Hey, Facebook: What’s that smell?, Part 2

they were causing users and they didn't care. So in this episode, we continue our exploration of events and learn how this information affects Facebook's b S score. And if you haven't listened to part one, it's in your feed now. We'll be right here when you come back. Welcome to Calling bull Shit, the podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what companies say they stand for and what they actually do and what they would need to change to

practice what they preach. I'm your host, time Ontogue, and I've spent over a decade helping companies define what they stand for, their purpose and then help them to use that purpose to drive transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of organizations today, they're still a pretty wide gap between word. Indeed, that gap has a name. We call it bullshit. But, and this is important, we believe

that bullshit is a treatable disease. So when the BS detector lights up, we're going to explore things that a company should do to fix it. Facebook says its mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and we've called bullshit on that. In fact, in our previous Facebook episode, we gave them a sky HIGHBS score of seventy two. But some pretty important news has dropped since that episode wrapped, So let's

do a quick catch up. Since we left off, there's been both good news and some seriously bad news from Facebook. First, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Young came forward. Sophie says that while working there, she noticed political parties across twenty five countries had been manipulating Facebook to mislaid and in

some cases harass it's our in citizens in fairness. Facebook then took a step in the right direction by creating an independent advisory board, similar to what Cameron Ashgar, founder of Cross Media, suggested in our first Facebook episode. When I heard of its formation, I thought this might actually be a turning point, but then the hammer fell. This is the Facebook Files, a series from the Journal. We're

looking deep inside Facebook through its own internal documents. Francis Hogan, a product manager in Facebook's civic Integrity unit, left the company in May, taking internal documents with her. She delivered those documents to the Wall Street Journal and law enforcement,

giving us an unprecedented look inside Facebook. The thing I saw Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money. In October, how Can testified to Congress that Facebook had extensive research on all of the problems and negative effects of their platforms, from misinformation on Facebook to

toxic Instagram content target young female users. Not only did they know, they chose to do nothing about it. The only way we can move forward and heal Facebook as we first left him in the truth. Either way we'll have reconciliation and we can move forward is by first being honest and declaring world bankruptcy. And the way Mark Zuckerberg chose to move forward in the midst of their very public trial for moral bankruptcy was to change the company's name to reflect who we are and what we

hope to build. I am proud to announce that's starting today. Our company is now meta. It was a head scratcher. It's a move right out of the big tobacco playbook. Remember when Philip Morris became Altria, and even if it was genuine, it was pretty much guaranteed to raise suspicion

about the company, not lower it. Zuckerberg isn't going anywhere, and he surrounded himsel off with a tight group of people at the top who literally don't care about harming the welfare of users, which is why we're seeing Facebook employees like Jong and Howgan go public, joining former co founder Chris Hughes, former investor Roger McNamee, and others in

calling for Congress to step in. But as we've seen lately, Congress finds it hard to agree on some pretty basic stuff like that an attack on our capitol is bad and that voting is good, for instance. So I'm not holding my breath. So here's the question, what the funk do we do to try to get to the bottom of this. I reached out to an expert who has some unusual and I think sorely needed attributes. He's a trained software engineer with a decidedly humanist point of view.

My guest today is the first century renaissance man, Ramash Screeny Vazon, a Silicon Valley native U c L, A professor, AI engineer, anthropologist, and author of several books, including Beyond the Valley, How innovators around the World are overcoming inequality and creating the technologies of tomorrow, and whose Global Village rethinking how technology shapes our world. First, I want to thank you for being here, Remage, and welcome to calling bullshit.

Thank you for having me Tie. I'm really excited to be part of this. So before we get into the topic of the day, which is Facebook, I'd love for you to just introduce yourself. So I'm a very strange cat in the sense that I'm a mix of a humanist,

a social scientists. Right. I'm I'm pretty trained in like anthropology, cultural studies, all these issues as well as engineering, and I think we need all three of these spheres to be in conversation with one another to get us out of the mess, uh the many messes we find ourselves in right now. My work is really rooted in the larger question of how we humanize technology, how do we transform technology so it serves the best purposes of humanism.

And so when I mean humanism, I mean that idea that we all feel and sometimes we forget that we're all in it together. You know that your well being might be connected to my own. So that's sort of respect of people's and their lives across our planet, particularly in the continents of Asia, Africa, South America and so on. You know, these people represent together the vast majority of technology users, yet they're conspicuously absent really from almost anything

involving major decisions around big technology platforms. So this kind of idea of dignity and respect for all people's that has such promise in relation to the Internet, My work is really trying to drive us back to where that as our north star. Yeah, and I saw that you somewhere that you described it as your work is the intersection of technology, innovation, politics, business and society. What was it that drew you to that topic? I mean, so,

I am a late nineties Stanford graduate in engineering. I worked for two years right after my undergrad in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, developing kind of machine learning technologies, and all the while, both in my classes as an undergraduate, in my own personal life because of you know, my family being from India and are my family traveling to different parts of the world, but just sort of also just generally in my own life, I saw an incredible

disconnect between the priorities, the lives, the values, the belief systems of people around our beautiful planet and where we were driving technology. And even in my context as an AI developer, and you know, the late nineties, with the realities that I was witnessing and and the insights that came from other fields in many other parts of the world. So you can't really understand technology and what it means without really thinking about things that are not about technology,

if you know what I mean. But you know, all the while, what we tend to do as we elevate, if not fetishized technology, and that becomes the object of our gaze and our attention, rather than what it actually means for our people, for our planet, for diverse cultures, for democracy, for economic justice, for racial justice, all these issues those are not questions fundamentally about technology. And I think I've always been sort of a humanist at heart,

someone who cares about these values more than anything. Yeah, well, we need more people like you with that incredibly diverse background, right, It's very rare, it seems to me, is particularly in the Valley. That's true. Yeah, and I'm in the Silicon Valley right now. I'm from Silicon Valley. I went to the same high school as Steve jobs stand for a late nineties, So this world is very close to my own personal world. Yet I've also seen how incredibly opaque

and limited and actually nearest sighted this world is. It's very disconnected. That's why I called my last book Beyond the Valley, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Yeah. So let's pivot to Facebook, and this is our second episode on Facebook. In the first one, the inciting incident really was the Capital, right, and we talked a lot

about that in Facebook's role in it. The big change since we wrapped episode one is that we've learned via whistleblower Francis Hogan, that Facebook knows right, Facebook knows that they are endangering mental health and in some cases physical well being, and they choose to ignore it. And so for us at calling BS, that really raises the stakes, and so first I just love to hear you know,

kind of what you think about all of that. I mean, what Francis Haagan sort of leaked out that she was privy to as as a whistleblower was what a number of scholars, not just me, but like, you know, dozens of us and journalists by the way we're pointing out, you know, we all saw these things, but we saw the effects in various parts of the world. We saw the effects with January six. We saw the effects with the incredible divisiveness associated with Brexit and the and the

Trump election. So we saw, wait a second, what's going on here? These algorithms are manipulating us psychometrically to be

more divided than ever. So we were seeing this. It was extremely helpful for our cause as scholars to get that corroboration from internal studies that Facebook was doing, showing that Instagram, for example, and any of us who've used Instagram can see this, and you can imagine being a younger person in their early twenties or teens, just how it's correlated with the feeling that I'm never good enough. You know, I'm never good enough, I'm never beautiful enough.

I'm never hot enough, I'm never smart enough, skinny enough, because so much of Instagram is artificially filtered, right So, so basically these revelations were extremely important because they showed how what Facebook is attempting to do, which other big tech companies are also trying to do in their own realms, is basically dominate our lives in relation to all things socially oriented. Right. They want to basically be the place we go to to communicate with no and socialize with

one another. But in the process, what's occurring is not tie you and I talking with one another. It's some weird stuff that's going on in the middle that's manipulating what you see and when you see it, and what I see and when I see it. And there's this massive acquisition of data that is being used to target us as psycho graphic subjects, not demographic, but psychographic. What will drive you crazy, what will get you aroused, what

will get you to be more extroverted? As I was preparing for this, I ran across a quote by Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, in Axios, and in this interview, he said that Facebook and Instagram constantly ask themselves one question how do we consume as much of the user's time and attention as possible? And then he went on to say we were exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The investors, creators, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin's Systrom, all of these people understood it consciously,

and we did it anyway. And I guess my question is how why is this even legal? Like it's odd to me that we allow this to go on? Well, partly because we're only wrapping our heads around what's going on recently, and our lawmakers are even more slowly wrapping their heads around what is happening here. I mean, I'm trying to work with as many of them as I can. One piece of good news is that lawmakers across the

political spectrum for various reasons. The thing is that what is occurring here is, you know, leveraging the kind of principles of free speech. And I'm all for free speech. These technology companies have actually they used that as their sort of crutch and then they do whatever they want with us. I don't mind that the Internet supports the capacity for all types of speech, but what I do mind deeply is that the most heinous forms of speech

are what are being most prioritized. So you know, Tye, it's one thing for me to say, Tie, you know, you should be able to speak how you wish, and you should be able to read what you want. It's another thing to say that, Tie, I'm just going to keep feeding you insane, crazy and at times conspiratorial and outrageous content. So you so you go crazy with a dopamine firing in your head, and it's like staring at

a burning car the entire time. It's so Actually, these companies are not prioritizing actual free speech in the sense that all forms of speech are, you know, maybe even equally accessible. But no, I'm sorry, I'm I'm interrupting. Here you go, I'm excited now. Just the last thing I would say is in democratic societies, there's always been voices that are a little extreme on various margins those that's

part of democracy. Here, what's happening is, you know, we're all being presented with completely different worlds in front of our fingertips, and we're all glued to our phones and on these apps and on these websites all the time, so our entire experience is completely different. Tights, say, you and I were like the same demographically, the same, politically, the same in terms of economic class. We could be presented with completely different dissenting worlds on these platforms, right,

We live in completely different reality bubbles on the platform. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing. They claim that they shouldn't be responsible because they exercise no editorial control on the platform. They are not a media platform. But the algorithms exercise editorial control. That's the point. It's just not it's non human. But that shouldn't absolve them. They created the algorithms. That's the point. Opt In is a default on every level,

and it's not just opt in. You know, people like Edward Snowden have made the point that even if our phones were on airplane mode, we're being recorded all the time. Say I'm hanging out with Utah, but I left my phone at home. Data about me is still being gathered through your phone, through your device, which is creepy because you can stitch together data points triangulate. Yeah. Okay, so let me shift gears for a sec here and just

get into another aspect of this. My sense, given that Facebook scale, that we're all affected by Facebook in some way today. But I'm wondering what you would stay to somebody who says, well, if you don't like what they do, just delete the platform, don't use the product. Easy, Easier said than done. If you're in a country in the world where Facebook is the media network, they say, we don't.

We are not a media network. They're the biggest media network in the history of the world period period, you know. I mean they're only vuying with like a YouTube, which is of course part of Google, right. I mean, if you want to look at Instagram, Facebook, I mean the technologies and WhatsApp. If you look at the union of those three groups, we're talking about three point five billion people out of eight billion or so people in the world.

That's that they're all media platforms, and they are together, if you put it all together, the biggest media network in the history of the world. So it's like saying to someone like, oh, well, too bad, you can just choose to get off of our platform and use something else. It's just not It's really unrealistic on so many levels, right, I mean, because of what we call network effects. I'm

on Facebook, not because I care about Facebook. I'm on Facebook to connect with my relatives in India, with people I worked with in South America. That's why I'm there. So it's like too late. They are essentially a utility, if not something approaching a monopoly. So they are the de facto place for socializing. And I don't mean Facebook the technology. I mean Facebook the company which owns again Oculus right, which is their gateway to meta by the way,

um Instagram, what'sapp in Facebook? Ye? And in terms of Facebook's attitude about all this, I read another thing that I found sort of outrageous. This long time Facebook executive and now new Chief Technology officer ct O Andrew Bosworth came right out and said that he blames users for the choices that they make on the platform. He said a bunch of that's insane. Yeah, he said a bunch

of crazy things. He said, rather than social media people are to blame for the proliferation of misinformation online, He said the owners should be on the individual and any meaningful democracy. He called Facebook a fundamentally democratic technology, despite the recent revelation that the platform allowed high profile users to break its policies. Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media, he said that

individuals choose what sources to trust. That's their choice. They're allowed to do that. If you have an issue with those people, you don't have an issue with Facebook. You can't put that on me. I just that attitude seems I don't know, anti human in a way like it just seems wrong. It's uninformed also right, in addition to

being just being untrue, it's uninformed. And sometimes these are these are perspectives you hear from people like who are just so ensnared within the kind of tech bubble they somehow think that what they're creating is an open portal to the world. How is that possible? If what I see on Facebook is determined computationally and algorithmically by Facebook, can they tell me how I can experience my Facebook feed in a in a way that is more open or is more self directed by my own choices, my

own values. Of course not. Yes, indeed, so just spending another minute outside the US. As you pointed out, the vast majority of users are outside the US, and one aspect is that the US is where most of their

modern ration happens. In other words, they pay much more attention to the US platform than they do outside the US, which means that most of their users are looking at a completely unmoderated platform in terms of hateful content, and so I just wondered if you could talk about the impact in places like the global South, India for example, and you know what the effects are on democracy worldwide? Yeah,

I mean Facebook. You know, the company understands that the most you know, kind of crop that they're going to get or will have to kind of deal with is in the US, right, So in other countries, you know, this approach to where just getting people content that rolls them up, that outreaches them, that drives them a little crazy is the norm. Right. So we've seen how that manifests in genocides in myyan Mar with the Rohinga community. We've seen how it's actually manifested in the more recent

attack on Burmese people by the state government. We're seeing it right now in the Two Grayan region of Ethiopia. We've seen this in Sri Lanka. We've seen it right here at home in January six. We see it all around the world. And we can also see how despots and authoritarians, people like Rodrico de Terite in the Philippines, Jayur Bolsonaro in Brazil have been able to use social media to divide and conquer to polarized people. And our former president was a master at being a central node

of digital activity on many different platforms. He put out content messaging that worked perfectly well for these dystopic forms of virality and visibility that I'm speaking about. Ramatous take on Mark zuckerberg obstacles to regulation and Facebook's revised BS score right after this, back with Roma Srinivasan, author of Beyond the Valley, how innovators around the world are overcoming

inequality and creating the technologies of tomorrow. So just different topics, but but relevant, I think is and and some of our listeners may not understand this. I didn't for a long time that Mark Zuckerberg is an unusual CEO and that he holds absolute power at Facebook because he owns the majority of the voting shares and so unlike most normal companies, he doesn't report to the board as most CEOs do, so the board doesn't decide Mark does on everything.

And so when you look at his actions personally, well, I guess professionally, they're hard to peel apart, Like, what do you think it tells us about his goals for the future. So the way Zuckerberg is able to get away with this is through what's called dual class share of structures. That basically means that Zuckerberg actually owns, you know, a different class, a different what's called class of equity. This is an equity that can't be overcome by other

people on the board's decisions. Facebook basically has a strategy from this example to other ones, including their you know, so called independent you know, advisory board. They basically say like, hey, we're down with regulation, We're down with your opinions, your voices. But at the end of the day, these are just little advisory groups or the board that actually doesn't have

any power. You know, why would the board actually even care to change the status quo unless they have more humanist or humanitarian sensibilities given that they're making more money than ever. So what you actually see is again abate and switch. They say they're innovative, but actually they're really anti innovation in the sense that they're not resourceful at all. They say they're you know, supporting democracy. Really what they're doing is figuring out a masterful model of a triumph

of a kind of oligarchic capitalism over democracy. So this is kind of like when we talk about the governance of these technology companies, you know, you can't expect them to do any sort of self regulation at all, because it's it's actually just you know, like little fake sort of agreements to the public like hey, okay, next time we'll have better AI. Okay, next time we're you know, we're part of this consortium with the a c l U. None of those things ultimately change the decisions that are

made on a business or technological level by the company itself. Right, Yeah, I think that you don't agree with this, but but obviously you'll correct me. So let me take a run at this. Mark has absolute power, and he doesn't seem to care whether Facebook is good for people or good for the world at all. In fact, we know that he is now knowingly pursuing revenue growth at the expense

of people's mental health, young people, childre don. In some cases, he knowingly lies in public occasionally to Congress about his intentions to change. And so I look at that behavior and it begs the question is Mark a sociopath? Like does he have some kind of clinical condition? Yeah? I mean you were right to say that. My I would answer no to that. Yeah, I heard that you disagreed with this, and I just I just wanted to hear you talk more about why I think the system is sociopathic, right,

I think the system is just deeply inhumane. Actually, And as far as Mark Zuckerbrook's concerned himself, I've actually met him a little over a decade ago. I mean, I wouldn't call him shiny happy people, but you know, I I thought he was just kind of in that way that a lot of engineers can be. I mean, this is a long time ago, just kind of just sort of wants data and evidence and analysis, and it is sort of like, you know, interested in the growth of

his platform. Right. So it's so it's sort of like we have created such a system where growth, no matter what is what is valued. And you know, some of these people are so kind of just almost you know, this is a very humane guess that they're just so overwhelmed with not just them growing the platform, but all the like hysteria and criticism at all. It just feels like they're they're not They're not the people we should

rely on to do much of anything. They have to be forced to be accountable to a public that they monetize. And also remember all of these companies live on in Internet that was paid for you know, I know it was a long time ago in nineteen sixty nine by US taxpayers. They're exploiting the public on on multiple levels, both in terms of investments that they've monetized for their own private benefit, just like you know, Visor, which seems to be like the state corporation right now, and and

and Maderna. I'm all for vaccination, but but I don't like this. I don't like that we are having a privatized aation of public life on every single level. Right, Yeah, I agree that the system is sociopathic. I guess given the amount of power and wealth that he has accumulated, how do we begin to think about protecting ourselves from

Mark and other people like him. It's time for actual decision making power to rest in the hands of third parties that represent people, and there needs to be more of a relationship between private technology companies that have created certain types of spaces and technologies that they should certainly benefit from on an economic level and the rest of us.

You know, And you can't expect this to occur within the bubble of a tech company within the bubble of this sort of hyper growth oriented, just valuation oriented, toxic business model. So you know, I think I think we're just going to have to try our best. I mean, I tend to be someone who really deeply admires uh Cornell West. Actually he's like my hero. He just calls everyone my brother. So let's let's try to say, hey, Mark,

you're my brother. But you know, we're gonna call We're gonna call stuff out, We're gonna keep it real, and we're gonna have to ensure that you that this kind of you know, egregious offense I think upon people around the world, especially the people who are most vulnerable, working class people. So one of the other levers that I've been thinking about, just as I've been circling this problem and trying to figure out how do we how do we begin to get out of this One of the

other lovers is the employees. I mean, Francis Hogan is one of a handful of employees which now include also a co founder, Chris Hughes, who have spoken out, which is incredibly courageous, particularly for her. I assume that Facebook, like most companies, is full of good people. How do we encourage more of them to either you know, whistleblow if they can, or just vote with their feet and

go do something else. I think that some of the greatest activism in terms of actually raising our awareness as a public around these issues are from employees within these companies. So I have so much appreciation for people who work in these companies. You know, a lot of engineers are very good people, where they just aren't just like I wasn't necessarily trained in all these other issues, but that

may not necessarily be their job. The problem is someone needs to have that awareness, that kind of more holistic, interdisciplinary, you know, humanist kind of sensibility, and they need to have you know, FIAT decision making power. And you know, it's that that's the issue here. But I think when I look towards the future, believe it or not, I have a lot of I don't know if it's optimism as much as determination that we can move things on a much better direction, in a much more human direction.

I wanted to spend a little bit more time talking about regulation sation. One of the things that you've said is that we need legislation that to quote you, set the right balance between free speech and algorithms that make hate speech and blatantly false information from unreputable sources go viral, And obviously I totally agree with that. What do you see as the major challenges to regulation? What? What a

great question, you know. I think in this particular case, in a sort of strange way, I do have a lot of hope because progressives, people in the center, and Republicans kind of all are pretty miffed by the status quo when it comes to where big tech companies are a lot of Republicans like to claim that the tech companies are biased against conservatives and conservative interests and that

they actually don't support free speech. A lot of people on the more progressive side of the of the political spectrum are pretty outspoken about how sort of these oligopolic tendencies have not kind of monopolistic tendencies can hijack an economy and hijack equality. So you know, whether it's equality or whether it's like you guys are biased against us

kind of thing, everyone's got a problem. So I think that there are certain things we can do, and I've been calling for what I call a digital Bill of Rights. Senator Cloba Charge just introduced a Privacy Bill. It has some aspects of what I've been calling for, which I would think I think is more progressive, you know, representative real Kanda and who I think is really intelligent um and or really brilliant on these issues, just released a book on these issues. Has been an interesting figure in

these discussions. Here's a fertile ground for us to do something about the status quo. M that's good news. So another thing I wanted to talk about is just the frame of reference I guess that we bring to regulation because for some reason, when we view tech companies, it's viewed as a big deal to regulate them. But we regulate for the common good all the time. Certain drugs are illegal, or their age limits to things like drinking

or driving a car, flying an airplane. Why do you think we don't automatically view Facebook or other big technology companies through that same lens. I think it's because a couple of things. I mean, first of all, it seems different than a car. We use the car in very specific, defined kinds of actions and activities, and so in those activities were like, yeah, there should be seatbelts in the in the car, right, But our digital lives are our

lives increasing for better or worse. It's sort of saying like, our lives should be regulated, and I don't think people have an easy time wrapping their head around that. That's why we need actual regulators. And remember regulation is not the enemy of business. Regulation actually allows businesses to maintain

their competitive edge. If you look at, for example, the last time a major company was broken up in the United States, that was a T and T. Last time I checked, a T and T is doing pretty well right now, right, So it forced the company to actually compete. And that is what regulation, at least in that particular case,

antitrust action is about. In a way, it's about asking the company to maintain integrity and actually innovative innovation in this case isn't just creating a new iPhone that's going to die in three years so we all have to buy another one. So I want to spend the last few minutes that we have trying to light a few candles here, because obviously this is a tough problem, and we really believe in the power of action to create change,

both inside companies and outside them. In the book, you talk about a future where technology becomes stakeholder centered instead of shareholder centered to get there, though you point out that people should have a hand in designing their own technology, how do we get there from here? It's such a good question. So I think what we can do is actually I think not like we we like we started with our conversation tie and not sort of have this be about technology, but about what kind of world we

wish to live in. And I think that that question is the most important question that should drive all our discussions about many things, not only technology or Facebook. So when I think about that world, it would be a world where there is dignity and respect for all people's right It would be where our individual rights would be respects as sovereign human beings. You know, we wouldn't be sources of manipulation and engines that fuel our depression and

anxiety and trauma and divisiveness. So I think that's one second is when we talk about stakeholders, we need to understand what are the populations within the country, around the world that are affected by decisions made about a large scale technology platform or platforms that are owned by Facebook right in that three point five or so billion users. So in that case, we have a huge opportunity to

resolve some of the problems with the digital economy. Instead of hiring a few exploited, traumatized content moderators in in in the Philippines, what if Facebook partnered with independent journalists in every single country where it operated, so that those journalists could actually have power over mediating, you know, auditing, tweaking, working with Facebook technologies so that they could reach people in those countries in ways that are more fair I

mean by part is it hearing. So that's a huge idea, right, this could be a huge way in which Facebook, which is a trillion plus dollar valuated company. Right, we haven't even talked about meta. Next time, I guess, I guess next time, I'll be back. So when we say stakeholders, we need to think about those. We have to identify groups of populations. We have to identify the groups whose

voices should be empowered. That can be done with this great advice is a reboard in relation to Facebook, and then real steps need to be taken to arm those different groups with greater power. That means that we moved from disorientation to real collaboration. That's what I'm proposing. And in the meantime, in our schools and our universities. We need our STEM curriculate to not just be stem, but to also be steam, including the arts and the humanities.

I think more than ever, people need to really study the humanities and the social sciences so they can understand the question what kind of human being do I want to be? What kind of world do I want to live in? Those are not questions, quite honestly, that are usually asked in engineering classes. Yep, No, that's such a great point. Okay, roomation. Last question on this show. We have something called the BS scale, So it goes from zero to one hundred, zero being the best zero BS

and being the worst BS. So Facebook says that their purpose is to empower all of us to build community and bring the world closer together. Where do we think Facebook falls on that scale in terms of actually living that purpose? Right now? I'll give them an a D and be nice that way, because I do have hope, because there are good people who work at Facebook. You know them, I know them. I am willing to always sort of hope for and and not in this moment

where people are so quickly calling one another out. I try to follow a practice of compassion. I think that there's a huge opportunity here where it could be at an inflection point for real transformative change that is great for businesses but great for everyone else to write. And that is what I want us to get to. And I'm I'm determined. That's that's why I'm here with you. I'm determined to do everything I can to take us there because I'm a veteran of this world. We can

do a lot about this. We can do a lot about this, but we need to start with real dialogue and giving up some power and trusting one another, real collaboration. I love that vision. Based on that, what's the one thing that you would tell Mark to do two to actually enact that, which would of course lower that score. Sit down with the right kinds of scholars and journalists. Let's all get together. Let's agree to some real actions that you can take based on what our conversation are.

Agree and actually enact those actions. And here's another thing. Let's do some A B testing. If you are to implement some of these changes, Let's see how much that actually, if at all, detracts from your you know what they call engagement, so you know, attention is their currency. As you alluded to earlier, so like, is that really the case? You know, if I were exposed to interesting content that's not just crazy trauma hype machine content, and it was

just sort of like maybe interesting in other ways. Uh, I don't because human beings we only like to look at burning cars. I really don't. I think human beings are more complex than that, and I think human beings are also activated by things that activate their interests and expand their imagination. And call me a hopeful optimist about humanity, but you know what, we gotta fight for what we

mean by humanity here moving forward. That's right, Dent. It just reminds me of one of the ideas that someone put forward in the first episode was instead of a like button, let's try different kinds of buttons like maybe made me think button right. Things that encourage you to think critically about what it is that you're looking at. Things that encourage you to engage in healthier behaviors and with healthier content. This was so great. I so appreciate

your being here with us today and thank you. Oh it's my pleasure. This was a great conversation, and thank you for having this podcast. I had no idea when I started looking at Facebook that they would turn out to be such a complicated story, or that their score would be so high. But the b S score just goes way up when you know about the BS and decide to look the other way, and it goes up even further if you decide to try to hide it

to me. The tragedy here is that Facebook has so much potential to do good, the ability to support and promote great causes at scale, a way to share important information about a pandemic, for instance, at scale connectivity in all parts of the world. That's what I want from my social media. The really big line is that they have to pursue this antiquated and dying form of capitalism

that puts short term profitability over humanity. I am convinced that it's ultimately bad for business, and that the mark will prove this out over the long term. So I'm going to raise Facebook's BS score. Remember the scale is from zero to one, zero being the best zero BS, a hundred being the worst total BS. In episode one, we gave them a seventy two. We're raising it twenty

points to two. Some might say even that is too low, but we're going to spare them those eight points because, like Cromace, I believe the company has a bunch of good people working inside to try to change it, so there's always hope. And if you're running a purpose led business or thinking of beginning the journey of transformation to become one, here are three things you should take away from today's episode. Today, I'm going to switch it up

and do these in the form of predictions. One, with a b S score of ninety two, I predict that Facebook is going to lose the war for talent. Young people today want to work in organizations that align with their values. The very best people won't be interested in joining Facebook, and those already there will leave. If you're running a purpose led business, keeping your BS score as low as you can is a competitive advantage too. Being

an ultra high BS company attracts regulators. I predict that at the very least, the days of Facebook's anti competitive behavior of just acquiring or copying competitors is over. If you're lucky enough to be running a purpose led business that gets big, a low BS score keeps congress away. And three, being an ultra high BS company destroys shareholder value. I predict that Facebook investors who in the short term have benefited from all this bad behavior will start to suffer.

There is a massive shift taking place in capital is um right now. We're seeing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history, as boomers age out and transfer their money to the next generations. Those generations want to invest that money in ways that align with their values. So if you're starting or leading a purpose led business, low bs will improve your ability to access capital to grow

that business privately or in the public markets. Usually at this point in the show, I would extend an invitation to Mark Zuckerberg if he ever wants to join us to chat. That door will always be open, Mark, But I'd also like to extend an invitation to Facebook employees who continue to fight the good fight. If any of you ever want to come on our show, you have an open invitation. Thanks to our guest today, Ramas Srinivasa. You can find out more about him on our website

Calling Ship podcast dot com. If you have ideas for companies or organizations we should consider for future episodes, you can submit them on the site too, And I highly recommend you check out Romation's book Beyond the Valley. Subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and thanks to our production team Hannah Beal, Jess Fenton, Amanda Ginsburgh, Andy Kim, D s Moss, Mikaela Reid, Basil Soaper and

me John Zulu. Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and is hosted by me Time Montague. Thanks for listening, Ye