The New Zuck

Charting Mark Zuckerberg's path toward MAGA

Mark Zuckerberg on The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello!

We have a new one for you we published over the weekend. If I were the best version of myself, the New Year’s resolution version of myself, the flossing-twice-daily version of myself — that’s probably when this email would’ve landed in your email inbox. Sunday at the latest.

And here we are, on Wednesday. So, the gap between who I’d like to be, and who I am … today, it’s a 4-day gap. OK. We can work with that.

Anyway, where was I? The episode.

What’s going on with Mark Zuckerberg?

He recently conspicuously pivoted toward MAGA, meeting quietly with incoming Trump officials, and complaining about the Biden administration on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This week, we trace the story of the Meta CEO, and investigate what his new persona means for the four billion people who use his products.

A larger thought here

This episode is about how to think about Mark Zuckerberg. But how should we think about Facebook, about Instagram, in 2025? We did the slightest of nods to that question in our episode. It’s one of the bigger questions really. Two decades in, are we glad we have social media? A question you might discuss in the comments. But I’ll leave you with this bit from Matt Yglesias’s column last week:

I think Mark Zuckerberg is basically correct that the “fact-checking” information control response to the problem of misinformation spreading on social media has basically been a failure. But the fact that social media sharing puts people who try to be scrupulous and accurate at a competitive disadvantage to people who try to be sensationalistic and prejudice-flattering is a real problem. I sympathized with almost everything he said about this to Ezra Klein during his lib turn in 2018, as well as with almost everything he said about it to Joe Rogan as part of his MAGA turn this winter. The underlying problem is that while technological progress is good in the aggregate, not every specific innovation is good. Zuckerberg just happens to be cursed with the reality that he became very rich at a very young age by being a pioneer in a technology that is basically harmful. He strikes me as a genuinely well-meaning person, and Meta has gone on to do lots of things that are more interesting and more promising than its core Facebook/Instagram business. But there’s no way around the fact that an information ecosystem based on virality — whether Facebook or TikTok or Twitter or anything else — exacerbates the flaws of establishment media rather than improving them.

But then there is the specific conservative angle, which is that conservatives have come to believe (accurately) that the baseline moral values of the academic expert community are hostile to them and therefore (inaccurately) that expert views should be categorically dismissed.

OK. What else. If you’d like to hear it, you should check out the Joe Rogan Zuckerberg interview, I feel like I learned something about the strange ways our country is shifting in those three hours. And if you want to hear a Zuckerberg from one iteration earlier, here he is with Ezra Klein in 2018.

Part of the reason I’d wanted to talk to Mike Isaac was this very insightful piece about Mark Zuckerberg he reported, way back in September.

And Casey has been like a house spy in Meta Castle this week, with story after story about Meta's rapid changes and the likely consequences, processed, somehow, in real time. Does Casey sleep? I hope so, we all need sleep.

That’s it for me this week. New one on Friday, if I get the newsletter out that day, my one request would be that while it’s fine to applaud, please don’t do a standing ovation.

Thanks,

PJ

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