Joe: A study from MIT found that on social media, a lie spreads six times faster than the truth. Lewis: Six times? Wow. Joe: And here’s the kicker. It's not primarily because of bots or some rogue algorithm. It's because of us. Humans. We are the ones who share falsehoods 70 percent more often than facts. Lewis: That is a deeply unflattering portrait of our species. Joe: It is. And today's book is about the company that built a multi-trillion-dollar empire on that single, terrifying human flaw. Lewis: This has to be about Facebook. Joe: That's the chilling reality at the heart of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee. Lewis: And what's wild is that McNamee isn't some outsider throwing stones. This guy was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. He was Mark Zuckerberg's mentor for years. He's a Silicon Valley legend who also happens to be in a touring rock band. He was a true believer. Joe: Exactly. Which makes his warning so powerful. He saw the utopian dream, and then he watched it turn into a catastrophe. And it all started with what he calls "the strangest meeting ever."

Lewis: Okay, I’m hooked. What makes a meeting in Silicon Valley, the land of strange meetings, the strangest? Joe: Picture this: it’s 2006. A 50-year-old Roger McNamee, a titan of tech investing, sits down with a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who’s in the middle of an existential crisis. Yahoo has just offered to buy his two-year-old company, Facebook, for one billion dollars. Lewis: A billion dollars. For a website that was basically just for college kids to poke each other. I would have taken that money and retired to a private island. Joe: Everyone was telling him to. His parents, his board, his employees. But McNamee looked at this kid in a hoodie and told him the exact opposite. He said, "Don't sell. A big company will ruin it. I believe you are building the most important company since Google." Lewis: Hold on. A billion dollars in 2006? Why on earth would an investor tell him to turn that down? What did he see that no one else did? Joe: He saw two things that were revolutionary at the time. First, Facebook insisted on real identity, unlike the anonymous chaos of MySpace. Second, it gave users control over their privacy settings. McNamee saw this as a foundation of trust that could build a network more valuable than anything before it. Lewis: So he was basically the guy who told the band not to sell out, because he thought they could be the Beatles. He saw the potential for greatness. Joe: He did. He became Zuck's mentor for the next three years. He truly believed in the mission: "to make the world more open and connected." In the early days, he says, it was all babies and puppies and sharing with friends. The idea of persuasive technology or manipulation never even came up. Lewis: That sounds so quaint now. Like a black-and-white photo from a world before the internet got weird. So at what point did he realize the band was starting to smash up the hotel rooms and light things on fire? Joe: The shift happened around 2016. McNamee starts noticing disturbing things. He sees these ugly, misogynistic memes targeting Hillary Clinton, spreading like wildfire through Facebook Groups. Then he reads a report that a company was using Facebook's tools to find supporters of Black Lives Matter and selling that data to police departments. Lewis: Whoa. That's a long way from puppies and babies. Joe: A very long way. He realizes the platform he helped build is being used as a weapon. So he does what a mentor would do. He writes a detailed, heartfelt op-ed outlining his concerns, and before publishing it, he sends it directly to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Lewis: And how did they react? I'm guessing not with an open mind and a thank you card. Joe: Not even close. He describes their response as polite but completely dismissive. They basically said, "Thanks for your thoughts, but these are just isolated incidents." They passed him off to a subordinate, who just repeated the company line: "We're a platform, not a media company. We're not responsible for what third parties do." Lewis: That’s the classic Silicon Valley defense. "We just build the car, we're not responsible if people drive it drunk." Joe: Precisely. And that was the moment for McNamee. He realized the people in charge were either in denial or, worse, they didn't care. He writes about this profound "failure of imagination" in the tech community. The idea that their creation, their massive success, could actually undermine society and democracy just didn't compute for them. And that's when his journey shifted from mentor to whistleblower.

Joe: And that failure to listen is what leads directly to the catastrophe. To explain what Facebook should have done, McNamee uses this brilliant, and frankly, devastating, analogy. He brings up the Tylenol crisis of 1982. Lewis: The cyanide tampering? That was a huge story. How does that connect to Facebook? Joe: In 1982, someone laced Tylenol bottles with cyanide, and seven people died. It was a terrifying, unprecedented act of product tampering. Johnson & Johnson, the parent company, was facing total ruin. Lewis: I can imagine. So what did they do? Joe: They did something radical. They immediately took full responsibility. They pulled every single bottle of Tylenol—31 million of them—off every shelf in America. They took a massive short-term financial hit. But then they did something even more important: they invented tamper-proof packaging. They didn't re-release the product until they had solved the problem. Lewis: And the result was that people trusted them more than ever. It became the gold standard for corporate crisis management. Joe: Exactly. They converted a disaster into a victory by prioritizing customer safety above all else. Lewis: Okay, I see where this is going. So when Facebook realized its platform was being 'tampered with' by Russian agents, data miners, and conspiracy theorists, instead of pulling the product to fix it, they... what? Put out a press release saying 'some users may experience democracy-ending side effects'? Joe: Pretty much. They denied, they deflected, and they delayed. McNamee's core argument is that they couldn't follow the Tylenol model because, for Facebook, the "poison" wasn't an external threat added to the product. The poison was baked into the product itself. Lewis: What do you mean by that? Joe: The business model is the problem. McNamee, along with tech ethicists like Tristan Harris, who he collaborates with, describes an "architecture of persuasion." Facebook's success is built on three pillars: surveillance, data analysis, and behavioral modification. They track everything you do, on and off the site, to build a profile of you. Then their algorithms, the News Feed, the Like button, the notifications—they're all designed to trigger your most basic emotions: outrage, fear, vanity, loneliness. Lewis: Because emotional engagement is what keeps you on the site longer, and the longer you're there, the more ads they can show you. Joe: Precisely. And that system, which is so incredibly profitable, is also the perfect weapon for anyone who wants to spread lies or hate. As the MIT study showed, lies are simply more engaging than the truth. They're more novel, more surprising, more emotional. Facebook's algorithm doesn't know the difference between a fact and a lie; it only knows what gets a reaction. Lewis: This is where the Cambridge Analytica story fits in, right? The idea that they weren't just stealing data, they were using it to target our 'inner demons.' Joe: Exactly. The whistleblower Christopher Wylie famously said, "We exploited Facebook... to target their inner demons." Cambridge Analytica got data on millions of users through a personality quiz app. But McNamee stresses that this wasn't a "breach" in the way we normally think of it. For years, Facebook's platform allowed app developers to harvest not just the user's data, but the data of all their friends. It wasn't a bug; it was a feature. It was the business model. Lewis: So the very architecture that made Facebook a trillion-dollar company is the same architecture that makes it a threat to democracy. They can't fix the problem without breaking their own business model. Joe: That's the catastrophe in a nutshell.

Lewis: This all feels so massive and overwhelming. It's easy to just throw your hands up, say the world is broken, and delete the app. Does McNamee offer any actual hope, or are we just, for lack of a better word, 'Zucked'? Joe: He does, but it's not a simple tech fix. He says we need to stop thinking of this as a new problem and start looking at it as an old problem in a new form: unchecked monopoly power. And he argues we've been in this position before. He points to the 1956 antitrust case against AT&T. Lewis: The phone company? Ma Bell? Again, what's the connection? That feels like ancient history. Joe: It's a fantastic parallel. Back then, AT&T had a total monopoly on communications. The government sued them, and the result was a consent decree. AT&T agreed to stay in its lane—the regulated phone business—and, crucially, it was forced to license all of its patents to anyone for a reasonable fee. Lewis: And what did that do? Joe: One of those patents was for a little thing called the transistor. Forcing AT&T to share it effectively gave birth to the entire semiconductor industry. It created Silicon Valley. The breakup didn't kill AT&T; it unleashed an unprecedented wave of innovation and growth. Lewis: Wow. So breaking up Facebook, or Google, or Amazon could actually be good for technology and the economy? That's a fascinating, counterintuitive idea. It’s not about punishing them, it’s about creating the conditions for the next wave of innovation. Joe: That's his argument. He believes more, smaller companies would lead to more competition and better outcomes for everyone. But he's also realistic. As you said, that's a huge political battle. So he also focuses on what regular people can do. Lewis: Okay, I need to hear this. What can one person do against a machine this powerful? Joe: It's a combination of personal and political action. On a personal level, he says we have to consciously break out of our filter bubbles. Actively seek out information that challenges our views. Be deeply skeptical of what we see online. He gives very practical advice for parents, too, citing pediatric studies that recommend strict limits on screen time for kids. Lewis: That's a big one. It's so easy to hand a kid a tablet, but he's saying we're running an unsupervised psychological experiment on them. Joe: He is. But the biggest piece of advice is to reclaim our agency. To recognize that these platforms are designed to be addictive, like slot machines, and to consciously choose to spend less time on them. And then, to take that reclaimed time and energy and demand political action. To tell our representatives that we want a Data Bill of Rights, that we want real privacy protections, that we want antitrust enforcement. Lewis: It sounds like he’s calling for a cultural shift, similar to how we started to view smoking or drunk driving. Something that was once seen as normal is now understood as harmful, and we have both laws and social norms to deal with it. Joe: That's a perfect analogy. He's calling for a new movement towards what he calls "human-driven technology"—tech that serves our needs, not tech that exploits our weaknesses.

Joe: Ultimately, McNamee's message is that for decades, we put technology on a pedestal. We believed the myth that it was always a force for good. And he says, flatly, that was a huge mistake. He quotes the line, "Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master." For the last decade, we've let the servant run the house. Lewis: And it has redecorated in ways that are making us anxious, divided, and misinformed. It’s not about being anti-technology. It's about demanding technology that serves us, not technology that manipulates us. You know, the book got some mixed reviews. A few critics said it felt repetitive. But listening to this, I feel like the repetition is the point. He's sounding an alarm, and you don't just ring an alarm bell once and walk away. Joe: I think that's exactly right. He is trying to wake us up from a dream that has turned into a nightmare. The final message of the book is a powerful call to action. He quotes the European Commissioner for Competition, who said, "We have to take our democracy back. We cannot leave it to Facebook or Snapchat or anyone else... Society is about people and not technology." Lewis: A powerful and urgent message. It leaves you with a sense of responsibility, not despair. It’s not about logging off forever, but about logging back into the real world and our role as citizens. Joe: Well said. And on that note, we'd love to hear what you all think. Does this feel like a solvable problem, or is the genie out of the bottle? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Lewis: We're always listening. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.