00:31:39 · Max Read
[00:31:39] S1: I want to share my story that I'm tracking, which is that Joel Kaplan, Meta's global policy chief, is leaving the company after fifteen years. Kaplan is, to me, least, really fascinating figure. He's a Scalia clerk. He participated in the infamous Brooks Brothers riot during the two thousand elections. And probably most famously to people who aren't, like, you know, committed Facebookologists, he was a close friend... He's a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh and sat behind the Supreme Court justice during his confirmation hearings. This is, of course, when Christine Blasey Ford accused him of rape. But his role at Facebook has been a sort of conservative whisperer. You know, Facebook, for the first ten years of its existence, fifteen years of its existence was... Probably got more criticism from the right than it did from the left. And there's all these sort of, in my opinion, sort of manufactured controversies about censorship and shadow banning and trending topics. And Kaplan's legacy, I think, was helping them navigate through those mostly by shifting the company externally and internally a little bit to the right. And, you know, it would be sort of satisfying, I think, to imagine, you know, if you if you are politically on the left, satisfying to imagine that Kaplan is leaving because the Republicans are gonna get blown out in the midterms. But it seems much more likely that he's just leaving because it's been fifteen years, and the job is probably exhausting, and he's made a bundle of money, and why stick around?
00:33:01 · Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:33:01] S3: Where do we... Where where do you think he's gonna land? I mean, probably somewhere in the Trump administration? [00:33:05] S1: I I mean, it's a it's a good question. I suspect he's like a Rubio 2028 guy. That's that's... I'm gonna put that marker down right now. But I think for the next few months, it's like whatever the open guest house on Kauai with... At, you know, at Mark's at Mark's estate is probably the place he's going to go. [00:33:22] S3: Do you have a group chat with the other Facebookologist as you call yourself? [00:33:26] S1: It's like... Yeah. No. I like to just keep it, you know, notes to myself. I've got like a nice little cork board, in my garage and some red yarn so I connect things. I don't need to talk to people about this stuff. [00:33:36] S3: Where do they go when they when they leave Facebook then? Do you have like a little separate, you know, island? [00:33:40] S1: Yeah. Well, I've got a couple different filing cabinets. Don't worry about what I'm doing in my private time.
00:33:40 · Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:33:40] S1: Yeah. Well, I've got a couple different filing cabinets. Don't worry about what I'm doing in my private time. [00:33:45] S2: By the way, what struck me was that he's being replaced by Dina Powell McCormick, who has been there for... I think she gets a new job every month there. She's a former Goldman Sachs banker, a big Wall Street figure, one of the most charming saleswoman... Or salespeople, I should say, on the street. She's... I I saw her last at at a conference in in May where she was trying to convince me to try those... The the glasses that they they came out with. Her glasses. A a... Even her... A truly gifted salesperson could not convince one person to put those glasses at that party on. [00:34:20] S1: As Rob is talking about how charming he's finding these people, I just wanna remind you this conversation started with a discussion of how charming he found Billy Evans, just as you're trying to sort of adjust in your head, Rob's ability to suss out charisma. Guys, thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us, talking about Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, the movie, the news. When we come back, we have John Carreyrou back answering audience questions about Elizabeth Holmes and the Nathan Fielder documentary, You Can See Everything.
00:34:20 · Max Read, S0, S5
[00:34:20] S1: As Rob is talking about how charming he's finding these people, I just wanna remind you this conversation started with a discussion of how charming he found Billy Evans, just as you're trying to sort of adjust in your head, Rob's ability to suss out charisma. Guys, thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us, talking about Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, the movie, the news. When we come back, we have John Carreyrou back answering audience questions about Elizabeth Holmes and the Nathan Fielder documentary, You Can See Everything. [00:34:58] S0: Compute scales in an instant. Storage scales in an instant. So why does the network underneath them still get ordered months ahead? Sized for a peak that may never come? With Lumen Intelligent Internet, businesses can add network capacity in minutes when demand shows up and dial it back when things quiet down. No guessing months ahead, just room to grow across more than 10,000,000 US business locations. Finally, a network that moves as fast as your ambition. Visit lumen.com/ambitionready. Lumen, the trusted network for AI. [00:35:32] S5: Stripe is built for whatever comes next. With Stripe Billing, you can easily test and iterate subscriptions, launch new usage based and hybrid pricing models, and automate invoicing. Stripe Billing supports whatever business model you wanna launch next, and Stripe powers all the Forbes AI 50 who have monetized. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing.
00:35:32 · S5, S6, Max Read, John Carreyrou
[00:35:32] S5: Stripe is built for whatever comes next. With Stripe Billing, you can easily test and iterate subscriptions, launch new usage based and hybrid pricing models, and automate invoicing. Stripe Billing supports whatever business model you wanna launch next, and Stripe powers all the Forbes AI 50 who have monetized. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing. [00:35:55] S6: Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all. Legacy stability and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only, availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities. [00:36:30] S1: John, welcome back to Hard Fork. [00:36:32] S7: Thanks for having me again. This is becoming a regular thing.
00:36:32 · John Carreyrou, Max Read
[00:36:32] S7: Thanks for having me again. This is becoming a regular thing. [00:36:35] S1: Yeah. I'm enjoying it. So we saw this movie last week. We both enjoyed it. We had a great conversation about it on Friday. And then since then, the movie has actually come out, and there's been a frenzy over Elizabeth Holmes, over, some of the stuff that comes out in the movie. I am wondering what your experience of that has been like. You had sort of been saying you were done with the Elizabeth Holmes story, here you are right back in it. [00:36:57] S7: I mean, it's been surreal. This movie has gone completely viral, and it feels like the the story has only become bigger in terms of the the public impact. Even, you know, at the height of my newspaper reporting for The Wall Street Journal in in 2015, 2016, the height of publicity around the book, 2018, or even, you know, the coverage of the trial, I never felt like quite as many people were being read into the story and paying attention as now. [00:37:32] S1: Yeah. I was talking with some of our production staff, and they were saying they've been going to bookstores to pick up a copy, and it's sold out here in New York, that it's off the... Going off the shelves in airport bookstores. Have you heard any of this?