#178 The Facebook Catastrophe w/ Roger McNamee
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2020
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2006, Roger McNamee played a crucial role in convincing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg not to sell his company to Yahoo!. A couple of years later, he helped bring Sheryl Sandberg in as Facebook's COO. Yet despite this personal connection, and his role as an early investor in the company, Roger now believes that Facebook has become a threat to democracy. In this episode, Bob and Ben talk with Roger about his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, the role Facebook has played in spreading disinformation, and the steps he believes we should take to regain control over the tech giants of the modern world.
Roger McNamee is Managing Director of Elevation Partners, which he co-founded in 2004 with U2's Bono. Roger is also a member of the band Moonalice, which plays live stream every day at 4:20pm.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:08.7 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:10.7 | And this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:13.0 | And today our guest is the New York Times best-selling author of Zucked, waking up to the |
| 0:19.9 | Facebook catastrophe, the paperback version, |
| 0:21.9 | just came out earlier this year. |
| 0:24.5 | And Roger McNamee, I figured we would start off. |
| 0:27.7 | Could you tell us about the most awkward five minutes of your professional life? |
| 0:32.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:33.3 | So here's the, let me set a stage here. |
| 0:35.3 | So imagine that I have been involved in Silicon Valley |
| 0:38.9 | since before personal computers, right? |
| 0:41.7 | So I got started there full time in 1982. |
| 0:44.9 | So back in those days, space was still the final frontier |
| 0:48.7 | and that was the focus of everything. |
| 0:50.9 | In 2006, I'd already been at that business for 24 years. I was an elder statesman. People |
| 0:58.5 | came to me for advice all the time. And one day I got a phone call from a guy I didn't know. |
| 1:04.0 | At Facebook, he was the chief privacy officer. And the thing is that Facebook, even though it was only |
| 1:08.8 | two years old, even though it only |
| 1:10.9 | had 9 million users, I was already convinced this was the next big thing. |
| 1:17.0 | They were doing a social media platform and they were the first ones to understand the importance |
| 1:23.2 | of true identity. |
... |
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