· 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?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: I think a lot of the later emperors, it's the usual succession plan problem throughout history. You have the one good king, and then you get the sons and the sons of the sons, and then you get the friends or the advisors of the sons, and you get these egomaniacs who don't have the right political mind for empire building. They end up wasting a lot of the trust they've built with their constituencies. They don't actually have that founder gene to be able to build a state, a standing army, a trade-based economy, all this. Augustus did have it. Zuckerberg's interpretation of what Augustus did is really interesting because when he talks about it, he says, "One of the things that Augustus did was he took a pillage-based economy and turned it into a trade-based economy, and he was able to kind of show Roman citizens that they didn't just have to be fighting endless civil wars decade after decade. They could actually live and trade and work in peace." Which is a pretty selective interpretation of what Augustus did, because one of the ways Augustus was able to do that was by erecting a standing army, which Rome had not previously had, and also by entirely eliminating political liberty from Rome. He turned it from a republic into a system that was entirely based on the power of one man. The ways in which his own interpretation and his memory kind of colluded to give him a pretty idiosyncratic understanding of who Augustus was and what his contribution to history was, I thought was a pretty interesting and revealing insight into maybe how Zuckerberg sees himself.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should, too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. When you talk to either him or the people around him, do they talk about like this ruthless competitive drive of his? [00:00:00] S1: You know, if you were to ask a lot of these people, like, what are the two things that people still don't understand about him, even though he's been a public figure and in our lives for close to a quarter century now? The two things they always say are, you might think you understand how competitive and ruthless he can be in a business sense, but like you're probably underestimating that. And then the second one is that he's actually not an asshole, that he doesn't treat people badly, and he's actually like a pretty nice guy. I didn't include those quotes in the piece because a lot of members of his family and his colleagues would say things like that. Even his critics and his rivals and his enemies, who I did also interview, said a lot of the same stuff. His competitive drive can't really be underestimated, and it's also interesting that most other people who are that competitive just have this gene where they also are pretty monstrous to the people around them.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: One of my favorite quotes in the piece is there was a former AI researcher that used to work for Zuck and now is at a competing lab, and he goes unnamed in the piece, but he said exactly that. He said, "Mark is the fucking terminator. He just doesn't stop." One of his advantages is that he's always discontent, he's always unhappy, but I think he says he's not an asshole. He just keeps moving forward. And then there's another thing that Mark, I thought was interesting. It was a direct quote from Mark, if I remember correctly, and he was talking about his advantage relative to like Sam Altman and Elon, where he's just like, "The things I do are kind of unsexy. I'm just very good at getting a team and taking something and improving it a lot over a long period of time. And then because of the structure and the business that I have, I don't have to essentially keep raising more money, and I don't really have to ask other people's permission to do what I'm doing."
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, that was something that I found very interesting about him and that I think I came to appreciate about him in the course of reporting the piece. I think I began it with skepticism about a lot of the products that Meta's built and feeling pretty ambivalent about the impact on society that social media's had, lots of things like that. One of the things I did come to appreciate about him is that I do kind of see him in the mold as like a classical American business mogul, as distinct from the more recent generation of AI founders. In that quote, I think he says something to the effect of, "My edge in the world is sitting down with a team and methodically improving a single product over the course of decades and building more and more value into it." And he doesn't go out and do all these big splashy things. I think one of the things I appreciated about that was regardless of what you think about Meta and the products it makes and offers, Zuckerberg as a figure, I think, is ideologically coherent and unconfused in a way that a lot of the major AI figures are not. He sees Meta as kind of a business, first and foremost. And I know it's like a full-stack deep technology company and all these other things, but I don't think he overestimates the impact that the business has on history. Whereas if you talk to a lot of the major AI figures, it's really hard to talk them off this cliff of thinking that their company is the last thing that will ever be built in human history. And I appreciate about Zuckerberg that he doesn't go there.