EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 29,681 words- 0:00 – 15:00
Most people do not…
- RMRoger McNamee
Most people do not realize the degree to which the choices that they're making are being influenced by people that they're not even aware of, and how, when you're going to s- the search results on Google or to your news feed on Instagram or Facebook, they're not picking things that you like so much as they're picking things that they believe they can monetize. And this is a really important distinction, because what they're doing is they're creating a data voodoo doll. Tristan's ... It's a great phrase Tristan came up with, "data voodoo doll." They're gathering data. We think we give them a little data. The thing you have to understand is that data that we're giving them, that's a vanishingly small percentage of what they have, because in real life, we touch electronic systems all over the place. Every time we use a credit card, every time we go to the bank. Any medical thing generates a digital record. Our phone tracks where we are in real time. Any time we send an email on or to a Gmail or Microsoft email account, when we use a shared online application like Google Docs or Office 365, there's a digital trail from all these things. And all of that data is available to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and they create this data voodoo doll, and every time you do a search, every time you look at your news feed, you have to, in your head, realize, "Oh my God, these guys are using that data voodoo doll to manipulate the choices that are available to me."
- CWChris Williamson
My Facebook reach is declining by the second after I've had Professor David Carroll first and now Roger McNamee joining me on Modern Wisdom. Roger, welcome to the show.
- RMRoger McNamee
It is such a pleasure to be here, Chris.
- CWChris Williamson
Really excited to have you on today. Very timely with the release of The Great Hack on Netflix and this resurgence of interest in Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Can you tell the listeners who don't know who you are a little bit of background-
- RMRoger McNamee
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... about yourself, please?
- RMRoger McNamee
So, I first came to Silicon Valley in 1982 as an investment analyst, right before the personal computer industry began. And I was lucky enough to be part of the most important firms investing, first in public tech stocks in the '80s, then part of Kleiner Perkins, which was ... became the biggest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley during the '90s, the heyday of the internet. I was in their office the day that Marc Andreessen brought in the idea that became Netscape, the day that Jeff Bezos brought in the idea that became Amazon, the day that Larry and Sergey brought in Google. I started a firm with Bono in 2003 called Elevation, and in 2006, a 22-year-old entrepreneur came into my office with a crisis. His name was Mark Zuckerberg. I helped him navigate the crisis, and for a period of three years thereafter was one of his advisors. And that is the context for my conversation with you here today, that from 2006 to approximately 2016, I was a huge fan of Facebook, and then at the beginning of 2016, I started to see things going wrong on Facebook, which really violated my sense of what the company was about. I thought Facebook was a force for good. And it began in the US presidential primaries in the Democratic Party in 2016. It then included issues related to Black Lives Matter, a protest group in the United States, and then Brexit happened in June of 2016. And at that was the point at which I realized that the same algorithms, the same business model that makes Facebook so great for marketers, those same tools could be manipulated and used to undermine democracy. And at that point, I started to realize I needed to do something. I started looking for allies and couldn't find any. I was finally able to persuade a tech blog to let me write an opinion piece about this in September of 2016, and while I was writing it, more news came out, civil rights violations on Facebook, and then our intelligence agencies said the Russians were trying to interfere in the US election. So I sent the draft of the opinion piece to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, my friends, to warn them. I thought something was really catastrophically wrong with the product, and they were not particularly supportive.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
Actually, I think they, they, they treated it like a public relations problem and that the public relations problem was me-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
... and so they tried to make it go away, and in the process they handed me off to one of their colleagues, or a guy I knew really well that I was very friendly with, and we spent three months, and I ... After the US presidential election, I go to them, "Guys, you have got to do what Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical firm did when, uh, somebody put poison in bottles of Tylenol, the analgesic, uh, in drug stores all over the city of Chicago. Killed a bunch of people." And the CEO of Johnson & Johnson didn't wait for the government, didn't wait for anybody to tell him. They withdrew every bottle of Tylenol from every retail shelf in America and didn't put it back until they had invented tamper-proof packaging. And I thought, "That's the right way to handle a crisis like this." If you have played a role in harming the civil rights of people, if you've played a role potentially in undermining democracy in the United Kingdom, in the United States, you have got to throw yourself on the mercy of the court the same way that Johnson & Johnson did. And I spent three months pleading with them, "Please do this," and they would have none of it. And finally, in February of 2017, I realized it was hopeless and I was faced with one of those choices, a moral choice that hopefully you never have to come across, but in my case I did, where I'd officially retired from the investment business. I could just walk away and say it was somebody else's problem.... but I didn't. For whatever reason, I realized my fingerprints were on this thing. I'd played a role. I wasn't a huge part of it, but I was part of it, and I'd done two things. I'd helped Zucked keep the company independent in 2006, and then I'd helped to bring Sheryl Sandberg into the company, and those two things had made a big difference. And I thought to myself, "If I'm not willing to stand up and do something about this, I'm not willing to do... stand up about anything." And so I became an activist, and I didn't know what that meant at the beginning, honestly. The goal was really simple, just make people aware of the problem. And I met a young man named Tristan Harris who was coming out of Google, and Tristan had been on the US news program 60 Minutes, and he had given about a ten-minute presentation on something he called brain hacking, which is the use of persuasive technology on smartphones by internet platforms, and how you can manipulate peoples' attention. And it... a light bulb went off in my head, and I just realized that's how the Brexit thing and the US election things had happened. And so the two of us joined forces and set out to try to make the world aware of this thing, and the first thing we did, we caught a miracle in a bottle. I mean, it was just unbelievable. Two weeks after we joined forces was the TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada. TED is the... you know, it's ground zero for TED Talks, right? I mean, this is 1,500 technology and entertainment and design people all in one room. We're thinking, "We'll get Tristan to do his brain hacking thing there. Everybody will know. We'll get 1,500 business cards. We'll be all done. Our job will be over." So we go to TED. S- a miracle occurs, and somebody gets Tristan on the docket on ten days notice. And keep in mind, normally TED Talks, people prepare them for six months. Tristan's got ten days.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
He goes there. He, he just shoots the light out. It was just amazing. He was fantastic. And we're going round to collect cards. We got two business cards afterwards, and no follow-up at all. It was completely hopeless. We're, we're just despondent. And then another miracle occurs, and I get connected to a guy in Washington who works for Senator Mark Warner, who is the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, which is, was at that time the only committee of Congress where the two parties were working together. And they were the natural place to look at Russian interference, and potentially to help us protect the 2018 and 2020 elections. And that began our interaction with Washington. And so we go there. We had very successful meetings with him and with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was very focused on, on the competition antitrust issues, and that got us started. We wind up playing a role in causing the hearings that take place in the fall of 2017, in preparing Congress for those hearings, teaching everybody what they needed to know about Facebook and Twitter, and to a lesser extent Google. They kind of understood Google. And I've basically been doing this full-time, 24 hours a day, ever since, and I've written a book called Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, which has been a platform for activism. I continue to go to Washington all the time. I continue to deal with folks in press, and my job is really simple. There is a very, very scary thing going on, and most of us have no idea. I mean, we think we're giving up a little personal data for a service we love, right? It could be YouTube. It could be Facebook. It could be Instagram. It could be, you know, any one of a dozen things. We have no idea that that's not what's going on at all, that these guys are building versions of The Matrix or of Minority Report, and they're not doing it 'cause they're bad guys. They're doing it 'cause they're engineers, and it's a really interesting engineering thing. Can you use massive data gathering and algorithms to make the world more efficient? That seems like a laudable goal. The problem with it is that if you convert all human experience into data, if you process it with machine learning, if you then use it to make the world more efficient, something's gotta give. In fact, two things have to give. One of them is democracy, and the other one is free will and individual choice. And my attitude on this is real simple. Maybe people are okay with that, but they don't know that's what's going on, and we need to have a conversation about it. In order for a conversation to happen, somebody's gotta tell 'em what's really going on, and I'm one of the people who has decided to devote my life to doing that.
- CWChris Williamson
We are big fans of Tristan Harris on the show. I first heard him on Sam Harris, uh, just over a year ago, year and a half ago, and we went down that rabbit hole big style, uh, after that. I spoke to Kai Wei, the CEO of the Light Phone. Have you heard of that?
- RMRoger McNamee
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah, of course.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep. Spoke to Kai. Very interesting guy. So we've been... The listeners will be familiar, I think, with tech reduction and, uh, the-
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... race to the bottom of the brain stem, a little.
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But-
- RMRoger McNamee
It's, it's really important. But the thing, Chris, to keep in mind is we keep learning new things.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
And Tristan and I spent last weekend... not this past weekend, but the one before, together, and we were comparing notes about h- how far we had come. Because when we got together, we thought that the addiction hypothesis that Tristan had come up with, the one that underlies the Light Phone, that underlies all these other things-... was the root cause of the problem.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
But earlier this year, a professor from Harvard Business School named Shoshana Zuboff published a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It actually came out in Europe in the fall of last year, but it came out in the States in January, and it changed our lives, because Shoshana has been studying Google for more than a decade and she spent roughly a decade writing this book. And it is the most important work of economics, sociology, in my lifetime. And again, that's my opinion, but I really feel strongly about this, that this book is to the 21st century what Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was to the 18th and 19th. I mean, it describes an economic system that is dominating the world, but about which people are completely unaware, and it names everything, it describes how it works. And the important thing to understand is the reason that addiction exists is because of the incentives of this surveillance capitalism, which is about gathering all the possible data, converting all human experience into data, and then using it to make the world more efficient. And you sit there and you say, again, "Is there anything wrong with that?" And I go, "It's not for me to say." But most people do not realize the degree to which the choices that they're making are being influenced by people that they're not even aware of, and how when you're going to s- the search results on Google or to your news feed on Instagram or Facebook, that they're not picking things that you like so much as they're picking things that they believe they can monetize. And this is a really important distinction, because what's, what, what they're doing is they're creating a data voodoo doll. Tristan's... It's a great phrase Tristan came up with, "data voodoo doll." They're gathering data. We think we give them a little data. The thing you have to understand is that data that we're giving them, that's a vanishingly small percentage of what they have. Because in real life, we touch electronic systems all over the place. Every time we use a credit card, every time we go to the bank, if we wanna buy a home, there's a credit rating score. Any medical thing generates a digital record. Our phone tracks where we are in real time. Any time we have an Affinity Card from a grocery store or any kind of airline, all that data is captured. Any time we send an email on or to a Gmail or Microsoft email account, when we use a, uh, a shared online application like Google Docs or O- Office
- 15:00 – 30:00
(laughs) …
- RMRoger McNamee
365, there's a digital trail from all these things. And all of that data is available to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon. Now, obviously Microsoft and Google do not sell their data, they just keep theirs, but they buy the stuff from everybody else. Facebook does the same thing, and they create this data voodoo doll. And every time you do a search, every time you look at your news feed, you have to in your head realize, "Oh my God, these guys are using that data voodoo doll to manipulate the choices that are available to me." They know my income, they know where I work, they know how long I commute, they know the composition of my family, right? They know how I spend money, where I spend money. And they're not using that to make my life better. They're using that to make money. And again, we may be okay with that, but we ought to have a conversation about what's really going on, because it's-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
And my thought experiment that I wanna give to everybody who's listening right now is just imagine this, what if I'm right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
What do you wish you... What will you wish you had done if it turns out I'm right? Because the thing about Shoshana Zuboff's book is it is brilliantly researched. It is like 500 pages of text and 200 pages of footnotes. I mean, the woman is... I mean, she deserves the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I've never met anyone like her. As impressive as Tristan is, as impressive as all these other people in Silicon Valley is, she's at that level or more. And, uh, and that requires thinking. So Tristan and I have spent a lot of time trying to amplify the signal from Shoshana to make sure m- more people are aware of it. And, you know, the other people who circle around this thing are all looking at Shoshana like, "Oh my God, how did you see this?" Right? 'Cause it's so complex, it's so nuanced, and how in the hell did we miss it? Well, the answer is, it's these guys... There's a, there's a famous sociologist in America named BF Skinner, no longer alive, but he had these- this notion of operant conditioning, this notion that you could manipulate behavior of any species by changing the conditions in which you held them. But the critical element that he always said was, you had to do the experiment in a way that the subject was not aware of it. And Google, in particular, has been really careful to conduct experiments in ways we're not aware. Can I give you a couple examples?
- CWChris Williamson
Fire away.
- RMRoger McNamee
So think about Google Maps. Now, do you use Google-
- CWChris Williamson
Love it, love it. Used it-
- RMRoger McNamee
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Just did a 2,000-mile road trip across America and used it to get me from Dallas to Norfolk, Virginia via a number of major cities. So it was, in my experience there, surface level, lifesaver.
- RMRoger McNamee
E- Exactly. Everybody loves Google Maps, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- RMRoger McNamee
Now, let's think about the person whose drive in the morning to work...... is an hour long or 45 minutes and where there's more than one way to get there. There's a standard way that is the, you know, all, all else being equal, it's the fastest way to go. You take that route every day, but you check every morning just to be sure. And every once in a while it'll say, "Nope, not today. Today you're gonna take this really weird route." And maybe they say there's traffic conditions or whatever. Do you know what's really going on? So-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I'm scared to find out. (laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
So there's this, there's a concept, there's a concept in engineering called load balancing, which is when you have a complex system, in order to have maximum efficiency through the system, you need to balance the load, and you distribute the weight or the traffic in ways that keep everything moving smoothly. The same concept applies in an airplane. It's why sometimes you have to have, put more people at the back of the plane to keep the balance right. So when it comes to traffic, the reality of this thing is that on any given day, some people have to go on inferior routes in order to maintain the flow of the system as a whole. Which means that sometimes when they tell you to take that other route, it's not 'cause there's a traffic problem, it's 'cause, hey, it's your turn. Today you're gonna take the inferior route. Let's say you're in a huge hurry. That could be a real problem for you, and you've had no choice in it 'cause you trust Google, and they've not been honest with you about, "Hey, today is your day." They're just saying to you, "Please take this other route." And you say to yourself, "Hey, what's the big deal in that?" And I'm going, "Maybe there isn't one," right? So then you think about how they monetize, uh, maps, or especially how they monetize Waze, right? So Waze is now the, it's the equivalent now of the-
- CWChris Williamson
Is Waze, is Waze owned by Google?
- RMRoger McNamee
Of course. It's owned by Google.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- RMRoger McNamee
And, and so Waze, you know, it's taking all the traffic conditions for everybody and, and putting them there. And again, the goal of the person using Maps or Waze is to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. But Google's goals are actually different than that, 'cause they're load balancing in the case of Maps. And in the case of both Maps and Waze, they gotta get paid. Now, how do they get paid? They get paid for something that Shoshana describes as footfall. And footfall is getting you to go buy some ... basically advertisers pay them for traffic to go buy their location. So let's say they know that you like fried chicken, and you're on Waze and it's roughly mealtime. Well, they're gonna drive you past f- the fried chicken people who've paid them for footfall, and that may take you off the optimal route. Now, does this happen to you every time? No. Does it happen to you some of the time? Yes. Can it happen at a time that's very unfortunate? Definitely. But here's what matters about it. Google is playing God. They're making choices for you, and because you trust them as an honest broker, it doesn't occur to you that they don't have your best interests at heart, that th- they're really doing this optimizing for their own business. And on those two, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal. Now let's go to Pokemon GO. So most people don't realize where Pokemon GO came from. In fact, I didn't know until Shoshana told me. So Google had this thing. You remember those glasses, Google Glass?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- RMRoger McNamee
So Google Glass was a thing where you had a little screen in the corner so you could keep track of whatever you were keeping track of all the time and have a camera pointing
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- RMRoger McNamee
... forward. And as far as I can tell, the reason people wore Google Glass was so they could look like a dork.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
Right? Remember, do you remember what we called them?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
We called them glassholes.
- CWChris Williamson
Nice. Nice. Yes. Makes sense.
- RMRoger McNamee
And, and it completely failed, but I want you to understand what Google was trying to do. They had been capturing human behavior for a lot of ways, and they'd been capturing a lot of free data, right? I mean, the reason they created Street View was that they realized that having a picture of every street and having a picture of every home was really valuable, and it was un-
- CWChris Williamson
Why? Why is it valuable?
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm-hmm. …
- RMRoger McNamee
where we allowed a bank, Wells Fargo, to take money out of millions of accounts of consumers with no penalties, where we essentially allow businesses to do whatever they want with no constraints.So against that backdrop, smart people are gonna take any advantage they can get, and these guys are operating in a new area where there are literally no rules. And, you know, i- in the early days of the telephone system, operators listened into phone calls. Eventually we decided, "You know, that's not a good idea. We don't want the postal service to be reading the mail, we don't want like operators listening in." We are at exactly that point with internet platforms, where we need to set the boundaries. And my only goal here is not to convince you that there's something wrong with Google, or something wrong with Facebook, or something wrong with anybody else, but rather to say, we need to decide where the boundaries are. In the United States we have a problem right now, which we've had for a long time and it's gotten a lot worse, which is that we have a white supremacists who are going on murderous rampages all over the country with staggering frequency, more than one mass murderer a day nationwide. And a huge percentage of these things are effectively incubated, that is the people are activated by things they read, things that they learn and interact with on social media. Social media is playing a, an outsized role in a whole series of problems related to public health for children and adults, for democracy, for privacy and our ability to make choices without fear, and for competition and innovation. And in that sense, I would argue that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are like the chemical industry in the period between 1950 and 1980, when that industry was very high growth, very high profit. Why? Because they could pour their waste products, mercury, chromium, mine tailings, wherever they felt like. They could pour mercury into fresh water, polluting rivers and streams and drinking water, they could leave mine tailings on the side of the hill to leach into fresh water, uh, in, uh, rural areas, and there were no costs, no consequences. And eventually society realized that was a terrible idea, and we should make the people who created these toxic chemical spills pay the cost of cleaning them up. That is the conversation we need to have. If your system is used to undermine democracy, if your system is used in ways that lead to increases in teen suicide, massive increases in bullying, if your system is used in ways that allow disaffected people to find each other, gather, and then perpetrate violent crime, should there be some penalty? Should there be some limit? Should there be responsibility? And my goal here is to just trigger that conversation.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
We've looked at these things as though they're all separate problems, that the public health issue, you know, which would be Tristan's brain hacking and all that, was unrelated to elections, and that that was unrelated to privacy, and that was unrelated to the whole issue of innovation and competition. But in fact, all of them are the result of the incentives of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. And it is this business model where our lives, our digital existence is for sale to anybody, that they can know the most intimate things about us, and we have no control. I mean, why is it legal for Google or Microsoft or anyone else to read our documents or to read our emails for their economic benefit? Why is it legal for a bank or a credit card processing company to sell our most intimate financial details to anybody who wants them? Why is it legitimate for a mobile company to sell our location? Why is it legitimate for a healthcare services company of any kind or a healthcare data company to sell our most intimate health data? Why is anything about us for sale? That is the conversation I wanna have. And again, you don't have to agree with me, but we should have the conversation, and until we have the conversation, in the United States people are going to be killed in shopping centers, in bars, and in other environments, in schools, and, you know, in the United Kingdom you're gonna be struggling with issues like Brexit, in Myanmar they're gonna be dealing with a genocide, in the Philippines they're gonna be dealing with death squads, in New Zealand they're gonna be dealing with terrorist attacks on mosques. You know, I mean, these are not small issues, and the critical thing is, you know, I talk to young people all the time and they say, "Roger, I'm a digital native. I grew up with this. I- I'm not worried about this." And I go, "I'm not talking about how it affects you. I'm talking about how the data they get from you is used to harm other people." Think about this. Google has so much data. Uh, w- what they do is they identify life events, and then look at the things that preceded it. So if you buy... they look at everybody who buys a car, and they look at like the 1,000 or 10,000 steps they took before they bought the car, and they compare it to everybody else, right? And they find the distinct patterns. They do the same thing with women who announce that- that they're pregnant. So they look at like 10,000 steps in front of that, and they find what's common.So, there are certain things before you buy a car that you do that you may not even be conscious of that don't say you're buying a car, but are just indicative of increasing probability, because when you have a data voodoo doll, you're not selling targeting, you're selling certainty. Right? You're selling this, I have 90% confidence this person is gonna buy a car, or get this, Google knows, I believe with 90% confidence, that a woman is pregnant before she knows. Think about that for a minute. I'd like all the women who are listening to this to think about that for a moment. You may not know if you're pregnant, but Google may, and we ought to ask, is that okay? Because what happens is that once they know, everything in your feed, everything in your search results reflects what they know that you do not know. And suddenly, you do not, as- as Tristan says, you do not have agency over your life, and I don't know that that's legitimate.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a- a good point there. I recently made a- a comment on a podcast about how much I love the new schedule send email feature on Gmail.
- RMRoger McNamee
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
I said, it- this now allows you to send, uh, an email tomorrow at 12:00 midday as opposed to having to be online. So it saves it in your drives-
- RMRoger McNamee
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... and then publishes it when you want. But you are right. If I start writing to my business partner about flyers for Freshers events in September, which we need to get flyers for, in the sidebar of that email, I have adverts for flyers.
- RMRoger McNamee
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Because they are allowed to read the content of my emails, and the question of-
- RMRoger McNamee
Well, actually, they- they have asserted the right to do that. We've never actually had a conversation whether that's legit or not, because remember, they say they're a common carrier. That's how they protect themselves from legal liability.
- CWChris Williamson
What- what's a common carrier, please?
- RMRoger McNamee
That's, it- it's when they say they're a platform, not a media company, to avoid responsibility for the content on their platforms. They say, "We're a platform."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
Which in- in- in- in the parlance of the communications industry, it means that you control a pipe. And if you control a pipe, you're not responsible for what goes through the pipe.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
Unless you know what it is, right? If you're going through and looking at it.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Yep.
- RMRoger McNamee
So essentially, this is what makes it illegal for the postal service to read your letters.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
For Federal Express to look inside your packages, and for the phone company to listen, right? And so you could say that Google's and Facebook's insistence that they are platforms, not media companies, therefore not responsible, that that means that they should not be allowed.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a precedent.
- RMRoger McNamee
Oh yeah, there's a lot of precedent. Point is, in the United States, our Congress is, I think you could say, charitably ineffective, and at the moment, the government of the United Kingdom is distracted, right? And as a consequence, getting thoughtful legislation to deal with problems like this is harder than it should be, given the scale of the problem, right? And my point to you is, you might find it incredibly convenient to have a list of people who will sell you flyers, but there are points in your life that should be private. There are moments when sanctuary is absolutely essential to our psychological and human wellbeing, and these guys are systematically stripping that away. Think about Alexa. You put Alexa in your bedroom, you put Alexa in your office, and you're trusting the employees of Amazon, you're trusting the hardware vendor, you're trusting hackers to never do anything that hurts you. And maybe statistically you're gonna be okay, but there are gonna be a lot of people who are harmed really badly from just the indiscretions and the things that should remain private, and are not under this model. And Shoshana Zuboff makes this brilliant point that the imperative of surveillance capitalism is to invade every possible domain of human existence. I mean, when you hear about Facebook doing experiments to try to create things that allow you to think instead of typing your queries or your posts, they're trying to invade your head. And you say to yourself, "Well, it'll never work." And I go, "Well, I hope not, but- but what if it does?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
These are really smart people, right? And the critical thing is, at a point in time when we're dealing with climate change, at a point in time when we're dealing with a crisis of obesity and all this other stuff, the best and brightest in our economy are devoting 100% of their effort to manipulating human attention and human behavior. Now, that sounds very Chinese to me, right? In China, the government is determined to manipulate everybody in order to keep them in line. And I'm going, well, I just think the United States of America, and I don't know how you feel in the United Kingdom, but- but in the United States of America, I think that's a very un-American thing, and our companies are doing it, and we are not conscious of it. And I just think there is something wrong with all this happening outside of our awareness.
- CWChris Williamson
I think you're right. One of the things that I want to touch on, I want to begin to go back a little bit further to the beginning of your story and talk-
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... about, talk about this journey from 2006 to 2016-
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and- and find out, you were...... with Facebook through its in- not its inception, but really i- its adolescence, I suppose, and it's establishing itself in-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
(laughs) …
- RMRoger McNamee
in revenue, you've just got nine million users, but I think you have the most important company since Google, and before long, you will be bigger than Google is today. And because of that, if it hasn't already happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo is gonna come up to you and offer you $1 billion to buy Facebook. They're gonna do it right now. And everybody you know, your mom and dad, your board of directors, your management team, your employees, your friends, everybody's saying, 'Mark, take the money. It's a billion dollars, dude, you're 22. You can change the world. You'll have 650 million bucks.' Your venture capitalists will promise to back your next company, and he'll tell you it'll be way better than Facebook." I said, "Mark, I've been doing this for 24 years, and I know two things with extremely high confidence. One is, there is not one entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has ever had the perfect idea at the perfect time twice. I am convinced Facebook is the perfect idea at the perfect time. It didn't happen for Steve Jobs, not gonna happen for you. The second thing, I don't care who buys it, they're gonna wreck it. This is your baby. If you believe in the vision, you gotta carry it out." So, you have to imagine we're three feet apart on comfy chairs in this conference room with mood lighting, right? It's not like, it's not like a conf- it's not like, uh, a conference room. It's really, uh, like a living room with low lighting, and we're right next to each other, face to face. I'm expect- I've just laid this really heavy trip on a guy I've never met. He's 22, right? Some kind of reaction I'm expecting.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
I got nothing. I mean, he goes into these s- this series of thinker poses. He's trying to decide if he trusts me. And I don't know if you've ever sat with somebody in an absolutely dead quiet room, expecting a response-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
... and not gotten one, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
In 15 seconds, it starts to get really, really uncomfortable.
- CWChris Williamson
It feels like a lifetime, yeah.
- RMRoger McNamee
Right? At the one-minute mark, I'm saying to myself, "Well, it's okay, 'cause he's really showing me great respect. He's, he's trying to decide if he trusts me." At the two-minute mark, I'm going, "Whoa, this is really creepy."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
At three minutes, I'm digging trenches in the upholstery of the chair I'm sitting in. At four minutes, I'm ready to scream, but I realize I'm in the presence of a singularity, right? I mean, th- there's nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this kid is like, he's truly one of a kind. I mean, I've never seen anybody go through a thought process like this." Finally, he calms down, and he looks at me, he goes, "You're not gonna believe this." And I go, "Try me." "That story you just told? That's why I'm here. That exact thing has just happened. Every detail that you said was correct. Yahoo, billion dollars. Everybody told me, 'Sell the company.'" And I said, "Well, Mark, what do you wanna do? Do you want to sell?" He goes, "No, but I can't run it by myself and I, I, I don't wanna disappoint everybody." And I said, "Well, hang on. You got plenty of capital. You're growing like a bat outta hell."They don't have any right to tell you the dance is over. So I helped him understand how you convince people that, wait a minute, when you're part of a rocket ship, you don't abort the mission just 'cause y- you think you've gone high enough, right? You, you play it out. And the whole meeting maybe took half an hour. He goes back, he kills the deal, convinces everybody to do the right thing, which they did. And from that point, for three years, I was one of his advisors because imagine this, he's got a problem, right? That his board of directors wanted to sell the company, his management team wanted to sell the company. He was gonna have to do some upgrading, and he didn't know who to trust. So, I was one of the people he trusted, and so I helped with that. And the key thing I did was to bring in Cheryl. And I knew Cheryl f- back from when she was at the Treasury Department, 'cause she and Bono had worked together to forgive all this debt of emerging countries for the millennium, and she introduced Bono to me, and then I helped to introduce her to Google, which got her started in Silicon Valley. So we were super close, and I was convinced she was the right fit for Mark, and likewise, Mark for her. So you can imagine, I'm a huge believer in this company. But around 2009, Cheryl's on board, in place, and the thing about really successful executives from Silicon Valley is they rotate their mentors according to what they need, and by 2009, they had the management team that they wanted. So my role was kinda done, so I move into the background, and I'm in this, I'm like in the bleachers cheering along, but I'm not, no longer an insider from 2009. So...
- CWChris Williamson
What was your, what was your role from 2009? What, what did you do? Was it just...
- RMRoger McNamee
Well, we were an investor. So he, it didn't happen right away, but about a year after, uh, I met Mark, he gave us a chance to invest, and then an, another one that Elevation took advantage of, that followed.
- CWChris Williamson
Did you, did you unload every single penny of your net worth in, (laughs) into, into that to, to try and maximize?
- RMRoger McNamee
No, no. No, no. I mean, it wasn't at all obvious at the beginning what the business model was. I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
No, I just thought, I thought with the rocket ship propelling itself towards the future as you suggested that this would be a...
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not... I mean, Elevation made a huge investment in it, okay? It made as big an investment as it could, and it worked great for Elevation, and you know, but to be clear, it, it doesn't work quite the way you described. That's just not how the world works.
- CWChris Williamson
I understand.
- RMRoger McNamee
And, and again, I, I, I really liked him. I liked Mark. I liked Cheryl a lot. I was a real big believer. Now the thing is, I'm a professional technology analyst, and there were signals along the way that not everything was right. But unlike Google, Facebook took quite a long time to get its business model right, and the thing that's a problem today does, didn't really begin until about 2013. So I'd been out of the company four years by the time it began, but the things that led to it and the things that caused the problem, there were signs as early as 2007, really, that, uh, that Mark did not respect the people who used the products, that he didn't respect privacy, and that he wanted to push them, force them if necessary into a level of openness that would ultimately be really problematic.
- CWChris Williamson
Can you remember the first particular signal of that kind that, that comes to mind, or were there-
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a couple s- a couple of those that come to mind?
- RMRoger McNamee
Not a... Well, the problem here was that I thought that he learned from the mistakes. The first one was a thing called Beacon, and you may remember Beacon. Beacon was their first effort at monetization at scale, and the notion was if you were out in the real world, and you bought something, and you were a Facebook user, the person you bought it from could do a promotion on Facebook and publish it to your newsfeed. You know, you went to a sporting goods store and bought trainers, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
And they published it in your newsfeed. But almost immediately, a disaster happened.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
A young American man bought an engagement ring from an online company called overstock.com, and Overstock was one of those things that take, sold things at really deep discounts. So they published to his newsfeed that Mr. X has just bought an engagement ring for 95% off, and here's a picture of it. So the first word his bride-to-be gets that he is going to propose is that she sees this thing in his newsfeed.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
All of his friends see this thing at the same time. Now, nobody has any control. They have no idea this is going on. It's just started, and it's a massive disaster. And I mean, it, uh, we're talking train wreck of the first order, and it's the kinda thing where you would think a company would never go near invasions of privacy again. And I, I wanna say that's sort of 2007 that that's going on, and, uh, so Cheryl comes in in early 2008, you know, they repackage the technology as something called Facebook Connect, which it, it works the same way, but it does something totally different. Facebook Connect is a very convenient way to log onto websites so you don't have to remember lots of passwords. The problem is, of course, that Facebook used it to spy on people as they went around the web, the same way that when they put Like buttons around the web was all about tracking what you were doing as you went around the web. Now, it, Facebook resisted using that data in their advertising for a long time. But when they went public, the press- the, the ad tool they had at the time was incredibly successful 'cause of the growth in users. Advertisers have to go...... where the audience is.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Sell tickets and tell…
- RMRoger McNamee
they brought a different value system. They brought this hyper libertarian value system of, hey, move fast, break things, right? That you're not respon- you can disrupt without being responsible for the consequences of your actions. And that, unfortunately, happened in kind of a vacuum, that post the bubble bursting in 2000, the venture capital industry was in retreat. It turned out that, uh, that was a critical moment, because suddenly, you could, you know, the, the limitations historically of technology, we didn't have enough processing power or memory or storage or bandwidth to do what you wanted to do, those all...... basically evaporated around 2003, 2004. So you could s- for the first time, do global consumer product like Facebook or Google or, or Instagram. And these guys saw it before anybody else. So they got there, and they set the rules and they set the culture. And at the beginning, it was like this hybrid culture, right, where these people were doing real business and more or less obeying the rules. But the second generation of companies, so now we're talking about YouTube, we're talking about, uh, Uber and Lyft and Spotify. Uh, we're talking about Airbnb. These guys basically started off with the notion that laws just don't apply to us, and that there are people out there who do not understand what's going on and we can take advantage of them, 'cause we're not responsible for the harm. So suddenly, predatory business models become the rule in Silicon Valley. You know, there's a company in the nicotine business called Juul that makes vape pens, and every one of these things I had a chance to invest in, and I'm just sitting there going, "Wait a minute, this is the best that Silicon Valley has to offer. I can't manage other peoples' money if I'm not willing to invest in these things." But my personal value system didn't allow me to go there. And so I realized I gotta retire, so I retired in 2015 at the very end, because Elevation winds up very successfully. We distribute everything at the end of 2015 and I'm free, free at last. And something happened, because within a month, I'm on vacation with my mon- with my wife and I'm looking at Facebook and I see posts coming from Facebook groups notionally associated with the Bernie Sanders for President campaign. This is very beginning of the Democratic primary. And they're really deeply misogynistic and they're not the sort of thing any campaign would want its fingerprints on. You'd never put it on an official Bernie site that you were doing a misogynistic thing. And yet it was spreading like wildfire, like somebody was spending money to get my friends to join these Facebook groups, and I'm thinking, "That's really weird, and really bad." You know, 'cause I'd, I'd always... I- I have a rock and roll band called Moonells. Actually, a second one called Doobie Decibel System and we've used Facebook really successfully to build our fan base and to promote-
- CWChris Williamson
Sell tickets and tell fans about when you've got shows and events?
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah, yeah. And, and to communicate with them directly, and for them to communicate. I mean, we have... There's a Facebook group for, for Facebook, but there's one called The Tribe that's just the fans, right? And you know, it's... So it's like, you know, I'm... I mean, I've been a true believer of Facebook, early adopter. I mean, we did the first Facebook Live of a rock and roll concert. The day the product was turned on, we had a show that night and we broadcast the whole show on Facebook Live, the first time that had been done.
- CWChris Williamson
That's cool.
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah. No, and we did a bunch of stuff. We were the first one on, uh, on whatever the one is that Twitter owns. Um, I can no longer remember the name.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's what Scott... Periscope. Periscope.
- RMRoger McNamee
Periscope. But all those things came out. W- we missed Meerkat by like four days.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
But, um, but w- you know, we were a really early adopter and we'd been streaming our shows for years, right? So we really knew a lot about it and I have four patents on live streaming, which by the way are completely worthless because of the market power of Facebook and Google. Um, I can't enforce them. But the point here is that in March of 2016, Facebook expelled a group that was using the ad tools to identify people who were interested in Black Lives Matter, which is a protest group, and a completely peaceful, honorable, really in my opinion, important civil rights organization. And they were gathering data on the identify... identity of these people and selling it to police departments, which is a massive civil rights violation. Now Facebook did the right thing, right? They expelled them. But by then, the damage had been done. And that's the first inkling I got that wait a minute, these ad tools are not benign. But Brexit was the critical thing, because at Brexit, all of a sudden I realized, wait a minute, there is an asymmetry. Because engagement... You know, you know Tristan's hypothesis, right? You wanna go down the brain stem, so the most basic human emotions, fear and outrage, which are part of flight or fight. That those are the, the lowest common denominator. You can get engagement from the largest number of people by appealing to that, and it's asymmetric. Basically, people with a naturally conservative personality will be, on average, more fearful. So from a political perspective, right, it's easier to use these tools to inflame people who think of themselves as being conservative, which means you can't use these tools equally effectively across the full political spectrum. There's a massive asymmetry.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting.
- RMRoger McNamee
And-
- CWChris Williamson
That's something I've never heard or thought of before.
- RMRoger McNamee
And, and that asymmetry has been... It didn't begin here. That's been Rupert Murdoch's model from the beginning, right? And so the Murdoch organization has played to that on Fox and on Sky and other... Where, wherever they've had control of the news agenda. And, you know, it's just... These are elements of human psychology we can't avoid. And I didn't know all the nuances, but I knew enough to know that there was something really wrong here and that's when I got, you know, activated to try to do something about it. But again, in this context, I'm viewing Facebook as the victim. When I went to Mark and Sheryl nine days before the US election in 2016, it was as a friend, as their mentor, to try to alert them to something that was, I thought, really horrible. And...... the truth is, I think that they looked at me and said, "Roger, if you're so smart, where are your two billion active users?" You know, "Where are your billions of dollars?" Because for the prior five or six years, pretty much everything Facebook had done had worked out. And if you're as successful as they were for as long as they were, human psychology, you start to think that all these things happen 'cause you're a genius, and that therefore, everything you think is right. Right? They'd- they'd been proving critics wrong for a long time, and so I think their visceral reaction was to just assume I was wrong. And I totally understood that, which is why I spent three months trying to persuade them, because I mean, I've been around this a long time, and this is not the first group of people I've seen who've had that kind of Midas psychology. And I didn't- I didn't think less of them because of it, right? I just thought it was a high bar to get over, and I was worried that I was no longer the right messenger. And, but I spent three months, I gave it my best shot because I didn't want to say anything publicly, 'cause I thought the minute I said something publicly was gonna change our relationship permanently.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
Um, so I didn't say anything public for a long time. I actually waited another six months after that before I said anything publicly. And 'cause I wanted to give them a chance to get it right. I was convinced that no one could fix these problems better than the people running the companies. And keep in mind at that point, I think it's just Facebook. I have no idea that this is also about Instagram, it's also about Google, it's also YouTube. It's about, um, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, all these other companies. I just, you know, maybe it's another-
- CWChris Williamson
So, so to, to in- to interject there, uh, what I think a lot of people at home might be thinking, and certainly one of the thoughts that's coming through in my mind is that, it looks to me, and it seems to me like right now, litigating from top down, restricting what platforms can do, or some sort of very stringent law enforcement with more transparency, et cetera, et cetera, appears to be really one of the few cards that we have to play now. But as you've alluded to there, a much more effective solution would have been for it to be bottoms up, would have been for the people within the business, behind the business to have got in there, nipped it in the bud early, and then redirected the business model appropriately.
- RMRoger McNamee
Well, we continue to appeal to employees at all these companies. You know, Tristan does this every week, and he's still in communications with senior people at- at, uh, particularly Facebook and Twitter. Now, the reason we do that, you may remember Uber had a massive situation with a woman came, named Susan Fowler. And Susan wrote a blog post a couple years ago in which she talked about the toxic culture at- at Uber. And here's the thing, the toxic culture of Uber wasn't a secret. Everybody knew about it, but the management team, the board of directors, the employees tolerated it because the company was on this rocket ship of growth. And Susan Fowler wrote this blog post that, for whatever reason, shifted the perception of the employees so dramatically that over the next six months, there was almost 100% turnover of the management team. It changed everything. And we looked at that and went, "That's all we need here. We just need to get the right person." And w- w- what was interesting, 'cause it was a series of people. First Justin Rosenstein, who did the like button, then, uh, Sean Parker, who had been the first president, and Facebook completely ignores these guys. And then Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been in charge of growth until 2011, does a thing at Stanford University in late November of, uh, 2017, and it gets publicized in early December, and we're going, "This is it." Chamath had hired essentially all of the people running the growth team, which is- is the brain hacking part of- of Facebook. And we're thinking, "This is the guy." Well, Facebook apparently recognized that, and they came down on him, and somehow within 72 hours, he reverses his field completely and starts becoming a spokesman for Facebook.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- RMRoger McNamee
And he goes on TV. He came to the UK, he was on Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and- and he's talking about how, you know, Zuck's the smartest guy on Earth and only Zuck can fix everything in society. And I mean, not quite, but something like that. And I'm looking at that going, "Wow." I mean, Chamath Palihapitiya is a world-class poker player. I mean, seriously, he finished like, 101st out of, I want to say, 3,500 players in the World Champ- Poker Championship. I mean, he is no shrinking violet. There's no sh- I mean, he's not gonna roll over 'cause Cheryl calls up and yells at him, right? That's just-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think happened then? What do you think happened?
- RMRoger McNamee
I have no- I have no idea. I mean, there's been a lot of speculation. I only met Chamath one time. Zuck asked me to help recruit him-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
... when he went into Facebook 'cause his office was literally directly upstairs from mine at Elevation. And so I spent an hour and a half with him, and I will tell you, Chamath's one of the smartest people I've ever met, one of the most ambitious people I've ever met. He's- he's almost the prototypical top of the pyramid Silicon Valley bro.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
Exactly the kind of person you would want running the, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Growth team.
- RMRoger McNamee
... growth, the growth team at Facebook. I mean, Zuck totally picked the right guy.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
And, uh, you know, so I don't know him well enough to know what really drove it, but you know-... th- their for- you know, you can speculate. But it doesn't, the point is, it doesn't matter. They turned them around. And ever since, with all that news flow, there hasn't been anybody else other than Chris Hughes, the co-founder, uh, who's really come out and said anything. Now, Chris has been amazingly effective. He was Mark's roommate in college. He was the fourth co-founder of, of, of Facebook and he has been talking a lot about antitrust, and I have enormous respect for Chris. Uh, but think about this. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, there have been at least 9,000 people killed in what the UN calls a classic ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. There are, I think, 42,000 missing and presumed dead, so if they're all dead, let's assume that's 51,000 people. Not one person at Facebook has spoken out saying, "This is a moral outrage and we need to do something about this." Not one. And I'm thinking to myself, "How can that be?" I mean, h- how can that be? Uh, and what h- after Christchurch? I mean, Christchurch, proportion to the population of New Zealand, Christchurch is exactly the same percentage that 9/11 was in the US, right? I mean, this is a nationally traumatizing event, and nobody's got a problem with that? I'm just going, "Hang on. What is going on here?" You know, how about YouTube, right? I mean, YouTube recruits and trains terrorists. It poisons the minds of little children, and it's caused, in the United States, an epidemic of measles. It's got, you know, climate change denial happens on YouTube. Flat earth happens on YouTube. I mean, there's been one person, Guillaume Chalot, who was a, uh, algorithms engineer, left the company and has become an activist. But no current employees have got a problem with this? Actually, they do. They spoke out quietly, and the company ignored them, right? And
- 1:15:00 – 1:26:05
So to round up,…
- RMRoger McNamee
that's the difference between Google and Facebook, is that Google you've seen the employees go to management and tell them there was something wrong with YouTube. They fought against Maven, which was a defense contract. They protested at least a little bit against creating Dragonfly, which was the version of the search engine for China with all the censoring, and then they had a very, well, at least temporarily successful protest against the required, uh, arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. Uh, but Google's punished the, the people who organized the protest, and they've gotten away with that. Uh, but at least at Google, you see signs of the employees sticking their heads up and doing something, and that makes me hopeful. But Google's a really smart company, really well managed, with a lot of tentacles in a lot of places, and they're the ones who are, you know, trying to replace cities. Facebook's just trying to replace currencies, which is a disaster, right? I mean, 'cause you sit there, you go, "Hang on. What makes you a sovereign nation?" The legitimate use of force with the military and the police, and control of currency. And Facebook's going, "Hey, we're gonna replace you on the currency part." And I'm like, "WTF, dudes?" I mean, come on. What are you thinking? That's nuts.
- CWChris Williamson
So to round up, one of the things that I think a lot of people want to know, and me, myself-
- RMRoger McNamee
(blows nose) Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) It's fine. I'll chop that. I'll chop that. That's fine. Where are we? 1:16.
- RMRoger McNamee
Hang on. Let me blow it again.
- CWChris Williamson
Don't worry.
- RMRoger McNamee
(blows nose)
- CWChris Williamson
I love doing a pre-record, 'cause it just means that we can, we can do whatever we want. Uh, I've got about exactly three minutes, if that's okay.
- RMRoger McNamee
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm just gonna...
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I'll do it. One of the things that I'm thinking, I'm sure a lot of people at home will be as well, is that we are, um, currently a part of this infrastructure. A lot of these things are part of our lives.
- RMRoger McNamee
Totally.
- CWChris Williamson
Are there, are there any bits of advice? Is there anything which you can suggest to the people at home which are-
- RMRoger McNamee
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... the lesser of few evils, should I say?
- RMRoger McNamee
Well, actually... No, actually, there, there are positive things going on.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- RMRoger McNamee
The most important thing to understand is that Apple has decided to make protecting consumer privacy the focus of their product development and the focus of their business. And the things that they've done are huge, and they're getting more huge by the day. So, you know, if you do facial recognition on Apple, that image of you, which is incredibly detailed, never leaves the phone. That's a huge deal. Siri, one of the reasons why Siri doesn't perform as well as Alexa is they do a huge amount of the processing on the phone to minimize the data that goes into the system. Apple Maps. Apple spends a billion dollars a year on this mapping product. They do no monetization at all. Do you know why it exists? So that you don't have to use Google Maps. And here's what's really interesting. Instead of doing what Google does, which is to track every route you ever take forever, Apple, as soon as you're done with the route, snips off the depo- the place you left from and the place you're going to, breaks the rest into 10 segments, and anonymizes them so they can't reconstruct your route.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that true?
- RMRoger McNamee
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- RMRoger McNamee
Totally. So then Apple creates Apple Pay, where you can use your phone to pay for stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
The merchant, all they get is money. It's like you've just done a cash transaction. But the data leakage occurs with your credit card, particularly if you're on MasterCard. It, it, there's less da- a little bit less data leakage, uh, with... Well, the data leakage on Verizon occurs in a different place. But Apple says, "Okay, so we're gonna make a credit card. And the deal on this is the guy we, the bank we partner with can't leak any of the data." So if you use an Apple Card, which comes out this month in the United States and soon thereafter everywhere else-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RMRoger McNamee
... if you get an Apple Card and you use Apple Pay and Apple Card, it is like paying cash. It is a great idea. Apple has a new thing coming out in the new operating system called Sign In with Apple. That's the equivalent of Facebook Connect or Google Connect. But the difference is...... it uses a random email every time you log onto a website, so they can't track you. Now, this is really important stuff, because basically, Apple is going after a portion of surveillance capitalism, and they're going after it hard, and in a way anybody can use. The other thing that's going on around Apple is that there are all these other products, and this is like DuckDuckGo for search, but also now for browsing. Uh, Disconnect Me, which blocks trackers from being sent out by apps that are running inside your phone. I mean, the Apple ecosystem is becoming wildly more secure, where Android, the whole purpose of Android is surveillance. So the first thing is, if you've got an Android, as soon as your contract is done-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RMRoger McNamee
... move to Apple, okay? Seriously, that is the best thing you can do. I don't think you have-
- CWChris Williamson
You heard it here first.
Episode duration: 1:26:06
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