Robert Evans, Jamie Loftus, and Maggie Mayfish dissect Mark Zuckerberg's rise, labeling him the worst person of the 21st century for his misogynistic origins with FaceMash and stealing 4,000 student profiles. They detail how Sean Parker's toxic influence and $30 million forest-destroying wedding shaped the company, while Eduardo Saverin was diluted from a promised 34% stake to less than 5% through alleged Stalinist tactics. Ultimately, the hosts argue that despite Facebook's global expansion, Zuckerberg never outgrew his early data theft and exclusionary behavior, cementing his legacy as a moral failure rather than a tech visionary. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ego Modem Meets Will Farrell00:02:25
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello, friends.
The Worst Person of the 21st Century00:15:25
I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And today we're talking about a man who I truly believe is the worst person of the 21st century.
Now, by the end of this episode, you'll either agree with me or you won't.
But to join me on this journey, this odyssey, this epic quest, are two of my very favorite people, Jamie Loftus and Maggie Mayfish.
Jamie, you are you guys should introduce yourself.
That was a very quiet.
That was breathier than I was intending.
Yeah, for the marvelous.
I had to copy it.
Yeah, the ASMR crowd's really going to appreciate that one.
I can't maintain Sexy Baby for what appears will be the length of this episode.
It's okay.
You know what else they're going to appreciate?
That was a beautiful thing.
What was that noise?
Wow.
A Doritos cornbay snack.
What?
I better try one myself from our party size bag.
We've got both Blaze and Nacho Cheese.
I have never tried Blaze.
I'm honestly too weak for Blaze, and I know it.
Here we go.
You know, it's been a while since we talked about Doritos on the show.
And for no reason that I'm willing to talk about right now, we're back into them, baby.
So Doritos will be accompanying us through this journey into the heart of markness.
Love that moisture-sucking dust.
It really, it really distracted everyone from my terrible Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah, I did skip right over that into appreciating the beauty of Doritos.
We can only let two more fly, unfortunately.
really blue one right at the top doritos nature's sin remover i could be one over with additional doritos you're weak dairy weak that's your forget me now the world's forget me now no i didn't say that i didn't say that roofie your shame with doritos cornbay snacks anyway let's talk about mark zuckerberg speaking of marketing bad ideas okay Mark Zuckerberg.
That was her second.
Y'all ready?
Yeah.
Let's get into it.
In the year of Our Lord 2017, I made three trips into the Iraqi city of Mosul.
It was at that point still partly occupied by ISIS, who the locals just called Dosh.
I spent many hours huddled in small rooms with groups of Iraqi federal police and special operations guys.
We were all hunkered down listening for the telltale hum of Dash's drones, which they used as spotters for their mortar teams.
Now, here's the thing about being in a dangerous place like that.
After a few hours of tense anxiety, you start to get bored.
And the mobile internet in Mosul was actually pretty good, surprisingly good, better than it is in Los Angeles sometimes.
So, periodically, when I should have been doing literally anything else, I would whip out my phone and check Facebook.
I remember one time in particular, I was embedded with a small unit of guys from the Iraqi 9th Federal Police Battalion.
Things were exploding about a football field away from us, and I was Facebooking.
A bomb went off nearby, and I looked up from my smartphone and realized that everyone in the room, my Kurdish fixers, my wife slash photographer, the six soldiers we were chilling with, all of them were browsing Facebook.
100% of the room was on Facebook.
Now, I'm telling you this story because I want to start this week's podcast about Mark Zuckerberg by acknowledging his genius.
I'm about to spend about four hours tearing him apart as a human being, but in my opinion, he is undeniably a brilliant man.
Anyone who builds something so universally desired and used has a kind of brilliance.
And Facebook is objectively brilliant in the same way that, say, heroin is brilliant.
So, that's my little intro.
Yeah.
I like it.
Thank you.
Let's get into this shit.
A lot of digital ink has been spilled in the last few years about the sundry negative impacts Facebook has had on our society and world.
I want to make it clear off the bat that while this will certainly be a part of the podcast, I tend to view Facebook as a tool and thus more or less morally neutral on its own.
Our goal here is not to attack the social network as a concept or make you feel bad about using it.
I haven't deleted my Facebook.
It's how I talk to my family.
Yeah, that's how I keep an eye on my mom's confusing internet presence.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of parents sharing a lot of fake news about scary things.
Yeah.
My mom likes memes.
Oh, dear.
My sound's a meme head.
You know, when we were all just sharing goat sea around ourselves, I never thought my parents would wind up in that same bag, but with something even grosser.
My mom started doing this thing where she'll change her profile picture to a llama, and it's some old person joke that I don't understand, and she can't explain it to me.
She's like, we do it on Facebook.
And so I was like, why?
Oh, the boomer battalion.
Okay.
So, our goal is not to focus on Facebook, but its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who, as I stated at the top, I come to believe is one of the very worst people alive on this planet.
I agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do agree.
He's usually depicted as like a robot.
Like, that's the way a lot of descriptions of him will take.
And I think that's unfair.
I think it's unfair.
I don't think it's calculated.
Yeah.
And it like allows him to get away with the shit by being like, no, I'm just awkward and weird.
Yeah, I just don't get your human emotions.
No, no, Mark Zuckerberg.
No, You get it.
You get it.
So, Mark Elliott Zuckerberg was born on May 14th, 1984, in White Plains, New York.
For all you astrology heads out there, I crunch some members.
He's a Taurus, Sun, Scorpio, Moon, Virgo, Ascending.
Kill him, Will.
Wow.
Kill him.
No matter what you will.
Wow.
A telling chart, I think.
A telling and powerfully erotic chart.
Now, Mark's father, Edward, is a dentist.
His mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist, but gave up her career to manage her husband's business and raise their four children, Mark, Randy, Donna, and Arielle.
The business was run out of their house in Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Elliot Zuckerberg went by Painless Dr. Z, and his motto was, We Cater to Cowards.
It's a good dentist motto, right?
It's pretty good.
So far, whatever.
It's a little hardcore for me.
I don't know if that would be the dentist I had to choose.
Cowards.
No, I want the dentist who fucks me up.
My dentist name as a child was Dr. Vigenis.
And it was still that overhead.
Vigenis the dentist?
He would have to be a little bit more drinking.
Vagennis the dentist vagenis.
Oh my god, Vigenis the Dentist.
I mean, he must have never had a choice of what he was going to do in his life.
Stay tuned next week for the surely exciting episode on Dr. Vigenis the Dentist.
Don't know anything else about him, but I'm sure there's an hour of content in there.
So Mark grew up comfortable, shall we say?
Not fuck the world rich, but very well off.
Edward was a techie guy, and he trained his son in how to use the basic computer language on an Atari.
In 1996, when Mark was 12, his dad mentioned that he wanted a better way for his receptionist to inform him when a new patient had arrived.
Mark used his coding knowledge to build a program called Zucknet.
Zucknet.
Oh, I was swallowing water during that.
This is where it started.
This is where it started to speak into his view of the world, which is him.
Yeah, him.
Yeah, no points for originality on the name.
No, Zucknet.
And just as a heads up, I had to type Mark Zuckerberg a lot on this podcast, and I've come up with a lot of nicknames for him.
None of them are good.
May we rank them?
Yes, please.
Oh, yeah.
I'm going to give a power ranking going.
These are not clever nicknames.
I'm just going to state that off the bat.
Now, Zucknet has been described as a primitive version of AOL Instant Messenger.
The receptionist was able to use it to ping Ed, and members of the Zuckerberg family soon took to messaging each other with it, too.
Once the young Mark had his family addicted to the program, he started fucking with them.
Here's the New Yorker.
Quote, one evening while Donna was working in her room downstairs, a screen popped up.
The computer contained a deadly virus and would blow up in 30 seconds.
As the machine counted down, Donna ran up the stairs shouting, Mark!
So.
Ah!
Okay.
Okay.
Right now we're still in the zone where I'm like, that could be a fun thing.
Could be cute.
Could be a fun part.
Sure.
I mean, not to fast forward, but it seems like he never grows up.
It does seem like he never grows up.
A la, he's cheating on his final exam via Facebook.
Yeah, you can't blame him for this yet, but given everything else, it's kind of telling.
Because he can't grow a beard.
You know, it's like there's a lot going on with this guy.
He definitely never considered that, actually.
He's even worse at growing a beard than Ted Cruz.
Yeah.
Very smooth face.
And that's the shame because after a shame like Facebook went through with the 2016 election, you would expect him to drop out of public life for a while and then come back with a beard and launch a new product.
Maybe that's what he wanted to do.
Yeah.
But he can't.
He's just like, well, I'm going to go.
You got to stay.
Yeah.
I'll go listen to people.
The smooth, droopy face.
He didn't have a beard to wipe his sins away.
And he didn't know that the delicious taste of nacho cheese Doritos could have done that job for him.
Wow.
What a shame.
What a heartbreak.
Now, We Mark's brilliance was not all the result of autodidactic study.
When he was 11, his parents started paying for a computer tutor to help him develop his skills.
They had computer tutor money in the 90s.
Pooter tutor.
Tutor tutor.
Pooter tutor.
Tutor tutor.
Good old-fashioned pooder tutor.
Oh, a good old pooder tutor.
This pooder tutor did describe Mark as a prodigy.
I'm sure he was.
One of Mark's favorite childhood hobbies was to invite his artist friends over to the house, have them draw things, and then Mark would code video games based on the drawings.
Cool.
Neat hobby.
A try-hard friend.
Try-hard friend.
I'm sure those were great parties.
Everybody drinking way too much, Mountain Dew, big times.
Yeah.
For years, I only had a pool to offer for friendship.
So I would tell the cool girls, oh, like, you could come swim in my pool.
And then they would, and then they would leave.
And then I might need anywhere else.
No.
Yeah.
We should have learned how to code.
Oh, damn it.
I know.
Yeah, then you'd have been raking in the friends.
That's what it's all about.
Now, being a precocious rich kid, Mark Zuckerberg's parents shelled out the big bucks to get him enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy for high school.
Yeah, fucking Exeter.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a lot of strong opinions on Exeter.
Oh, I'm excited to hear them.
For some reference, Exeter currently costs its boarding students somewhere around $46,000 a year.
So Mark's parents spent roughly the annual income of an average American family on their son's high school education.
Everyone who goes to Exeter is a certified chod.
You will not change your opinion of that.
I've encountered so many.
Now, Exeter, if you want to sponsor the show, why?
Would be my chod money.
You will take your chode money.
But that would be very surprising.
I mean, they would have to eat Doritos and then they would be changed forever to become good people.
Yeah, it's like in that 90s commercial.
You bite it and then suddenly you're on a skateboard.
That's what Exeter needs.
Now, while Mark was at Exeter, he fell in love with fencing.
I did two right around the same time.
So let's not have any fencing jokes.
Oh, you see how my mouth opened and then it closed?
I know, I know.
You're welcome.
She had five ready to go at the end of the day.
I watched the joke fire back into her brain.
Now, Zucky Boy did well in most of his classes, but his strength continued to be programming.
At Exeter, he built a program called Synapse, which was essentially a primitive precursor to Pandora.
AOL and Microsoft reportedly offered to buy the software from him, and he turned them down.
When he wound up in college, one of the stories people told about him is that he was the kid who turned down a million dollars from Microsoft.
He's so like giving.
He doesn't care about the money.
It's not about the money.
Yeah.
The Accidental Billionaires, the book that was the basis for the social network, makes a huge deal about him turning down the money.
He's a good guy.
I think that title says a lot.
The accidental.
Whoopsies.
I think it's easier to understand.
Like, Mark's dad was rich as shit.
He was paying $46,000 a year for his kids' college.
Mark's never worried about money a day in his life.
So why would he give a big shit about a million dollars?
Yeah.
Doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's not a clout.
It's not.
His mom doesn't have like diabetes and like can't afford her medication and stuff, which most kids, you get offered a million dollars.
It's not because you're greedy.
It's like, yeah, that'll change my family's life.
Yeah, but this wouldn't make really much of a dent.
Thank you.
He'll go to Harvard either way.
Fuck it.
Yeah, he's still.
God, I hate rich people so much.
Yeah.
Realist, my deepest fear is rich people, and I'm coming to terms with that.
Totally reasonable fear.
Yeah, way more dangerous than that.
My deepest resentment is all rich people.
It's not resentment because I don't want to be rich.
I want myself and my friends to not be scared about our lack of health care.
I want that.
But I don't want Mark Zuckerberg money.
I just don't want anyone else to have Mark Zuckerberg money.
Yeah, I don't want anyone to have any money.
But he's giving his money away.
People will point that out.
And also, no, he's not.
I have several of my notes dig into the quote-unquote charity, not charity LLC work.
A rich person's charity that's not a real charity?
Stop it!
Throw the table!
Guys, he's an accidental billionaire.
Give him a break.
Well, it is very odd to have someone who is creating the housing crisis in San Francisco while also using a fake charity to pretend to help the resolve it.
I feel like the CEO of Salesforce is the only rich guy in San Francisco who's not full of shit about that and is like, no, we've created a problem.
We should probably pay taxes to fix it.
But anyway, Salesforce.
If you want to advertise something, Salesforce stand over here.
I know, he's the only billionaire in San Francisco who came out in favor of the tax hike to whatever.
You get a point.
Still don't think you should be a billionaire, but at least you're not on the wrong side of that issue.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg graduated from high school and was accepted by Harvard.
He joined the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, which is a Jewish fraternity, and met his now wife Priscilla Chan at one of their parties.
We started talking on a line to the bathroom.
She later recalled to the New Yorker, quote, he was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there.
I remember he had these beer glasses that said pound include beer.h.
It's a tag for C.
It's like college humor, but with a nerdy computer science appeal.
I feel Sophie's having a lot of trouble with that one.
So you can't just say unfuckable.
You can't say a lot of words.
He was unfuckable, but it was clear that he'd be rich.
It's like, Priscilla, I can read between these lines.
Mark could not because he had those glasses with shit typed on them.
Now, Zuck quickly made a name for himself at Harvard, and that's what he prefers people to call him, Zuck.
Zuck.
Is that his preferred nominology?
That's what his buddies call him.
That is a frat name.
Harvard frats are not even, they're not, they're boring.
The Accidental Billionaires talks a lot about the Harvard frats, the final clubs and shut.
I'm not going to get into that much because it's just so frustrating to talk about.
The short story is: Call Me Back When You're an MIT frat.
They program their own lit floors.
And sometimes kill themselves doing knife or socks.
Very true.
It's pretty cool.
Pretty cool, Bradwell.
Okay, so he quickly made a name for himself at Harvard.
People, of course, talked about the fact that he'd turned down a million dollars.
They also talked about Course Match, a program he built during the first week of his sophomore year.
It allowed students picking classes to see what classes their other classmates had picked.
Now, that sounds innocuous, right?
You know, nothing inherently bad about that idea.
But its real purpose was to allow guys to figure out which classes the hot girls were registered in so they could pick the same classes.
Feminism is always a lot of fun.
I want Mark to know where I am.
Facebook's Creepy Data Origins00:08:36
Mark Zuckerberg's life does not pass the Bechtel test.
Come chase me, Zuck.
Zucky Zuck.
Mark's next groundbreaking achievement was Face Mash.
The Accidental Billionaires describes it as, quote, a website where you compared two pictures of undergraduate girls, voted on which was hotter, then watched as some complex algorithms calculated who were the hottest chicks on campus.
Wow.
Good, good, good.
Once you're in the top school in the country, it's good to know whether you are hot or if you are.
Let's glad you still get to be, you know, objectified while it's fair Harvard, not homely Harvard.
Okay.
True.
Yeah, there was a day at Northwestern where they had one of these, like two or three days.
There was one.
Yeah, there was briefly one at my college as well, and it was quickly shut down.
But make no mistake, I tried to figure out what my ranking was.
I don't think I was on the site.
I did look for my site.
I also wasn't on the side.
And I cried about that.
I was like, I'm not even hot enough to register on the site.
I don't know if my college had one, but I was not sober enough in freshman and sophomore year to have used a computer.
Which makes me a feminist icon.
Yeah, I don't agree.
Your life passes the backdoor.
Fantastic.
You're too drunk to be a misogynist.
Hot dogs.
Okay.
Now, the pictures on FaceMash came from the Harvard Facebooks.
Now, the Harvard Facebooks were databases that each residence hall kept on the students who lived there.
Most of these Facebooks were private and only accessible to people in that residence unit.
Now, young Mark Zuckerberg kept a blog.
And because of that, we actually have a rather deep insight into what he was thinking while he programmed FaceMash.
So I'm going to read out young Zuckety Zuck Zucker Zucker Zucks.
That was bad.
But I'm going to type young Mark Zuckerberg's.
Thank you.
Yeah, eat one of those shame Doritos.
Fantastic.
All right, here's Mark Zuckerberg talking about FaceMash.
9.48 p.m.
I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.
So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night?
What?
The Kirkland Facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics.
I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
11.09 p.m.
Yeah, it's on.
I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing.
You can't ever really be sure with farm animals.
But I like the idea of comparing two people together.
It gives the whole thing a very tearing feel since people's rating of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person's hotness like they do on HotArnot.com.
The other thing we're going to need is a lot of pictures.
Unfortunately, Harvard doesn't keep a public centralized Facebook, so I'm going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are in.
And that means no freshman pictures.
Drat.
You can like hear him petting a cat villainously.
Oh, God.
Yeah, it's also funny because the way you read that, I think it's probably more attuned to how he was actually facing.
His internal monologue.
Yeah, as opposed to in the film where they choose a sort of Rayman type style.
Very gently put.
The movie is total bullshit.
But like the, yeah, it sounds like he took like a swig of off-brand vodka.
I think he was drinking Mr. Boston.
It was some sort of shitty beer.
It was, it was like not good beer.
Oh, okay.
But not terrible beer.
It was nice if it was a Budweiser because he's a rich man.
No, it was some weird East Coast thing, but it wasn't yingling.
Loser.
No loser.
I'm not disagreeing with you there.
Man, I feel like the only other way that Andrew could end would be like, also, I came up with this idea called incels.
I also founded another type of idea.
Just kind of seed the world with these ideologies crapping up.
Now, I do want to note that I don't think the no freshman pictures line is creepy, the way Zuckerberg uses it, because I do think that he is fundamentally the kind of guy who would be bugged by building his creepy wank site off of an incomplete data set.
Yeah, I would be.
I suspect that that's really what's going on.
He's like, I don't have all the pictures.
So we are going to get into how Mark Zuckerberg got all of the pictures that he used for his creepy wank site.
No.
As a hint, he stole them.
Wow, what another theme that's in first.
I took him on a sidekick.
But first, Maggie.
You a fan of products?
Oh, Robert.
Jamie, how do you feel about services?
I live to consume.
Let's all first consume a delightful Dorito.
Oh, my God, that's so good.
And then let's consume these other fine products and services that have paid us.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
Building a Rating Site at Harvard00:15:33
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're back.
We just had a quick little Dorito break while we appreciated all of the many bountiful blessings of capitalism.
And now we're talking about how Mark Zuckerberg got all of the pictures for his creepy wank site.
Now, the very sensible, super reasonable privacy rules Harvard University had established to protect the pictures and data of its students were getting in the way of something Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do.
It's in the way.
It's in the way.
I want to do this.
He was left with only one option.
Only one option.
Break into those residence halls and steal the data.
Now, Ben Mezrich, the bad writer of The Accidental Billionaires, suspects that that's exactly what Mark did.
In typically overwrought, overwritten fashion, Mesrich envisions Mark sneaking into the residence halls like a teenage torny version of Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible.
He admits that this is totally theoretical, but he imagines a couple fucking in the room while Mark is stealing the data, like he's hiding from them and stuff.
It's super weird.
Some weird fanfic about a dorky 18-year-old.
He was writing it so that the Aaron Sorkin movie would be exciting.
Like he was handing off, he was literally handing off chapters to Sorkin as he finished them.
Sorkin also a judge.
Yeah, I mean, well, it's like when all these people believe in the inherent genius.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, we should praise.
Really, really a wild circle jerk taking place.
Yeah.
Well, Fincher, yeah, and Fincher, and it's the perfect storm of people who are looking down on others.
People have to self-mythologize.
Yeah, it's a lot of people who are really good at one thing and know better than anyone else at 99% of things, but think they're really good at everything because they're really good at one thing.
It's why engineers make up most terrorists.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's true.
Look it up.
I do want to say my biggest takeaway is that Zuckerberg is smart at one thing and is incredibly stupid at everything else.
Like every other person.
Every other person on the planet.
Every other person on the planet.
But like your plumber doesn't get on airs about his ability to fix a smartwatch or launch a social network.
He knows, no, I'm fine at everything else.
I'm really good at plumbing.
That's great.
That's how the world works.
They don't try to run for president.
Yeah, I'm good at this job.
I would be terrible at fighting fires.
For some reason, I'm looking at Mark Zuckerberg merch right now.
I was like, I want to get a shirt with him.
I don't know.
We'll come up with a shirt idea during this podcast.
I do have in the shirt we're coming out with, Hindenburg the Oligarchy.
Oh, okay.
He's going to be one of the guys on the flaming Hindenburg.
Hot plug.
Hashtag Hindenburg the oligarchy, everybody.
They all died on blimps.
We wouldn't have these problems.
Very true.
So I did not find the accidental billionaires to be an enjoyable read, but I have to say, I think a lot of what Mesrich posits, including most of this, is quite plausible.
I doubt anyone was fucking in the room, but the idea that Mark was basically breaking into these residence halls to steal pictures, he got the picture somehow.
That seems plausible.
I broke into a residence hall and stole several air conditioners.
So not that hard.
You can't just drop that and not get into.
Did you need the air conditioners yourself or were you fencing them for dope?
To me, I felt like I needed it.
I was really hot.
Ironically, I broke into a bunch of Boston campuses that weren't mine my freshman year of high school because I was hired for the street team of the social network.
So I snuck onto Harvard grounds to put up posters to be like, heard of this movie?
Heard of this movie?
Make like $20.
Wow.
That is a deep connection.
That is a really deep connection.
I still have a mouse pad.
Fantastic.
You have Zuck merch.
I just want more.
Yeah.
So, however, he did it, Mark managed to steal all the pictures he needed to build his stupid hot or not clone.
Here's what he wrote on his blog before taking it live.
Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools, maybe even ones with good-looking people.
But one thing is certain, and it's that I'm a jerk for making this site.
Oh, well, someone had to do it eventually.
Were we let in for our looks?
No.
Will we be judged on them?
Yes.
Yay!
Fucker.
Wow.
During this, he realizes that he is not a catch.
I will say, in fairness, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg ever had illusions about that.
You don't even need to feel like he had to write it down at any point.
That's a given.
He's like, well, it goes without saying.
I really got to become a billionaire.
Yeah.
It's urgent.
Zuckerberg launched the program and gave the URL to a handful of friends and some kids he wanted to impress.
According to Mesrich, Face Mash went viral without Zuck really intending for that to happen.
In the first two hours, the site logged 22,000 votes.
Now, that was only by like 400 some odd students.
So everyone on Harvard sounds kind of gross, in fairness.
Mark shut it down as soon as he realized it had gotten way, way more popular than he'd intended, but the damage was done.
He was hauled in front of Harvard's deans to explain himself.
He admitted he'd done a bad thing, but argued that he'd also helped expose security flaws in Harvard's systems, and he offered to help fix those flaws.
That's the rock star moment in the film.
Yeah.
And that's how Mesrich presents it.
He also states that Mark's social awkwardness and his confusion was his greatest defense.
That the deans had realized he wasn't really a bad kid.
Yeah, I'm going to read a little selection from that.
He's just awkward.
Don't you feel bad for him?
He's just actually wants to have sex with him.
Yeah, actually, that's Rashida Jones's, the purpose of her character in the screenplay is to make sure that we still like him.
I mean, right, because she just like, Rashida Jones, like, Asterisk looks at Jesse Eisenberg sympathetically.
Yeah, and that, like, don't, don't, don't music lies in the background every time.
I think I actually found a Mark Zuckerberg shirt that I want.
So I'm going to read a clip from that chunk of Accidental Billionaires that describes that scene you guys were just going over, because I think it's actually grosser.
Oh.
The gathered deans had looked at him and listened to his stilted affectation, and they had realized that Mark wasn't really a bad kid.
He just didn't think the same way other kids did.
He hadn't realized that girls were going to get mad because guys were voting on their appearance.
Hell, Mark and Eduardo and probably every other college guy in the world had been ranking female classmates in terms of hotness since the dawn of structured education.
Eduardo was pretty sure that someday some paleontologist would find a cave drawing ranking Neanderthal girls.
It was simply human nature.
No, it's not.
That's...
No, no, it's not.
Treating people like a rotten tomato score is not inherent human nature.
Well, what was the first time you remember being like rated by someone in fourth grade?
Yeah, middle school.
I remember there was a large period of my life where I was not hot.
And then when I became okay looking was when someone stuck a sticker on my butt.
Yeah.
No way.
It was a spicy sticker from the spicy sandwiches that loved.
That was my first like, someone finds me attractive.
Yeah.
Oh, someone had to just stick a chicken sticker on your butt.
I remember there was like a hard copy circulating in my fourth grade class and it would change throughout the years.
So there was like eraser marks.
It is a real thing that people will always do forever, but empowering it in any way.
And making it easier to do.
I don't know that people will always do it forever.
I think that boys, because I can tell you I did it as like a teenage boy and I did it because I grew up with media that did it too, with like magazines.
I didn't just come up with in my head like, oh, what if we ranked girls on a 10-point system?
Like I saw that and read that and shit on the internet and then I did it.
Face Mash was something of a disaster on the surface, but it earned Mark the attention of the Winklevoss twins, two young rich kids who liked rowing boats and had come up with the brilliant idea of creating an app called the Harvard Connection.
I think the Winklevoss twins are cute.
They are objectively cute.
They're cute.
They're objectively good looking guys.
And I used to try to play a character that was the third Winklevoss.
He was like their spare tire.
His name was Trip.
Trip.
Trip.
Yeah, it would be Trip.
It was Trip.
He had sex with the car.
I refuse to believe that both Winklevoss twins have not also had sex with cars.
They have enough money they could have bought kit from Knight Rider.
That's true.
The Bitcoin brothers.
Yeah.
They're hot.
They are hot.
They're hot.
And they row.
No wonder Mark hated them.
Yeah.
Well, they're hot.
It's the Revenge of the Nerds, you know, story.
Yeah.
So they're nice.
It's classic feminist text.
Revenge of the nerds.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, there was another movie I liked as a teenage boy and then watched as an adult and was like, is that that's rape?
There is rape.
That's for sure rape.
There is.
For sure.
Fun film.
Now, the idea of the Harvard Connection, the site the Winkle bosses wanted to make, was basically a site where they wanted a site where cool guys in college could meet girls without having to meet them in person.
There was something called the fuck bus that would ferry girls from other colleges to Harvard.
That's what they called it, the fuck bus.
But they thought that was inefficient and wasted time, and they wanted a faster way to meet people to fuck.
And that was the idea behind the Harvard Connection.
No sick.
The Winkle Vosses couldn't actually code.
They were just rich guys with an idea for a fuck site.
Mark Zuckerberg came in with pictures.
Robert, language.
What else do you call it?
It's a fuck site.
And I got nothing wrong with a fuck site if it's just like an egalitarian.
Like Tinder.
Tinder was just created so that everybody could fuck, but a site just so that rich guys can meet girls to fuck, that's gross.
Yeah.
A site for everyone to fuck?
Whatever.
I got another one.
And it's true because it's like a selected few getting a certain like resource.
Yeah, they think that.
There's a specific idea that like, oh, we're just so busy rowing boats and going to school.
What if we had a fuck site?
Love rowing boats.
If a man can row a boat, he can.
I'm not going to finish that.
I threw a bottle at a Harvard rower once on the bridge.
In my defense, I was drunk at 8 a.m.
Oh, Jamie.
You can't know how proud I am of you knowing that.
They look so silly.
But it's super proud.
It made me mad.
So the Winkle Vosses didn't actually know how to code, which is where Mark Zuckerberg came into the picture.
He initially agreed to help them with the project, and for a while he emailed back and forth with them.
But as time went on, it slowly became clear that Mark had no intention of actually working on their project.
He was just stringing the Winkle Voss twins along while he worked on his own project titled The Facebook.
Savage.
Now, the Facebook was minus a few features, the social network we all know and grudgingly accept the existence of today.
Mark did not start it on his own.
At the very beginning, the ground floor level, he worked with a dude named Eduardo Savarin.
Now, Savarin was a fellow Harvard student and one of Young Zuck's few good friends at the school.
He came from a rich family and he'd made like $300,000 the year before with a series of clever investments.
Mark needed Eduardo's cash to get his idea for the Facebook off the ground.
The original agreement was that Eduardo would be the Facebook's business manager while Mark would handle the coding.
Eduardo put in the first $1,000 necessary to get Facebook off the ground to buy servers and all that stuff.
With the money taken care of for now, Mark Zuckerberg was free to build the website of his dreams.
And while the Facebook of today looks a lot different from the fuck-focused Harvard Connection website the Winkle Voss twins thought Mark was building for them, the original design for the Facebook had an awful lot in common with that idea.
Here's how the Accidental Billionaires describes the initial layout of the site.
There was a picture near the top, whatever picture you wanted to add, then a list of attributes on the right side.
Year you were in college, your major, your high school, where you came from, clubs you were a member of, a favorite quote, and then a list of friends, people you could add yourself or invite to join, a poke application that allowed you to poke other people's profiles, letting them know you were checking them out.
And in big letters, your sex, what you were looking for, your relationship status, and what you were interested in.
So, while Mark's vision was seemingly more complete than the Winkle Voss' idea for Harvard Connection, it came down to the same basic goal: getting people, namely Mark Zuckerberg, laid.
Quote.
The thing that would drive this social network was the same thing that drove life at college, sex.
The Accidental Billionaires is a fun book.
Yeah.
Wow.
So, but I don't think he's wrong about that.
I think he's nailing what these kids are going for.
They wanted a fuck site.
Congrats to everyone who had sex in college.
I guess like naive is the wrong word, but I like really didn't think about sex at all until much later in my life.
I was like, to be married in the military.
That was chilling.
No, I don't think that.
Somebody thinks I could have done that.
No one I knew was fucking.
Yeah, me either, really, I guess.
Man.
Man.
Yeah.
Rather, it's like, Carolyn.
It's impossible to be an 18 to 21-year-old male and not be thinking about that way too much.
Like, not that the focus of our media doesn't make it worse, but, you know, your hormones as a man, like, that's when things are going fucking wild.
So people be horny.
I lost my virginity to a woman, actually, now that I can't do that.
Congratulations.
Chronologically.
Yeah.
Now, I could go on for a while about the juvenile nature of Facebook and his founding.
They chose to hire their first wave of coders based on the results of a drinking contest, but I feel like that would be counterproductive.
Y'all get the point.
Mark Zuckerberg was a gross young adult when he first started his social network.
It has gross DNA.
But none of us are at our best when we're college sophomores.
I hope most of you didn't do anything as nasty as steal thousands of people's data so you could rate girls based on whether or not they were hotter than literal cows, but we all do shit that we aren't proud of at that age.
I would not be declaring Mark a bastard purely on the fact that he was a sick, horny nerd in college.
When I was 18, I drank so much that I vomited on three separate strangers at the same party.
Three separate occasions.
When I was 19, my friends and I brewed up 30 gallons of trash cider and got a crowd of strangers so drunk that one person vomited off the fourth story balcony of the Dallas Sheraton onto a restaurant full of people.
My friends and I gleefully heckled the patrons as they ran for cover.
There were umbrellas on the tables.
And I remember my friends shouting, those umbrellas won't save you.
So let it never be said that Behind the Bastards is a show that judges people just for doing dumb shit when they were young.
I was a shitty young person too.
It's okay.
Test your boundaries.
Test your boundaries.
It's fine if you were.
And if Mark Zuckerberg had changed as a human being after this, I would not be judging him based on the fact that he wanted to make a fuck site when he was 19.
That's really what is so disappointing is that it comes from such a normal place.
Totally normal.
It's pretty normal.
It's pretty like mundane.
It's pretty commonplace.
And given the context of the time it's in, like none of this was like shockingly misogynistic or anything like that.
It's kind of like we were not woke culture.
He's not worse than he's not like there were like there were definitely kids in fucking Harvard and stuff who were date raping people.
Testing Boundaries as a Teenager00:04:21
Mark Zuckerberg wasn't doing that.
I've never heard any accusations of anything like that.
Like he was just a normal background noise level misogynist for the time.
Horny hacker.
Horny hacker.
So let's get on to why he's really a bastard.
I'm going to brush over most of the founding of Facebook and the sundry drunken parties that the accidental billionaires makes a big deal about.
The winter bosses are hot, etc.
Super hot, etc.
Abs like a goddamn cheese grater.
Both of them.
Yeah.
The short part of it is Mark and Eduardo met a guy named Sean Parker, the Napster founder.
Justin Timberlake?
No, Justin Timberlake.
Kind of looks like him, though.
Yeah.
Justin Timberlake.
At that point.
Oh, right.
In the movie.
Yeah.
I mean, Timberlake.
Justin Turlake, you know.
He's a good man to have.
Play Sean Parker.
They kind of look like it.
He did great.
The moment.
Oh, what's that famous horrible line that he says like, what about a million dollar?
What about a million?
Oh, yeah.
You know what's better than a million dollars?
A billion.
And then he like fade out.
Yeah, he just disappears into the wind.
Yeah.
Now, at that point, Sean Parker did not have much money, but he was an experienced tech entrepreneur and had solid connections in the industry.
It seems like he kind of helped convince Mark to move out to California with a couple other Harvard students to work on the Facebook during the summer.
Over this time, it had spread from Harvard's campus to colleges across the nation.
Mark and his first employees wound up letting Sean Parker crash on their couch.
The Facebook continued to grow, and Mark made the decision to drop out of school and stay in California, a choice I endorse for 100% of Harvard students.
The Facebook wound up securing a bunch of VC money.
Yeah, get out.
Get out of that fucking school.
Same with Stanford.
Go to New York, I guess.
I don't care.
The Facebook wound up securing a bunch of VC money from Peter Thiel under the requirement that it drop the V and just go by Facebook.
This was apparently Sean Parker's suggestion, and damned if it wasn't a good one.
No one said he was bad at branding.
Bad at having weddings because he had a $30 million wedding that destroyed a forest.
Wow.
Yeah, he had a Lord of the Rings-themed wedding and he didn't get permits and had to pay $10 million in fines.
He used bulldozers in places that you're not supposed to.
Nerd culture is toxic.
Yeah.
You want to do your fucking Lord of the Rings wedding up, destroy a forest for it.
Hire someone to see what they're doing.
He was playing the point.
Yeah.
Like he wanted to be Sarah.
He saw that as a nice point.
You didn't really get the message it was trying to convey.
A whole bunch of little sarons.
Fucking JR Tolkien would have been pissed at him for having a bulldozer.
Not a big fan of industrial construction equipment.
Read the guy much.
Also an anarchist.
Kind of a weird anarchist, but yeah, self-declared.
Interester.
Yeah.
He was a weird type of anarchist.
A lot of stuff about the Catholic Church or whatever.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Chode anarchy.
No, I mean, he was like, he has a good quote, which was like, I don't think people should be in charge of other people.
Less than one in a million is capable of doing the job, which is what I agree with.
I think I really agree with that.
You live through World War I. You don't want a big fan of hierarchy.
Now, well, Mark and Facebook's first few employees were living in Palo Alto.
They were being bankrolled by Eduardo Savarin.
He had put roughly $20,000 into the company to get it off the ground.
He was also working while in New York, trying to sell to advertisers and stuff, putting in his time and also the only person putting money on the line.
So he's really believed in this project, really being a good friend.
But his relationship with Mark got rocky.
The accidental billionaires and the social network make it look like Sean Parker got his hooks into Mark and he and Zuckerberg started taking meetings with investors.
He even had a bad friend.
He influenced him.
You know.
Zuck Innocent.
Yeah, exactly.
They were meeting without Eduardo's knowledge, and Eduardo reacted by cutting off Facebook's assets to his money because he thought he was getting edged out of the company, which is exactly what was happening.
But Eduardo.
He's a diabolical teen.
Yeah, I know.
Pretty gross.
Now, that's what prompted them to make a deal with Peter Thiel.
Since Eduardo was contracted to own 30% of Facebook, they couldn't cut him out entirely, but it seems like their lawyers engaged in some complicated legal fuckery.
We will be talking about that legal fuckery and the other people that Mark Zuckerberg fucked over who are not mentioned in the social network because he stole from somebody else too.
But first, you know what doesn't steal from anyone.
What, Robert?
The wonderful advertisers who support our program and/or show with their products and/or services.
You're right.
And we're also supported.
Ah, Maggie, you beat me to that delightful, satisfying crunch.
How's those blazes doing?
Eduardo Saverin Cut Off00:04:12
Oh, man, I am a convert.
Does it warm up a cold winter day?
Sure.
I like it.
I like the tingle.
It's like a heater for your insides.
That's a free one to Ritos people.
Don't use that.
Products.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
Friends Who Got Screwed Over00:11:27
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
That's exactly what I always say after a solid product and or service.
Now, we were talking about what Mark Zuckerberg did to Eduardo Savarin, the good friend who invested $20,000 in his buddy's idea and also worked full-time pretty much to try to make it a reality, which is great friending.
You'd think that would build up some loyalty.
Eduardo sounds like a really good friend.
Eduardo sounds like a real one.
Yeah.
Let's talk about how he got it.
He's fucked over.
He was hot in the movie, right?
Yeah.
He's the guy who does not come across as a douche in the story.
Yeah.
I don't know anything about him.
Maybe he kills chickens or something, but maybe chickens need to be killed.
I hope he got in on Bitcoin, too.
I think he's rich anyway, so that probably doesn't matter.
I looked him up afterwards.
Now, Mark pretended to make nice with Eduardo, and so Eduardo signed a contract that made it look like he was getting actually 34% of the company.
But this was just a bunch of complicated legal bullshit.
And the company was allowed, based on the sort of terms of the contract, to actually dilute Eduardo's shares to weigh less than 30%, more like 10%.
Saverin maintains he was cheated out of his fair stake of the company.
When Mark and Sean Parker edged Saverin out, they also cut his name out of Facebook lore.
It's not all that different from the stuff you'll hear about in Stalinist Russia.
He was basically deleted from the company history.
Now, when the social network came out, Zuckerberg attacked it for being inaccurate.
But in the years since, the emails he sent to his lawyer around this time have come out.
At one point, he asked, quote, is there any way to do this without making it painfully apparent that he's being deluded to 10%?
Talking about Eduardo.
To which his lawyer responded, the broad categories of legal risk are a fiduciary duty.
As Eduardo is the only shareholder being deluded by the grants, again, as Eduardo is the only shareholder being deluded by the grants issuances, there is a substantial risk that he may claim the issuances, especially the ones to Dustin and Mark, but also to Sean, are a breach of fiduciary duty later on, if not now.
According to Business Insider, this is exactly what happened.
Quote, Savarin eventually sued Facebook over breach of fiduciary duty.
Facebook and Saverin settled, and he walked away with 4% to 5% of the company.
That stake is now worth close to $5 billion.
So again, he's doing all right.
You don't got to feel that sorry for Eduardo.
But what Mark does is slimy here.
Yeah.
Now, while the exact terms of the settlement are unclear, Facebook was also forced to reinstate Saverin's name in the company history.
Mark also eventually settled with the Winkle Vosses and their partner in the Harvard Connection, a guy named Narendra.
They reportedly got $65 million.
While Facebook's legal team were working on that case, they searched Mark's computer and came across the IMs he sent at the time.
These IMs paint a very fun and very ugly picture of the man previously described as just robotic.
Wait, do we know what his screen name was?
I don't.
I think Zuck.
It says Zuck in the types.
Oh, maybe he got it.
All right.
Okay, I'm sure.
So it may just have been Zuck.
Here is one excerpt from a conversation between Mark and a friend talking about his real plans to work on the Winkle Voss' social network.
This is when he was still telling the Winkle Vosses he was working on it.
Friend, so have you decided what you're going to do about the websites?
Zuck.
Yeah, I'm going to fuck them.
Probably in the year.
But he then corrects probably in the year to ear.
Ear.
Yeah, look at that.
Yeah, the ear.
Zuck, you freaking scam.
Yeah, I can see why they won that suit or settled.
Yeah.
Information that's turned up in the years since has also shown that Eduardo Saverin was not the only friend who invested in Mark's website and got fucked over.
Paul Sieglia seems to have invested $2,000 into Facebook in exchange for some stake in the finished project.
Now, at some point, Mark Zuckerberg clearly realized that his baby was going to be valuable.
He started lying to Sieglia, claiming that the project was basically dead in the water so that he could pay the friend back his $2,000 and cut out his interest in the business.
Here's one email he sent to Sieglia in 2004 while he was in California working to make Facebook.
Paul, fuck it, I knew!
I'm guessing that you don't want to talk to me, but I wanted to say happy birthday and that I hope to resolve our differences.
I see that what I did was wrong, and I'm really sorry that I behaved as I did.
Please give me your address and I will mail you back the $2,000 for your trouble.
More if it will repair our business relationship.
Another summer is here and I still don't have any time to build our site.
I understand that I promised I would, but other things have come up and I'm out in California working during break.
I just don't want the obligation of having to answer you for not following through and I won't be able to.
The first half of that email sounds like what my cousin texts everyone every time he gets out of jail.
Hoping I can repair these relationships, regretting my mistakes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One month later.
Hi.
Again, regretting same mistakes.
So really regretting those same mistakes.
Cycles are a bitch, aren't they?
And hey, in some fairness, I never got over the mistakes that I made at 19 because like six months ago, I was drunk in Santa Monica and I started stealing light bulbs from the outside of bars and throwing them at my friend's feet.
You taught yourself away.
Still doing that.
I haven't grown up either.
But I don't have billions of lives in the balance either.
I am purchasing the Zuckerberg shirt.
Why don't you read the front of that Zuckerberg shirt?
It's a good Zuckerberg shirt.
It's a picture of Zucky programming as a Harvard student.
He's got a water bottle, a wine glass, and a Red Bull.
And the quote below reads, quote, you can be unethical and still be legal.
That's the way I live my life.
Ha ha.
Ha ha.
Oh, beautiful.
No.
It gets uglier.
See, the problem with being a tech-obsessed young person who fucks over countless people to start your business is that a lot of the conversations that prove you to be a gross weirdo are going to come out.
Here's one Mark had with a friend after he launched Facebook in his dorm room and 80% of his classmates were using the service.
Zuck.
Yeah, so if you ever need any info about anyone at Harvard, just ask.
I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS, redacted friend's name.
What?
How did you manage that one?
Zuck, people just submitted it.
I don't know why.
They, quotation marks, trust me.
Ha ha.
Dumb fucks.
That is.
That's really the corny.
Yeah, there's a scene in the social network where Zuckerberg meets two fans and they make like idiots of themselves.
They like fall over each other.
And the point of that scene is, aren't the people who look up to you stupid and dumb?
And that's what I think Fincher is very effective at communicating with his films.
Right.
And while still lionizing the main character as like, yeah, his customers are idiots and let's make fun of them.
Yeah, they're farm animals.
Yeah.
They're the farm animals.
They do the same thing in Vice, which bothered me.
Anyways, I have very strong opinions about Vice.
It made me mad.
It made me mad, but I thought it did a good job of talking about how execrable of a human he is.
Why would anyone make Dick Cheney look remotely cool right now?
I don't know.
Maybe it's because I've been there and I've seen the consequences of it.
I didn't think he looked cool, but I thought it.
To an everyday consumer, he could seem cool.
That's the fun.
You know a lot about Cheney, whereas a little bipartisan.
Yeah, you know, that's a good worry to have.
It's like I was reading an interview with the guy who created The Punisher talking about like who's being told that like police officers are putting it on his car and he's furious.
He's like, no, he's not a pro-cop character.
He's making the point that our justice system is so fucked that a lunatic with a gun is murdering strangers in the street.
That's not good.
Like, awesome, right?
Yeah.
That's what we are doing as cops.
So culture is devoid of nuance.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, very frustrating.
The shirt's on the way.
Fantastic.
Facebook received its 1 millionth registered user on December 30th, 2004.
It spread to high school students in September of 2005 and introduced the ability to tag people in December of 2005.
In September 2006, the service was finally open to everyone anywhere in the world.
The stage was finally set for Facebook's blisteringly rapid growth to the world's single most dominant media organization.
During this time, Mark Zuckerberg grew wealthier and ever more influential, but he didn't grow out of being a tremendous douchebag.
In fact, as we'll cover in part two, the wild success of Facebook turned Mark from a kind of slimy nerd bro into something much, much darker.
Jamie Loftus, plug your pluggables.
Well, you can find me online wearing my new Zuck shirt at Jamie Loftus Help and on Instagram at Jamie Cry Superstar and Legal.
They call it the Graham.
They call it the Graham.
Sorry.
Famous Zuck entity.
If you want to support me and Zuck, I'm going to be posting a picture of my ironic Mark Zuckerberg t-shirt on Mark Zuckerberg's platform any day now.
Fantastic.
I'm really like, I'm really telling him.
I'm really Zucking excited.
He'll get the message, I think, this time.
Yeah, you'll get a show him from inside his diamond bathtub filled with Crystal.
I'm a fucking coward because he's calling me online.
Maggie Mae Fish, pluggables, plug.
Yes, you can find me on Twitter at that name, Maze with an E, because of my dead great grandmother.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can find me on YouTube at that same name.
And yeah, I have a podcast about friendship, which you can find on my Twitter.
Fantastic.
I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
I have a book called A Brief History of Vice, where I injure my friends with dangerous ancient drugs.
Oh, that's not your review of the movie Vice?
No.
I am kind of frustrated that them stealing my name, which no one had ever used outside of my book.
It was a really unique title.
The Doggy Dog World.
Now, you can find this podcast online at behindthebastards.com, where all of these sources, many, many sources for this podcast will be available.
You can find us on Instagram, TheGram, and Twitter at BastardsPod.
And you can buy a t-shirt from TeePublic.
You can get hoodies.
You can get drinks.
You can get stickers.
You can get a Lottie 20 millimeter cannon branded with Behind the Bastards content if you need to knock out moderately armored vehicles.
Yeah.
I do.
Who doesn't?
They do too.
We all do.
We all need to shoot through police bearcats every now and then.
Yeah.
And the TeePublic Lottie 20mm anti-tank gun can help you do that.
So, TeePublic.
Let's go shopping.
Great site.
Let's go shopping and come back for part two, Mark Zuckerberg, the worst man of the 21st century.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Destroying the World with AI00:01:52
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.