Stephen Levy: "Peak Facebook"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Stephen Levy, author of Facebook: The Inside Story, to talk about the moment he decided to write the book (3:30), the first time he met Zuck (8:10), the “book of change” (9:45), why Zuckerberg didn’t need an “adult in the room” (13:15), his deification in Silicon Valley (16:30), how Trump used Facebook (18:30), dark profiles (21:20), why Facebook is still moving fast (24:30), Facebook’s antitrust fight (28:00), on whether encryption changes things (30:30), Facebook as a utility (33:30), Zuckerberg’s shrinking inner circle (35:20), the hardest thing about writing the book (39:00), how Zuckerberg has changed (43:30), the Facebook phone (47:45), Cambridge Analytica (48:45), and whether Facebook is too big to control (53:00).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.4	Back in the dorm, we couldn't anticipate this.
0:06.4	But you think about it, they were out of the dorm within four months, and they were in Silicon Valley.
0:11.3	He was surrounded by some of the best minds in Silicon Valley.
0:16.3	He had this great advice, and everything went great for him.
0:22.6	He was able to make that pivot from a college network to something that served everyone in the world.
0:33.6	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley.
0:41.1	We have a throwback edition for you this week.
0:44.6	So, as you are no doubt well aware, this has been an absolutely monster week for big tech.
0:51.6	So Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, all reported just gigantic profits,
0:58.6	generally blowing away where we're already ratcheted up expectations from Wall Street.
1:04.1	We're talking about many, many tens of billions of dollars between them.
1:08.3	And it really just highlighted this growing concentration of power amongst the big guys,
1:12.9	as well as just this broader shift of more and more money flowing to the internet,
1:20.1	more and more times being spent online.
1:23.4	And so that is one bit of context.
1:25.9	The other thing you may have noticed, which I touched on in the paper last week, is that
1:29.7	Mark Zuckerberg, it's kind of broken cover about what his next big plan is.
1:34.6	And that is to make Facebook a Metaverse company.
1:39.2	And his idea is that in five to ten years, Facebook will not be known so much as a social media company,
1:46.0	but a Metaverse company now.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.