's just a one person accusing the company of harm to themselves. It's not like a class. It's just like one individual says, I was harmed by X. And so that is not liable. That's not under this section 230.

These are state cases. And this one, there have been, I think the company said hundreds of thousands of these have been filed individual tort liability cases. Wow. So what's happening right now is the courts have consolidated them. And so we're going to do a few bell. weather cases on each of the different types of harm. And then ultimately, if there's enough consensus where all those verdicts come out that way, they'll probably consolidate them the way they did the tobacco lawsuits where everyone who was

like dying of lung cancer from tobacco consolidated into what's called a mass tort. And that was, I think, a hundred billion plus settlement that the tobacco companies did with all of those to settle all of the torts at once. because ultimately you can't really litigate all of them. So what people think that original win is the first bellwether case that the courts had set as like this will be a bellwether for the rest of these cases. So the fact that it was such a clear and definitive win

for the girl alleging the harm means that we could easily be leading into a mass tort, right, where they actually would suffer, you know, a huge payment, like a hundred billion plus type thing. And there could be other cases with like other legal theories for why people were harmed. Yes, exactly. So there's going to be like this one was more like this, you know, this woman's depressed from Instagram and like exposure to all these like feeling that people were promoting eating disorders, etc.

But there are going to be other cases, two of different types of content. People were exposed of different types of harm. I don't know exactly which cases are. I would expect there to be one about like bullying. harassment and maybe exposure to grotesque content, right? There's going to be different varieties of this harm. And so each one of those then establishes that like other people can, might have be harmed by this and then other lawsuits will flood in.

I mean, I can only imagine the number of people who could allege, I mean, I could say Instagram's made me depressed, you know, and I think truthfully I wouldn't be making that up. Yeah. It upsets me a lot. You seem upset right now. I'm not really happy about it. Yeah, I mean, somebody said something very mean about me today.

And I saw it and put it right in front of my face. I tapped a little button with a heart on it. And it showed me mean things people were saying. That's terrible. What the hell is. Yeah. So, I mean, you compared this to the tobacco lawsuits. Those were some of the largest punishments ever levied against American companies.

It's honestly, if you look at sort of the annals of American capitalism, it's like one of the only case. in which like companies of that size actually were punished in some large way, in a way that affect their businesses long term going forward. Is that the kind of like what we're talking about that could hit Facebook? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Facebook definitely, I think, is bracing for that type of thing. If you look at their filings, they talk about that risk in their risk session. And it seems like a very plausible risk for them.

I think that this is where I think Wall Street is. is worried. You really can't keep spending $100 billion a year on your failed AI projects and also be facing like $100 billion in liabilities for math torts or maybe more than $100 billion. Like it starts to add up. Do you know what I mean? Like even if you're making $200 billion a year, like you know, you really want your problems to be in the single digit billions. Yeah. Not in the triple. Like this, it could be a triple digit billion like bindings against them. Like I think so. Yeah.

That's really wild. Is then part of the AI idea to be like an escape hatch from that a little bit to at least have some new kind of business to move into? Yeah, I mean, I think they need to sell Wall Street on this idea that there's growth, right? Because the problem is that Facebook is definitely declining. There's actually just even if it was a wonderful place to be that people were happy about, which it's not. There's just not a lot more people in the world who can join it. Like it's kind of saturated. Yeah.

And so then you look to Instagram and WhatsApp for growth. And those aren't the kind of superpowered growth. Also, most people are Instagram, most people on WhatsApp. So like, where are you going to get your superpowered growth to sell to Wall Street? If you want to keep selling a growth story. And so that's where the AI bid, the Metaverse bid is part of like, like I was saying, I think Mark wants to be in the Cool Kids Club, which is the growth stocks. You could be a dividend stock.

You could be like, I'm for pensioners. We just pump out cash and everybody gets a. a dividend. Like there's a different path you could choose. But he's chosen the, I want to keep playing in the growth stock category. I mean, WhatsApp is used by how many billion people? Like, if you leave the U.S. especially, it's just the I message or the texting for most people in the world. I mean, you would think that that would be enough for any company, right? You think that would make you AT&T and just print money forever and rest on your laurels and have a great life. And so it's literally the desire for coolness that makes him.

I mean, you know, I don't know. Like, I think it's not unique to him too, right? Like, I do think that we see this. I just think when you don't have restraints, right? People act crazy. Mm-hmm. Might have noticed that with other parts of the world. And yeah, I think also the impulses that drive some of these people never change, right?

Like if your impulse is number go up, then no number will ever be high enough for you because number go up is how you got there in the first place. And now you're like, well, I got one billion. I want two billion. Now I got two billion. I want 10. It just, you know, pushes you and pushes you forever. There is no satisfaction. But, well, if we were to see, if meta were to truly decline, what would be the result of that, you know, both for our lives and, you know,

financially is it, is it a systemic risk to the financial system? It is a massive company. I mean, look, yeah, it's a, it's a key part of our stock market and et cetera. But I think the way these companies decline is, um, is not sudden, right? I mean, if you look actually AOL, we're talking about earlier, which I covered, it still exists. I'm not sure if you're aware of that. I'm slightly aware of it. Yahoo is a good example. They are, they still exist. They're still like you can basically ride a user base and milk them on the way down for quite some time, right? And so what we see about internet companies is they don't really blow up. I mean, sometimes, but mostly they just sort of slide into like this zombie state, you know,

where like you're like, oh, yeah, they do exist. You end up on their website. You're like, why am I here again? What happened? Or you email someone with a Yahoo address. You're like, oh, yeah, why do you have that? Right. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, find me on Facebook. Oh, you're still on Facebook. I mean, the sort of reputation Facebook has right now is it's where, like, you know, boomers who have like have a couple screw looses just go to look at AI content. And it's, you know, sort of like, oh, no, grandma's playing the slots. Oh, you know, grandpa's on Facebook. Yes. My mom is on there basically just so she can argue with her MAGA relatives. And she's because she has some idea that she can do some good there.

It's like, you know what? God bless you, mom for giving it a try. And so I can see it continuing to slide in that direction where like, oh, no one in their right mind uses that, but some number of people still do. But yeah, I mean, does that cause any, like, what is the difference between a truly declining failing meta and what we have now? If it already sort of has that reputation. Well, I think what I worry about, right, because when I first pitch this piece to my editor at the New York Times and I was like, I think, Matt is dying. And she was like, oh, this is the greatest news. Let's write it as a positive piece. And I was like, well, I sadly don't think it's necessarily going to be that positive.

Like, I would love to dance on the grave too, obviously. Wouldn't we all? But the reality is when these companies start declining, what they do is they cut their like content moderation teams and their safety teams. And so suddenly like, we already know, right, they were infiltrated by like the Russians who are trying to interfere with the elections. We already know that they're like all these sort of like misinformation campaigns that they're. The FTC just put out a report in this administration saying that meta is the number one place for frauds and scams, like more than 60 percent. I think of frauds and scams reported to them are from our take place on that platform. So all these seniors are getting scammed out of their life savings. So the problem is it's going to become just assessable if it's not already. And that's really unfortunate, right? And people will be harmed, right?

Because they're still on there. And they have to be on there because there, you know, there's a lot of schools where they're like, oh, the organizing for the school happens there. Or like there's reasons you have to be on. And if it's not a safe place, right, that's actually a really bad outcome for the world. Hi, I'm Beck Bennett. I thought I was Beck Bennett. No, no, no. I'm Kyle Mooney.

Sorry about that. Exactly. No, all good. All good. Thanks, buddy. Yeah. And we host the show, what's our podcast here on Headgum? This podcast is brought to you by Square Spang.

Square. Square space is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and make you look like a kick-ass person online. Like your skateboarding through the internet or you're like you're surfing through the web. Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand and get paid all in one place. I like that it's all in one place. I know, I like that I don't have to go around, you know, like different stores or something. It's just on my website. Well, it's like, oh, do I need to go to like a, do I need another type of website to like,

find the right pictures or like another type of website to upload the, you know, it's all in one place. The video or the audio or like, no, I want, it makes it easy, make it easy on me, please. Yes, and you can do all those things, photos, videos, changing fonts. You know what I mean, the designs are amazing. They're catering to all your different needs. There are SEO tools, which I know what those are, and they're custom domains. Oh, what's come up with a domain right now.

Let's see. I wonder if it exists. www. Friends. Meeting. Friends. FriendsmeetingFriends.com. That's an original thing that we came up with.

Friends meeting friends. Anyway, so check out Squarespace.com slash headgum for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use off for code headgum, save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hell, sounds easy. Anybody could do it. I think I've been thinking about lately is, you know, the media regulation that sort of started happening around like the 60s in the U.S., like the 60s to the 80s and 90s of head.

you know, people are watching television and it needs to be at least a little bit good for people, right? And so they did stuff where, okay, we're going to require you to have like a news division. I remember specifically in the 90s, I believe, maybe the late 80s, like they put limits on the number of commercials that could be on kids shows because they were like, you go watch a kid show from like the late 80s. It'll be like 10 minutes of show and 20 minutes of commercials. And they're like, that's ridiculous. And they just made a lawsuit. Now it's 20 minutes of show. 10 minutes of commercials.

Just some like basic shit. Yep. That, you know, it's a different era of regulation. And it was the FCC. It was the public airwaves. Yep. But like at this point, social media is so massive as this is where, this is like the dominant form of media. Yep.

And meta is already such a cesspool. If you imagine it getting worse. Is there an argument eventually? Like, do you think that there's a world in which the, I mean, not this government, certainly, but some future government says, you know, we need to like put some very basic rules in place about this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I sort of do see tobacco as a little bit of a trajectory, right? Like, not only did we have the settlement, but we also put gruesome warnings on it and

then taxed the hell out of them so that cigarettes were so expensive. And then basically it became sort of socially uncool to smoke. Yeah. And so, and now barely anyone smokes. And so actually there's, it's, it was like an ultimately like a snowball that rolled in, in a good way. And we had like a better outcome for society. And I feel like we're kind of at that tipping point with social media.

People already want to quit, right? It's like you wanted to quit smoking. You wanted to quit social media. And so like, I do think that if we, if the ball starts rolling, I could imagine more measures taking place that would be like, whenever you logged on, it would be like, I don't know there'd be some warning. or there would be more policing of the scams or they would be more liability for them

if they had scams on there. Like I can see lots of things happening that would ultimately lead to A, maybe cleaned up or maybe just less usage. And is Zuckerberg or anybody at Facebook like aware of this problem? And we're talking about basically the sentiment on the part of the average person

is so negative towards these that we're comparing it to the tobacco industry, right? which are the most reviled companies in American history, like people blame them for obviously millions and millions of deaths. So that's how bad they are. And it is going to lead to the failure of the company's impossible regulation. And yet the actual steps that you see them take is always we're adding ads. They're cutting the monitoring teams.

They're like letting more bullshit flood in. The quality of the ads is getting lower. why do they never take any effort to be like, oh, we need to actually make something that people like on some level, right? I mean, they're a consumer-facing company, right? And so, you know, Apple, for example, among the tech companies is a consumer-facing company. And they are good at a lot of problems with them, but they are good at sort of generally

delighting people. You can tell that they think that that's their business. I often open my iPhone and I'm like, oh, it came up with a way to make my life slightly easier I didn't even think of, right? Plenty of other bad shit that they do. But they clearly know that's where their bread is buttered. Why does Facebook not realize? Or Meta not realize this.

Well, real simple. You pay for your iPhone. You don't pay for Facebook. Okay, fair enough. So you're not their customer. They don't care, right? And their customer is interesting because it's advertisers, right? And the advertisers actually also weirdly don't care the same way they care about a TV commercial.

They want their TV commercial to be all. awesome and that's like the cool people in advertising work on that. But the people who are making the internet ads are like, it's just volume business, right? This is not a arts and crafts business. This is not artisanal. This is not like the high end stuff. And so you basically just have a volume machine. So you're selling to kind of like these mass pump and dump kind of ad networks. That's your business. That's what's so weird. I actually was just talking about this with my creative team because we were talking about doing maybe doing a video about it. Like why ads have gotten so much worse.

Yeah. Because people used to hate TV ads. Yeah. Like in the 90s, right? Oh my God. Advertisance is terrible. If you go back and watch TV ads now. Yeah, they're like practically like a fine art movie.

Gorgeous short films, right? Yes. And we were talking about it and our theory is that it was when you're watching television, you have to convince people to watch the ads through the quality of the ad. Otherwise, they'll leave the room. Yeah. Or they'll change the channel. But once you're, and you also have to sort of appeal to almost everybody.

all types of people are watching it. Whereas now that ads are hyper-targeted. Yeah. And you can just hit, okay, I want 35-year-old dog moms in Cleveland. Then it can just be like, yeah, here's dog food, you dumb idiot. Right? Like here's a picture of dog food. I, I, an AI voice going like, her dog was dying.

And then she gave the dog the food. And the dog had a miraculous thing happen. Like this. And you're watching, you're going, what the fuck is this? Right. Is that, does that track for you at all? explanation. Absolutely.

Yeah. Because I remember, you know, online advertising used to be, it was like Punch the Monkey Banner ads, these really crappy ads. And you would always sit around going like, well, what is Coke going to show up and like make a beautiful commercial? I know. And they never did. They never did.

It continues to be these horrible companies. Yeah. It's because of the, like you said, it's the fragmentation of the audience too, right? Like, so no one place is the showcase ad, right? just all these little targeted bullshit messages for each segment. And like they're just, they're so like bare minimum. But what's fucked up about that is people talk about this all the time,

the fragmentation, the death of the monoculture. Yeah. Except we're only on three fucking websites. I know. Isn't that incredible? We're on YouTube meta and whatever else you want to choose X or whatever you want to choose to the next one, TikTok.

We're all on three websites. We've just been fragmented within the websites. And nobody likes that about it. Correct. Because they took away our remote control. Okay. So if what you say is true and meta is going to decline and, like, eventually fail, what kind of world do you think will be in in a couple years?

Yeah, look, I don't know. I mean, like I said, I have hopes for this federated media universe, but like you said, it's been slow. I still think that's sort of the best model to break the hold. Because the thing is, we're in a crazy moment where, like you said, there's three gatekeepers for our entire information economy. Yeah. Like, I think about this all the time that, like, if Google and meta and Apple decided that a country should not exist and took it off all of their maps and everything, like, it would functionally not exist. Yeah.

Like, it's actually insane the power that they have, right? And so I think mostly what I want for this world is we have to break that stranglehold somehow because it's not. safe, right, for people to control information. And if you don't mind me pivoting to the book, I'm put. I was about to do that, please. Because basically, I'm writing, I've just written a book on how to fight authoritarianism. And one of the things I learned in reporting on authoritarianism was I didn't quite realize. I thought it was like 50% police state and gulags and 50% control of and censorship of the media.

But it's actually like 90% of the game for authoritarianism is controlling the information environment. Really? You need to do very little violence just to show people that it's possible. You know, Putin's very good at that, like aggressive poisonings, you know, but there are very few of them. The real thing is controlling the information environment. And so what I'm really terrified of is we're in the perfect environment for authoritarianism because you just have to get these three companies to perhaps show up at your inauguration and give you gold bars. And then, like, you're in, right? You've controlled it, right?

So we are in a very dangerous time. And a big piece of it is the consolidation of power. We've never seen like this consolidation of power for the global information economy, not just even in the U.S. Like this is the whole world. Yeah. And the way that meta specifically has sort of shifted from even aesthetically, the sort of aesthetic of democracy of openness from the Obama years,

which is when they first went mainstream. stream of like, oh, it's an enlightened liberalism to feeling like a much more authoritarian company, A, and how he buddy buddies with the Trump administration, but B, just the, like, fuck you take it sort of attitude that the companies have now. Right. It matches that really directly, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, one of the things that I feel like having done all this research on authoritarianism is

that it's inevitable. Basically in every country, the authoritarian manages to capture the media, right? And that's happening right now, certainly with the friends of Trump who are buying up CBS, CNN, TikTok, et cetera. So we're definitely seeing that with legacy media. Right. But we're also, I think, underestimating that what we call big tech is big media, right? Because they're the gatekeepers.

Right. And so the cozy relationships that all of those companies have with the administration is also dangerous and worth examining in the same light as the way we're looking at the takeovers of CNN and CBS, right? And so we're in, and that happens everywhere. Like in Hungary, Orban, what he did was he just, he did all the state advertising money to the legacy media companies and then starved and make it illegal for all the independent media companies to get any outside funding. And so he tried to starve them out. And ultimately, that worked. So, but there's different strategies, but they always do the strategy of trying to control the media.

Yeah. And if you look at the large tech media companies, you have X, which we know what happened there. You have meta, which again is cozying up to the Trump administration and is sort of fundamentally authoritarian in its own right. And then what else do you have? You have TikTok, which has also bought by the same people. By the same fucking people.

Yeah. And then you have Google is the only other one that I can think. of Apple is not itself really a media company. We've mentioned them a couple times. Microsoft Enterprise Company. I mean, okay, there's Netflix, a large media tech company. But then you have Google, which is the world's largest advertising company and the world's like now largest streamer and largest video platform.

And for some reason, Google has not gotten overtly authoritarian. Not yet. And I feel like, but, you know, and we have to hold the line on that. Like the thing is. is that what I worry about is that the natural tendency is like corporations are immoral, right? They don't they don't exist in a morality space. They are designed as an entity to avoid legal liability. That's the actual reason that corporation exists. And so they are always going to align with power. Like that's just the definite way that it's going to play. And so unless we hold them

accountable and say like we're going to, we, the people demand that you act better, right? And use whatever power we have to do that, like, they're all going to go this way. And so Google, I feel like, is actually at the last front on that fight, to be honest. Yeah. The more that I think about it, I'm like, it's the only major part of the internet that has not, like, avowedly joined the Trump administration, basically. They have done some things. So YouTube, right after the election and replantformed, basically everyone who had been de-platformed for terms of service violations. A lot of people who right-wing kind of streamers who had like broken the rules. They have loosened the rules on lots of things that were like, you know, so they're doing

little things around the edges, but like I do feel like there's a feeling that it's still somewhat neutral. But like, how long does it last? Exactly. And, yeah, what happens once it starts tilting in one of those directions? And the amount of power these companies have over our democracy is really, I don't think we appreciate it. You know, I was thinking so much about, you know, Zoran winning in New York last year, which, of course, was for a lot of people on the left, like this huge victory, this democratic victory. And I was like, I don't think we were really analyzing how, what big a role Instagram played in there.

Like, I come to New York a couple times a year. I remember landing in New York, being on like the air train from JFK airport and opening Instagram and being served Zoron videos because it had identified me as being in New York. And just the fact that there was that pipeline was like a huge part of that campaign. But they were the first ones to do that. What happens when, you know, someone at Facebook starts going, well, we actually don't want that to happen anymore. And the same thing on all the other platforms. Is. Yeah.

I mean, what mechanization? do we the people have, right, to do anything about that, especially when you say they're amoral organizations corporations, but, and that's because they're profit seeking, except that Facebook or meta is not even controlled by the desire for profit anymore. It's controlled just by Zuckerberg, as you said, because it's not democratically run by the shareholders. Yeah. Well, I will tell you what I think is the leverage. So I've just started this center at Harvard called Independent Media and Audience Project. And what I'm doing there is I'm actually trying to build

what I'm calling the Nielsen monitor for the internet era. So one of the things is that one of the reasons they have this power is because they control audience data information. Turns out this monopoly on knowing what people want to watch is the most valuable monopoly in the world. If you look at their profits, it's like, wow, that was a really cool data source to get a monopoly on. Yeah.

So I want to break that monopoly. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to build an actual way to make a public interest, Nielsen, that monitors what's happening on these platforms. So we could say, because right now we suspect what we're like, oh, I don't know, YouTube seems still neutral. We don't know. I want to monitor that and actually show what is happening. We don't have that accountability mechanism.

And so I believe transparency is one of the best tools, actually, for fighting authoritarianism. So a lot of the stories in my book are about. the fact that sometimes you don't have a lot of tools. Like in Czechoslovakia, Votslav Havel, who was like the poet who led the like saw the Velvet Revolution that like nonviolently overthrew the communist regime. And his whole thing was authoritarianism is built on lies. And so even just telling the truth is actually the most radical thing that you can do.

And that's why, of course, they go after comedians, right? Because the comedy is, of course, the quickest way to tell the truth. Sometimes. And so I think that one of the things we need to tell the truth about is the control of this media environment. So I'm doing this very ambitious project. So if any of your viewers have a billion dollars lying around or even just a million, send it my way. But we want to build this monitor to really understand because we need to answer this question, how much are they controlling our environment.

Yeah. Tell me more about the book. It's sort of a manual for how to resist authoritarianism in a way. on an individual. There it is. And you described it to me as, you know, trying to answer the question of how as individuals we fight back against authoritarianism, as opposed to as a society. What have you found in looking into that question? Yeah.

So this book was such a weird project for me because, like, I'm a tech reporter, right? I'm a tech investigative reporter. And I spent most of my time in this space. But so I woke up the day after the election and I was like, you know, I feel like I'm spending so much time focusing on. tech power and try to hold tech power accountable. But I think I need to learn a little bit more about authoritarian power. Like what does it look like? How does it feel? How do I prepare? So I worked with my friend Ami Fieldsmeyer and we were like, let's just call dissidents around the world and find out what they have to tell us. And I, to be honest, I was sort of hoping for like

some cool shit like code words and like spycraft. I was like, we're going to learn the real, you know, the cool stuff. We did learn a little bit of that, but honestly, like, the real finding from it was that fighting authoritarianism is actually a little different than I said. First of all, it's a narrative game, right? They're trying to control the narrative.

They're trying to say these bad people, there's always some fringe, marginal people that are the reason for your problems, is not us, and we have to persecute them. And there has to be a whole big lie, usually about some outside enemies, some wars, you know, et cetera. But it's all about narratives.

And the way you fight authoritarianism is you build a better narrative. And part of that is building being nonviolent. So being nonviolent is much more effective because it gets more people on your side. So state violence against nonviolent protesters is actually really bad for their narrative. Right. We saw that with Minneapolis. They basically left. Right.

Because they lost the narrative war, right? They killed two people, unarmed people on the street. And that was the loss. So a big part of like fighting authoritarianism is being really disciplined about being nonviolent and also being really clear about who you're, what you're fighting for, right? Which is like ultimately it has to be pretty human, protecting your neighbors, like being in community with people and also always in community with the people who are being targeted. Because the whole goal is to get you to be like, ah, you know what, don't worry about the trans people.

Let them take them. Let them take the immigrants. Because they want to pick off those groups so that there are less people, that those people won't have enough people to fight back. But you have to fight back before they become completely a police state, right? So it was interesting to me because I realized that it was much more of a narrative fight than I had thought it would be. There's still a lot of things you can learn about like Spycraft. We have a couple chapters on like, you know, not idiotic things not to do with your phone, et cetera. But more it was about actually learning to be compassionate.

and realize that the big win for them is if you stop caring. If everyone just stops caring and starts scrolling Instagram all day and like numbing themselves out, which by the way is fully understandable and I definitely do. But that's how they win because then they control the narrative. They control and nobody does anything and then they just take and take and take. Right. You know? I was going to ask what the difference is between, you know, societies that fight back against

this and don't because, you know, the real risk in an authoritarian regime is like look you it takes you know 12 to 16 hours a day just to feed yourself and make money and you know live a life and raise your kids and most people struggle with that and you know there are plenty of societies where like people are like yeah things aren't going good but you know hey I'm just trying to survive here I imagine I've never been to Russia I imagine that's what it's like under Putin do well I'm like oh yeah it sucks but I mean what are you going to do I still have to like get up and go to work. There's plenty of societies that, you know, have had authoritarianism go up and down and back and forth and, you know, plenty of South American countries where they've been through, you know, peaks and valleys and rises and falls.

It's like, oh, the last 50 years have been crazy. But what are you going to do? We just keep trying to live. And that is sort of the thing that stops us the most from. How much time can you really put in? Yes. And so how do people defeat that problem? Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point.

And I think that one, that's why this book is really designed as like a buffet menu of options. Like we just tell stories of people doing different things because I think there's a lot of people who think I have to devote my whole life to this. Or I have to go stand on a protest for eight hours and I don't have time for that on a weekend. But actually there's a million things you can do. Right. So one of the things that we write about is there's a group of people around the country who are basically helping trans people flee. states that have criminalized their existence. It's like an underground railroad. Yeah. Right. You could spend a day driving someone to another state. You could actually not do that. You could just

spend half an hour helping them load their U-Haul. There are people who just do phone calls and check in with them on the way and make sure that they're okay. Like, there are a million things you can do that are small, right? I think one of the things I love is this story about this professor at Rutgers to university. So when Columbia was being attacked by the Trump administration that, like, we're going to take all your grants unless you let us like basically run your curriculum and set the agenda. And Columbia caved, right? And so this Rutgers professor was just like, oh my God, that seems bad. He doesn't know anything about this stuff. He's a chemistry professor. Grew up in Puerto Rico. He was just like at a chemistry convention. He was like, I'm just going to,

he's like, I want to Google NATO because I think we need like a NATO for universities. So he like goes to Chad GPD and he's like, tell me about NATO and like, how would I build one for universities? Writes up a mutual defense compact, basically. Like universities we should all stand together, defend each other, brings it back to his university senate, gets them to pass it. Then all these, all the other big tens pass it. All these university senators pass it. Then the whole movement starts where all these professors around the country sign on to

these letters, et cetera. Wow. And here's the thing. All these votes don't matter, right? the university center, the president's like, that's sweet faculty. I love that for you. Yeah. But it's a sign.

And after that, no university has given into these demands. The Trump administration did another round of 10 letters, some of them to the big 10 schools. No one did it because the thing is one of the most important things you can do is pressure whatever institution you're in to be better than they want to be, right? Right. Make them feel the pressure from below so that they don't just succumb to the pressure from above, right? Right. Right. So everyone has the ability to take a vote at your university center or write a mean email to the provost, right? Like, these are things we can all do. And we're all part of institutions that we could try to make me better. We're all part of institutions like in our daily lives. Yeah. Your workplace. Your faith institution, make your faith leaders stand up for whatever thing is going on. You know what I mean? We have that power. We think, oh, the institution has to take that action. They don't do it unless they're pushed. Right? So we have to push from up below.

up. To tie this back to meta, you're sort of bringing this to a point that I talk about a lot when I'm talking about activism, which is that the platforms like Instagram have tricked us into thinking that like that literally is the social world and that, you know, what matters in terms of your own personal political beliefs is what you post, right? And what other people post and commenting on what they post and like talking about, oh, I didn't like this post, et cetera.

And to me, this looks like, I don't know, we're like trapped in Plato's cave or something. You know, we're like trapped in a dream world. Yes. That is actually, it's sort of replaced our real power with a form of false power. Yeah. The idea that posting is, I mean, I post all day, right?

Because I'm literally a comedian and a communicator. And that's like how I broadcast partially, how I might inform people of here's a candidate or here's a policy. But the way that I actually exercise power is like out in the world, right? Do you agree with that? Yes. I mean, one of the things I feel like we learned in our reporting was that there's, I think it's an unproven theory, but there's a pretty credible theory, right?

That the social media activism movement of the past 20 years or so actually detracted from real movement building. And so there's a lot of people out there who believe that like a lot of energy was directed into that that didn't end up really translating into real building a political power that you need to do, which is more of an on the ground with people and community thing. I tend to be weirdly, despite my views about meta, I tend to still be an optimist about generally social media as a concept because I do believe that it gave voice to a lot of people who were not given voices before. As a journalist, I was never encouraged to cover a lot of the

communities that have found voice on social media. So I still believe that it plays a role. But when it really comes down to putting pressure on institutions, there's some amount that happens. Like, I think that the boycott Tesla movement was actually kind of a hybrid movement, right? There were definitely people who stood in front of every dealership with signs, right? But there was also a lot of performative posting about like I sold my Tesla or you know what I mean. And honestly, all of those things combined did lead to a decline in sales, massive decline in brand value. I think they went from top 10, one through 10 brands to like 95th and the like reputable brand. Right. So it did matter. And it also got Elon out of the White House, right? Because he had to go back.

Even though he also has one of these unaccountable shareholder deals, he was like, his board was like, you got to get back here and fix this. Right. So that was a successful movement. So I'm not a believer that it's like an either or, but it's like, You absolutely can't only do the social media. I mean, the proof of that is it just happened this week. You know, Spencer Pratt didn't become mayor in Los Angeles, right? And I literally would see the amount of heat that he had online, not just on X, but like on all the platforms, was really massive. And I literally saw fans of his going, how did he lose? He had 10 times as many likes on his posts. Right.

Literally they said, like I saw people say, the Democrats must have stolen the election because look at how. many likes Spencer Pratt got. Like, yeah, the, the likes aren't the votes. Like it, it actually, you know, the people of Los Angeles maybe didn't see all the posts. Like the people who are in their houses and had to take an envelope out of the mailbox and put a little, you know, fill in a circle. They did it based on something else. Yeah. And that, that to me was a really clear instance of the, of the disjuncture there that, in the fantasy world that a lot of, and it's easy for me to point in, you know,

point and laugh at those people because I'm opposed to them. Yeah. But I feel there's plenty of places in my own life where I'm still making this fundamental error and that we all are. I mean, people make this error a lot about Zoran, right? There's a lot of like, oh, Zoran, I'm so good on social media.

I'm a New Yorker. Okay. I cannot tell you how many people came to my door to knock doors for Zoran. And the difference between them and the other door knockers. So I had a door knocker the other day who couldn't pronounce the name of the candidate

because they were clearly some paid person they cared not at all. The Zoran ones were like so amazing. I started to bake cookies for them because so many of them came and they seemed so hungry. And like that's the difference, right? You meet someone in real life.

You talk to them. They're like real. That was a huge part of his campaign. And everyone's like, oh, he's the social media candidate. No, he had an incredible ground game. Yeah, absolutely he did. And that was, you know, the physical structure of New York and the amount of time that he had to do it. Like, maybe kind of a singular thing to be able to do that.

Yeah, it's hard to do in L.A. Hard to do in L.A. and hard to do in a lot of cities. But I guess, like, is there a future version of social media that, okay, like the original promise of Facebook was there's all these people out in the real world who I know. and how do I get in touch with them? Well, I could write down their phone numbers or whatever, but oh, here's this like literal Facebook, like in a university. That's what it was originally based on, the idea of here's a directory of all the people you might run into,

how you could get in touch with them. And like that was useful as a way to connect me to people in the real world, not as something that supplanted it in some way or obscured it. and I guess I'm wondering like if there is some version of social media that goes back to that a little bit that like is feels like it accentuates and improves our ability to interact in real life rather than you know supplanting and replacing it with something so so thin. Yeah. I mean, look, I think one of the things I hate to give him any credit, but Mark Zuckerberg in an interview last year said something that I think was really true, which is that social media started as this. way to connect to sort of your past, but it has evolved into like a tool of discovery. Because they took control of the remote, especially like you said on TikTok, right, the joy, the delight,

the serendipity, they're still that available. And it is also, I find for young people, like, they are really interested in getting offline, right? Because they grew up on this stuff and they're like completely over it. I think it's sort of like, it reminds me of like the generation whose parents smoked, right? They're just like, come the fuck on. I'm over this. And so I still think it's a good way for discovery and for finding out about things. And also group chats are the future, right? Everyone's in their group chat, like connecting with their friends, like the kind of what Facebook started as. I mean, I think it's not talked about enough that like the group text, no matter what platform it is on, is sort of the most important app of the last decade. Absolutely. Right. Right.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess all we can do is continue to root for Meadows' eventual failure and bankruptcy and dissolution and break up by the United States government and regulation, right? I mean, are you, do you find yourself rooting that way even though you're a tech journalist who's maybe supposed to be covering this stuff a little bit more objectively? Oh, no. I've given them on objectivity. I think that that was a cool fad, but it's over. I'm into disclosing your biases. And so, but I would say I really think like a breakup. as long overdue, right?

Like the consolidation of Instagram and WhatsApp was actually those deals shouldn't have gone through. But I do think that like that won't be enough. And so it would be nice. It's just hard to imagine right now, but it would be nice for someone to be like, we shouldn't let this place be such a cesspool. Yeah. And it would be nice to have some tech regulation.

Well, and the last time we tried that right before 2024, it caused all the tech leaders to turn right wing and to try to throw the government to a president who didn't want to regulate them anymore, which, I mean, hopefully we'll get another bite at the apple in the future, but like that is, fingers crossed. That is a problem. Well, to help us get a bite at the apple, people can pick up a copy of her book on how to fight authoritarianism on courage. Where can, well, people can get a copy in our special bookshop, factuarypod.com slash books, but where else can people find you? It should be everywhere. It comes out June 30th, so you can pre-order right now. Right.

On courage, how to be a dissident in an age of fear. And if you want the audiobook, Rachel Maddo did the narration. Oh, my God. Yeah. Wow. Good for you. Yeah. Good for her.

And I was going to make a very stupid joke about how, I don't know why I always think this about Rachel Maddo, about anchors, that they're always wearing formal jackets on top and like pajama pants on the bottom. And I was like, was she wearing pajama pants while she? recorded your audio book. But you know what? She wasn't on camera. She was probably wearing full pajamas. That was a bizarre tangent to end the interview with. Julia, thank you so much for being here. It was such a treat. Thanks for having me. I'm glad you had a good time. Well, thank you once again to Julia for coming on the show. Once again, the book is called Encore. You can pick up a copy at our

special bookshop, factuallypod.com.com slash books. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con. Over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll read your damn name and the credits. This week, I want to thank Christina Quaranta, Sarawar, Troy Stifler, Fakriton, Ibrahimov, Yuri Lowenthal, Adam P, Aroos Harmon, Kalan, and Avaro Eggberger. If you'd like me to read your name or username at the end of the show, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Kanover. I want to thank my producers, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening, and I'm going to see you next time on Factually.

That was a HeadGum podcast. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville. And I'm Jeff Tremaine. Welcome to Jackass the Podcast, a new show coming to f***. Coming to f***. That's what it is. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville. And I'm Jeff Tremaine.

Welcome to Jackass the podcast. A new show now on Headgum. Woo-hoo. I've learned a jackass movie has to be really 90 minutes. Every minute over is a minute to roll. Apparently, there's only so much butthole you can take. We're going to take you behind the scenes of our entire history. All the best bits, bad behavior, and even worse decisions.

All of it. Sometimes we don't make the right decisions, Jeff. I've noticed that. Every so often. With guests like Spike Jones. I think this committed Jackass the podcast. What was it going to be called? The Jackass podcast.

Without you, the IQ drops significantly. Steve-O. There's a strong chance that were it not for Jackass, that I would be in clown makeup right this fucking minute. Chris Pontius. That shot of your butt just cruising up. I'm like, I got that on TV. God bless us.

Dave England. Yeah, when you come in and you're being really nice, I'm like, damn it, something bad's going to happen to me. Wee man. Jeff grabbed me from the back of the head and threw a punch. The whole bar just stopped and wanted to kill me. And some of the crew that's been with us from the beginning. I had to share a room with this guy, and I left a nice surprise in the toilet form.

Every time. Apparently, he hates to flush. Subscribe to Jackass the Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, PocketCast, or wherever the hell you get podcasts. Our new episodes drop on June 18th. Woo! Look out for new episodes in your feed every Thursday. Watch video episodes on YouTube and follow along with us on Instagram and TikTok at Jackass the podcast. What were we just talking about?

Probably buttholes. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast. That was us now on HeadGum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive from our show. This is Us.

That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes. A little bit. Are we going to laugh? A lot.

A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday.