· 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.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[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. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Another funny thing is he used to end the meetings by shouting, "Domination." And Sean Parker, the early president of Facebook, told him he had to stop doing it because it could be cited one day in an antitrust suit. When you ask him about it, I think he says, "Well, it's a little bit overdetermined. I only took Latin because I was really bad at French, and when you take Latin, of course, they make you read these things." But then kind of the more time we spent talking about it, the more animated you could see him getting about it. And just recently at their keynote, he brings out his personal muse agent, and he refers to it as Agrippa. The name Agrippa was one of the two key early lieutenants for Augustus, who until the end of his life, he mourned the death of. So obviously, this is a really salient thing for him. Augustus is also just a very interesting choice because he's the most sensible of the Roman emperors. He doesn't go into a lot of the excesses of his successors. [00:00:00] S0: What do you mean by excesses?