· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: So his team reached out to me first originally, I think, toward the end of last year, which surprised me quite a bit because a couple years ago, I wrote this profile of Palmer Luckey, who started Anduril and Oculus. And in that profile, the big villain in the piece is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had provided a comment for it, which I think eventually led to some sort of reconciliation between Palmer and Zuckerberg, because after 2016, Zuckerberg had fired or didn't block the firing of Palmer Luckey after he'd made this small contribution to a pro-Trump group. So they'd had a big falling out, and that falling out had become legendary at that point in Silicon Valley, and it was a big part of this piece I'd written. So I was kind of surprised to hear from his team that he would be interested in talking to me. So I think earlier this year, I think we were both a little bit skeptical about the idea, and we decided just to have lunch for a couple hours off the record just to meet and say hi and say everything that was on our minds. I initially came away from it feeling a little bit pessimistic about a piece just because he's one of the most overexposed people on planet Earth. He's been under a microscope for 25 years. But eventually, I did land on a number of things that I thought really made him interesting, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about before. In a lot of ways, he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. So Larry and Sergey, they eventually step away. Bezos steps away. Obviously, Bill Gates stepped away. Jobs died. Zuckerberg, in a lot of ways, is kind of the last one. He's also kind of weirdly representative of millennials as founders because there are literally no others at his level, at his scale. I haven't looked this up, so maybe this is a bit wrong, but I think the second most valuable company started by a millennial would be Stripe, which I think is worth, I don't know, 100, 150 billion dollars, something like that, so one-tenth of Zuckerberg's company. So I thought maybe there was some underexplored territory there with him. And then, like with a lot of these pieces, the things that you start out being interested in, they still make their way into the piece, but once you talk to someone, a kind of whole galaxy opens up.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
And so I think it ended up going a lot of different directions, and over the course of about five or six months, I spoke to him, I spoke to almost 40 other people for the piece. [00:00:00] S0: Wait, explain that when you start to talk to somebody, you realize a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Wait, explain that when you start to talk to somebody, you realize a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean? [00:00:00] S1: Usually with these pieces, I begin with a thing that I'm interested in first before I find the right person to use as an excuse to explore the thing. I think with Zuckerberg, there was still a lot of kind of rawness and open wounds from the 2016 to 2020 period, where there was an enormous amount of government and other types of pressure to censor social media. Obviously, since then, there's been this huge national debate about whether social media is a good thing in the first place, whether it's extremely harmful and comparable to alcohol and cigarettes and should be regulated as such. There was a number of different themes I think I was broadly interested in before I was interested in Zuckerberg per se. But I think with a lot of these people that I write about, there's this, the old, in the Talmud, there's a rabbi who basically says, "When you kill a person, you destroy a world." And I think it basically gets at the idea that every individual life contains many, many different worlds within it. And so once you spend a lot of time with someone and spend a lot of time talking to their family, their friends, their colleagues, thinking about them, reading every book that's been written about them, this entire universe of relationships and work and psychoses and successes and failures just opens up. And then it's usually not until that point that you kind of figure out what the piece is really going to be about.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: You said that you thought he was overexposed. I would take the opposite. I actually think he's like, we know so... Considering how powerful he is and what you just said, he is a singular character. I spent a few days with him, and this is the conversation I had where it's just like I said, "I've read every single book on Facebook. They're fucking terrible. I've seen all your interviews." It's just like, what I was trying to do is like, I want to basically, you have all this stuff in your head. You have a singular limited experience. There's nobody your age that's even remotely close to achieving what you've achieved. And yet, I still don't understand how you think about building products, how you think about recruiting talent, how you think... Essentially, I'm only interested in how you've built this phenomenal company. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life, nothing about all the lawsuits and all the other controversies. So just this. And I feel like that still hasn't been done. There's so much information inside of his head that he has not let out yet. You went into this saying he's overexposed. Did you change your mind when you started spending time with him?
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: There's partially a difference in the way... You and I kind of do a similar thing in terms of our work. You on the podcast side, me in prose. But I think the angle of approach that we each use is a little bit different. So what you just described, I totally agree, is really underexplored, and I don't think anyone's gotten at it. And anyone who is primarily interested in that is probably a bit disappointed by the piece about him that I wrote. Usually, what I'm interested in is who this person is and what it's like to be them and what it's like for the people in their lives to be around them. If I could- ... tilt the gyroscope that people have on this person's life and their psychology by 10%, I feel like I've accomplished something. If the person is kind of culturally central and salient in an important way, which obviously Zuckerberg is. The piece opens with this interview I did with his parents. It closes with time I spent with his family and his wife. And I think those two bookends kind of explain the lens that I brought to him a bit more than trying to get into the hardcore details of the business he's built, which I agree, it's all somewhere in his head, but he's not the best spokesman for it. [00:00:00] S0: Why did you choose the angle of essentially comparing him to an emperor or a Caesar?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Why did you choose the angle of essentially comparing him to an emperor or a Caesar? [00:00:00] S1: He has this longstanding interest in the Romans and in Augustus in particular. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and turned it from a republic into an empire. I think a lot of these figures, I remember at some point Elon compared himself to Napoleon. So I think a lot of these world-straddling figures at that level, they do think in these historical parallels, but they're mostly pretty superficial. When I looked into the Zuckerberg thing, this is actually a very, very longstanding interest of his going back to when he's 15, 16, 17 years old. [00:00:00] S0: He's making computer games. [00:00:00] S1: He's making computer games. One thing I realized when talking to him is that courses he took in Latin in high school, where they had to read and memorize verses from Virgil's Aeneid, he still remembers now at the age of 42 and can recite them. Augustus is a big figure in that. [00:00:00] S0: One of my favorite parts of the piece was, I don't think I remember this. At least I don't remember from any of the books I read, because this was quite a while ago, but when Facebook and Google at the very beginning of earliest Facebook, and he would end these meetings by saying, "Carthage must be destroyed," which is also in your piece.