TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW Disparagement Clause ft. Jason Koebler

Starting point is 00:00:00 Look, I want to do one bit of news though, before we start talking about the book, which is of course, and I love it, it touches me at the bottom of my heart. There's so many people sent this to us because you have understood what we like. Yes. What we like are the things that we have picked to hyperfixate on. Among them is Sarasota representative Greg Stubbe. I'm ringing the big Greg Stubbe bell. It's a really massive bell.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Insanely loud. Devastating. Who, in what appears to be a kind of woke outburst, erupted at speaker Mike Johnson, who was trying to, well, they were like working out a form of proxy voting in this Congress for new mothers. And Greg Stoobbe was like, no, you're trying to stop new mothers from voting, and then stood up and shouted, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus. Which I think is the-

Starting point is 00:00:51 Fuck. Which, look, that's the energy! Yeah, well I sort of agree, but I think the more salient point here is, all of the fish and wildlife investigators got doged out of their jobs, and like, all of the cops who investigate the crime of, like, catfish theft, those are all, like, they've got detail to do, like, ICE no-knock raids now, so Stoobie is free to let loose in Congress a bit, I think. Because he's not looking over his shoulder. NARES He finally recovered from his injury falling

Starting point is 00:01:20 off that roof a year ago. ALICE What if that roof fall changed something in him? You know? What if he's, what if he's crypt, what if he's dark woke now? Oh yeah, Greg Stuvy is good. He's gonna do the face turn. I sort of, maybe this is like alternate history paradox game mod brain here, but I think that if, you know, if DSA got it together and you're looking at a communist America, Greg Stuvy

Starting point is 00:01:44 could make the leap. I think he could be one of those guys who just switches pretty effortlessly. Yeah, you just have to like, you just have to start planting propaganda around Northern Florida. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. The communism ideology drift happens in Northern Florida and pretty soon you get like a woke Stubbe.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Yeah. Anyway, anyway, look, we have so much to talk about about this book. And like I said, all tariff discussion, we're putting a relief plan on it where we're going to talk about it on Monday. Well, we're just doing what the president is doing, which is deciding we're going to talk about it and then kicking it down the, kicking the can down the road a bit. Yeah, exactly. Hanicking at the last second and going, that's too hard. Talk about it next time. Yeah. And because we haven't done that, we've actually had to, we've had to doge Milo and he is now working at a manufacturing job and it's making him much more masculine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Milo is now one of those two guys throwing the oil rig parts around.

Starting point is 00:02:38 No, he's working at the Bunnings factory. He's doing the, he's making the hot dog. But look, let's, let's talk about this. And I want to talk first about the book's author, Sarah Wynne Williams, who was an early-ish employee at Facebook, who kind of saw that Facebook would need to have a government relations function before kind of anyone else, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did, pitched her own job and then kind of got hired and was increasingly important as Facebook began to realize that the main barriers in front of its growth are going to be governments that either want them to pay taxes, want to regulate what they're

Starting point is 00:03:14 doing, and so on and so on. It's so cool that Mark Zuckerberg, boy genius, didn't think about the government at all because his Facebook is a functionally and overgrown like hot or not for like girls in his college class. I mean, Jason, do you think I have the right end of the stick here, right? That this is that she's this idealistic person who looks at like the Arab Spring basically fully buys the idea that this is Facebook that did this. And then it's like, we have, it's important that then we like use this politically responsibly.

Starting point is 00:03:45 Yeah, and there's a part in the book where she was working at the UN. You know, she's from New Zealand. So she she had some job at the UN and said like, this is incredibly, incredibly boring. I'm just doing like reports with a bunch of old people. And then she sees the Arab Spring and she's like, Oh, if I actually want to impact the world, I need to work at Facebook because it's just like changing how everyone, how protests are organized, how elections are run and things like that. And she takes it to Facebook and they're like, oh yeah, we don't, we don't think we need that for like a year or like two years until she finally gets hired.

Starting point is 00:04:18 And then they're like, oh shit, we, we definitely need this. It's like when you're, you're trying to be the student of the great Zen master Zuckerberg, he must turn you away three times before you can go be his head of government relations. The book is the story basically of her career, which I think it's notable to say, like it spans most of the 2010s and she actually gets disillusioned like really, really, really quickly, it seems, right? Because the people at Facebook seem to either not understand their own platform or as they start to understand their own platform, they start to just completely not care

Starting point is 00:04:54 about anything that it does other than get people to look at ads, basically. It felt to me like she started to get disillusioned when they sent her to Myanmar pregnant by herself to meet with a military junta there to try to get Facebook unblocked, and was sent through this Kafka-esque hell where she wasn't sure if she'd be imprisoned forever there, and kinda spiralled from there, I felt. That seems not great, I will say.

Starting point is 00:05:22 It's like one of the thieves of this book, weirdly, is it's not just Facebook's impact on the world, but Facebook's impact on the people that work there. In terms of, in fact, I'll say this, that is one of the most revelatory things about the book. We knew all of the stuff about the impact on the world, the impact on politics and stuff. Just how terrifyingly bad the working culture is there. That was new. They like, celebrate when their representatives in certain countries get sent to prison as like a kind of blood

Starting point is 00:05:51 in blood out thing. Like there's a whole passage late in the book. Like the mob? Yeah! Like you get out of doing time for Facebook and Robert De Niro is there in a traditional USC and huge suit to celebrate? Yeah! It's like you took your first pinch in Argentina and you took it like a man. You didn't say nothing after the Rohingya genocide. Everyone was posting.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Yeah. I mean, there's a part in the book where a Brazilian employee gets arrested and Mark Zuckerberg is like, oh, this is a good look for us. Like we're fighting the Brazilian government. And he does this whole Facebook post about, you know, how Facebook is standing up to the regime in Brazil for free speech, more or less. And then like 10 minutes later, you know, on his private jet, they're like, oh yeah, like, I don't know who that guy is. And years later, you know, Zuckerberg doesn't even remember the guy who went to prison for him. So less like Goodfell is more like the Irishman then. This is one of a thousand examples of what a gigantic piece of shit this guy is.

Starting point is 00:06:49 And the other thing to note, right, is that the thing that ends ultimately Sarah Wynne Williams's career isn't that she gets burnt out of Facebook and leaves. It's not that she writes this tell all and then gets fired for it. It's that she gets sexually harassed out of the company by her immediate boss Joel Kaplan, who is the former Bush staffer who is the current head of policy at Facebook, who currently has the job right now, right? Sexually harasses her out of her job. And that's the story. So this is where we're going to get. I mean, this is... We all knew this was a terrible company, but you know, this is quite something.

Starting point is 00:07:24 I'm going to start with something in the middle, which is one world leader treating Mark Zuckerberg the way he ought to be treated. Two days later, at a state dinner at the White House, Mark gets another chance to speak with President Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he'll do him the honor of naming his unborn child and she refuses. Yeah, he wasn't shocked by this white boy's perfect Mandarin. Yeah. He was... Yeah, I mean, that's maybe... That's a weird thing to say, dude. Yeah. White boy shocks world leader with a perfect odd request.

Starting point is 00:08:01 White boy makes world leaders slightly uncomfortable, it seems like. And then the next time they meet in the book, he again wants to like ask She for more favors from Facebook and the bodyguards just create a perfect human wall between him and Mark Zuckerberg. My favorite part is they can't even get a meeting with She like throughout the entire book. She is not willing to meet with Zuckerberg and so they like reverse engineer these like situations where Zuckerberg might casually run into him like at these state dinners or yeah exactly.

Starting point is 00:08:36 They call it like a poliside. That's the biggest mistake. You can't really engineer a meet queue. It always goes wrong. And so that part where all the bodyguards get in the way, they had like gone to this conference organizer and asked if Mark Zuckerberg's dressing room could be next to President Xi's dressing room, so that they could just like casually run into each other, and Zuckerberg could ask like, uh, can Facebook enter China? And they were basically like

Starting point is 00:09:02 outsmarted by the Chinese regime. I feel like that's down to the like wall of bodyguards aspect, which you should really price in maybe. Yeah. And even then, right? Like even as Facebook starts giving the Chinese government everything they're asking for in terms of like information on people or whatever, she still has no time for Mark Zuckerberg. He treats him like he he treats him like, like shit on his shoe, which again, reading this book is the correct way to do it. Anyway,

Starting point is 00:09:31 I also wanted to give another passage, a longer passage that I think sums up this era of Facebook very well. Mark Zuckerberg is giving a speech at the UN. Sarah Wynn Williams, his career is kind of in full flight now. She's been threatened with jail like twice, feeling once in Myanmar, once in Korea. She's like being told to like work through having a very like like a sort of birth related hemorrhage. She hates her job. She hates Mark Zuckerberg. She hates all these people, but she's still being dragged along. Zuckerberg is at the UN and he stood up in front of a sort of an assembly and he doesn't know what to say. Grab, grabbing random diplomats trying to get them to name his son. Name my son!

Starting point is 00:10:08 I got no idea. He's like eight years old at this point. I've just been calling him, hey you! I've just been calling him you boy! The idea that he wasn't asking Sheila to name his son is like trying to get an in with him, just because he couldn't think of a name and he was asking everyone.

TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Disparagement Clause ft. Jason Koebler

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TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW Disparagement Clause ft. Jason Koebler