Offline with Jon Favreau - The Book Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want You to Read

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Meta has called an emergency arbitration hearing over a tell-all memoir by Facebook's former Director of Global Public Policy. The author, Sarah Wynn Williams, has had to cancel all her book promotion…including coming on Offline this week. Jon and Max protest Sarah’s gag order by delving into her book, Careless People, and platforming her allegations of sexual harassment, the company’s role in Myanmar's genocide, and its supplicant relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Then, the guys discuss whether humans have passed peak brain power, and why Sam Seder’s appearance in a Jubilee video has everything Gavin Newsom’s podcast is missing. 

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and then getting the beauty ad is just so. Or the weight loss ad. Right, it's just like knowing that that is when you're deleting a selfie, you're saying I didn't look good in this probably, or there's a good chance of that. It's fucking gross. When you're going to your $20 million vacation house

in St. Barts that you know was built partly off of exploiting 14-year-old girls feeling bad and delivering them a weight loss ad and thinking this is good and in fact I want to go out of my way to do a cover-up to keep getting that money. How do you do that? How do you go to that house? You're just really excited about free speech. I'm John Favreau. I'm Max Fisher.

Max, are you ready to land on the meta do not hire list? You weren't looking for a job there, were you? I don't know. If I was, I think this is going to be the week that that finally, once and for all ends. Cross that off the bucket list. We originally had a special episode planned for you all today. Sarah Wynn Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, who recently published an explosive tell-all memoir about her experience at the company with the great title, Careless People. Great title. It was scheduled to sit down with Max and I to talk about the many serious allegations

in her book, as well as the official whistleblower complaint she filed with the SEC. But late last week, Metta called an emergency arbitration hearing, arguing that by writing and promoting this book, Sarah had violated a non-disparagement clause in her severance agreement. Metta claims that they emailed her about the arbitration hearing, but she didn't show up. And the arbiter ruled in Metta's favor and prohibited Williams from further publishing, distributing, or promoting careless people. So our interview with Sarah was cancelled. Wild.

Her publisher, Flatiron Books, has no intention of halting the sale of the book. And while we don't exactly know what's next for Sarah, I imagine she'll challenge this ruling in court, which she can do. And hopefully she can get to resume promoting the book, in which case we will have her on. But in the meantime, we figured we'd do what Sarah can't do, uh, currently and talk about the experiences and allegations she wrote about. Uh, but before we get to all that, we just got to, let's start talking about Metta's attempts to silence Sarah, which are wild. Can you recall another attempt by a tech company or any company to silence an

employee as blatantly and publicly as this one? I, this feels totally unprecedented to me because it's not just silencing her. They are trying to suppress this book. I mean, part of the arbitration ruling says that she has to, with all means within her power, stop distribution of the book, which is not within her power, so it effectively, like, has not pulled it off the shelves. But they are really going all out in a way that I have never seen before.

And companies don't usually do this kind of thing, even if they're really, really mad about a book, because it looks terrible. It looks really bad. And it really tells you something that they are willing to say, we are gonna take the incredible PR hit and the major PR risk to try to suppress an entire book,

because either there's like some level of vindictiveness from the executives who are implicated very, very heavily in this book, or they're just absolutely terrified by the allegations in it. But whatever the motivation, it's not working. It is absolutely hilarious that this all comes just a few weeks after Mark Zuckerberg announced that they're going back to their free speech roots.

I know, I know. Like we all knew it was bullshit, but it's, oh yeah, Mark Zuckerberg just believes in free speech. He's such a chill guy who wants to go buy Rogan and hang out and suppress the publication of books that he doesn't like. And they don't even, their legal strategy, I think this is important for people to know, publicly in their PR statements, they're saying, oh, the book is all false or it's already known, which are two contradictory claims, by the way. But legally, if you actually read the arbitration,

they just claim that she is not allowed to disparage them because of her non-disparagement agreement when she left the company, and they are also being very transparent about this. They're saying, yeah, that's right, we fired her because she complained about Joel Kaplan allegedly sexually assaulting her. Yeah, and they say in the ruling too,

we make no judgment about the content of the book in the ruling. That's right. Right. Even as they come out and say, and it's like, it's not just her. There are all of these stories that you're hearing now of book reviewers being like, meta was hounding us. The Washington Post book reviewer described the meta comms people hounding him for days in a preemptive quote, counter assault.

Before the book even came out, like peppering him with questions, are you going to review it, what are you going to say about it? He wrote, in my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper book sections, no company has ever done this with me. And one of the world's most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book, it's time to pull out all the stops. So the book reviewers are panicking about Metta, which is concerning. Well, as you said, it's not working.

Careless people rocketed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list after Metta pulled this. It seems like they might have really fucked themselves with this stuff. This might honestly be the biggest dry sand effect of all time. Like I wish to God that Metta had tried to suppress my book. Like you can get these kinds of sales. So there's a little independent bookstore, like right by my house.

And I happened to walk by there the day the book came out, or maybe it was the day after, but it was before the injunction of the arbitration happened. And they had like a big stack and like nobody was really looking at them. And it was the day after, but it was before the injunction of the arbitration happened. And they had like a big stack and like nobody was really looking at them and it was like, well, maybe it's not really selling that well. And I was like, okay, but I'm glad that she got it out there and it's in the public record. And then this arbitration ruling hit and I went by the bookstore the next day because I was like, I should get a physical copy.

And they were like, not only are we sold out, because I couldn't find it. I was like, oh, they put it in the back because nobody was buying it. They were like, we're sold out and we're on deep back order. It'll be weeks before we can get enough copies. They were like, the demand has been crazy. That's awesome. Yeah, it has not worked for them,

which tells you something about the company and about the recklessness that they engage in, which people who have been like reporting on the company have been trying to warn us about for years. Sorry, well, Williams is trying to warn us about in this book and it is wild to see that just they'd like they come out swinging and they're not really thinking about the consequences apparently. And I'm wondering about the freak out and I mean they did it is a it is bad timing for

them because they have some some court cases. They have a big FTC case that's a Mark Zuckerberg is getting interviewed for seven, or deposed for seven hours this week over this FTC case to maybe break up Metta. You think they'll have some questions from the book? They have to get a copy first. Well, let's get to the allegations that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to hear. We've both read the book now and in addition to a thousand little stories about the selfishness and carelessness of Mark

and Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan, there are a handful of major allegations in the book about sexual harassment, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and offering the Chinese Communist Party tailored surveillance tools to spy and crack down on dissidents that we should share. We talked a little bit about China last week after the Washington Post reported on a complaint Sarah filed with the SEC.

That said, we want to read you all an excerpt from the book where Sarah begins to understand the extent that Facebook was willing to appease the Chinese Communist Party. Yes. Let me pull that up. So we are, as you said, because she cannot be here, but we have 300 pages of Sarah Wynne Williams. We're just going to read her book directly. And I also, this is kind of a dream for me,

reading out loud on a microphone is like, that's just so fun to me. Okay, Facebook would build facial recognition, photo targeting and other moderation tools to facilitate Chinese censorship. This is Sarah Williams discovering documents about Facebook's big plan to get into China. Under direction from Mark,

Facebook assembled a large team, including some of its most senior and respected engineers to work up what the Chinese Communist Party wanted. Always a great sign. They start building new censorship tools for Honi, who's a private equity company, to use to scour through people's messages and posts, converting everything to simplified Chinese. I find detailed content moderation and censorship tools. There would

be an emergency switch to block any specific region in China, like Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are, from interacting with Chinese and non-Chinese users. Also an emergency, extreme emergency, content switch to remove viral content originating inside or outside China, quote, during times of potential unrest, including significant anniversaries, like the June 4th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the citizenship tools would automatically examine

any content with more than 10,000 views by Chinese users once this fidelity counter got built. The documents say that Facebook deployed it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it's been running on every post. And then there's... The key phrase there is inside and inside or outside China. They're just deploying it outside China just as a little gimme, just as a little, here you go Xi Jinping, here's a little taste, why don't you deploy Chinese censorship outside of China's borders so like if there are Chinese dissidents in the United States

I don't it's a great question I mean as we discussed last week they deleted the Facebook page of a Chinese dissident in the United States on behalf of Beijing as I read through page after page I see the sort of briefings that would warm the hearts of every government I work with we never share this type of information and believe me, they've asked, but here are detailed explanations of precisely how the technology functions, algorithms and photo tagging and facial recognition, all the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook are providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese

government's needs. It's white glove service for the CCP. The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government has asked on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship and encryption, and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter. So things that they told the US government are physically impossible for us to do. They are proactively doing for the Chinese government. White glove service for the CCP. It's a good line. It's a great line. It's a good line. And really sort of captures what this was because, you know, you're reading in Sarah's

voice there, she, her job was to work with governments all over the world and governments all over the world probably wanted some of this, some of them. And it was always a no. But Mark wanted to get into China so badly that maybe one of the most repressive governments was willing to give all these surveillance tools to them. Right, proactively, to volunteer it, yes. And I think that, I think this is one of those things where it's not just the crime, it's the cover-up. Like you expect Meta to sell out its users, we kind of knew that that was always built into the platform, but they

are selling out the US government, which regulates them ostensibly in theory, by telling them we can't do these things that you're asking us to do, these ways that our platform is destabilizing the US, but then actually it turns out that they can't. Turns out they've been lying to the US government and regulators, according to the book. Question for you that I never really figured out. Why didn't they ultimately not end up in China, Facebook?

I mean, I think we have to read between the lines a little bit, but the implication that I got is that just China never wanted a major American-owned social media platform in their country. They wanted a Chinese-based company. I mean, this was always their thing, even when they did work with American internet companies, is you have to have a headquarters here and you have to work with Chinese companies.

And like, if they could just have a Chinese company that was based entirely in China and that they had all of their usual tools of leverage and control over, why wouldn't they prefer that? And also, why wouldn't they prefer to? And also why wouldn't they prefer to have that homegrown for economic reasons too? So as horny as Mark was for the CCP, they ultimately, it was unrequited. I honestly think that they were playing him

from the beginning. Interesting. And they talk about how Instagram was in China early on, like over a while ago, like a very stripped down version of Instagram. And I think this was always just a, like, Xi Jinping showing a little ankle so that Mark Zuckerberg would hand over the crown jewels. This metaphor is really getting away from me.

But then planning, like, always planning to kick them out. And you see Sarah Wynne Williams and other people at Facebook, according to her accounts, like, trying to tell the executives that and trying to to say like, this is never going to happen, and we're creating all of this risk for ourselves for nothing, but it's just, it's, it's his white will. Let's talk about the allegations concerning Myanmar. So we all know that Facebook was accused by the UN of abetting a genocide in Myanmar. We've talked about it a few times on this show.

Yep. a genocide in Myanmar. We've talked about it a few times on this show. But now, thanks to Sarah, we know what was happening inside Facebook as this violence unfolded. Max, you highlighted an example that shows just how indifferent Facebook's leadership was to what was happening in Myanmar. Can you read that one? Yeah. So this is just, we won't get into the whole everything that happened. This is just kind of a revealing moment. This is an anecdote that is about Facebook systems actively promoting false claims that

have led to race baiting and led to a bunch of riots and violence in Myanmar. I get an email telling me the junta wants us to remove these posts because they're causing real world violence. Riots aren't going Buddhist mobs are attacking Muslim shops. People are dying. The posts seem like a clear violation of our standards. But the content operations team, which is based in Dublin, doesn't want to take the post down. The case officer tells me she doesn't think they violated our rules, but she can't find

anyone who speaks Burmese, and Google Translate doesn't do Burmese, so she can't say for sure. I pull in someone more senior, and he reaches out to that same contractor they'd hired a few months before, a Burmese guy based in Dublin, their one moderator for Burmese content to review the material. Five hours passed. How long do you think this will take, I ask. There are riots in the streets over this. I really need these posts to come down. Unfortunately, no idea, the senior guy responds. He's offline. I have pinged him on FB and hope he sees it when he gets back to me. This is again, people are dying as this is happening.

Do you have a contact phone number for him? I write, this is an emergency. The senior guy calls him. The Burmese contractor is at a restaurant and I'm told he'll go home and should have access to a PC in 15 minutes. He'll come through the post and try to see what is being said and if we were on action on it or not.

Nearly two hours pass and the senior guy confesses, contractor does not have his work laptop and he himself is on the road But he'll get to it when he gets home later I feel both responsible and completely impotent when we'll be you'll be in a position to do this We really need to move quickly and then of course Nothing happens for many hours until the government finally just blocks Facebook This cannot be the system Facebook relies on when people are dying. If posts are causing riots in the streets, we can't be depending on some random contractor in Ireland who's out to dinner and can't find his laptop.

But they did and they continued to because they didn't care. Well, I was going to say it's, I'm glad we read that one after the China passage because the contrast with like they were willing to hand over all of their trade secrets and build new surveillance tools. There's no principle of stake here. So the Chinese Communist Party could take down a post at a moment's notice anywhere in the world that was critical of them. But there's a genocide unfolding in Myanmar and they've just got one guy in Dublin who's a contractor who speaks Burmese who was like out to dinner and didn't bring his laptop. And multiple executives at the company are like, hey, we're causing multiple deaths of

people in Myanmar and just nobody can be fucking fussed to do anything about it. And she talks about this was an incident in 2014. She talks about this continuing and being the status quo for years. And I appreciated knowing even though it was not like super surprising, but knowing just that everybody in the company was completely aware of this. And as you say, it wasn't a priority. They didn't care, so they chose not to act. And the only reason was that it would have taken up

a little bit of their time and they just, why do they care? Just people in Myanmar. Offline is brought to you by 3Day Blinds. Talk about how Love It came up with the idea to have 3Day Blinds. Talk about how Lovett came up with the idea to have 3Day Blinds installed in your office. That's not what happened. That's not how it went.

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For a free, no charge, no obligation consultation, just head to 3dayblinds.com slash offline. One last time, that's buy one get one 50% off when you head to the number three, d-a-y blinds dot com slash offline. Another allegation we should talk about is Facebook targeting and manipulating the emotions of teenage girls. So in April of 2017, a confidential document from Facebook leaked to the Australian press that claimed the company was offering advertisers the opportunity to target 13 to 17 year olds during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel

quote worthless, insecure, stressed, defeated, anxious, stupid, useless, or like a failure end quote. Offering advertisers to target these young girls with weight loss or beauty ads during their most vulnerable moments. Wild. Again, documents, there is a whole presentation that leaks. This is not just like- 13 to 17 year old girls targeting at moments of insecurity to sell them stuff. At the time, Facebook claimed that they did not actually offer these tools and that this deck was intended to quote, help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. We now know from Sarah Wynne Williams that that wasn't exactly the truth.

Max, can you read the section you highlighted? Yes, so cut to at a big emergency meeting with a bunch of executives where they're talking about what to do about this. The privacy staffer explains that teams do this type of customized work targeting insecurities for other advertisers and there are presentations for other clients specifically targeting teens. We discussed the possibility that this news might lead to investigations by state attorney generals or the Federal Trade Commission because it might become public that Facebook commercializes

and exploits Facebook youngest users. To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens' sense of welcome to us feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook's critics had long warmed up. A statement is quickly drafted and the response team debates whether Facebook can include the line, quote, we take this very seriously and are taking every effort to remedy the situation, end quote, since in fact this is apparently just normal business practice. A com staffer points out which should be obvious that we can't say we're taking efforts to remedy it if we're not. This prompts other team members to confirm his take, revealing other examples they know of. Facebook targets young mothers based on their emotional states, targets racial and ethnic

groups. Facebook does work for a beauty product company tracking when 13-17 year old girls delete selfies so it could serve a beauty ad to them in that moment. And then she talks about how people in the meeting are horrified. The weird thing is that the rest of our Facebook co-workers seem unbothered by this. I'm still struggling to get a better picture of what we're dealing with here. So I ask for an independent audit by a third party to understand everything that Facebook has done like this around the world, targeting vulnerable people so I can try to stop it. Who has this information?

How many advertisers has it been shared with? The team is not enthusiastic and then she talks about other executives nix it. They say no paper trail, no investigation, then she talks about somebody actually dies maybe as a result of this or it's revealed from a lawsuit. The initial statement Facebook gives the Australian journalists who discovered the targeting surveillance back in 2017 does not acknowledge that this sort of ag targeting is commonplace at Facebook. In fact, it pretends the opposite. And she goes on, despite this, Elliot, Elliot Schrage, Joel Kaplan, and many of Facebook's most senior executives devise a cover-up. Facebook issues a second statement that is a flat-out lie.

Quote, Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The new statement is circulated to a large group of senior management who know it's a lie and approve it anyway. Fucking wild, man. I know. They were really, they're selling out kids.

They're selling out kids. So I know some of this has been reported. Some of this came out with the Francis Haugen whistleblower situation. So it's not a completely new revelation, but some of this is also new, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that there was a concerted cover-up, the fact that this wasn't just a rogue salesperson who went off and did this, that this was deliberate strategy from the top. And I think that what's revealing-

In fact, at one point, I think someone from the Australia team, after they put out the statement that it's alive, well, that Australia team called Sarah and was like, why are you putting out that statement? Of course, we actually, we brag about these tools to advertisers. So it's like, this is part of our business that we go around selling.

And so that person was mad from another perspective, which is like, you put out that statement, it's going to hurt our efforts with advertisers to sell more. The thing that comes through here is that they do the cover up not for PR reasons, not because they want to hide the fact that they have been doing this in the past. They do the cover up because they like it. They think this is good. It's deliberate strategy. It makes them a lot of money and they want to continue doing it.

And we have every reason to believe that they have The thing that really gets me is saying They don't even want to do an internal audit among themselves to find out how commonplace it is Because they don't want a paper trail even fucking the CIA torture program had a paper trail That's nuts It's really the idea that what else are they they doing they don't want a paper trail of? And I know there's been so many examples of this, but like if a 14 year old girl deleting a selfie

and then getting the beauty ad is just so- Or the weight loss ad. Right, it's just like knowing that that is when you're deleting a selfie, you're saying, I didn't look good in this probably, or there's a good chance of that. It's fucking gross. When you're going to your $20 million vacation house

in St. Bards that you know was built partly off of exploiting 14 year old girls feeling bad and delivering them a weight loss ad and thinking this is good, and in fact I wanna go out of my way to do a coverup to keep getting that money. How do you do that? How do you go to that house? You're just really excited about free speech. Just getting back to your roots, an MMA, you

know, just getting into some fighting and you're... I am so glad that he's feeling in touch with his masculinity. That's something I'm really happy for him. Maybe he would serve some ads. Maybe that's maybe he's a victim of his own. That's why he looks like this now. What do you think his screen time numbers are? I don't know. I bet it's really low.

That's another thing that she says in the book is that none of the executives or very few of the executives at Facebook let their own kids use the app. Who knows better how dangerous it is? Right, and it was just a very high, and we've heard this at other companies and from other people too, with Twitter and everything else,

but it is so telling about what social media does to kids, that the people who work in social media don't let their kids on social media. Yes, when they are speaking publicly, they're the liberation company, they're the free speech company, they're lifting all of us up, and when it's behind closed doors and among themselves, they know that they're the liberation company, they're the free speech company, they're lifting all of us up, and when it's behind closed doors and among themselves,

they know that they're the cigarette company. They know it. So we should also finally talk about the mistreatment that Sarah experiences at Facebook. We talked, I think we talked last week about the weird Cheryl stuff. We did. And I finally read it, and boy, it is so much weirder than you think it is from the media right now.

Oh yeah, yeah, just read the whole thing. She also details sexual harassment and mistreatment by her superior, Joel Kaplan, former Bush administration official who now serves as president of global affairs at Metta. There are genuinely too many examples of this to talk about all of them right now, but we

want to zero in on one specific incident. The performance review that Joel forces Sarah to take after she was on maternity leave, which she spent most of hospitalized. This was just galling. It's really galling. I returned to work in August 2016. My first day back, Joel Kaplan decided to do a performance review as he says it's performance review season. A quick google search confirms my suspicion that you are not supposed to be given

a performance review of your maternity leave. In fact, I understand that pushing someone to work during their maternity leave is against the law. Nevertheless, quote, you weren't responsive enough, he says. In my defense, I was in a coma for some of it. It's not just me, Sarah. Some of your other colleagues found it challenging to engage with you. And then she says, I mean, you know, I was in a coma for some of it. It's not just me, Sarah. Some of your other colleagues found it challenging to engage with you." And then she says, I mean, you know, I was in a hospital, in a coma and near death, but I accept that this did make it hard to engage with me at times." End quote. Irrespective, this leads him to conclude that there were quote, issues limiting my effectiveness. And both he and my peers say I was quote, difficult to work with during this period. Sadly, he notes that he is unable to put a formal performance review in the system to accompany this feedback

because I was out of the system for most of the performance cycle again, because she was in a coma. But he wants to know that if he could, but he wants me to know that if he could, it would be bad. I mean, and like, it's a horrifying story. She almost died. She almost dies like right during and then after childbirth. And then there's a lot of complications. She's in horrifying story. She almost died. She almost dies like right during and then after childbirth.

And then there's a lot of complications. She's in a coma. She's working for most of it. Yeah, and then when she wakes up from the coma, she's still in the hospital, she's out for a long time and then comes in and gets this review. I'm glad we chose this one too, because there's some sexual harassment allegations as well.

And we talked about the show thing. But I think it's important to realize that the portrait she paints of Facebook leadership, and this is true of Mark, of Joel, of Sarah, of a lot of them, is just like, they are so relentless about work. And the idea of the work-life balance is just completely out the window. They are just ruthless. Yeah. I think it's the meanness and the callousness and the cruelty that gets me,

not just because, hey, it seems like the C-suite of Facebook is a tough place to work and I wouldn't want to work there, so as you say, you know, it's a tough day for my job prospects there. But if they are willing to treat the people who they see every day, who they go on trips with and who they play Settlers of Catan with at weird work trips to Jakarta, like if they're willing to treat these people that cruelly and heartlessly, how are they going to treat the rest of us? Not well.

It is the, you know, move fast, break things hardcore, right? This is Elon and Twitter, this is Uber. This is like- It's all part of the greater good. If we're making more money, we're producing more good in the world. So actually you're the bad person for almost dying on maternity leave.

Well, and it's also like, we're changing the world here. You know, and we're building these things that are gonna change humanity and stuff like that. And so yeah, we're gonna break a few eggs, right? That's sort of the- Right, you have to be willing. And maybe one of the eggs is your life. But I will say that in all the pushback,

there's all these former Facebook employees who have now put out statements that all sound like they're the same statement. Yes, right. It's very conspicuous. But it's like, you know, I know some of these people too that have put out statements. It's very like, it's focused on Joel, mostly. And I know some of these people too, that are put out statements. And I'm just, it's very like the Joel,

it's focused on Joel mostly. And I don't know if that's just, Cheryl's gone, Mark's Mark, and Joel is now sort of the titan. But it's a lot of, that's not the Joel I know, Joel's been a mentor to me. And it's like, that doesn't have to be, those don't have to be lies either. Right?

Like people are different and some people could have great experiences with Joel Kaplan. Sure. Yeah. It doesn't mean that this is not true, and that he can't be an absolute shit to a lot of other people. Well, and it's also... Especially people who challenge him, like Sarah clearly did. Well, I mean, they, again, Metta's own comms around this

have explicitly said that they fired her, in part, for bringing these allegations against him. Now, the way that they have couched it is they said that they fired her in part for bringing these allegations against him. Now the way that they have couched it is they said that she was toxic behavior and unfounded allegations and we did an investigation and we decided that he was innocent. But okay, that's great. That's great that you decided that he was innocent of sexual harassment. Why is that a reason to fire her? And I think that this all speaks to an extreme protectiveness around him,

which I think is partly because he is their lifeline to the Trump administration. Yeah, that's true. I mean, he is the Republican Trump operative within Metta that's part of their deal, is that he gets free reign over policy and that Trump leaves them alone, or maybe does them some favors,

like pretending to ban TikTok. And I think that there is probably a legitimate fear within Metta that if Joel Kaplan left for some reason because there was enough of a movement against him within the company, because these instances are never isolated, that that would be really, really harmful for their relationship with Trump and therefore maybe the survival of the company. Yeah, that's true. And he is a Bush era Republican, but he's a, you know, he's a Bush era Republican, but he's also, you know, in the book,

she writes that he was like sitting behind Kavanaugh, during Kavanaugh's hearings, and then like his wife threw a big party for Kavanaugh after he was confirmed. So it's a very like Bush era Republican who has like drifted towards MAGA, and it's now the MAGA connection. Although now I guess Mark, you know,

Mark's standing at the fucking inaugural behind. Although now I guess Mark's standing at the fucking inaugural behind Trump. Can I actually give you another example of their MAGA Trump connection? So this is another, this is a quick excerpt from the book. This is right after the 2016 election. And the setup to this is that, according to Sarah Williams,

a number of the company's own executives concluded that Facebook actively elected Trump in the election, not just like a passive conduit, but like the platform and the decision they made got him into office. And there's this scene she recounts that's really stunning on this long international flight. All the executives gathered around Zuckerberg laying out the case to him. And I won't go into it because it's like, it's quite long, but it's

incredibly persuasive. But the part I want to read is Zuckerberg's response to all of this. Because at first he's like, by the way, he's like, fuck, even internally, he's like, we didn't elect Trump. These people don't know what they're talking about. This is bullshit. And I don't believe it. And so he does that sort of thing. Which he kind of did publicly at first. That was, yes, publicly it was like... And then they realized that they have to lay out the truth to him, and so they do this on this flight.

Thank you, yes. Mark quietly takes it all in. At first, he's skeptical and pushing back, but that gradually turns into curiosity. He starts to ask questions, trying to understand the mechanics of it all. He doesn't seem upset that the platform would be used this way, not in the slightest. If anything, there's admiration for the ingenuity.

Like these tools were there all the time for anyone to use this way. How smart that they figured it out. When all this was explained to Cheryl at a later business operations meeting, once she grasped what Trump's campaign did, her immediate response was not horror, but that it was brilliant and innovative. And do you think we might have a shot at hiring Trump's Facebook guy, Brad Parskell, to come work at Facebook? That was amazing.

No one said anything, and after an awkward moment, Chase and she shifted gears. Of course, that's silly. He can have his pick of jobs right now. A pause, but maybe there are others from the Trump campaign who we could bring inside Facebook. That part was fucking wild. I know, I know. from the Trump campaign who we could bring inside Facebook.

That part was fucking wild. I know. I know. It really, and honestly, it completely tracks. It completely tracks for me that they saw that Facebook could swing elections and they thought, hey, maybe this is useful. Maybe this has some business applications for us. And there's a part later that, again, you should all get the book and read it.

There's a part later where Mark starts flirting with the idea of maybe him running for president and sets up the tool when he went to Iowa and all that kind of stuff. And Sarah makes the point that like he knows these tools work. What do you think he learned from that? He owns the platform and he's like, wouldn't it be interesting if I could control the media and in my own. Maybe elections. Right. yeah.

So there's another conclusion that he seems to draw from this. I am really surprised that this has not gotten more attention. This to me is one of the most explosive parts of the book is that Sarah Williams lays out in this series of stories that kind of occur over and over throughout the book. That's this set of anecdotes mapping out what certainly reads like a concerted years-long global campaign by meta to covertly tip the platform in favor of certain politicians, governments, and leaders in exchange for favorable regulations and laws.

I found this to be very scary, and this to me was totally new. Just a few weeks over he takes over his predecessor's job, Joel Kaplan starts hiring a political sales team to push politicians here and abroad into becoming advertisers. The ideas of politicians depend on Facebook to win elections. They will be less likely to do anything that will harm Facebook. If Facebook is the goose that lays the golden eggs, no one wants to kill the goose, get them hooked on those golden eggs. And then she talks about this entire scheme that Jola Kaplan had to start, quote unquote, packs abroad to pay politicians that are friendly to Facebook. And she has to say that's bribery and illegal. Please don't do that. And the

idea apparently never goes anywhere, but tells you something about their mindset. By the way, this did not, at least for a while, did not work with Donald Trump since Facebook did help him in the election. And then he wanted to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail. That's right. So that's the book. Yeah. I know it sounds like we read a lot, but you know what? There's so much more.

Go get Careless People. Yes. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to read it. If you can find it. You should read it. Yep. And hopefully, at some point, Sarah can come on if this gag order is lifted and tell us more because I imagine she has a lot more that she didn't even get to put in the book.

Or you know what? Maybe I'll travel to a country without an extradition treaty and interview her there. Perfect. Interview her in Venezuela. Perfect. Oh man. All right. We're going to move on, but before we jump to break some quick housekeeping, you can now listen to the first two episodes of Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker.

Wherever you get your podcasts, this is our brand new show about how the Vatican's top money man, who was found dead in 1982, was entangled in a vast money laundering operation that put him in the crosshairs of the Sicilian mafia, a secretive far-right Masonic Lodge and the Catholic Church itself. 40 years later, journalist Niccolo Minoni gets a tip about the death that changes everything. Follow him as he unravels a web of power, crime, and conspiracy to answer the question, who really killed God's banker? Also, check out the latest Inside 2025, where Dan and Alyssa Mastromonico break down what

a government shutdown actually is, who's affected the political fallout, and what really went down behind the scenes. Get access to this exclusive series and more by heading to krikko.com slash friends to subscribe. When we come back, Max and I will talk about the all the non-Facebook news we've been watching. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. They say money can't buy you happiness. That might be true, but money sure can make you feel a lot of other things, like stressed, guilty, overwhelmed.

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Offline or download the Acorns app to get started paid non-client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns. Tier 1 compensation provided, investing involves risk. Acorns advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor view important disclosures at acorns.com slash offline. All right. Last week, the Financial Times published an incredible piece of offline bait. The article written by the Times's chief data reporter, John Byrne Murdoch, was titled, Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power? That's a great headline.

And noted that research shows that, quote, the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since. And that the share of adults who are unable to use mathematical reasoning to review and evaluate the validity of statements is increasing. He also shares a study that's been asking 18-year-olds since the early 80s, whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating, or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and the 2000s,

but began a rapid upward climb in the mid 2010s. And guess what? Adults show a similar pattern the same time. Right when everyone started using iPhones. I know, I wonder what happened in the early 2010s. What do you think of that piece? I mean, this is kind of everything. I know.

I think this is, I mean, it's everything we talk about with social isolation. It's people feeling more cynical. It's distrust of institutions. It's the right-wing political drift. Like, I think something that is really important that this highlighted is not just when we started getting dumber and like, of course, it's the phones, but it's like incredibly black and white, but where we are getting dumber. The biggest drops were among teens, the biggest drop was in reading skills over other skills.

And adults, the drop in literacy was double the drop in facility with numbers. So we are really, it's like, why are we becoming dumber? It's the move into a post-literate society. We are becoming less and less able to read. And I think a lot of that is shattered focus because we're addicted to our phones. And it's also the fact that we are being pulled away from the written word into video.

Right, it's the video thing. It is the video. And you hear teachers talk about this, you hear professors talk about this, that there's students, even the really smart ones, even in great schools, that they can't read a book. I think this is important too, and the reason I wanted to highlight the adults showing a similar pattern part is this is not enough. So much of the conversation around phones is some of the criticism of the criticism of the phones and kids using the phones is like, oh the old people are

yelling at the kids again and every generation has this and it's not limited to children. It's not limited to teens. It's everyone and we're focusing on teens because they are at the stage of life where they're most vulnerable and they're also, they're in school, right? And so they're learning. Right, right, right. But like, no, no, no, all the adults are getting dumber too. Yes. The phones are doing it to the adults too. Yeah. And they all have a problem too.

It's all of us. It's disturbing to see this evidence that you can go from someone who knew how to read and who knew, and I mean, like, obviously everyone still knows how to read, but someone who had the mental facility to spend a lot of time with the written word, and you can lose that. And you can train that out of yourself. I absolutely can.

Yeah, I'm not throwing any stones here. We just did this focus challenge where we were forcing ourselves to read for 20 minutes a day. And it was great. It was amazing. But it definitely took me a week or two to get back into it. I used to read a book every couple of weeks. And it's like, I have definitely started to lose that skill, but it is, I think it is the most, I agree it's important to highlight

we're not kicking the Zoomers or the teens. The drop among teens, there's this stat they report for US teens, the percentage who hardly ever read in their free time has jumped from 15% to almost 50%. And it's going up. There's no reason to think it won't continue to go up. And this is important, not just because it's like reading is nice and it's a good skill to have. But like, you know, we talk all the time about when you don't understand how things work,

everything looks like a conspiracy, right? In a way that makes you very like prone to kind of right wing arguments about tear down the institutions. They're conspiring against you. And when you can't, I feel bad to keep saying can't read, but when you like cannot consume information through reading, you consume it through your phone, you consume it through a video, you're not getting the same high quality of information, you're not understanding how things work because you're not able to get that information because it's harder for you to access it. So you don't understand how things work. So it not able to get that information because it's harder for you to access it so you don't understand how things work so it all

feels like a conspiracy it feels scary and that makes you want to reach out and smash all these systems that aren't working. And yes the consequences for governance. Huge. Democracy. Right. Huge. This is not just about your own mental health it's not just about your own

Totally. Success in the world, though it is about that, but it is very much like, as you start overlaying this on the voting patterns and election results and the gap between people who pay attention to the news and their politics and who are highly engaged versus the people who are not as engaged in their voting habits and how then it's not left right as much anymore but this sort of authoritarian populist crank, as Matt Aglasee calls it, realignment versus like people

who are still very engaged, who are more prone to, you know, supporting democracy and self-governance. Like it's, I don't think it's disconnected. Yeah. And it's both, you need to be able to read and to consume information through reading in order to be a responsibly engaged citizen. And also if you can't do that,

you're going to default to social apps, video-driven social apps that as we've said many times are controlled by a small number of companies that have, as we just heard, a vested interest in lying to you and manipulating you and promoting things that are not true in ways that consistently pull people towards the right. And just to like really underscore that we're not just beating up on like some other people who are like failing at being, like I feel this myself. It's not like, oh, dumb people are voting Republican.

Right, the dumb people are right, yeah. This is not what we're saying here. I feel it myself in, and like I'm someone who like obsessively reads the newspaper. There are weeks where I'm not feeling good, I'm not feeling focused, so I get more news from my phone, from social media, instead of reading the newspaper, instead of reading a book, and what do you know?

I feel confused, I don't understand what's going on. It seems like everybody's incompetent, it seems like the Democrats are deliberately failing, makes me angry at everyone, it makes me want to kind of throw all the bums out, and then I get some sleep, and then actually read the newspaper again, and then it's like, oh, okay, I understand what's happening here better I have more of a handle on it so we are all susceptible to it by degrees yeah it's bad it's bad

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first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Speaking of breaking our brains, let's end with the YouTube video that dominated our feeds this week. Sam Seder, hosted the Progressive Internet Radio Show and podcast The Majority Report, just starred in a now viral video titled, 20 Trump Supporters Take On One Progressive. The video is published by Jubilee,

a popular YouTube channel, as part of its Surrounded series, which features one guest debating 10, 15, or 20 other people simultaneously. If you're curious about the logistics of how that works, you can check out the video on Jubilee's YouTube channel. The logistics, it's a bunch of chairs. And you know what?

You have to see it to believe it. But for our purposes today, I want to talk about some of the crazy conversations that poor Sam Seder had to have. And the only way to explain them is with this very representative clip. DEI essentially provides tax cuts for the end of the year when you create your tax returns. They give you a tax credit for hiring someone who is black or a person of color. We're talking about government agencies that do not get tax cuts. tax returns, they give you a tax credit for hiring someone who is black or a person of color. We're talking about government agencies that do not get tax cuts.

Government agencies... They don't. No. Yes, they do. They absolutely do. I'm talking about... And parts of it, and public sector gets tax cuts when you hire a person of color. Government agencies don't pay taxes.

Government agencies operate on, are funded by the government. That is not true. That is not true. And you know what? I think, I think the whole juxtapose of this entire conversation. What month is this? This is January. Okay, so we can agree on that. Wow. Wow. Okay, so you and agree on that. Wow. Wow. Okay, so you and I both watched this.

Subsetting. I knew this was our last topic. I was like, I'm gonna get some representative clips because it's an hour and a half. Yeah. I watched the whole thing. You know, I watched the whole thing and... It's all like this?

I have to say... It's a banger. I have to say, it's a banger. I have totally turned around on it. Really? I think it's great. I don't think it's great. I think it's fucking horrifying. Sure, no, I understand.

In the past, I have watched the one conservative debates. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's the thing with it is that whoever the person that the 20 people are debating is is that person is almost always more prepared Of course and better at this than the other people. That's kind of the way you're watching Yeah, that's your so like my views on this have been you know shaped by watching Charlie Kirk do it or whoever else They've had do it right sure. This is the first one. I've watched I didn't watch the Pete Buttigieg one I guess Pete's also done this and been the one person.

And Dean Withers, who's been one of the participants at some point, he's been the, but watching Sam do it, I thought it was valuable because I was like, oh, these people are not very well-informed, yet very smug about not being very well-informed. Also many of them very open about being like, one woman is like just a white nationalist, basically. She's like, what's wrong with xenophobic nationalism?

She literally a quote from her. And Sam Seder is like, oh, oh, you see him suddenly get it, that that's who she is. And he's like, you know what, I'm not going to debate you on this. That's just, we just have a fundamental difference here. But I kind of thought like, and this was, I was going to bring a take here that, that breaks Austin's brain because Austin has been, Austin has been talking a lot, a lot about Gavin Newsom's podcast.

I know he's really into Gavin Newsom's podcast. And my take is Gavin Newsom's podcast should be more like how Sam Cedar was debating these people. Sure. I agree with that. Yeah, because this was an edge. It was him exposing their ideas for what there are. Yeah. And some of them made I don't want to be too some of them made some good points here and there and he took them apart.

And I just thought it was more useful than like, hey, how are you? And like, tell me about MAGA. I agree. What I will say for it is that I appreciated that he, Sim Cedar, seemed to see that the value here was not like an emotionally satisfying moment of like, Sim Cedar dunks on conservatives and shuts them down, but rather like,

let's draw them out and see like, what is going on inside the bubble that these people live within? And that is, I think, valuable and important. And I agree, I would love to see Gavin Newsom do that. I do think it's important to see it in context a little bit in the way that people actually hold beliefs and ideas. Because I think there can be something a little bit,

maybe misleading is not the right word, but when you kind of draw people out, or when you ask them what they believe and then confront them about it, they harden their views in a way that I think is not necessarily representative of the way that people actually hold beliefs. Like, I think this is easy for someone like you or I, or probably a lot of listeners of the show who are very high information, highly engaged in politics, easy for us to miss, is that we have like very discreet, clear views.

They all fit together in a belief system. We know where they come from. There's an ideology behind it. Yeah, we have a coherent worldview. We have a coherent worldview. At least to us. Right, right, maybe. You might hate it, but it's-

You might hate it, but at least it's an ethos. Most people do not hold views that way. For most people, their views are, they're much squishier, they're much more softly defined. They might hold multiple contradictory beliefs and might hold multiple contradictory, quote unquote, facts in their head about the same topic. And again, no judgment on this necessarily.

Some judgment for some people, but I'm not saying coherent like our view is better. I'm just saying it coheres, it literally coheres together and most people do not. Most people who are lower information, the beliefs are more symbolic. It's not, I literally believe, now once this guy was pressed on do you literally believe

that government agencies get tax cuts for, first of all pay taxes, which is crazy, and then get tax cuts for hiring people of color, he's going to harden that. And that is partly what I think can be slightly misleading about this format, is now it looks like he holds that view very strongly. But I think often when people express views like this,

and this is true, people on the right and the left, just people who are like normal, low information, they mean it as kind of like, well, this is how I feel about hiring practices. And this is, I think that government agencies aren't representative enough. And I'm going to kind of express that in something that like doesn't actually make sense if you examine it. And so I don't, look, I don't care if this guy got hardened in his beliefs or not. I do just think that it's worth keeping in mind when you see this, that in this context,

they're going to look like very firm, concrete beliefs. But in any other context, they're probably to look like very firm, concrete beliefs, but in any other context, they're probably not gonna be expressed quite that way. Yeah, that is a very good point. And it is interesting that some of the, some folks on the right thought that like, these kids destroyed Sam Cedar. Did they really?

Yeah, like on Twitter, that's like some of the discourse. Most people, I think, have judged it that Sam, sort of wiped the floor with them. But again, I don't even like who won or who didn't win or who got destroyed or who didn't is not actually what I found useful or interesting about it. I would say America got destroyed. America got destroyed.

But even like Vulture did an interview with Sam afterwards about it. And, you know, he sort of talked about the experience and how he didn't know what he was walking into because they don't tell you who's gonna be the people, who the people are in advance. He just walked in and just heard it. And so some of it truly shocked him and disturbed him.

And some of it he was like prepared for because he wrote, you write your own prompts, right? Like it was like prompt number one. I think that Trump's policies hurt the working class and help the rich, right? Whatever, that's the prompt. And then they argue about that. So he got to control that.

He did say, like when he was talking about that, he was talking with the woman who said, what's wrong with xenophobic nationalism? He's like, and some views are so out there that I was like, I would just rather. I think that most of the country agrees with me and not her. So I'm not going to go into them. Right. My only thought about that was not that I'm just, I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I was like, I actually think that we are, and this is one of the reasons why I find I liked the video and liked the whole exercise is we are in a moment now where I think you

do have to make the case for multiracial democracy. I agree 100%. And I think when we've had this whole debate about, we can't make the election about democracy because people care about, you know, cost of living and stuff like that. I think the chat, one of the problems there was, is that debate was us saying democracy's obviously good

and trying to convince people that the other side hates democracy. And we actually have to make the case for why democracy is good. And that could work better because it's not using the word democracy. But we have to make a case for the system. We have to make a case for a multiracial country. We have to make the case for all of these things because we think that they're basic. But like from that, from, from that 20 Trump supporters who were younger, diverse, diverse in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, gender.

Like I do think that Democrats or folks on the left or whoever you want to call us, like we have to get back to basics and trying to make the case for our worldview, even the parts of our worldview that we assume most people agree with, and maybe most people do agree with. But clearly we are seeing a younger generation now. And we can see this again in the voting data. Gen Z has took a hard, hard swing to the right. And maybe that's a one-time thing, but I wouldn't bet on it.

And it's mostly men, Gen Z men. And I don't think that it is, at least from these conversations, it's not just cultural. It's not just like the bros and we got to go on the bro shows and all that kind of shit. Like there are worldviews that these folks

and other young people were espousing that are the MAGA cohesive worldview that I think we have to challenge. Yeah, I agree. And we have to challenge like the fundamentals of it, right? Like why xenophobic nationalism is bad. Right. I have been saying since 2016 that I think that we have had a cultural narrative for a long time, not just the United States, but like broadly in democracies, that we kind of won the argument on liberal democracy

on racial and cultural pluralism in the 1960s and that it's over and that we all agree that Martin Luther King Jr. was right and that racism is bad and that both democracy itself, like voting who voting freely and who your leaders are going to be and then liberal democracy more broadly defined as an equal rights for everyone is just like the status quo and the default and it's all the thing we want and I think that that was never true. I think that from the beginning in the 60s which is when we first instituted like real full liberal democracy there has always been a movement that says this is wrong, this is not what we want, but there has not been a channel for it. What has changed is that now because of the way that

primaries work, that they're open now, that political parties are collapsing, and their institutional authority, the way that media is now democratizing, there's now much more space for people to come together and find each other and say, wait a minute, we actually agree that we never liked this, that we never wanted liberal democracy, we never wanted pluralism, and we've got this competing vision that has been on the margins, or at least has felt like it's on the margins for so long that we all just wrote it off as they're the bad guys, they're the baddies. And you say, well, you compare them to Nazis. And we all agree that Nazis were the bad guys

in World War II, so of course we never wanna be them. I don't know, Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. It's all out there now. But also I think one of the challenges is we, oh, everyone knows Nazis are bad. No, I agree. But then Elon, and you've heard some other people say this too now, they were like,

who's the one trying to be like, you know, the Nazis are bad, but the Nazis were actually communists. Oh yeah, no, the Nazis are left-wing. The Nazis are actually leftists, right? Like so they... For a long time, that's been Jena Goldberg. We think that just because everyone says, everyone agrees that the Nazis are bad, that we agree that fascism is bad.

Exactly. But this movement now is saying, okay, they're trying to rewrite the past also. Because no one in this movement is openly running around being like, yes, I hate everyone and I'm evil. Evil's good. They are thinking of themselves as the good ones. Right, they think, I just wanna save our culture. Yep, and we have to engage with those ideas

and refute them as opposed to just assuming that everyone agrees with them. Right. And they see themselves as standing up for democracy. And this is actually articulated well by the xenophobic white nationalist woman, where her belief is that, quote unquote, we, which of course is very loosely defined, but also clearly defined, we are the majority. So we get to be in charge and we get to set what the culture is. In her mind and in the view of what you and I would call right-wing ethno-nationalism or right-wing authoritarianism that is actually saving democracy Which is actually something that Stephen Levitsky gets really well is that the big movement

Against liberal democracy as we understand it comes from people who see themselves as saving it Yep, and you and you hear it too. It's more like well, we have just a European identity Yes, that's the tradition of this country. And I don't have a problem with the other people, but like they should have their country and we should have ours. And everyone should be able to do their own thing. And you're just like, oh, fuck. This is where we're going.

Would you ever do one of these Jubilee things? Because I mean, you've done focus groups, but you don't, I assume you're not usually arguing with people in focus groups. I have to say, Sam was excellent. And I say, like, I think Sam has made fun of us a lot on his show on Pets in America. That's what I've heard. I don't care.

Honestly, he's a really effective. Yeah, he's very good. I'd rather, I don't, you don't have to be nice to me. And, but as I was listening to him like that, it's really hard to be the person. Yes, I'm sure. And so you have to do a lot of prep. You have to know a lot of shit.

And like to be on your game like that with whoever you get and whatever crazy thing they, and some people said some crazy things to him that I think he probably wasn't expecting. You could tell that a lot of arguments he was expecting because they're normal political arguments and some things were completely off the fucking wall. Like the tax cuts for the government agencies, the DEI.

So you have to be prepared for that. So I don't know, like I would need like a couple weeks to not come to work. Easily, yeah. And just prepare. That was the, beyond how distressing it was to see these views held by my fellow citizens, the thing that I found hardest to watch

was I kept thinking like, oh God, imagine being in that moment and having two seconds to craft the perfect response that is like, rebuts it, counters it, but also redirects it, but also, you know, you're not saying anything that I say. There's a lot of going home afterwards and doing a jerk store called kind of thing. That's right.

How's that for a 90's Seinfeld reference? I love it, I love it. All right, so that's our show for today, Max. It was great. I enjoyed having Sarah Wood-Milliams on In Spirit. Yes, me too. And if she wants to come on Not In Spirit. I love it. All right. So that's our show for today, Max. It was great. I enjoyed having Sarah Wood Williamson in spirit. Yes. And if she wants to come on, not in spirit. Please. I'll see you in Caracas.

Once you're legally allowed. Max will see you in Caracas. In Pyongyang. All right. We'll see you all back here next week. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor.

Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Seglen. Dillon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeleine Herringer, and Adrienne Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you.