Tasha 0:00

Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched the facebook.com from his dorm room, then went out for pizza with his friends. It was February 4th, 2004. By June the next year, Mark was celebrating 3 million Facebook users from his new Palo Alto offices in California. He left school for Silicon Valley, and his platform was quickly reinventing how people connected to the internet, information, and each other. By 2010, the meteoric rise of Facebook was unmatched and legendary. So it was about time that someone wrote the story of its mythological founding and got it shining on the silver screens. But when your main character isn't giving interviews, the author of the book hasn't finished writing the damn thing, and the film screenwriter pledges his loyalty to a good story over the truth, the end result is bound to be Real Twisty. Welcome back to Real Twisty. I am Tasha.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

I am Matt.

Tasha 1:16

And today we're watching The Social Network, a 2010 film directed by David Fenture, who will soon meet again, Matthew, with Zodiac.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

And I didn't know he did Zodiac.

Tasha 1:30

Yeah. And who scared the hell out of 14-year-old me with seven.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

So are you saying that like the social network was also a horror?

Tasha 1:38

I think so.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

It could be.

Tasha 1:40

I I think it very well could be. Written, not seven or zodiac social network, written by Aaron Sorkin. This movie is loosely, loosely based on the quote unquote nonfiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mesrich, which is allegedly based on the quote-unquote true facts of the start and rise of Facebook from 2008 to about 2000 or 2003 to about 2008 to 2009-ish. And you will soon understand why there are so many allegedly's and quote unquotes and loosely bases in my opening here. I have come prepared in a shirt that no one can see, and I'm so freaking sad, but it's my popcorn and movies t-shirt. Movies because it's popcorn and movie time, guys. And it only took us two weeks to get back.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

I've got my mockman cult shirt on. Is that relevant to this? Because it's cultish.

Tasha 2:46

It is cultish.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

It is very cultish. Also, and during the intro, you mentioned the year that it started, and I was like, our oldest is younger than Facebook, let alone younger than Google.

Tasha 2:59

Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah. And Matthew. We have to address this head on. We both love Aaron Sorkin.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Oh yeah.

Tasha 3:07

Oh yeah. Let me count the ways.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

West Wing. There's one. There's Newsweek, which we just finished watching again for like our newsroom.

Tasha 3:15

Newsroom, which you're right. We just literally Newsroom, yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

They call it Newsweek, though, in the show.

Tasha 3:20

Yes, that is the name of his show.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

That's how I got it.

Tasha 3:23

But the name of the show is the newsroom. And we just finished watching it again last night. And then Moneyball, which is like one of your all-time favorites.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Yes.

Tasha 3:31

Which I could take or leave. Like I'm fine.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

It's probably my favorite Brad Pitt movie because it's it's it's baseball.

Tasha 3:37

I love that it's baseball and I love what it covers.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yes.

Tasha 3:40

But it it's more of like a one and done for me. I'm like, okay, that's really interesting. Bring me back to Newsroom or the West Wing, and I will like settle in. It's Aaron Sorgan is like, he's amazing. Yeah. But you have one of his shows almost constantly playing in our house at any given time. Surely you can quote much of the 25 episodes of Newsroom by now.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

No, I cannot.

Tasha 4:05

Far be it from me to snub my nose at the man. He's brilliant, but I am going to say that it's my version of Gilmore Girls.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

I'm just saying.

Tasha 4:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

It's real quick witty.

Tasha 4:15

Which is really funny because I'm going to talk about Gilmore Girls here in a minute.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

I bet.

Tasha 4:20

Um he broke my heart a little bit, like into like a thousand pieces when I read this interview that he gave about the social network and its dramatic liberties. For an interview with the New York magazine, he said, I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth. I want it to be to storytelling. And by golly, there was no lack of fidelity on his part. Like the storytelling is great.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

It is. It's really good.

Tasha 4:53

It's so good. The movie, I give it five chef kisses of out of five. Like, yes. It's it's it's the cream of the crop. Everything about this movie is so wonderful. The cast, the pacing, the camera work, the wit, so witty. All the characters are multifaceted. That's one of my least favorite things about movies is whenever the good guys are 100% good and the bad guys are 100% evil. Aaron Sorkin's so good at creating characters that are real life. Everybody's a little bad and everybody's a little good. And there's, you know, no one's 100% one way or the other. And he It's very human. Yeah, he captures very human characters in this movie. They're the best kind of characters. It does leave us, I feel like in this movie a lot. I felt like I didn't know who I was supposed to root for because every character is so freaking flawed. Yes. But shady.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

They're all shady.

Tasha 5:52

They're shady, and so is the true line of truth of this movie. Yeah. So the movie covers the beginning of Facebook's from its first little tickle in the back of the gray matter in many people's brains through its rocket ship journey to success and mark's first two multimillion dollar lawsuits. There's scandal, there's hoodies, there's betrayal.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

You just say hoodies.

Tasha 6:23

I did.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

And well, don't forget the well. If you put the hoodies, you're gonna gotta put the flip-flops.

Tasha 6:29

And the flip-flops, scantily clad co-eds, an in-sync member.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Not just co-eds, I'm sorry, Asian co-eds. It's Asian.

Tasha 6:39

They make a point of Dakota, Dakota's in it.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, I know.

Tasha 6:43

I mean, I you mentioned it, and I was like, oh my god, that is decorative.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

It took us a few takes to be like, is that her? And like she's younger. I think this was the best part of uh Justin Timberlake's career ever. Like, forget music. This was on par his.

Tasha 7:01

I loved it. And and I love that Justin Timberlake was playing Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, which turned the music industry upside down.

Tasha 7:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Yeah.

Tasha 7:15

I was like, this is the best casting decision of all time. So meta. Ha! Meta! Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Oh, oh, please don't sue us.

Tasha 7:24

So, okay. So basically, everything in this movie is everything that made the early 2000s a good time. So it's just it's gonna be good. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the awards that it won because it's not just me that says it's a good movie, like people across the board. Yeah, everybody agreed. It earned three Oscars, four Critics Choice Awards, four Golden Globes, and then Aaron Sorkin just like cleaned house. He won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay that year. In fact, I counted 45 awards total that he won for this screenplay. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Not nominated, just one like he personally won or like the movie one.

Tasha 8:07

He personally won 45. Plus, the social network script was on the blacklist, which is the industry's annual list of best unproduced screenplays. So screenplays before filming begins, but great screenplays, the best of them go on this list called the Blacklist. And before filming began, this was on that list.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Sorkin's doesn't sound like a good list when I first hear it.

Tasha 8:38

I it does sound like a bad list, but it's a good list. It's a good list to be on. It's it's the list. If you're a screenwriter, you want to be on it because if your if your script has not been bought yet and you get on that list, that script's gonna get shopped. Like people are going to be bidding for that script, right? They also heorkin also won the screenwriter of the year from the Hollywood Film Awards that year, just in general. The year the movie released, he got screenwriter of the year from the Hollywood Film Awards. And then the Social Network won the adapted screenplay of the decade in 2020 at the Gold Derby Awards.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

In 2020?

Tasha 9:18

Yep. So from 2010 to 2020, all the movies that had ever been made, social network cleaned house, it won best adapted screenplay out of all adapted screenplays that were made in that entire decade. So Aaron Sorkin's out there doing the damn thing. Like he just he's he's doing it. But while he's doing it, maybe 45% of it is accurate. So you gotta go in knowing that, and you gotta come for the storytelling and not the story. Like, don't go into this thinking that you're this is not just the facts.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Well, West Wing's not based on anyone true, and neither is Newsweek.

Tasha 9:55

But no one goes to watch West Wing thinking that they're getting the real story of the White House. They're not like, oh yes, he was president.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

That's totally what Bush did. That's totally what Reagan did.

Tasha 10:06

No, not at all. But should we get into it?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Sure, let's do this. Roll tape.

Tasha 10:11

So, like we mentioned, Gilmore Girls. Gilmore Girls prepared me for the opening scene of this movie. I'm just gonna okay. So we we opened this movie, Jesse Eisenberg, young Jesse Eisenberg, 2009. Jesse Eisenberg is when they film this. He plays Mark Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

He looks the same today as he did yes, way back then.

Tasha 10:31

He has not aged, which is probably why he didn't get casted for the new social.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

But I mean, you look at Mark Zuckerberg, he doesn't look like he's aged either, FYI.

Tasha 10:41

Not too much. Have been rougher to Mark Zuckerberg, allegedly, than they have been to uh to our friend Jesse Eisenberg. And I I think it's probably because you know, Jesse Eisenberg hasn't had to deal with the fate of nations crumbling, yeah, you know, with the blame on him, you know, his shoulders.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Yeah, I'm with you.

Tasha 11:04

You know, he hasn't had a lot of stressful things like that happen to him.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

I didn't mean to veer you off. Go ahead.

Tasha 11:09

That's okay. So it's a good point. So Mark Zuckerberg and the badly treated Erica Albright, which is played by the lovely Rooney Mara, are setting in this pub in Boston, having a cold one.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Boston, gotta love Boston.

Tasha 11:26

Gotta love Boston, one of my favorite places. And I need you to understand that a standard script, one script page, typically equals one minute of screen film time. Yeah. Okay. Gilmore girl scripts for a 42-minute episode were 80 pages long.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yeah, so it's about almost 30 seconds a page.

Tasha 11:49

Yes, those girls were they there were no pauses, there were no dramatic pauses. Nobody was frowing their brow and like looking into a camera. That trained me for the social network. Social network fit 162 pages into 120 minutes of film. So thank you, Amy Sherman Palladino. I could not have done Aaron Sorkin without.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

She's way pro. She's way pro.

Tasha 12:12

She's brilliant. And this opening tennis magic really took like all of my skills because they are just battering it back and forth. This scene reportedly took 99 takes because David Fenture had like a very specific time stamp that he wanted to put on it. He was like, I want it to be specifically this many minutes and this many seconds. And Mara was only scheduled to be on set for four days at the very beginning of filming. Um, all of her scenes had to be done back to back at the very beginning. So they would begin this the take, they'd get through the take, and he'd be like, Great, love the chemistry. Can you cut 53 seconds off that? Oh gosh. Which I mean, you know, I think about that, and I think that had to have added to that tension that they're building in that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Like just naturally because they're trying to that kind of makes sense, you know.

Tasha 13:06

And I think it's kind of brilliant as a director. Like, I don't know if he was trying to drive that naturally with that, but man, that is their talking. The angst is building in this conversation, and I am getting pissed off for her because he is a damn asshat. Like the shit he's saying to her. I just yeah, he has no regard.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

He doesn't seem like he has regard for anyone.

Tasha 13:31

Patriarchy man is just rolling off of him. So, straight out the gate with this scene, we've got our first falsehoods, which is sad because it's literally the very first scene of the movie, and it's like the first seven minutes of the movie. There was no Erica Albright. Erica Albright is not a real person, uh, totally fake. But this scene is used to establish a few things for us. One of the things that it talks about is that Mark reportedly got a 1600, scored a 1600 on his SATs.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yeah.

Tasha 14:03

That is a well-spread rumor. Has been around the track a few times on the internet, around Harvard, like this is all in the news. However, it has never been confirmed. He has never shared his actual scores, nor has any school that he has ever attended. So it's all rumor and speculation that he got a perfect score on his SATs. Okay. Regardless of whatever he got on his SAT scores, it does establish that the man is kind of a savant. Like he's he's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah.

Tasha 14:35

The the junior classman, Eduardo, his buddy, really did make $300,000 on an oil investment by tracking barometric changes and predicting hurricanes. He was obsessed with meteorology, just like on the side. And he used that side obsession to help him anticipate how the weather was going to affect oil prices and disturbances in the trade routes. And so using that knowledge, it's almost like counting cards, he made $300,000 on oil investments.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

But what did he invest with to start? Do you know?

Tasha 15:15

Well, uh, probably his father's money because he comes from very wealthy.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Well, I'm just saying, like, did he start with like $300,000 and just doubled it? Or did he start with like a million and then just got 30%?

Tasha 15:27

I don't know what he started with, but he made $300,000.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

I mean, that's still real good. What I want to do one day when I grow up.

Tasha 15:34

Yes. When I grow up, I would like to have a weird obsession with meteorology that tells me how to make money on oil prices. So there was no big breakup at the pub. There was, however, some girl somewhere on campus that Mark did think was a bitch. He not only thought she was a bitch, but he was sitting in his room one night openly blogging about her while he was drinking beer.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

So that moves on to the next scene in the movie.

Tasha 16:02

Yep. And drinking, blogging, Mark thought it would be hilarious to get photos of all the kids in his house. He lived in Kirkland House. He thought it would be great to get all of their pictures online and have people write who was hotter, his housemates or farm animals. Now, the movie says that Billy Olson proposed the farm animals animals bit, but no, by his own admission, in his blog, which he published on FaceMash when the site went live, boy had no qualms with putting it all out there. It was entirely his idea. He wanted to compare his classmates to farm animals. Billy Olson, his roommate, said, Yeah, wait, take out the farm animals. Do student versus student, you know, and then like maybe a farm animal, but like student versus student. And as soon as Mark figured out how easy it was to like scrub all the photos from his house database, he was like, Crap, we need to do all the campus houses. So I think it's really interesting that the movie was like, Let's make the farm animals thing Billy's fault, right? Like they're not gonna make Mark look that bad.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Yeah.

Tasha 17:14

But then they make him a huge misogynist. Yeah, he makes a crack about Erica's breast size and then face mash. The site only rates girls in the movie. When in real life, it was all students, guys and girls. Everyone was fair game. It was never a let's just rate the girls thing. So it was really interesting to me that they were like, let's not make him a total dick. Let's, you know, put the farm animals on someone else.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

But then they really made him like a way worse dick.

Tasha 17:47

Yes. When you read the book, which I unfortunately did for this project, you're welcome, everyone. It makes it out like he physically broke into some of the campus houses, like to get some of the data. I'm not even kidding. It literally read like he was Tom Cruise dropping down, like all wired up around the in the vault with the lasers, holding it all together with a textbook so that he could get the data that he couldn't get from his room. But actually, it just sounds like he figured out some pretty basic passports from his dorm room and was able to like get it.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

He broke the security.

Tasha 18:22

So I don't I don't know what Ben was getting at with a book, but you know, he was just a kid who knew how to hack.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah.

Tasha 18:30

And the film is a big to-do spreading through the whole campus and crashing Harvard servers. But in actuality, this is how it all went down. 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and all of his teenage boy undeveloped frontal lobeness. He gets the site up directly on the site. Like I said, he publishes his online journal documenting how he gathered the data. We're gonna call it gathered the data and his farm animal inspiration. He goes ahead and tells everybody that. Eduardo does not offer any sort of algorithm. There's nothing drawn on a window anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Yeah.

Tasha 19:40

Um, and also, like, do we really think that Mark Zuckerberg, who we've just been told got a 1600 on his SATs and is like some computer whiz, was able to hack into all of these systems to get things from the Harvard servers that he couldn't have come up with the algorithm. Algorithm on his own. Like, right. So Mark got the site live and he sent the link to a few of his friends as a joke, and then he went to he left his dorm and went to a meeting. And when he got back from the meeting, the site had gone essentially viral or as viral as like meeting.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

So was it like not like in the middle of the night? No, like it was showing. Like it was no, like he did this in the movie, like right after he got back from the bar.

Tasha 20:26

There was no bar. I mean, I know getting drunk in his room.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

I know.

Tasha 20:29

So he goes to the meeting, he comes back, and it's been passed around, right? So within 24 hours, within the first day of the site going live, he's getting complaints from multiple campus women's groups about the site, and the traffic load for the site is starting to get too heavy for his computer to manage. And so he starts to think, yeah, this is like way too big of a pain. This was just supposed to be a joke for my friends. Like, I'm gonna shut this down. As he's shutting it down, the Kirkland House server, his house server, crashes because it's not just too big of a load for his computer, it's too big of a load for his house's server. Yeah, but only Kirkland House. Okay, not the entire Harvard system, just his house, because every house has their own server. Okay. He overloaded their server with the site. Dustin Muskowitz and Chris Hughes, his sweet mates, were there, and they had not participated at all in the in the thing because they thought it was lame. And they had been working on their own individual class projects. Server goes down, they lost their work.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

Yeah, wow.

Tasha 21:41

Right?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

I'd be upset.

Tasha 21:43

I would be pissed. Harvard then begins an investigation because you know, you kind of have to. You've got some pissed off women's groups, you've got a server that's gone down, and you know, now like the crimson, which is the college papers writing about it because it's like what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Big deal. Yeah.

Tasha 22:00

Yeah. So they brought charges against Mark for hacking their communication systems, violating copyrights, and compromising student privacy. Joe Green and Billy Olson, who had been around and had kind of been part of the whole thing, they got hit with lesser charges. Mark gets called before the advisory board, which in the movie it's called the ad board. Yeah. But that's what it is. Now, in the movie, uh, we cut back and forth. Uh, we we cut back and forth between the startup of Facebook and the lawsuit. So it's like, here's startup mark and here's lawsuit mark. And neither of them is really dressed very differently. They're both rocking Adidas flip-flops and hoodies. Every now and then, lawsuit mark might have a tie. But really, if you want to know where you are, you just need to look for Rashida Jones. Yeah you know, like is she there? Yeah. Then it's you know, 2009, you're at a lawsuit. Is she not? You're in Harvard. It's okay. So we've switched back to the lawsuit moment. It's the first lawsuit moment of the movie. And they say that in the movie, between him, he's talking to Rashida Jones's characters, character, and she's clarifying something. She's like, So Face Smash got 22,000 hits in two hours. And you know, he's like saying, That is not true. And Ben Meserich wrote it in his book. People have said that for years. It is not true.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

So Ben, so Ben said two 22,000.

Tasha 23:36

Ben said it, it is in the movie, it has been published in multiple articles. I lost track of how many newspaper magazine articles I read who said that. It is not true. The site had 450 visitors in the like 36 hours that the site was live. So it didn't have 22,000 hits, which would have been 22,000 visitors. It had 450 visitors. Those 450 visitors cast a total of 22,000 votes over the approximately 36 hours that the site was live.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

So that 22,000 clicks.

Tasha 24:16

Clicks. Yeah, but not hit 22,000 visits to the site.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

It's different.

Tasha 24:25

Yes. So automatically you're watching this movie and you're like, who the hell is this kid? And how did he know how to hack the Harvard houses? You know, like that's just not a normal sophomore. I am a sophomore. This is like what I do when I'm drunk.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Yeah.

Tasha 24:39

Let me introduce you to Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew. Are you ready? I even got his middle name. What? I know I got his mom and dad's names. Oh my goodness. All of his siblings' names, too, but I decided to leave them out of it because they didn't do anything.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

But you're gonna put his parents' names and his parents.

Tasha 24:54

You know, I can't do anything about it. They're guilty by association. Let's learn about Mark. Allegedly. Let's learn about Mark. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. Elliot. Elliot. He was born May 14th, 1984, to Karen and Ed Zuckerberg. And Facebook, the inside story, written by author Stephen Levy. He points out that Mark was born just four months after the Apple Macintosh computer. Wow. I thought that was kind of cool. Also, that is a great book. Everybody should go read it. It is very good. I read it and you know, I read that part and I was like, oh, that's kind of Kiss Met. It's like that Apple Macintosh was born, and then Mark was born. So we were born before the Apple Macintosh. Yes. I like that you keep like relating to the dates in this movie by how old we are or how old our children are.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Yes.

Tasha 25:48

Well, his dad was a huge tech science and math enthusiast, and he already had a computer and a modem in the house in 1984 when Mark was born.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Well, that's pretty cutting edge for that time.

Tasha 26:03

Yes, it is. Especially when you think about the fact that his father was a dentist. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

Yeah. I was trying to remember that screams computers.

Tasha 26:13

I know, right? I was trying to remember when we first got a computer in our house. And it took me a hot minute to remember. Do you remember when you guys got your first computer?

SPEAKER_00 26:22

I think I was in junior high when we got ours. And it was like a commun communal computer. Right. It was down in like the family room.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

And you pretty much took turns on who got on. But then after a while, I think my brothers got their own computers. And so it was like, I guess it's mine and Ryan's. That's fancy. But it was like way late. Like they were in high school when they got their own. And they were, yeah, that oh, that was a breed in its own.

Tasha 26:48

Well, we I thought it through and I remembered we lived in this house in North Kansas City. Holla. And no one from North Kansas City is listening. But uh, so I started thinking back. I was like, okay, when did we live in that house? Because we moved a lot when I was growing up.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

If you're from Kansas City, please send us something. Like a plant or whatever.

Tasha 27:10

Um, we lived three blocks from North Kansas City High School.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

So uh the betty one's from Broomville, Colorado. Do a shout out.

Tasha 27:19

The house that we lived in is not even there anymore. It has been torn down. This was a very shady house. I I was thinking, like, okay, when did we move there? When did we move out? So I think that it was about sixth grade when we got this computer. I remember the computer sat in the living room. I remember the wall it sat against. I remember that if you were setting at the desk at the computer, you had to move so that people could get into the bathroom because the chair blocked the door to the bathroom. Um, and I was I sat there and wrote a paper about Walt Disney or school. Yeah. And I remember it had the snake game. And I I didn't play that game. I loved that game.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

I played uh Mindsweep a lot.

Tasha 28:02

Yeah, no, I was all about the snake. I was like, gotta get that snake around, and he just keeps growing, but he can't eat his own tail, you know. So it was like real tricky. Gotta get gotta get around. When we moved to the next house, the computer went into my room, and I used to sit and write short stories, but we never had the internet, ever had the internet, and I don't know. We I only I was only in that bedroom for like a year, so I don't know where the computer went after that. So somewhere there is a very, very, very old computer with those black floppy discs that's got like America's great lost short story like hidden on it. But that's literally all I could do. I could type and I could play the snake game. That was it. The screen was green and black.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

I remember we had uh access to like there's like that and digital encyclopedia that was like a big deal back then. I forget what it was called.

Tasha 29:05

Oh, we didn't have that. We had the encyclopedia books.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Well, we had those two, except we were missing a few letters.

unknown 29:11

We didn't have those.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

So I want to say this when we got our computer. I might be false on this, or I might remember this wrong. Uh, when we got our computer, I think we still had a TV that was like the big box ones that you had to like turn the dial to change the channel. Uh yeah, I think we still had that.

Tasha 29:32

I think my dad still had that TV when you and I got married.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yes, your dad totally did. Um, when when we had kids, I think he still had it.

Tasha 29:41

We are the family that's like, does it work? I don't care if they've upgraded it, you do not get rid of it. Let's replace it. We still get channels. Come on, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Well, um Wayne is still playing.

Tasha 29:52

I exactly. Can you play John Wayne on it? We don't need anything else. We didn't have internet, but my friend from church, she had internet. She and her family were like way cooler than it was incredible, and they had AOL chat rooms, and they would let us go play. This is also the family. She was an only child. This is also the family that introduced me to B-rated horror movies, like where the spiders were bigger than the people. Uh nice, or the you know, the big giant women that came through stomping on the towns and uh mystery science theater. They introduced me to mystery science theater. It was a good time there. Um, but yeah, chat rooms, that's where I learned about chat rooms. I was so jealous.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

I was so obsessed with chat rooms.

Tasha 30:44

I was like, what is this world? It was so insane. Well, these problems that you and I had, well, more me, because no one in my family ever had our own computer. Like, I don't that did not happen.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

No.

Tasha 30:57

Um, we were married when I first got my yeah, first of all.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

That was the same with me too.

Tasha 31:02

Um, Mark didn't have that problem. Ed, his dad, was a second-generation American, and Ed said that growing up in New York City as a good, smart Jewish boy, they became doctors or dentists. They did not pursue, did not pursue computer science. So Ed became a dentist, like his parents expected of him, but he kept on all of his like excitement about computer technology and he kept on top of it, right? He he made sure to always be in the know about what was changing. And so when he was 25, he met Karen. She was 19, and they started dating, and then they got married. And after a couple of years, they moved to Dobbs Ferry, New York, to the house that they raised their kids in. They had four kids. Mark was the only boy, he was the second child. And then the early 80s, Ed moved his dental practice to the first floor of their home. So the whole family moved up a floor, the whole first floor. They had like a huxtable thing going, except where Cliff had just his office in the back. This was like a whole floor. Yes. So Karen had graduated with a degree in psychology, and she had practiced briefly in a nearby hospital, but she left her practice to be home with the kids, saying that she was instead applying her skills to keep her kids off of a therapist's couch and to help her husband's nervous dental patients.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

I mean, more power to her, right?

Tasha 32:38

So, Ed, being the lover of tech that he was, was the first dentist in his county to have digital x-rays and wow, yeah, and intra-oral cameras. He had an early website before many businesses had adopted that practice, and he kept his patient database on an Atari 800 until he updated to an IBM PC.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Oh, wow. Yes. I did not know you could store stuff like that on an Atari.

Tasha 33:05

I don't think you were meant to. So that's pretty smart, though. That's wow. Mark followed suit. He was very interested in all of it. He got his own computer in sixth grade. He loved the game Civilization. Um, and he learned programming. Uh, at 10, he demanded that his parents take him to Barnes and Noble, where he bought a book on C, but it didn't have all of the information that he needed. So they got him a tutor who came out to the house for an hour every week for two years to tutor Mark. And they tried to enroll him early in like some high school AP computer classes, but the teacher said that their 10-year-old would know everything that she was teaching to the high school AP computer students.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Nice.

Tasha 33:56

So they were like, okay, well, let's see what's being taught at the local college. So they bounced up to the local college and said, Hey, can we see what you're offering for your computer science classes? And the only class that he didn't know the information for already was a graduate level class. So Ed drove Mark to this grad level class and took him to it and sat down. And the teacher stopped what he was doing and looked at Ed and said, Sir, uh, you can't bring your kid to class. And Ed said, Sir, my kid is the student. And uh, there you go. He was like the Doogie Hauser of computer science.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's awesome.

Tasha 34:38

Overall, he was a small kid, he was small in stature. He played Little League, but hated it. Um, he took fencing at school. The whole family loves Star Wars, and he used to make Star Wars themed home movies with his sisters, which I found very endearing.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

That's adorable.

Tasha 34:57

Yes, he also made his own computer games, which I, you know, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

That's pretty cool.

Tasha 35:04

They were like uh Risk. I'm gonna really out myself here. I've never played Risk before.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

I know you told me that.

Tasha 35:11

And I've seen David play it, and I've literally just gone, nope, and walked away. Like, and we've played some pretty complicated board games. Like, we are the board game people who oh that game can go on.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

This that can that game is like Monopoly, is like it can go on forever.

Tasha 35:26

And I'm not I'm not about that. Like, I'm just not. Um, but yeah, that's what he was doing in his spare time. So his dad had a telecom system installed that ran through the house for the dental practice, and Mark created what he called DuckNet. He created this an entire year before any sort of chat room was ever released on the internet. Yeah, AOL chat rooms, not a thing. Ducknet is though, he wrote a code and created software, and he linked all the computers in the office and in the bedrooms and throughout the house to create chat rooms so that they could communicate to one another without having to use an intercom system so that they could talk to each other about hey, this patient is here, hey, this has arrived. So he freaking, as a child, created chat rooms before AOL created chat rooms. Mark had been attending public school, but he really wanted some advanced computer science courses, yeah, and they did not offer them, as we were just talking about. So he got his parents to transfer him to Phillips Exeter in Exeter, New Hampshire. It was a private um boarding school, and that's where he went for the rest of his high school years. The prep school was part of the 10 school admissions, which is a set of feeder schools to Ivy League schools, and Mark entered as a junior. There he met Adam D'Angelo. Both were coming from suburban public schools. They were looking for more programming studies and they headed off. But outside D'Angelo, the people that he went to school with, they said that he was kind of shy and he kind of kept to himself and he spent a lot of time in his room writing code when he wasn't being like the captain of the fencing team or doing math Olympiad. While he was at Exeter, he met another student named Chris Tillery. And you might find this story interesting, Matt. Chris was a senior when Mark entered Exeter as a junior. Chris had been born in the Midwest and then his family moved to Africa. And as a high school student, they had sent him back to Exeter for prep school. As a sophomore at Exeter, Chris created something that might sound a little familiar to you. I want to know what you think.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

I mean, his name his name somewhat sounds familiar, so.

Tasha 37:56

What he created, he called the Exeter Facebook. I don't know if you've ever heard of anything that sounds like that. Chris pulled all of the Exeter students' names, photos, phone numbers, and quotes from the campus address book, and he digitized all of that information and then distributed it through the school's servers. And at first the school was like, hey, hey, hey, this is against our school policies, but then they were like, Oh, wait, there's like some good worth to this. And so they gave him permission to continue. So as a student, sophomore, junior, senior, Chris continued to do this service for the school. So when Mark enters as a student at Exeter, the Exeter Facebook is something that he receives. And Chris does this as his entire time as a student. And when he leaves, he passes it off to the school. And then he goes on his merry way to Harvard to begin his collegiate studies.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

So does he is he the one that inspires Harvard to do the Facebooks?

Tasha 39:03

Oh no, like they were already doing it. Facebooks were were already kind of being done across college campuses, but this whole like digitized Facebook thing was kind of a new thing that was happening. So Chris goes to Harvard and he's there in 2004 when Zuckerberg releases the Facebook.com to Harvard students.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Yeah.

Tasha 39:28

So when asked about the appropriation of his idea, Chris said as an adult, he said that he wasn't really bothered by it at the time because he had just seen it as like a school project.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

Yeah.

Tasha 39:40

But as an adult, he had the mixed feelings about Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

Gotcha.

Tasha 39:45

He said that he felt like Facebook has a lot of moral ambiguity. He really doesn't feel great about the mental ramifications, like the mental health ramifications of the site and the number of hours that Facebook claims from Zuckerberg's users, to the point that he said that Facebook made him feel bad, like just mentally feel bad as he used it. So he deleted the app from all of his devices and closed out his account in 2016. And I thought that was really interesting. Whenever you think about the fact that I mean, I'm not saying that Mark took Chris's idea and made it into, you know, this multi-million, well, now billion dollar uh franchise, but somebody did because it was in a book. So somebody else said it for me. So I'm just gonna, you know, but for him to be like, hey, I made this thing and now I'm saying it so bad that I deleted the whole thing off in 2016 and I haven't touched it since. I think that's pretty, pretty interesting. So that was his kind of like projects at Exeter. Mark and D'Angelo had their own senior project at Exeter. They created a program called synapse.ai. And it was a program that would plug into whatever music device you were using, your iPod or whatever, would review the music you had been listening to previously, and then would use your music choices to then suggest other music to you. Oh, nice. Right? So when they graduated, Adam went off to school in Cali and Mark Soft launched Synapse from Harvard. He really pushed to get Synapse off the ground. And on April 21st, 2003, he got an online publication to promote a trial of the program and get users to give their feedback. The users all had a ton of negative feedback regarding data mining, which hindsight seems to be a common theme for Zuckerberg productions.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Wow. Yeah.

Tasha 41:56

You know, on April 23rd, so just two days after they were given access to the program to try for free. Mark made his first ever public announcement, what would be the first of many to come in his life, about the safety and importance of user privacy for one of his programs. So he addresses that data mining situation, but then the users started calling out Mark's weird language syntax in his site prompts. One paragraph in particular was very rambly, very cringy, kind of boasty, and promised Synapse could help you get a date with a Chinese girl. Yeah. Wow. So regardless, Microsoft and AOL both tried to buy the program from Mark and D'Angelo.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Really?

Tasha 42:51

Yep. One of the companies, we don't officially know which, but the social network and Ben Mezrat Mez Rich claimed that it was Microsoft. One of the two companies offered one million dollars to the boys, but it came with the caveat that they had to leave school and come work for them for three years. They were they would be contracted for three years. Oh wow. Um, neither boys wanted to commit to that contract, so they passed up the money. The summer of 03, before they began their fall uh sophomore year, and before we have our our like fall tryst with face mash, yeah, Mark interned at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies as a program analyst, and he lived with Adam D'Angelo. Adam came back and he interned with MIT. And at MIT, he studied under the tutelage of Judith Doneth, who specialized in the rise of social networks. Maybe you've heard of it. Kind of an important part of a small part of our culture, you know, and kind of uh of what becomes Mark. Mark's Empire, if you will. This was a big time for this thing called Friendster. And D'Angelo's internship was all about like the why of that. He said that Mark wasn't really into Frister, but he recognized its value. So Mark was paying attention to the info that D'Angelo was coming home with about Frister and how it was changing like the landscape of the internet, if you will. Up until then, people had operated under anonymity, like in AOL chat rooms. Um MySpace.

SPEAKER_00 44:38

Yeah. I've never heard of Friendster until we started digging into this.

Tasha 44:42

Right. So Stephen Levy described it as a costume masquerade where you could misbehave without consequences.

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Yeah.

Tasha 44:50

I was like, oh, oh, buddy, that's so true. Friendster was the first social network, though, that tied a real life person to their online persona. So, like in chat rooms, you had a fake name. Yeah. You know, people could go into a chat room and say, Oh, yeah, I'm totally a 14-year-old girl. You know, real info. Exactly. But Frister's mission was to be an online community that connects people through networks of friends for dating or making new friends. It was supposed to be a safer way for networking online. By Mark's sophomore year at Harvard, Frister had more than three million users, and Mark was one of them. Oh, wow. So Mark returns from his internship and you know, his summer vicariously reaping the Angelo social network deets.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Yeah.

Tasha 45:41

And he just jumps straight into his sophomore year at Harvard by creating course match, which gets mentioned in the movie.

SPEAKER_01 45:51

Yes.

Tasha 45:51

He scrubbed again a bunch of stuff from Harvard's records. Um, and they were like, dude, no. Uh, but it was a website that he launched from his laptop that allowed students to look up other students' courses, like what they had registered for. And it created like a whole realm of like stalker situations. So it's like I didn't need everybody to know where I was gonna be Tuesday at two o'clock, but now everybody does. Film Eduardo mentions this in the social network, you know, really briefly. But the the course match actually burned out his computer after a few weeks.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

Oh, really?

Tasha 46:32

Yeah. Stephen Levy said that Mark got a few things from the experience, though. He was able to reuse the code later whenever he made the facebook.com. And he said that he realized how hungry people were to know what the people they knew were doing, which also fed into how he created Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

Yeah.

Tasha 46:53

In October, the Crimson, the you know, student-led paper at Harvard, featured Mark in the paper, not for course match though, for synaps. They put him right on the cover. So Mark was already getting like huge play in the Crimson before any face smash antics for his computer wizardry. Keeping that in mind, we meet in the film the Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron, and their friend Divya Narendra. The Winklevosses were seniors, and in late 2002, Vivia had approached them with the idea for Harvard Connection.com, which was basically going to be a dating site because Harvard students are too busy to meet people, they just don't have time. Yeah. So in early 2003, they hired another student, Victor Gao, to be their programmer. But Victor got too overwhelmed trying to do that and uh manage his course load. So Victor bowed out of the program.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah.

Tasha 47:55

But not before recommending one Mark Zuckerberg to take his place.

SPEAKER_00 48:01

Oh, he recommended him.

Tasha 48:03

He recommended him. Divya did not find him in the Crimson, like portrayed in the social network. Victor found him. So the night before Mark's advisory board review or face mash, his fraternity, his Jewish fraternity threw him a goodbye Mark party. Because no one thought he was coming back from this from this review. Mark wore beer goggles to the shindig.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

I don't remember wearing those.

Tasha 48:30

I never did. Uh but I only heard about them associated with like the classes that were like, we're gonna show you what it's like to be drunk.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Well, they did that like right before prom. They had like a big like thing outside, and then one of them was walk with beer goggles on this line.

Tasha 48:48

Well, he wore them to a party, so apparently he could walk the line well enough to get to the party and in the door and hit on someone because that's where he met his now wife, Priscilla Chan. Yeah, he met her. She was studying to be a pediatrician at Harvard, and she was completely dumbfounded that he was on the verge of being kicked out. She was like, You are stupid. I don't even understand you. Isn't everybody here thankful to be here, working their asses off, trying to get the damn thing done? He was like, Well, no, not everybody. So he asked her to go out on a date with him, and she was like, But you're not even gonna be here anymore. And something he said wooed her because she decided to go with him anyway.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

And one thing led to another.

Tasha 49:36

And today they are married with children. Yes. So the next day, Mark goes to meet with the ad board, and at the end of the ad board hearing, they put him on disciplinary probation. That disciplinary probation ran from November 3rd, 2003 to May 28, 2004. The Crimson reported on this whole fiasco on November 19th, letting everybody know the outcome of the disciplinary board hearing. The only real stipulation of his probation was that he was required to see a counselor because they said that his trans get his transgression was deemed improper social behavior. So, again, Mark's on the front page of The Crimson, you know, just making the news. Well, they wanted him to go to like a therapist or something. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

Wow.

Tasha 50:31

Allegedly, we're calling it a a counselor because it was improper social behavior. Wow. And then he was on disciplinary probation basically through the end of the school year.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

So that means he was still going to class.

Tasha 50:45

Yes. Well, yes.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

I mean he was still available to go to class.

Tasha 50:48

He was available to go to class, he was not kicked out or anything.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

That was the thing that wasn't fully clear.

Tasha 50:52

Like, remember he says it when he's talking to Eduardo in the movie, but he says it's gonna go so freaking fast.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

But then he like goes to like a classroom.

Tasha 51:00

Yeah, he says he's not pro he's not on, he's not expelled, he's on probation, is what he says. So Mark apologized to the women's groups that were very upset with him. He also arranged some pro bono computer work for their individual groups to kind of like make it up. Green and Olsen did not show up for the hearing, but they also faced no consequences from the school. However, Joe Green's dad, who was a professor at UCLA, was pissed. He was so mad. And he said, No more Zuckerberg projects for you. Like laid it down, was just like, nope. That would later cost his son hundreds of millions of dollars.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

Yeah.

Tasha 51:45

While Joe always said that Mark was confident, his dad described Mark as cocky. It had a very big difference of opinion, and it it did cost Joe some cash.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Sometimes that's just a generational thing. You know, personalities don't.

Tasha 52:01

It yeah, the eye to eye sometimes, sometimes. Mark later told a judge that this whole experience taught him that people are more voyeuristic than I would have thought. And that may or may not have driven some of his later decisions at Facebook. Keep that quote in your head every time you think about what happens.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

That makes sense on Facebook.

Tasha 52:28

Yeah. So remarkably, the day of his probation, the day his probation began, was the first day that Divia emailed Mark about their project. Um, the twins did not approach him in a hallway after class like they show in the movie. And the four of them did not meet at the pork, which is the slang name for the longer name of the group that they were in that I cannot remember. So I'm just calling it the pork because I think it's really funny to me. And that's much easier to, you know, it's easier to remember ham than it is the long freak sounding name that it is. In fact, Mark never made his way into the pork, not even that front entrance room way place where they're allowed to take like their fiancés and their parents. Like he's not allowed, he never made it there.

SPEAKER_00 53:19

Would that be called the engagement room?

Tasha 53:21

I don't know, but I just spit everywhere. They reportedly met at the Kirkland house, Mark's house house in the dining hall, and that's where the twins and Divia talked him through their plans to start a site for Harvard students that required a Harvard HDU. Let me try this again, Harvard.edu email to register and would eventually be expanded to other schools. They said in their deposition that Mark seemed really excited about the project, that he seemed like he really got what they were trying to do. He was on board, and then he just ghosted them. And it's because of this combo that they claim he stole their idea. He used their Harvard.edu requirement and rolled it out to other schools, just like they had explained to him that they had planned. And they claimed this was a wholly original idea, their wholly original idea. Vivian emailed Mark November 3rd. By November 30th, it was Thanksgiving break. And Mark told them he had left his charger at home, his computer was dead, and he would get back on the project when he got back from eating turkey.

SPEAKER_00 54:36

Yeah, because in the movie he starts they talk about excuses and all that.

Tasha 54:39

Yeah, and and they did get all of those. That is a real thing that happened.

SPEAKER_00 54:44

Yeah.

Tasha 54:44

Something interesting though, in August of 2003, while all of this is happening with the Winkle bosses and Divia and Mark, but three months before they all meet at the Kirkland Dining Hall, another Harvard student named Aaron Greenspan launched his own Harvard platform called the House System. The House System was a social network in which students had to use their Harvard.edu email to get um signed up and to log in. And he tried to get the Crimson to write about it to help encourage enrollment. They refused. Greenspan headed the student entrepreneur group, and he had already at this point invited Mark to join the group. Mark had turned the invitation down, but had stayed in touch with Greenspan. And Greenspan had shared his house system platform with Mark. They had talked about their projects with each other. The house system had a section called the Universal Facebook. Um, it had all of the same house Facebook features that the other sites had at the time. Greenspan says that when he asked Mark about the project that Mark was working on, Mark said it had to do with graph theory. And Greenspan thought he's trying to make a Harvard Frintster. But he said that Mark was acting really cagey and suspicious. And he just thought, I can't trust him. And so he started keeping an eye on his own program and he ended up tracking that Mark act into the program and accessed the house system.

SPEAKER_01 56:24

Oh, wow.

Tasha 56:24

And it's coding. In a later interview with New York Times, he claimed that if it wasn't for him and the Winkelboss twins, there wouldn't be a Facebook as we know it today. He said that Mark plundered like he was a pirate. Now, in the movie, we get the proposed timeline of when Eduardo entered the scene as an investor in the Facebook. I want to talk about Eduardo and the making of the Accidental Billionaire's book and the social network for a minute before we get into how slippery that whole thing is, because he really informs a lot of what we know and how we understand the story. One day in 2008, Ben Meserich supposedly gets an email from a Harvard senior who's like, dude, one of my friends co-founded Facebook, and no one knows that he even exists. Like they don't know who he is. You want to talk to my buddy? And Ben's like, you know, like many people in stories we've already covered, they he heard this and he just saw dollar signs.

SPEAKER_01 57:31

Yeah.

Tasha 57:32

So did all of his Hollywood pals. And so before the interviews were even done, the rights to the story, the rights to the story were sold, and the movie was underway. Everything was happening in tandem. Ben was interviewing and writing the book while Aaron Sorkin was writing the screenplay. The book was published July 14th, 2009 by Doubleday, and the movie was filming by October and debuted September 24th, 2010 at New York Film Festival. So it was like very fast. There's an author's note at the beginning of the book that reads the book is, quote, a dramatic narrative account based on dozens of interviews, dozens, dozens, hundreds of sources, and thousands of pages of documents. There are a number of contentious opinions about the events, memories from dozens of sources, some direct witnesses, some indirect, can often lead to discrepancies. Details of settings and descriptions have been changed or imagined, and identifying details altered to protect privacy. I employ the technique of recreating dialogue based on recollections of the participants. Some conversations took place over long periods of time in multiple locations and were recreated and compressed, set in quote, likely settings. End quote. Wow. Okay. So for this book, Eduardo Savron participated. Mark Zuckerberg did not. In an interview with Time, Ben calls his reporting immersion journalism, where he builds the story as a thriller or a narrative by recreating the story, choosing what he believes really happened. I'm gonna say that again. Immersion journalism, recreating the story, choosing what he believes really happened. It's how he explained his storytelling. He said, quote, I think as a whole, this book is nonfiction, end quote. Wow. When he was asked if it was hard to get people to tell the real story, he said he isn't the kind of investigative reporter going in with a notepad trying to get an interview. He's just going in, hanging out with the people and having a good time with them.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

So he's not an investigative reporter.

Tasha 59:57

So I think we know right out the gate that pretty much everything that he says is bullshit. He's spinning a yarn. Um, all throughout the book, he says things like, We can picture he likely did this or did that, maybe this happened. There are whole chapters of this book that are written as pure specul speculation. And Eduardo approached him as a guy that felt taken advantage of. So he's presented in this like highly sympathetic light, and the narrator just can't be trusted. Like, just can't. He's swayed. He's swayed by the guy who came to him and said, Please tell my story. Uh, you can hang out with me and all of my college buddies, and we'll get you beer, and you can come into the Phoenix like all the time and just hang out with us. Um, because Eduardo graduated, but he still continued to go back to the Phoenix and hang out with his frat guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:52

Like so it was like it like these clubs or whatever, are they like because they're like clubs forever? Like if you're part of the Phoenix, you're part of the Phoenix forever. So is that is that like unheard of?

Tasha 1:01:04

Going back and partying at the Phoenix?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

After you've graduated, like going back to visitors.

Tasha 1:01:08

I don't think that it's unheard of to go back and visit, but I think it's maybe not common to go back as often as Ben alludes to Eduardo going.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

Like Matthew McConaughey hanging out with high schoolers.

Tasha 1:01:22

Yeah, it's definitely got that kind of vibe going on. All right, all right, all right. All right, you know, so I want to explain how the whole Eduardo Ben cute meet happened. So, yes, Ben gets this email. Hey, my friend Eduardo is the co-founder, we know. Ben says, Oh, I totally want to meet with you and your friend. So they meet for drinks, and Eduardo becomes his primary source of information until Matthew. He's not anymore. Because while the writing is going on, Eduardo's lawsuit is still going on.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Really?

Tasha 1:02:03

Uh yeah. Oh yeah. Because the bookslash movie timeline is literally being written in real time with the events at that point. So Eduardo's battle with Facebook and Mark gets settled in January 2009 while the book is wrapping up.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

Yeah.

Tasha 1:02:23

And part of his settlement with them is that hey, if you want your money, it's like a you can't participate in this book anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

An NDA thing.

Tasha 1:02:31

So Eduardo signs an NDA, he settles with Mark, and he exits stage left on a book that he had already set in motion, knowing that it's moving on with or without him, because the movie script is also already being written, and no one is going to tell Aaron Sorkin to stop writing or Sony that they can't make a movie that they've already started paying people for. And really, Eduardo's already done a ton of talking by now. We're in the final stretch at this point. So, I mean, he's already done the damn thing. Of course, he's gonna sign in NDA. Like, he's out nothing. He's gotten his side of the story out. Yeah, he has you know burned all the bridges, but he also like he has the fire extinguisher. Yeah, he's carrying a fire extinguisher with him. You know what I mean? Like the the bridge is on fire, but it's okay because he's on the other side with a fire extinguisher and like raft. He's okay, he's fully fine, he's fine, he's just gonna watch the damn thing burn. So everything in the book is hearsay, yeah, and that's what the movie's based on. And everything in this book is out of order with the movie because Ben combined a whole bunch of conversations to make a clean narrative, and then Aaron Sorkin did the same because they were working together, but Aaron Sorkin did it better because he's you know the king of writers. So while yes, there was a Caribbean party, which is where we're at at Eduardo and Mark's Jewish fraternity. Um, Eduardo says he didn't talk to Mark there, like they weren't even friends at that point. He describes Mark as a kid with a mop of curly hair that was just standing off in a corner. He says his self-defeating awkwardness was so palpable, it was like a force field that pushed everyone away. And that's Eduardo's whole theme for Mark, that Mark was jealous he didn't fit in, and that Eduardo did. And throughout the book, he consistently compares Mark to a computer, input in, input out, with no sense of emotion or readability, and a face devoid of expression, except for his eyes, which he describes as hiding something anarch anarchist behind them. Now I hate this party scene, and you've touched on it already, but I hate to talk about Asian girls. I hate it all the way through my body. Like he starts in, and I love Andrew Garfield, and I want to sucker punch him in his damn throat. Like, and it's all through the book, yeah, too. So reading the book was pissing me off. Yeah, you told me that. I absolutely cannot even stand it, and it just makes me mad. I had I was so mad I had to read it. And then Eduardo says that this Caribbean party was was like a long time before his Phoenix punch, and like a long time before they even started talking about Facebook. So, like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:29

It's way out of order.

Tasha 1:05:30

They they put it in because it it was a good scene. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:34

Drama.

Tasha 1:05:34

So in the movie, Andrew Garfield says that Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes were programmers, so he's like, I don't know why he came to me first, you know, because he's got friends that are programmers, and then they're like, Oh, because he wanted money. Well, that's not entirely true. Dustin was an economics major, and Chris Hughes was majoring in history and literature, they were not big programmers. In fact, after the Facebook.com launched, Dustin went to the store and bought a whole bunch of books on programming and taught himself how to program to try and make himself useful so that he could stay on at Facebook and like make himself useful for Mark. He wanted to keep up. So he taught himself how to do those things after the launch of the platform. When they came on board, Mark made Dustin his key tech lieutenant and he put Chris in charge of publicity. And then his friend Andrew McCullum was put in charge of graphics. But Mark knew he needed money for servers, so he needed an investor. But Eduardo was not the first person that he went to. Mark first tapped his pal Joe Green. But Joe was had a very scary daddy at UCLA who said no more Mark Zuckerberg project.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:55

No more Zuck projects.

Tasha 1:06:56

So Joe was out. Um so Mark went to Eduardo. He knew Eduardo from his frat. Eduardo's reputation preceded him. Eduardo was born in Brazil, but his family moved to Miami when he was 13. Get this, because they had discovered a kidnapping plot for Eduardo. Oh wow. Right? Because his family was so wealthy. The kidnappers were going to kidnap Eduardo and demand a ransom. And it was like a whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:26

Wow.

Tasha 1:07:26

So his parents packed everything up and they moved to Miami.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:30

This is why you're commenting a lot about Eduardo stuff.

Tasha 1:07:34

Yes. He comes from generations of wealth. And then he made all that oil money. And he was a member of the Harvard Investment Club. He was the guy who knew about business. Like that's how everybody in the frat like talked about him. Mark pitched him the idea and Eduardo saw the value. And while he did put in a thousand dollars, so did Mark. So that's another thing that the movie kind of skews is that they make it sound like they were living on Eduardo's dime.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:03

Yeah.

Tasha 1:08:03

But Mark also put in a thousand dollars. So they started with two grand. Each of them went in equally. They were not running solely on our Eduardo's 1,000. The splitting of the company was two-thirds Mark, one-third Eduardo, because Mark was doing all the work. Eduardo just put in the money. But from the beginning, there were five founders: Mark, Eduardo, Andrew, Dustin, and Chris. So the movie makes it out like it was just Eduardo and Mark at the start. But that wasn't true. At the start, it was all five of them out the gate. In the deposition scene, we get a rundown of all the messages between Mark and the Harvard connection team. And these are pretty accurate, if not in word, in tone. Mark pretty much um decided immediately that he wasn't going to help them. But he also didn't want their platform to launch before his own. At the time the movie came out, we didn't have access to Mark's personal chat messages. This had not been dug into. But Business Insider got into all of this like in late 2010. And now we do have access to Mark's chat messages, which is kind of sad. Really sucks for him. Uh, and we'll circle back to this like at a later point. But uh, there are a few quotes from his messages at that time that Business Insider found that do really show intention.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

But where are these?

Tasha 1:09:31

What are these chat messages like through they're from like AOL chats?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:35

Oh, AOL chats and stuff like that. Okay.

Tasha 1:09:37

Yeah. So on D7 D7, December 7th, 2003. So a week after meeting with Tyler, Cameron, and Divya, Mark sent Eduardo a message that read, check this site out, www.harvardconnection.com, and then go to Harvardconnection.com forward slash datehome.php. Someone's already trying to make a dating site, but they made a mistake. Ha ha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm delaying it. So I won't be re so it won't be ready until the Facebook thing comes out. So this is a week after he's met them. Oh my gosh. A few weeks after this message, he met with the Harvard Connection team a second time in the Kirkland building, this time in his suite. Cameron saw a whiteboard in the hallway that like joined the two bedrooms in the suite.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:29

Yeah.

Tasha 1:10:29

And on the whiteboard, it said Harvard Connection. And Cameron started to walk over to look at it. And Mark like freaked out and was like, Yeah, you can't be in the hallway. And so Cameron left the hallway and he just saw it. Oh, you know, this is Mark and he's awkward. At this point, Mark had not shown them any code. He had not looked at the site with them. They didn't see anything. But at this meeting, Mark was pitching like new design ideas to the three of them. And so they still think, okay, this is moving, like he's working on it. We're we're going forward. Business Insider purports an IM exchange with D'Angelo, um, who's in California at the time, and Mark's talking to him. And Mark says, So you know how I'm making that dating site? I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing, because they're probably going to be released around the same time, unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have done it. Like, I don't think people would sign up for the Facebook thing if they knew it was for dating. And I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too. But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well. I wonder what the ideal solution is. I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing, in which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like, is there a good way to consolidate the two? To which D'Angelo said, we could make it into a whole network like Friendster. Ha ha. Stanford has something like that internally. And Mark said, Well, I was thinking of doing that for the Facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with or connections. With the Facebook, you don't do that via the system. I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people. Ha ha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the Facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like, look, yours isn't as good as this. So if you want to join mine, you can. Otherwise, I can help you with yours later. Or do you think that's too dick? D'Angelo replied, I think you should just stitch them. And Zuckerberg said, The thing is, they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh, wait, I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently, insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil, so he's rich. LOL. Oh my gosh. Mark went to visit friends in the Bay Area at the beginning of January, and he was super excited about the big houses in Techland. It apparently lit a fire under his ass. And so he spent the first week or so of January like doing some heavy, heavy coding to wrap up Facebook. And by the 11th, Eduardo was signed on to pay for the servers. And Mark registered the Facebook.com domain. Uh facebook.com without the facebook.com, just Facebook.com was already taken. So they couldn't do that. They had to add the. Oh, really? Yes. In a conversation with another friend, allegedly his now wife, Priscilla, he asked what he should do about Harvard Connection. And she said, You know me, I don't think anyone should do anything bad to anybody. That's that's the best advice he has received from day one. Later, that same friend asked him what he decided to do. And his exact words were, Yeah, I'm gonna fuck them. Probably in the year, star ear, because he typed ear and meant ear. So he had to correct himself. So Mark met with the Winkle Vosses and Divia for, or as he says, the Winkle Vi for the last time on January 14th, 2004, right? In the Kirkland Dining Hall again. In that January 14th meeting, he told the guys that he was too busy to work on the site currently, but he didn't say he was out of the project. He just said at the moment he was too busy. Kind of delayed he needed to take a break. But he had told his friend, presumably Priscilla, that he was going to tell them at that meeting that he was out. Like that was supposed to be the meeting where he said, I'm done. But when he circled back to her after meeting with them, he told her that he had wimped out because he was intimidated by the poor bastards. I mean, they were like huge compared to him, they were like six foot five and they're on the row crew, right? Right, they're like always in the gym.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:12

Yes.

Tasha 1:15:13

Later, when Mark was confronted about dragging his feet on Harvard Connect, Mark replied he might have been conflict avoidant. So, you know, I would say that's probably a good way to put that.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:27

Yeah.

Tasha 1:15:27

So February 4th, Mark launched the facebook.com to Harvard students in the accidental billionaires. Eduardo Via Ben claims that it was his own idea to send it to his Phoenix brothers as he'd been initiated 10 days before. Andrew McCullum had designed the header using a vectorized image of a guy. Some say the picture is Al Pacino from Microsoft Office ClipArt. Later in 2005, they realized that because it was like open to anyone who had an office license, they couldn't trademark their own site. So it was removed from the header and they like redesigned the whole thing. Stephen Levy says that the Facebook.com drew from all of Mark's previous projects, even some coding. It took the ability to know what classes your friends were taking from course match. You could be voyeuristic like you were on Face Match, and he could avoid the ad board again by only using the voluntary content that people posted themselves. And he was excited that people would gladly populate his site with their free content. So he could launch with absolutely zero content. All he had to do was provide the scaffolding for them, and they would fill the site themselves, which is total low cost for him.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:53

Right. Well, when you look at well, I mean, my only experience was MySpace. And that was a whole you had to like design your site, pick music to put on there, post all the pictures. Yep. Um, but then also with MySpace is like you use like a username, but like with Facebook, like you have to use your real name. Yep. And it's just it you get your news feeds by whoever your friends so you can find your friends faster. And it was just more streamlined.

Tasha 1:17:20

Yeah, that's what but Facebook does not provide any content. The second, I do not know why I never my brain just never like put these things together. So I'm reading all of these. I read like four books. I've I've read more magazine articles about Facebook than I I don't I feel like I think to look at stuff. I feel like I know Mark Zuckerberg, like it's just too much, it's too much. But I the moment that I read, they didn't even have to populate content for their product, the customer did it for them.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:58

They just built the structure, that's all it was.

Tasha 1:18:01

The customer populated the content for them for free, and they were making money off of it. I've never been so angry about social media in my whole damn life, except for when I started reading about the like button, and then a whole new rage was lit in my belly. Uh, but we'll get to that later. So here we go. Next, where are we at? So we talked about populating content and scaffolding. He borrowed the cross-hatching of friends list from D'Angelo's project, Buddy Zoo, and he incorporated a six degrees game where students from Harvard could figure out how closely they could link themselves to the dean. And he got his permission from the dean to do this. So when it launched, they could actually see, like, I know this person, and this person knows this person, and can I link myself to the dean? So then the dean had his own Facebook page because you had to, yeah, right, in order to do this. So he got the staff and then he had his friends. Then, like he learned from Synapse, privacy was huge, right? So it was a big deal when he launched the Facebook, especially when compared to AIM. You had to use your real names and your Harvard EDU emails. People could only see the info you shared, and you had to opt in to share with that person. This was privacy that up to that point had been unmatched on the internet. Yeah. So really, like we talk a lot today about how there is no privacy on Facebook, but really when it launched, it was a new level, a new standard of privacy for users that was unseen to that point. The idea of a social network wasn't new, obviously, because like we talked about on campuses, you know, Harvard had been trying to build one, but the face smash debacle had really made them put on the brakes. Elsewhere, you had Exeter's Facebook, Stanford had Stanford STEM tunnel. They had launched that four years before and it was huge. And there were others, some even with a networking component to it, much like we know Facebook to be today. Plus, Friendster, Myspace, Friendster had launched way back in 2002 and had opened to the public in March 2003 with a half a million dollars in angel investments. It had even turned down a $30 million buyout from Google at this point, but it had a limitation that the Facebook solved for. Unlike Friendster, you could see your friends' networks on Facebook and invite them, like invite their friends to be your friends. So you could expand your networking circle that way. So it became a game of who knows who really fast. But that that wasn't even how social networking began. And I'm gonna take you all the way back now to the beginning of social networking. History I would not have if it was not for Stephen Levy and his wonderful, wonderful book. So in January, what year do you think? I want to ask you what year you think this was.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:16

I mean, I'm thinking like the 90s, like 92. Let's not that far. I'll choose 92.

Tasha 1:21:21

January 1997.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:24

Okay.

Tasha 1:21:25

Mark was 12 years old and 25 miles away.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:28

We were just starting high school.

Tasha 1:21:30

Everything happens in New York, I'm telling you. A man named Andrew Weinrich gathered a group of investors, journalists, and friends in a Soho building to announce his new product. He said it was going to change the world by getting everyone to index their relationships in a single place online, all of their interests, their jobs, and their connections in one single place. And he named his company Six Degrees. It was free, it was web-based, and it would connect the world in a single database. And you received an email invite to participate. So somebody had to invite you, put in your email. That's how you got connected to Six Degrees. Wow. And it created like a virtual Rolodex of who knew who.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:18

The was Kevin Begin part of this?

Tasha 1:22:20

I don't, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:22

I felt like he should have been.

Tasha 1:22:23

That was but that is what I asked whenever I read all about it. It peaked at three and a half million users. Wow. Uh, which I was like, I've never heard of this before in my life. So I'm so amazed. But in December of 1999, Andrew Weinrich sold his his company six degrees to youth stream media networks for 125 million dollars. The sale included the pending patent method and apparatus for constructing a network database and system. Wow. This later became known as the social networking patent.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:02

Oh, it's a patent name.

Tasha 1:23:04

It is a patent.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:05

Oh.

Tasha 1:23:05

So on February 4th, 2004, after launching the facebook.com, really with a Mark Zuckerberg production on every page. The movie was telling the truth about that. Mark went out for pizza with his friends. He didn't sit at his computer and pray all night, as Aaron Sorkin would have you believe. Um, he speculated at dinner that someday someone would do what he'd just done for Harvard, but for the whole world. Sam Lesson, another Harvard student, was with him. And Sam had previously launched the Harvard Exchange, which was like Harvard's eBay or Harvard's Facebook marketplace. Whatever. Depending on you know what generation you are. His dad had been had actually been one of Andrew Weinrich's original investors in Six Degrees.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:57

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:23:58

Isn't that crazy? So Sam Lesson, who's eating pizza with Mark Zuckerberg after the launch of Facebook, his dad was part of his dad invested in six degrees. So he's sitting there and he has way more context about social networking and this whole business, yeah, right, than what anybody else at this table has got at this point.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:20

Right, including Mark.

Tasha 1:24:21

Exactly. And he recognized immediately that the facebook.com is going to be huge. And he speculates aloud that it could be the thing and that one day it could be worth tons of money. But he says years later, when he's interviewed, that Sam says that Zuckerberg was really nonchalant about it. And he was more concerned with what the site could become and what it could do in universities than any like amount of money he would ever make with it. So that whole idea of him like being so obsessed with what can this become and what can this site do? And it doesn't know what it is yet. Yeah, we say see this play out in the movie whenever he's sitting on the couch, like talking to Eduardo about, you know, Eduardo's like, we need it to make money.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:10

Yeah.

Tasha 1:25:10

It's time to, it's time to make money. And he's like, we don't know what it is yet. Like, you know, that conversation to me is so much like this conversation that he has eating pizza with his friends. Like, I'm not even thinking money right now. I'm thinking, like, what can this become?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:26

Yeah.

Tasha 1:25:27

How can this grow? He's so enveloped in the thought process and in the fun of like problem solving and thinking ahead of like, how do I grow this and what do I make this into? You know? So that's February 4th. February 9th, the Crimson published their first article about Facebook.com. And the Winkle bosses sent their letter to Mark, accusing him of stealing their idea and demanding that he cease and desist operations the very next day on February 10th, which is my cousin Michael's birthday. P.S. By then, the Facebook had nearly 5,000 members, and most of Harvard had heard about it at this point, including a movie star, as they mention in the film during a deposition.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:14

They say who it was.

Tasha 1:26:15

The movie star was Natalie Portman. Oh, really? Because she was a student at Harvard at the time. Uh, Mark did in fact respond to the C-Synthesis letter as shown in the movie, but he also did continue his work. The twins and Divia continued their campaign against Mark. They did complain to the Harvard president who said that he could not be bothered. Every account I've found is pretty damn close to the infuriating movie scene. And they did enlist the help of their family attorney. From here on out, I'm gonna get a little bit out of order with some of these things because I just have to in order to bounce around and like keep a clear train of thought. But so keep with me and ask questions if you have them. I will try. Okay. So Mark, according to Ben slash Eduardo, made the following statement when he was asked about it by the about uh the Winklevoss's arguments. He was asked by the ad board. This was his statement to the ad board. Now I have qualms with this before I tell you this statement. My qualms are as such. Why would he be meeting before the ad board if the president was like, not my circus, not my monkeys? Yeah, you know what I mean? I I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:32

But this is what Ben slash Eduardo Well, do you think that they went to the ad board after he wasn't gonna help them? Like the wink.

Tasha 1:27:40

Harvard had like a very uh everything I've read says. Harvard has a very strict, like, we don't get involved in the financial business affairs of students, and in fact, that's part of why they did not want the movie filmed on on site. So I I don't know, but this is what they Said he said, perhaps there was some confusion, and I can see why they might be upset that I released a successful website while theirs was still unfinished, but I definitely didn't promise them anything. Frankly, I'm kind of appalled that they're threatening me after the work I've done for them free of charge. But after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections, including companies like Microsoft, I can't say I'm surprised. When I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:32

Wait, so that was Mark or that was Eduardo slash Ben.

Tasha 1:28:36

Eduardo slash Ben said that that is what Mark said to the advisory board about that. They also say that six weeks after the launch, but so they say it was six weeks after the launch. Ben slash Eduardo say six weeks after the launch of the facebook.com, Stephen Levy slash Mark, say before March. So that would have been less than six weeks. Was the Bill Gates lecture?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:09

Okay.

Tasha 1:29:09

Okay. This is also the day that the facebook.com launched at Columbia. So Ben and Art Eduardo and Aaron Sorkin do not say Columbia launched the same day as Bill Gates. They do say that it's the day that Mark was like, you gotta launch to other schools. But in actuality, that was in the plan from the beginning. And it happened on the day that they saw Bill Gates speak at the school. Harvard Connection by this point had changed its name to Connect You and it went through two more developers and launched as a social network to 15 colleges in late May. When the Winklebust twins graduated in June, however, one of the commencement speakers did not mention the success of Connect You. Instead, they mentioned the amazing creation of a Harvard students product, the facebook.com. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:08

Yes.

Tasha 1:30:09

Mark and Eduardo would like you to believe that there was no concern with the twins and Divya and Connect You. That's one thing they both agree on. However, the competition was obviously a big enough deal that Mark got a little twisty with his behaviors. According to Business Insider and what they were able to dig up in 2010, Mark exploited a flaw in the platform's account verification process. And he was able to create a fake Cameron Winkelvoss account with a fake Harvard EDU email. He listed his height as 7'4. Yeah. The boys were 6'5. Nice. His hair as Aaron Blonde. I think he meant Arian blonde. His eyes as sky blue. And his language as Waspy.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:03

And so he's signing this up in the Facebook nope. Or in the Harvard or Connect You. Connect you.

Tasha 1:31:11

He also appears to have changed some privacy settings of several users to invisible, which then made it impossible for people to find them in the system.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:23

Wow.

Tasha 1:31:24

And then he just took it a step further and completely deactivated 20 accounts entirely.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:29

I mean, that's funny, but it's also like real petty.

Tasha 1:31:32

Yes. This was not the first time he had gone a hack-in, though. Uh previously, when it was revealed that the Crimson would be writing an investigative story about ConnectUs charges against Mark and Facebook. He hacked into the Crimson's database to find out what the writers and editors thought of him and were going to print. He did this by using their private login data uh for the Facebook.com. So he went through all of the Crimson members' logins for the Facebook accounts. He went through their Facebook accounts. And if any of them had had failed logins, he took those logins and assumed there was a possibility that their logins failed because they accidentally put in a password from another account. And so then he used their email and the wrong password that they had used on the Facebook.com.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:31

Oh, so what you're saying is it saves the wrong keystrokes.

Tasha 1:32:35

Yes. So he was checking to see did they accidentally put in their Crimson password, thinking that that was their password for the facebook.com. And it ended up being correct. Correct. For at least two crimson members. Huge scandal. I'm pretty sure they did not opt in for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:54

Also makes me want to sign out of everything and not have passwords.

Tasha 1:32:58

But there's that doesn't even help. They weren't signed in whenever they're saying those passwords weren't even the passwords.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:05

I want to close the account.

Tasha 1:33:06

They had put bad passwords in.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:09

Oh, I know. But then that means he can also find out. He can find your good passwords as well.

Tasha 1:33:15

So three Crimson members reportedly sued Mark later in a suit that was later settled out of court.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:24

They proved that.

Tasha 1:33:25

Uh because his little trail marks were everywhere. So in the movie, we see these things playing out. Mark and Eduardo attend Bill Gates, but instead of launching Columbia's site, they go out with the girls, not before going back to the apartment, finding the cease and desist letter. Why did I say it like that? Cease and desist letter. And then talking about its legitimacy. And Aaron Sorkin follows this timeline for the most part. In Ben's book, they finally bring in the other three founders and social network, they're nowhere to be seen yet. We just uh got straight to relations. We go straight to relations with the girls in a bar bathroom. Ben slash Eduardo say it was in the men's room of the dorm. Either way, not great.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:14

This is what the dorm bathrooms are not private either.

Tasha 1:34:17

This is what Ben slash Eduardo says in the book. Quote, we it a thought hit him and he couldn't stop smiling. They had groupies, and then he says a computer program could actually get you laid. So that whole we have groupies that Aaron Sorkin wrote, that did come from the book. Yeah. And then like I threw up a little bit in my mouth. Now, in the scene outside the bathroom, I told you this earlier. We see a guy trying to get into the bathroom.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:45

Yes.

Tasha 1:34:45

In the movie. And the actor, I get to share this with everybody now, but I also have like a little something more to say to you about this. So the actor who played the other Winklevoss twin to Army Hammer's twin. I just hit the mic. I hope that wasn't a loud boom for everybody. He is the man who is trying to get into the bathroom. So there's there's two people there's Army Hammer, and then they had this guy play the other twin. So all the way through the acting, Army Hammer was not standing in front of a screen. He was actually acting opposite this guy. And through the filming, the story goes that they did not know if they were going to make the twins fraternal or identical. If they went fraternal, then they could, you know, this guy could be the twin. He was the right height, he was the right build, he had the same color hair, everything was great. If they went identical, then they were going to have to juxtapose Army Hammer's face onto this guy's body, but they didn't know if digitally it was going to work. So they had to film it the whole way through with the understanding that, like, if they do Army Hammer's face, army hammer also has to dub all of the lines.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:56

Yeah.

Tasha 1:35:56

Right. So lots of extra work with this whole situation. And the guy basically didn't know until like the 11th hour what it was going to be. You know, he had to wait and see how it was going to play out in editing. But I have one qualm with this story. My qualm is if they knew that that was a possibility, and they knew there was a possibility that he was going to be a twin, how were they going to lay out this whole scene of him wanting to get into the bathroom after he had already written a cease and desist letter to Mark? And now Mark's blocking the way to the bathroom. And like there's not going to be any sort of like friction there if he's a Winkelvoss twin trying to get into the bathroom. And then Mark's standing there, like, you don't get to come in the bathroom. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:42

Well, that's interesting, yeah.

Tasha 1:36:43

So I don't know. But one thing that Aaron does here that Ben did not do with the book, we do not see Erica again in the book, but here she is at the bar, and we get one more tight little tussle between them. In actuality, she is not, nor is any other woman the catalyst for launching the Facebook at other schools. That was always in the plans. And it started before watching Bill Gates and before eating pizza. The split of the business percentages with Chris and Dustin that they talk about here, those were correct. Chris's was like a to be determined, and Dustin's was was factored in already and was taken from Mark's percentage. But again, there was not a fake combo with a fake Erica, and it didn't happen that night. And the discussion of we're gonna split the business percentages didn't happen that night. From the beginning, they were already involved. It was Andrew McCollum, he was already there. The Facebook was already also moving into Yale and Stanford. They were in Yale and Stanford by March, by early April. It was at Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Brown. Oh, yeah, as well as MIT, Boston University, and NYU. So in the movie, we see the twins and Divya, and they're getting geared up for their fated meeting with the Harvard president, which we've already kind of touched on, leads to nothing but ridicule and shame and is as painful as portrayed on screen. And then we meet Sean Parker. Justin Timberlake plays slime so well in this movie. Sean Parker, one of the two founding Sean's of Napster. What Aaron and Fincher tell us in this moment is that Sean Parker's broke. We learn that he is not a student, he's never been a student, he is unemployed. He is currently in the house of a girl that he met the night before who has Stanford's the Facebook open on her laptop. Yeah. And he's been looking for his next big thing. And here it is fate. And Amy have stepped in. And Amy tells him it's freakishly addictive. Yeah. She's had it for two weeks and she finds herself on it like five times a day. In fact, in the 2018 book, The Four, author Scott Galloway said that when measured by adoption and usage, Facebook is the most successful thing in the history of humankind because one of every six minutes online is spent on Facebook. And in 2016, one in five minutes spent on mobile was on Facebook. People spend more time on the platform than they do any other behavior outside of family time, work time, and sleep time. That is disturbing to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:40

That's crazy.

Tasha 1:39:41

Yes. Physiologist Benjamin Libett used EEG scans to show activity in the brain's motor cortex. He showed that it can be detected 300 milliseconds before a person actually feels like they've made a decision. So 300 milliseconds before you think you've decided to move, the activity to move has already started in your cortex, which is insane. So we click on impulse rather than forethought, and we're driven by deep subconscious need to belong, gain approval, and feel safe. He says that Facebook exploits those needs, getting us to spend more time on the platform by giving us likes. It sends notifications which interrupt your work and your home life with like an urgency. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and expert in how tech hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities, compares these social media notifications to slot machines. And when you add that to the fact that most college students, the age these kids are when the Facebook.com is getting introduced to them, are still developing the frontal lobe of their brain, the largest part of the brain, which acts as the control center of their body and is responsible for executive functioning, voluntary movement, speech, and personality. Yeah, I'd say freakishly addictive is an appropriate description. Like, yes. Facebook studies, their own studies, show that using the relationship status function, the one that Mark gets so excited about at the beginning, yeah, affects the user as well. Facebook studies show that when statuses change to single, the user logs on more to Facebook and for longer periods of time. When they enter a relationship, usage drops. They call it a sentiment analysis corresponding to the user's happiness level with their Facebook usage. Facebook's own studies showed a correlation. They said the happier a person is, the fewer timeline posts are made a day, the less happy, the more Facebook posts are made a day. And they want users on the platform. So if their studies show a happier user is on the platform less, I wonder if they're gonna push happier or more volatile content to their users.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:12

Yeah, that makes sense from stuff that we've seen on there.

Tasha 1:42:15

Right. And that's where we're gonna leave it for part one. Was there an Amy? Was Sean Parker in her bed? Is it all Amy's fault that he got involved and Eduardo got the shaft? And whatever happens to the twins and Divia, I guess y'all will have to come back next time to find out.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:35

And was there a snake? Was there a snake?

Tasha 1:42:37

Was there a snake in the room?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:39

Was his name Sean? Was his name Sean?

Tasha 1:42:42

Until next week, and it feels really wrong to say it after this episode. Like, subscribe, and share. From Matt, the brilliant editing David and me. Thanks for joining us on Real Twisty. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:00

Goodbye.