Transcript of Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong on Zuckerberg’s Power and Facebook’s “Reckoning”

The ambient takeaway for me of this movie is about truth decay. It's about the erosion of the very concept of truth, and it's about the deterioration of civil discourse in our society, and the diminishing reliance on facts and truth. And has Facebook had a large part in that? Absolutely.

It's on!

It is on!

Hi, everyone.

From New York Magazine and The Vox, This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. 16 years after writing The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin is back with a new film about the company formerly known as Facebook. The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, focuses on Frances Haugen, a data scientist and former Facebook product manager who leaked troves of damning internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz. The result was a 17-part investigation published by The Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2021. It revealed that Facebook knew, quote, in acute detail, detail that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands, and that, quote, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges, and numerous media exposés, the company didn't fix them. The investigation and Haugen's subsequent whistleblower testimony revealed, among other things, that Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018 to prioritize what it called meaningful social interaction, which ultimately encouraged polarization and the spread of misinformation. It showed the company was also aware of the negative effects its Instagram platform has on teen mental health. Facebook said at the time, the stories contain, quote, deliberate mischaracterizations of what we're trying to do.

It also changed its name to Meta roughly 6 weeks later. The Social Reckoning is in theaters now. The film stars Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horowitz, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Today, I'm talking with Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong. Sorkin is the award-winning creator and writer of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, which is currently being revived on Broadway. He won an Oscar for writing The Social Network, and Strong has an Emmy and a Golden Globe, among other awards, for playing Kendall Roy on HBO's Succession. I wanted to talk to them because, you know, I've lived this. And one of the things that was really interesting is that Jeff and Frances brought the receipts to something a lot of us had been saying in the years before, that this site was dangerous. And Jeff's reporting and Frances' whistleblowing created a situation where we understood what we thought was happening was, in fact, happening. And I do believe the company had known about it for a long time and didn't want to take responsibility, something something I've talked about a lot. There's also a number of other things coming out, the Musk documentary, the movie Artificial on OpenAI, and it's all sort of looking at these characters who are damaging society in significant ways and what that means for the rest of us and why we allow it.

Our expert question today comes from sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her latest book is called Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. So stick around. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hi, Sue Bird here. I've got another brand-new episode of Bird's Eye View for you this week. Joining me on the pod is Washington Mystics point guard Georgia Amor, We talk about the lessons she learned from the Mystics' first playoff push since 2023, making the most of her skill set given her size, and what it would mean to make the Australian national team. Check out Bird's Eye View on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

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with the guy who wrote the literal book on it, Peter Ames Carlin. He had put so much of himself into his music, like all of himself. I mean, it was hard for him to have romantic relationships that could last. You know, he didn't really do anything but put all the energy into his guitar.

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It is on.

Aaron and Jeremy, thanks for coming on On.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you, Kara. It's great to be here.

So I really like the movie. I obviously lived part of it and have been living it for far too long. But I want to start with a clip of Mark Zuckerberg from an interview I did with him in 2018. I asked him how he felt about the fact that some were blaming Facebook for inciting violence that led to the deaths of thousands of people in Myanmar. This was part of his response.

Look, I want to make sure that our products are used for good. At the end of the day, I mean, other people blaming us or not is actually not the thing that matters to me. What matters to me is how are people using our services and are we acting as the force for good that I know we can and have a responsibility to. Um, and it's not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is going to be good. I mean, this is humanity, right? People use tools for good and bad. But I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

So I think he was not telling me the truth then, and I since have given him a hard time in many other interviews. But in light of the revelations from The Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files, what's your reaction to Mark here? And Is this perspective reflected or not in the character you created? Aaron, you go first, and then Jeremy.

Well, I'll just give one example, the one that we dramatized in the film. Why the switch to MSI, knowing that the things that we reshare the most are things that make you angry, knowing what kind of content he's going to be shooting at people?

Jeremy?

Well, you know, my reaction to it is kind of refracted through my work on this movie. And of course, part of my job in kind of creating a longitudinal record of Mark's evolution was spending a lot of time with your interviews. You're sort of the Frost-Nixon or the Kissinger ones with Mark. And the person who most held his feet to the fire and who most held him accountable for the ways that he was handling and mishandling his responsibilities. But I think in one of those interviews, you said there's an expression in journalism, if your mother says I love you, check it. So I do believe that he means what he's saying in that interview. And part of my job maybe is to believe it. But I also think you called him at one point the most earnest of the leaders in tech. So I hear that, and I hear someone with an intention that these tools will be used for the good, and who just was wrong. An intentional person and unintended consequences at scale.

That's a really good way of putting it. And one of the things is sometimes you can be willfully ignorant. And that's where I sort of came down initially. And then I think he knew.

That's fair.

Right? And I think one of the things I had said, and it's a very clear through line through this, I said it in my book, that enragement equals engagement, which is something I've been saying for decades. Like, you have to understand the way they changed everything made it so enragement was engagement. And I think he fully understood that, but didn't want to take responsibility. And I think that really shows throughout this movie, is the lack of feeling that it's his fault. But Aaron, you said you were reluctant to make the sequel to The Social Network. Talk a little bit about that because it accelerated. I mean, I think you left the last movie on a sense that this could go the wrong way, and then it just did.

Kara, I honestly never felt like I was making a sequel to The Social Network. Honestly, what I call it is, it's a movie about friendship. Facebook, written by the writer who wrote The Social Network. One of the characters from The Social Network is in The Social Reckoning, as if Henry Hill from Goodfellas showed up as a character in Casino. There's a moment in— I'm going to answer your question in a second, but I want to go back to your first question. There's a moment in the movie when Wunmi Mosaku's character poses a question to Jeremy's Mark Zuckerberg that goes unanswered. Marc says, we're a bulletin board. We don't control what people pin to it. And Wunmi says, but you can, right? And there's no answer. Marc ends the debate. Why is it important that Marc allows extremist groups to pin things to his bulletin board?

Yeah, well, that was the debate we had in one interview over antisemitism and Holocaust deniers, where he said Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie, which I thought was the biggest tell. I was like, oh, they kind of do. That's their job.

Of course they do. I'll tell you who definitely means to lie, election deniers.

That's correct. And so, you know, I think, Jeremy, you've done a very good job of depicting that. But you told Aaron that you'd be interested in playing the role of Mark Zuckerberg if Jesse Eisenberg, who played him in the first film, turned it down. He thought he had glamorized him. But what attracted you to playing someone who is pretty much still reviled? I mean, Elon gave him a respite for a minute, but he still seems to be attracting the same kind of dislike. And throughout his career, I would say, what do you want people to take away from your interpretation of Mark?

Well, I'm going to parse that slightly. I mean, the first and the main reason is Aaron Sorkin. Aaron is the greatest writer alive. And Shakespeare said, our job as the players is to hold a mirror up to nature and to show the age and body of the time its very form and pressure. And that's what Aaron has done for all of us in our culture in an unparalleled, incomparable way. So, for me in my life, the moments that I most felt like I was was making contact with the sort of galaxy of my dreams were the moment that Steven Spielberg offered me a part in Lincoln and the moment that Aaron Sorkin wanted to meet me for Molly's Game. So this is our 3rd movie together. And so that's the main reason to do something with Aaron. I also feel, you know, Sean Penn told me once, our job is to be a bodyguard for our characters. I feel in a way, and Aaron has said, you know, when you write a character, it's as if you are Aaron, please correct me if I'm paraphrasing you, or maybe answer it for me.

Making your case to God why you should be allowed into heaven?

Yeah. And so, you know, I think that doing that for complex, fallible, perhaps even reviled people is an important thing. You know, I think somebody who came to see the movie with me on Sunday night said, I brought my dad, and it was a friend of my dad's. He said, you know, when I found out that you could burn a flag in this country, it's what made me love it the most. And it's the ability to structurally have the resilience to contain extremely dissonant points of view. And so, while I might entirely disagree on a human level with a character, I think in terms of this art form, it's an important and valuable thing to embody, and with conviction, and make the case for a dissonant point of view from my own. Which you did.

This is where the seed of the movie was planted. Jeremy, I'm not arguing with the way in which the way in which you play the character, the way that you're defending the character. But it was, I think, in 2019, Kara, that Facebook announced that it would no longer be fact-checking political ads. Right?

Right.

It was in 2019 I wrote an op-ed in The Times about that decision to not fact-check political ads. And Mark surprisingly responded publicly on his Facebook page by quoting a speech of mine from the American president that that defends an American's right to burn the American flag in protest. And what I thought was strange was that surely Mark, as smart as he is, knows the difference between an unpopular opinion and a lie. I'm not asking him to not post unpopular opinions yet. I'm asking him to not post lies.

Yeah, I would agree with you. I've had the same discussion with him. But one of the things that I think about a lot was whether, Jeremy, you were in that regard, You were articulating how he feels in a very, I would say, severe way. I think that's exactly what he says. He tries now to be a little funnier about it, but he was very much in that camp of, people should be able to say anything, right? And I have no responsibility for that.

I'm not sure I think the latter. And listen, there's a kind of transference that happens as an actor. So, there's still a— this thing has a long tail for me. But I do think that And I've heard you guys get into this, this idea that a private company should not be the arbiter of what is true for then 2.3 billion people. And I think the decisions to be made on the margins of content moderation, having tried to walk a mile in his shoes, are some of them very complex. And now I unequivocally condemn the points of view of the Holocaust deniers and of Alex Jones and Infowars. And, you know, I think that it's abhorrent. And I also think if we deplatform QAnon, I'm not sure what that does in terms of the dissonant viewpoints that I talked about. So it's just about going into these things. And Kara, I heard you once say in a conversation about VR, you know, well, yes, it allows you to see through their eyes, but does it allow you to understand their experience? And that's what— you talked about empathy. And that is my job in this case, is to sort of see empathically and serve Aaron's vision of the film.

Did you see him as a villain, either of you? Because there's a villainous element to it. And also, one of the things I always said to people, like, do you think he's a villain? I go, no, he's someone way over his skis on something he should not be doing. Like, he's utterly in his head. and won't stop running it, essentially. Yeah.

I did not see him as a villain. And a villain, at least in dramatist terms, a villain according to Aristotle, is someone whose goal is villainous. They want revenge. They want the money. In this case, what Mark wants is good, right? He wants to connect people. That's not a bad idea. It's the fact that he's out over his skis, and he's making mistakes. And I'm curious, Setting aside for a moment, you know, assigning blame, millions upon millions of people believe things that aren't true, like an election was rigged or a vaccine is— will give you autism, and refuse to believe things that are true, like the election was fair, the vaccine works, and man-made climate change is real. At a time like this, it's a terrible problem. Can't Facebook help? Shouldn't they? And I'd love to see them say, okay, you know, for a few years, we're gonna take one for the team and do this.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, they're not gonna do that. But Jeremy, go ahead.

No, I mean, listen, I think what Aaron is saying is profoundly important. And, you know, to me, the ambient takeaway for me of this movie is about truth decay. It's about the erosion of the very concept of truth, and it's about the deterioration of civil discourse in our society, and the diminishing reliance reliance on facts and truth. And has Facebook had a large part in that? Absolutely. Now, I do not and cannot see him as a villain. I saw him as imperious. I saw him as mission-focused to the point of myopia. And I saw him as completely besieged, which he, at that point, absolutely was, you know, by everyone, by yours truly, you know, and fairly so. but someone who had gotten quite used to being attacked from all sides, and who was attempting to manage that.

I agree with everything Jeremy just said. And I have to say, Jeremy just does a beautiful job of making those human moments, especially at the end of the film when he's in the war room surrounded by this—

The noise, yeah, of what was happening.

Horrible noise. chaos. So I agree with Jeremy.

You know, it's interesting because that's the— I mean, I texted him at that moment, too. I was like, what are you doing? You need to stop it. You need to turn it off. I'd told them to turn it off many times.

You mean literally turn it off?

Yeah.

You were telling him to—

Turn it off.

You mean take down Trump's posts?

Take down Trump. Turn him off. Yeah.

The first post they took down an hour and 20 minutes later, which is too late. The second post they took down 8 minutes later.

Yes. Once they had made the decision.

Once they had made the decision. And it's actually one of my favorite moments in the film. which is a human moment, because however much you might not like that man, Mark Zuckerberg, however much you might not like him, I do not believe that there is a nefarious intention. I believe he's a person who, for him, that day was devastating and who cares about our democracy despite the consequences of his company on that democracy. And so that moment, for a person who says, I am a free speech absolutist, to then take down a standing president's post is a moment of turmoil.

It's a massive responsibility.

Right. And I just reminded Jeremy, it was actually his first day of shooting that we shot it out of order. We had to shoot that scene first. Yeah, it wasn't easy. But Jeremy, preparing for the fact that we were gonna be shooting it out of order, had the rest of the actors who were in that scene read through all the scenes that led up to that that we hadn't shot yet. But I reminded Jeremy— there's very little I needed to remind Jeremy of— but at that moment, that this is like if the president was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office addressing the nation on all 4 networks, and you didn't like what he was saying, so you decided to yank the plug out of the wall. It's that big a deal.

Well, if he was saying, everybody get a gun and shoot everyone, you might, right? That's the issue. It's like, what— You don't want to make that decision.

You don't want to make that decision. I don't think you would do it as quickly as you would do it if I was the one saying it, or if you were the one saying it.

One thing, though, they knew it was coming. I wrote a column in The New York Times in 2019 essentially predicting the inauguration. I said there's going to be an insurrection based on the stuff on Facebook and Trump's statements before the insurrection. This was 2019. I said he's going to lose the election. He's going to say it's false, and he's going to call on his followers to do something about it, including an insurrection to stop the process. And when I wrote that, I immediately got a call from Facebook saying, how dare you say this about us? And I said, you're not even anticipating this happening? 'Cause it looks like he's gonna do this. And they were like, we think this is irresponsible you said that. And I said, well, I think you're handmaidens to sedition. So, I don't know. There we are. So, anticipation is also part— like, him being surprised surprised me.

I'm curious, does Facebook— does Mark share information with of domestic intelligence groups? Does he say, look, here's what we're seeing on Facebook, you guys should know about it?

I think sometimes, sometimes not. He's more resistant compared to other companies. It depends on the company, but he doesn't have to unless it's a court order. I think they're more of the court order thing. But one of the things that you touched on, Jeremy, here is— I know because I sat with him right when it was coming out, when The Social Network came out, he was very upset. I would call him near tears, actually, at a dinner. we were at. And he said, I think that— I said, what are you worried about? You're about to become a billionaire. What do you care? And it's also a Hollywood movie. And he goes, well, this is what people will think about me. And this is what people will take away. And I said, no, Mark, they're gonna think a lot worse in the coming days. But fine. And, but you said the screenplay was vetted to within an inch of its life by studio lawyers. But what— did you have concerns about the new film given now Meta and its influence has grown quantumly in the past 16 years? And were there details or moments in the scripts you had to fight for?

First of all, I have to give credit to Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony, who, from the day I turned in the script, it was full speed ahead. And he never asked me to tone anything down, or, can you change that person's name? Or something like that. There were notes from the lawyers, but nothing that hurt me, uh, at all. Um, what made me nervous was, uh, I'm spacing on her name. Sarah. Uh, she wrote the book.

Yeah. Careless People.

Right. That Facebook sought and received an injunction against her promoting the book at all. She was even sitting on a panel. Right. And she simply sat there. She wasn't allowed to speak. So I thought, oh boy, um, if Facebook seeks and gets an injunction for some reason that I'm not seeing, that the lawyers aren't seeing, and just put— all they have to do is postpone the release of the film.

Yeah.

Until after the midterms.

They weren't going to do that. Not you. It would cause intense problems.

Kara, I, you know, of course you must understand why he would have felt that way, and I think, as you know, he's someone who has said this, that it's important to him to feel understood, if not liked. You know, he's okay not being liked. He knows that he's not liked, but he does want to be understood, and he feels mischaracterized in many ways. Now, one thing I think Aaron has done superbly well is sort of encompassing his point of view in a way that I felt was accurate, and it's distilled in one of the Aaron has written. Picasso said, art is a lie that tells the truth. And we live in this sort of mirror, inverted mirror age where truth, social, is a truth that tells a lie. But this is a— Aaron has always said this about the other films we've made. It's a painting, not a photograph. So, I do feel, though, a tremendous onus on me to represent this person to the world, knowing that, you know, it's—

A painting, not a photograph.

Right.

Exactly. So, you compared the intense research you do for roles like an investigative mission. And what did that look like in that regard, as you're just jumping off from this? And what was the biggest challenge for you? You have the voice down disturbingly well. I was like, oh, I haven't talked to Mark since our last interview that was a disaster for him, which is a long time ago, 'cause he doesn't want to bother who bother him. But what was the biggest challenge for you?

All of it. I mean, all of it. Saying yes, you know, the risk involved. It was a massive amount of research and just trying to understand where he's coming from. And, you know, starting with— really starting around with your early All Things Digital interviews and the early Face of Facebook New Yorker profile, you know, going all the way through. I mean, to me, the question that Aaron is sort of answering in this movie is a New Yorker profile, Can Mark Zuckerberg Save Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? You know, how much and to what extent has Facebook been implicit in the fracturing and breakage of our democracy? But again, it is a kind of investigation that I do inexhaustibly and try to do as thoroughly as possible so that I can earn the right to represent somebody to the world.

We'll be back in a minute. I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Liu and Jean Liu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

We will reengage students, alumni, and other members of our community to examine how we preserve what is valuable about Greek life.

That was Cornell University's President Michael Kotlikoff trying to quell some of the anger on his campus in a video address on October 3rd. A few days later, he addressed Cornell's faculty, and what he said has since leaked out to the world, and it's clear that he doesn't want an outright ban on frats. He thinks a ban could make matters worse, driving violent behavior off campus and into the shadows. But clearly, his response wasn't enough for Cornell's community, because today the university announced announced a ban on frat parties for the rest of the academic year. Cornell also says it's going to add experienced sexual assault investigators to their police force. The question is, why didn't this happen 2 years ago, when the sexual assault at a campus fraternity was first reported? Or maybe the question remains, why don't we just ban frats? We're going to ask on Today Explained from Vox, available in your feeds Monday to Friday.

I'm Phoebe Judge, host of the podcast Criminal. Usually, I'm telling stories about other people, but this fall, I'm headed out on the road with a brand-new show. Stories about me and the people I love. It's called Don't Worry. I hope you'll come out and see it. We'll be in cities like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and lots more. Get your tickets at thisiscriminal.com/dontworry. Now, Aaron, this isn't a documentary, obviously. You've built a story based on real people and real events. And from The West Wing to films like A Few Good Men and Moneyball, you excel at heightening the dynamics, crafting dialogue, and highlighting the humanness in these stories. So, how much of the social reckoning from I Can Tell is fact versus storytelling, as you said, a painting? Give me one or two examples of key moments or characters you chose to dramatize and imagine versus rely on actual details.

There was a film critic a few years ago who wrote that when I write nonfiction, I use the real people for parts. And I thought that that was pretty accurate.

Yeah.

I'll give you one example. The character that Bill Burr plays, Charlie Garrighan.

Yes, Roger McNamee. You don't have to say it, but I've texted with him about it.

But go ahead.

Thank you. Yeah.

And the reason he's inspired by Roger McNamee and not called Roger McNamee, it's another— That was the first lawyer thing. Listen, I created a situation where Roger and Mark Zuckerberg would be in the same room at the same time arguing with each other.

Yes. Which doesn't really happen, right? Yeah.

Charlie says at the very beginning, if this wasn't an emergency, would I even be allowed in the building? And the answer is no. So the lawyers felt that Facebook could say, well, we would never allow of Roger McNamee in there, and so it looks like we're stupid, and now we're gonna sue you. So, I changed the character's name.

Well, he does articulate. Roger was very torn. I remember at the time, he and I would argue about Facebook. He was very pro-Facebook until he wasn't. It's a moment of, like, you know, road to Damascus for a lot of these people. Like, oh, no. Which happens a lot.

It's interesting you say, you know, I was sort of— one thing I was trying to understand is whether there was a sort of Damascene moment moment along the way. And this thing that I've thought about a lot, Justice Brandeis and the idea of the curse of bigness, and if this is a companion piece, this is about the curse of bigness, which couldn't possibly be more culturally relevant because of the other juggernauts that we're experiencing right now. And this historical phenomenon that Large technological breakthroughs have often, if not always, carried consequences that their creators are not able to or cannot control or foresee. And that's what this movie is about to me at its core. Also about the fourth estate and how vital journalism is. And that's what really, really struck me on Sunday night when I saw the film.

Well, what was key is that we all talked about this, but then Jeff brought the proof, right? We talked about what was happening, in there for years, but we needed the actual proof that Frances brought. And I think Frances' character is at the center of this, of course. It's about her, her journey. But then we meet Mark in 2021 while he's rehearsing congressional testimony for his team. He's strikingly cold and robotic, and Mark can be like that, referring to people as users and humans. And at one point, he says, this is a meeting where we make me likable, which made me laugh out loud because the first time I met him, he walked in, and he was very robotic and— not cold, but robotic. And said, I hear you think I'm I'm an asshole. And I said, I haven't met you yet, but people say you are. So let's see. Let's find out. And it was, especially in the early days, very awkward to talk to him.

Something I wanted to include, a trait of Mark's, but couldn't, was Roger would tell me that from time to time in a conversation, just he and Mark, that Mark would take a full 2-minute pause. He'd just be silent for 2 minutes. And I thought, I'm not sure you can get away with a 2-minute silence in a movie. Though, if anyone can do it, Jeremy.

I was sad, actually, that we lost some of the time before I said, you know what? Let's get to work.

It was sad for me too, believe me.

It is awkward. And he actually doesn't mean it. You know, there's reasons he's socially awkward the way he is.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's— you know, and he's not here to defend himself, but so—

No, I don't think he's being a jerk by being silent.

No, no, no. He's like a central processing unit.

He is. It's very much— and Gates has the same qualities. There's a lot of, you know, and they've improved, by the way, let me say. But one of the things right now among tech people is that empathy is toxic, empathy is suicidal. That's mostly from Elon and Peter Thiel. But how much empathy did you have for your character versus— The character of Mark versus the real Mark?

Well, for me, I'm dealing with the real Mark when I approach the subject. And I would say a radical amount, which is, I think, something that is going out of our world and something that is vital— empathy. So, yeah, I think without it, we're just fighting fire with fire. And I felt a lot of empathy for the insoluble dilemmas that I felt that he was facing. And I believe him to be a principled and idealistic person. You know, Martin Luther King said, in the future, we'll have guided missiles and misguided men. So I also believe that he's misguided and myopic. But I do believe that his intentions to connect the world and give people a voice that those things were sincere. And so, I also believe that he genuinely didn't think that it was his role as the leader of a private company to censor politicians in a democracy, or to be the arbiter of truth for a large percentage of the planet. Now, I might personally disagree with those things, but I had to find my way feelingly into having a respect for that point of view.

What about you, Aaron?

I only had empathy for Mark. There was no moment, no scene where I felt like, well, you know, I've got to write him as a jerk somehow. His first scene, the first thing he says after he spells his name, he says— asks what his occupation is. He says, I'm a professional defendant.

It's—

I have him making a joke. And obviously, the implication of the joke The last time we saw him, he was in 2 different depositions, Jerome. See, that he always has to answer for himself somehow. And Jeremy delivers the line with a slight smile on his face. His arguments, I disagree with his arguments. I didn't have to make them jerky. I had to make them the best version of that argument that I could.

So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here is yours. My name is Sherry Turkle. I'm the author of Artificial Intimacy. In your first film about Facebook, technology mediates relationships between people. In this new one, we see it encroaching directly on how people see themselves, and more than that, trying to reframe reality. The circle grows from psychology to politics. These days, Mark Zuckerberg suggests that although people may want 15 close friends, most can only manage 2 or 3, and Facebook, Meta, will fill in with 12 avatar friends to make up the difference. Will that be a whole new movie? Do you see all these developments as a continuation of the story you began in The Social Network, or something fundamentally different? Sheri's an amazing researcher, by the way, for decades on this issue.

Well, first, I'll say, as far as a whole new movie, this Social Reckoning opens Friday, October 9th. On October 10th, I will have no idea what I'm doing next.

Okay.

I'll have no idea. And when I don't have an idea, it's impossible for me to imagine ever having an idea. But to the meat of her question, and that sounds terrifying to me that Mark says, okay, if you only have 2 or 3 friends, The metaverse can provide you with—

13 fake ones who will be nicer to you than your regular friends because there's no friction. And that's one of the things he and many others talk about is, let's remove friction. And I was always like, no, no, we need friction. Friction is good. Not hate, but friction. So, seamlessness is their favorite word.

If in The Social Network in 2010, the idea essentially was, Here's a guy who is not really comfortable in the social structure of college. A lot of us feel that way. Feels there's a cool kids' table someplace and he's not at it and they're not going to let him at it. So he is a genius. He builds his own digital virtual cool kids' table that he's now the mayor of. What seems to be happening 2 things. One, he's trying to get not only as many people as possible to his cool kids' table, growing the number of users, he's trying to get as much of our lives as possible to happen in this virtual, uh, world that he's creating, that he is comfortable in. But the second thing, the really big difference between Facebook now and Facebook then, is the newsfeed. Back in 2010, And it was a social media site. It was a way to keep up with your friends. Once they added the newsfeed, and that newsfeed is powered by an algorithm, that means you're getting the news that you want to see, and Jeremy's getting the news that he wants to see. And so not only are we living with different facts, but many, many people are going to be, day after day, the top story is going to be, an immigrant committed a crime.

It's going to seem like that's the whole world, immigrants committing crimes.

Yep, absolutely. Jeremy, when you think about— like, I can't imagine you using a Muse charm, Jeremy Strong, I have to tell you. Like, and you talking to an AI agent, I don't see it.

No, I mean, I'm not on any social media whatsoever. But, and I love Sherry Turkle's work. You know, I think that What Aaron's talking about and the filter bubbles and echo chambers that we're all increasingly separated by in a solipsistic way and living inside of are very dangerous. And I think this idea of frictionlessness is very dangerous. I think friction is life. That's where life is. I guess for a long time I believed, okay, these platforms are are surfacing and amplifying and aggregating existing social dynamics and existing societal dynamics. And of course now, in what Aaron has written this movie about, they're not just amplifying or surfacing them, they're shaping them. And so that is of great concern. And I hope that this film about that reckoning can also serve to illuminate these things and be a wake-up call and a cri du cœur for some of these leaders to make some changes and to do better.

Yeah, I doubt that now. I still doubt it. So Facebook currently has over 3 billion monthly active users and nearly 40% of US adults say they regularly get news on Facebook according to Pew Research. Meanwhile, its business plan has killed the media really in a lot of ways. So that makes it where it's not just that people get their news from and that they've killed the other sources of news very handily through their business plan. When I interviewed Frances Haugen in late 2021, I told her, when you look at Mark's influence, it's very clear he's influential, but he pretends that they're not. And let me add that in her Senate testimony, Frances said, there's nobody currently holding Zuckerberg accountable but himself, and the buck stops with Mark. And that tension between growth and safety is critical and what pushes Frances to talk Talk to the Wall Street Journal reporter because the power is now astonishing because Mark and the other tech people realize, as I've said many times and I'll keep saying it, that Trump is a coin-operated president and these pretty non-political people are now deeply political. So talk about accountability and this power and influence on news, on social, and now on friendships even and how we interact with each other.

Both of you. First you, Eric.

Sure. Uh, by the way, Frances also says that she thinks things are worse now than when she—

Agreed.

Yeah. Okay. You said that, uh, essentially tech is taking journalism jobs.

Not just that, but power everywhere. There again, right?

Right. Uh, there is that, which is a huge problem, but also the rise of— we'll call them independent news sources. Uh, okay, the, you know, when people say do your research, the, the, those, uh, websites that they're going to, it feels like— did you ever happen to read the book by Andrew Keene, The Rise of the Amateur?

Sure did.

A Cult of the Amateur.

Yes, I did.

Uh, yeah, it feels like those independent news sources, to get a, a foothold, to kind of climb up the ladder, just had to relentlessly trash traditional news. news sources. It's corporate news. It's fake news. We're the real news somehow. And it's simply not true. The most reliable sources of news are still the traditional sources of news. Network news, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. The power that Facebook has now in that regard is immense. And I wanted to ask you, you. Is there a precedent for this conversation even happening? The idea that one company, one guy is a threat to democracy?

I guess that— what's his name who started all the wars? William Randolph Hearst, I suppose.

Right. Yeah. The power that he had was not letting Citizen Kane advertise in her—

advertise. Right, right. It was smaller. It was smaller. But he caused wars. He created wars.

Which, by the way, Alex Gibney can't do, right?

Uh, he can now because it got called But yeah.

The people that Frances was talking to in those Senate hearings and the president, their campaigns are funded by the people who need to be regulated. And, you know, when we hear the president say he's not going to instruct any guardrails for AI, it's just we're going to rely on his moral compass.

Self-policing. They're going to police themselves.

Right.

Yeah.

Sure.

That'll work.

Yeah, the arsonists are real good at keeping the fire from happening.

So the power is immense. Why? It's not like Facebook makes oil. They don't give us an essential thing. It's a social media site.

Yeah.

And a bad news aggregator.

And one of the things you did talk about, which was, again, this communications executive who was so great, and I love that actor. He's also in The Audacity.

Billy Magnussen.

Yeah, he's fantastic. He's very funny.

I agree.

But he said, we're post-government around here. And it's a jarring remark. I've never heard it. I have to say, like, they'd never deign to say that. But I think sometimes they feel like it.

I asked Jeff Horowitz, can you tell me an off-the-record thing that was said to you that you most wanted to— that you most wish was on the record? It was that. That.

Oh, wow.

It was, we're post-government already.

Wow. I've never heard that. They're not stupid enough to say that to me, I guess, because I would tell on them. But when you think about that power, one of the things that it's around is free speech. And January 6th is sort of the formative thing. When you were formulating this, I'd love you each to talk about why January 6th was the most important moment to frame this around. First you, Aaron, and then Jeremy.

You know, um, my writing style, it tends to be romantic and idealistic, uh, particularly about institutions. And I think that that was planted by my father, uh, very early in my life. I have a memory. I have a terrible memory. Can't remember much from when I was a kid, but I remember I remember watching Nixon leave the White House on the day that he resigned. And this, in the Sorkin house, this was not a national day of shame. My father was very proud, and he pointed to the TV and he said, look, the most powerful man in the world is giving up power, and there isn't a tank in the street. You don't see a police officer. Nobody's gun was drawn. And that stayed with me. So when January 6th happened, like most people, uh, it— you know, that was a horrifying, terrible, terrible thing. My conversations, my early conversations with Jeff and Frances, uh, were about that responsibility, uh, Facebook's culpability, uh, for, for January 6th. And they happened to be happening at the same time that I was having a number of conversations conversations with Michael Fanone.

This is the officer, D.C. officer.

D.C. police officer who was— he was twice electrocuted that day, just got his brains beaten in. The people who did it were pardoned. And I just found myself thinking, look, there's only one person responsible for January 6th. could not have done it without, uh, the help of Facebook.

You said to Puck's Matt Bellini in 2024, I blame Facebook for January 6th. Now, the spokesperson— let me just put this out because it's fair to Facebook— the responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6th lies with those who attacked the Capitol and those who encouraged them. I, I think I just call them handmaidens to sedition, and they, they stopped talking.

I think that's a good way of putting it. You said that by looking at Facebook, that, that you could tell that this is going to happen, that you could, you could see the water boiling. boiling? Why couldn't Facebook take down the things that were fomenting?

Yeah. I think my answer is slightly indirect. January 6th being the culmination of something, both historically and dramatically. But your last interview with Mark, the infamous controversial interview, I guess To me, January 6th is the result of— So, you guys got into it about why not take down these things? Why not take down InfoWars? Holocaust denial is abhorrent. You disagree with it, take it down. Right? So, eventually, he takes down InfoWars, and then Ted Cruz comes out and calls it a fascist attack on conservative voices, and invokes the Holocaust, and says, first they came for Alex Jones. Jones. Now, I want to decouple understanding from endorsement here. I'm not endorsing that point of view, but what I'm saying is the point of view of maintaining neutrality in that argument is what allowed January 6th to happen. That's the result of not being the ref, as Aaron writes in the film. And so to me, that is why it's the sharp end of the spear in terms of what is the consequence of this position?

Yeah, I agree. That's what I said to him in that interview. I'm like, it's going— today, the antisemitism's gonna flow downstream. It's gonna be toxic and ugly. It's not— you didn't invent antisemitism, for goodness' sake. It's been going on for thousands of years, but it's gonna get worse and worse and amplified, weaponized, and made into something real. I was like, it's gonna jump off the screen.

What about Sandy Hook denial? Was anything done with that? Was that left up?

No, we talked about it because we started talking about Alex Jones, and I said, you have all these rules on the platform, and you don't follow them. So, just don't have the— don't pretend to have rules if you're not gonna enforce them. And Alex kept breaking them over and over again.

And, Aaron, they were taken down. They were, yeah. And I also think, at that point of that interview, there were 100 billion pieces of content across the platforms per day. So, even if 99% of that gets taken down, you're still not able to eradicate crime in New York City. And so, that's Marc's point of view of that. But I also, think that there is something that one can understand in that point of view. I'm, I'm not saying it's right.

We'll be back in a minute.

I'm Seth Matlins, and on this week's episode of Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing, I'm talking with streetwear legend Jeff Staple, who in 2005 designed a Nike collab, which was the Pigeon Dunk, that caused a riot, resells for thousands of dollars 21 years later, and gets the credit or blame for bringing sneaker culture to the masses. In our conversation, we talk about why you can't buy your way into culture no matter how big your check, why 40 hours of meetings a week with none of them talking about what the customer actually wants is the most common way he sees businesses destroy value, and why when I asked him what he'd Create or Destroy, with all the power in the world? Jeff said likes and comments, because if likes and comments existed when he started, he never would've made the next thing. Create or Destroy. It's a business show, a marketing show, and the show that argues they've always been the same thing. From The Wisdom Is Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Everyone's talking about the prospect of a Democratic wave in the midterm elections, But here's something that matters just as much: the battle to control state legislatures.

That's the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

The GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, which means they control the governor's seat plus the statehouse and the state Senate. For Democrats, it's 16 states.

Meaning that the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports, things like increasing minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion.

If Democrats flip just a handful of state legislatures, the majority of Americans will now live in a state under full Democratic control, which could have big policy implications.

That's all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

This week on America Actually, we're in Wisconsin, and we talked to Francesca Hong. We have an opportunity through Wisconsin to Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested? And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable?

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It's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all. But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is a powder you stir into some water gonna do it for you? All that, plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop-obsessed father of Corn Flakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Let's finish up talking about the future. The Social Reckoning is one of several Hollywood films taking aim at tech right now. I just spoke with director Alex Gibney about his new Elon Musk documentary, along with Justine Musk, who is devastating in that documentary. And I've done an hour-long interview with her, which is really— she really puts the pieces together beautifully. And Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic, and Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Is it a broader cultural backlash against tech amassing or something else? Or are they just good stories? They are good stories. And Elizabeth is a constant good story in many ways.

I can only speak for myself, not Alex or Nathan or Luca. For me, it's a good story. And I think it's a coincidence that all 4 are happening at the same time. I know it feels like tech billionaires are sort of Hollywood's new Russians. But these people are now playing incredibly important roles in our lives, right? A role that I don't think Steve Jobs played, right?

No. Jeremy?

Again, I mean, it's about holding the mirror up to nature and being the abstract and brief chroniclers of our time. That's our job, is to show the human story, which is different from an essay or from the news. We need to be showing the human story of these things because they are the issues of our They are the third rail issues of our time.

Right. And actually, what's interesting about your depiction of Mark is everyone's like, oh, he's killed him. I'm like, no, no, he made him pathetic. It's not mean. It's not. It's something else.

Well, I have to say, it's certainly not my intention to make him pathetic.

What I'm saying is, I don't think you're being— they're like, you really screwed him.

When I watched the 37 hours of congressional testimony over and over and over and over I started to get this sense of a person who is just being besieged from all sides and who is desperately trying to stay afloat. And I know you asked him to resign on the show, and he declined. And so, but my attempt, it's not necessarily to ennoble him, but it is to represent him fairly at the bar.

I guess it's not pathetic, it's tragic.

I would accept that more.

I think you're right. When the resign thing, I was sort of joking, but I just wanted to get his reaction. in that regard?

Oh, his— Jeremy's, uh, I know what people think of me, so does my wife, so will my kids. Uh, I, I feel that, you know.

Anyway, I have 2 last questions. The Real Jeff Horowitz, who's now a tech reporter for Reuters, recently posted on X saying, the current slew of current AI company employees getting publicly uncomfortable gives me a sense of déjà vu from covering Meta for the last 7 years. Um, concerns first get raised internally and then they're ignored, then voiced broadly by employees who leave to work on external safety orgs, and then been specifically described by exiting employees who aren't fully believed. And finally come people who don't leave but gather receipts. Sometimes those people go public, sometimes not. Frances was one of the first to do it in a very dangerous way to herself. Do you think we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes of what's happening now? It is getting more play, and I think people are willing, especially in the data center backlash, I think regular people are quite concerned in the way they when you first started working on these stories?

I know so little about AI that all I can do— I don't think this is your question. All I can do is offer an opinion about AI as it pertains to my field. And it's that I'm optimistic, actually, because I think the audience is going to reject it. I think that if you play video games, if you play Call of Duty, you don't have an emotional connection to the people you're shooting in Call of Duty. duty. That's going to be your experience watching AI Schindler's List.

Yeah. Yeah. Jeremy?

I mean, I just think we are in a moment of existential civilizational crisis, and we're right there in the crosshairs of it right now. I think these red lines are being crossed. I think the issues of control and alignment are not being figured out and are being outpaced by the speed and acceleration of the technology. And it's the most powerful tool/weapon that has ever been in anyone's hands in the history of human civilization. And we need to wake up and regulate and do something about it.

And it's privatized.

Yeah, that's right. No, and Ezra Klein's piece of, you know, 2 weeks ago was essentially that that it's going to take a lot more red tape to go through to put a solar panel on the roof of the parking lot for these companies than it is to create this technology that threatens to end civilization.

Yeah.

And what's the upside of the technology? We got our email summarized for us?

Basically efficiency and frictionlessness, right?

That's right. There are some very good— there will be, there could be.

Not if the negatives, you know, not if anything comes about that people are saying is That's a legitimate percentage.

Yeah, no, 100%. It doesn't matter if we solve cancer if we're all dead.

Back in 1970-something, when Woody Allen made Annie Hall, he said, you know, it's good to make an effort once in a while.

Yeah.

Why? What is this quest for frictionlessness?

Well, I don't know. You know, I used to call when they were making all these apps, like dry cleaning delivery, all the food delivery. I said, San Francisco is assisted living for millennials right now. And so, you know, they just like everything easy.

Kara, I am an executive producer on a movie that Tom McCarthy made called A Statement, which is based on Nathaniel Rich's book, Losing Earth. And it's about the climate crisis. And it's essentially the same thing, which is we have all the information, we know what's coming, and because of our nature as humans and our refusal to see what's in front of us, we're blind in the face of events. And we're seeing now with climate, the steep cost of inaction. We're not going to have the luxury of 30 years to see that steep cost with AI.

No. And the thing I say, I do compare it to nuclear weaponry, which is if we had privatized nuclear weapons and everyone got a nuclear weapon, there's a reason we're not dead from nuclear weapons because we went global as a group, as a society together to on a global basis. And last question. The film is called The Social Reckoning. Reckoning is a great word. It's implicit in the title that there will be consequences. And Meta is dealing with some of the consequences related to landmark addiction lawsuits, which they're losing and will lose more of them. But we're still living in this polarized world that Facebook helped create, and an angry world, a politically angry world, the facilitation of people like Donald Trump. The platform remains very powerful. So I'd like each of you I want you to reflect on reckoning and what it means, because one of the things I've said for almost 2 decades now is these people don't think about consequences ever because they've never felt unsafe and they've never had to live consequences. So what does accountability, having done this movie, look like? What's a reckoning?

For me, the reckoning in the title was about the consequence. Here's what happens. You feed people misinformation for long enough, You feed people content designed to make them angry, here's what it's going to look like. We start off in the film with fairly benign examples, right? Somebody thinks that chlorophyll is an internal deodorant. Somebody else thinks that 5G cell phone towers. We've got a young girl being bullied at school. And then the final sequence. And I remember asking— I can't remember whether it was Frances or Jeff, but imagine for me something that's worse than January 6th. What's the next thing? And they just shook their heads. They weren't able to conceive of it. And I think that one of the things we're all guilty of is a failure of imagination.

Yeah. Although I can imagine. I can imagine a lot.

You are not guilty of a failure of imagination.

One of the people asked me, what's the danger? I said nuclear war was our biggest threat. humanity. And now it's AI that can set off nuclear war without our— like, it really can. It really could.

I don't understand why that's better than the setting-off-bomb system that we had before.

What exactly? Jeremy, last word on reckoning.

I shouldn't have the last word in this interview, so we should give it back to Aaron. But I don't have a great answer to that. I mean, perhaps this film is a form of that reckoning, a cultural reckoning. I fear that it's going to take a Hiroshima-Nagasaki-type event for everybody to wake up. And I fear that that will be the reckoning for us to find accountability. But clearly, these people elude accountability and deflect accountability and are, in a sense, post-accountability. You know, I played Donald Trump's mentor in a film a few years ago.

Amazing mentor.

Who was sort of the progenitor of fake news and misinformation and had no conscience whatsoever and no shame. And we see everything he believed encoded in everything our president does. And so a lot of these things have been with us before social media and are endemic to us as human beings. But I fear that the reckoning, unfortunately, might be a catastrophic event that is brought about by this Promethean fire that we are all really unwisely playing with.

Well, that's well said. And I think you guys have done an amazing job of this. And one of the things that's really important is to, as you said, Jeremy, is to put, I think more than a painting, it's a mirror and they need to see themselves over and over again. At some point it may sink in, possibly. Possibly. That's my hope because they have enormous power and they're not up to the task of the power they have. So I appreciate it. And it's a great film and I appreciate the work you guys have done on it.

Thanks very Thanks, Kara.

Thanks, Aaron.

Today's show was produced by Vicki Vergolina, Michelle Eloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Birney, and Madeleine Laplante-Dubie. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eamon Whalen, Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademiks. If you're already following the show, you can manage more than 3 close human friends. If not, have fun with Mark in the metaverse. It is no fun, FYI. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.