Zuckerberg Talks To Charlie Rose About Steve Jobs, IPOs, And Google’s “Little Version Of Facebook”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Guests:
Mark Zuckerberg
Sheryl Sandberg
Charlie Rose:
Tell me what the mission is today for Facebook. You’ve got 800 million and counting –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
– users.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
It’s an extraordinary reach. Someone said it’s the most expansive human enabler of communication, or an enabler of human communication there has ever been.

Mark Zuckerberg:
We’re trying.

Charlie Rose:
You’re doing well at it too. So what’s the mission? Where is this thing going?

Mark Zuckerberg:
So the stated mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected, right? And the idea is that when you give people this ability to stay connected with all the people they care about, and you make it so they can express new things about themselves or in communication with other people who they care about, then you just open up all these new possibilities. You make it so people can stay connected in ways that they couldn’t before. They can learn about new things, whether it’s events that are happening in the world or ability to organize new things or learn about new products or new movies or music that they want to listen to. It opens up a lot of new possibility when you can keep all of these connections open to the people that you care about. So obviously, a big part of our mission is just connecting all these different people in the world. And one of the things that we are really proud of is that now 800 million people around the world are using Facebook every month and perhaps even crazier — it’s mind-blowing from my perspective. But more than half a billion people use Facebook every day. And I just think that’s crazy.

Charlie Rose:
500 million plus people –

Mark Zuckerberg:
500 million people, yeah. That’s growing. And it’s growing every day. And if you just look back, you know, seven years from when we were getting started, I mean, there would have been no way that we would have thought –

Sheryl Sandberg:
500 million people in your dorm room.

Mark Zuckerberg:
The funny thing is that, you know, I used to talk to a lot of my friends when I was at — when I was in college. We used to go out to get pizza every night. And we used to talk about what we thought was going to happen in the world and on the Internet. And we thought that there would be something like this, right, that, you know, it seemed pretty much inevitable that people would have a way to connect and that they would be able to express all these things and that there would be tools to make not just a social network, but that every product that you use is better off with your friends. We figured that there would be tools to do that. But the big surprise of this thing is that we’ve played a big role in making that happen. And when we were in college, we just figured, you know, who are we to do this, right? I mean, maybe we can create this cool little community for ourselves in college, but clearly it’s going to be some other company that does it.

Charlie Rose:
That’s what it is, a web within a web, is it not?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well –

Charlie Rose:
It’s a personalized web within the web.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I think it’s shaping — it’s shaping the broader web.

Charlie Rose:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, right now, if you look back for the past five or seven years, the story of social networking has really been about getting these 800 million people connected, right, so that they can stay in touch with all these people who they care about, and getting them signed up for Facebook and all that. But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story that people are going to remember five years from now isn’t how this one site was built. It was how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends because they can tap into your friends, right, so whether it’s, you know, music services that we just announced this new product a little more than a month ago and since then some of the music services that are out there, Spotify has grown from a little more than three million users with Facebook to now more than seven million users with Facebook. Another service called Mog [spelled phonetically] has grown from I think it’s a relatively small number of subscribers but it’s grown by four or five times in the last month alone.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And I think what that just shows is that all of these different products are better when you’re doing them with your friends. I mean think about it, do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends, right? You want to go with your friends.

Charlie Rose:
Or do you want to know what your friends like rather than what a whole different [unintelligible] likes.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends, you know.

Charlie Rose:
The wisdom of crowds means –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
– so that’s Google versus Facebook right there.

Sheryl Sandberg:
I don’t think it’s Google versus Facebook. I think it represents –

Charlie Rose:
The wisdom of crowds versus the wisdom of friends?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, I don’t think — I think the wisdom of crowds applies not just to Google but to a phase of the web –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
– which is about information and about links. And it was a lot of wonderful things, mostly based on anonymity and links between crowds.

Charlie Rose:
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
What does the crowd think? What is the best thing? Ours is just structured a totally different place so it is an evolution. The information web still exists, it’s still broadly used, but the social web didn’t exist before. The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be Charlie Rose. He has to be Mark Zuckerberg. I have to be Sheryl Sandberg. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web, not just on Facebook but throughout.

Charlie Rose:
What is it about that people want to be on Facebook, they want to talk about themselves, what is the sort of essence of that?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think it’s always existed.

Charlie Rose:
It’s as though –

Mark Zuckerberg:
One of the things that I think makes us human. But yeah and obviously to know what’s going on with your friends’ lives or not just your friends but people you care about. Right? You know, people who you’re interested in who aren’t your friends who are maybe on the periphery of your social circle, yeah, I think that those are all just core human needs and until Facebook there wasn’t a great tool for doing that, but I think that a lot of that and building that up was the last five years. I think the next five years is going to be about, okay now you’re connected to all these people, now you can have a better music listening experience, you can have a better movie watching experience, you can see what your friends are reading and learn what news you should read first, all of these things I think are going to get better. And that’s the thing that I’m most excited about for the next five years. And if we do well I think five years from now people are really going to look back and say wow, over the last five years all these products have now gotten better because I’m not doing this stuff alone, I’m doing it with my friends.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And it’s personal, it’s not just that you’re bringing your friends with you and then it becomes personal to you. So if you look at how people use most of the web, most products out there, even if you’re logged in, if I looked over your two shoulders, you see the same stuff because it’s basically produced for the masses.

Charlie Rose:
Is the key to –

Sheryl Sandberg:
And ours is different.

Charlie Rose:
Is the key to the monitorization of the future the fact that advertising will believe this is the best way to reach people, who are likely to buy their products?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Marketers have always wanted you know personal relationships with consumers or relationships where consumers do two things, consumers buy their products and consumers tell their friends to buy their — that they buy their products. Marketers have always been looking for that person who’s not just going to buy but spread the word to their friends. What we do on Facebook is we now enable marketers to find that and then if I do it on Facebook I’m sharing with an average of 130 people. And so it becomes a word of mouth marketing at scale, so people can tell each other what they like which is for marketers the thing they’ve been looking for I think for a long time.

Charlie Rose:
Is there a limit in terms of how many friends you should have?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, I don’t think a limit in terms of should, they’re just –

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s very personnel.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– I think that humans have a capacity for different amounts of social relationships. And I think it varies from person to person but it’s also not about what you should do. You should use the product to keep in touch with whatever set of people you want to. And we try to build all kinds of products that make it so you can stay in touch with small groups. All right, we have this groups product that you know it’s I think it’s 300 or 400 million people who are using it on a monthly basis now in order to communicate on Facebook with a subset of their friends, right, not their whole friends list, something that’s very widely used and a lot of people want to do that. And then we have functionality where people can publish things publicly, right? And some people have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even in some cases millions of subscribers who they can publish to and communicate with. So I mean people have a variety of different communication needs and we strive to build products that help people set [spelled phonetically] all of those.

Charlie Rose:
What’s the valuation today of Facebook?

Sheryl Sandberg:
So we’re a private company so we don’t really have a valuation.

Charlie Rose:
So then why do you want to be a public company? Why do you even think about an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I actually think the biggest thing for us is that a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options, right, so you get people who want to join the company, both for the mission, right, because they believe that Facebook is doing this awesome thing and they want to be a part of connecting everyone in the world, but also, if the company does well, then they get financially rewarded and can be set. And, you know, we’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way. Now, the promise isn’t that we’re going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we’re going to build this company so that it’s great over the long term, right. And that we’re always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we’ll do that.

Charlie Rose:
And it will be a liquid dividend for your –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, whether it’s a dividend or not, they’ll be able to trade their equity for money. And you know, that’s something that we take seriously, as a responsibility of running the company. And we just care deeply about all the employees and the investors who have been there with us.

Charlie Rose:
Has the Groupon experience and has other things changed your sense of the timing of an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t — I don’t think so.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Not really.

Mark Zuckerberg:
No.

Charlie Rose:
You’ll go when what? When will you decide?

Sheryl Sandberg:
When we’re ready.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
No, but how — what will tell you it makes sense?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t know. It’s a good question. Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
But you’ll just know?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, yeah. It’s — honestly, it’s not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about it now.

Charlie Rose:
How do you measure the impact that we now believe social media play in the Arab Spring?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, my personal take on this is that it’s — the social media’s role is maybe a bit overblown in that. I mean, the way that I think about it is that if people want change, then they will find a way to get that change, right. So, whatever technology they may or may not have used was neither a necessary nor sufficient case for getting to the outcome that they got to, but having people who wanted change was. So, I mean, I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but it certainly accelerated it. And do you know of any effort in terms of where governments, because of that, are trying to shut down Facebook in terms of access?

Mark Zuckerberg:
There are examples intermittently throughout the world all the time, but –

Sheryl Sandberg:
And there are places we’re not available. Well, China’s obviously the big one. We’re not broadly available.

Charlie Rose:
So how do you see that going into China, because — and if in fact it requires some sense of censorship, does that make it a “don’t go”?

Sheryl Sandberg:
You know, if your mission is to connect the entire world for all the reasons we’ve been talking about, you can’t connect the whole world and not China.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s not something we’re working on or focused on right now because it’s not a decision we have to make. So you are correct that when and if we go into China, we’ll have –

Charlie Rose:
A billion and a half people.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, we’ll issues. But since, for right now, we’re not available, and we don’t have an immediate path to become available, it not — these are not policy decisions we have to make.

Charlie Rose:
So it’s not on the immediate horizon –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Not on the immediate horizon.

Charlie Rose:
– to go into China. And the reason is, though, is it because of what happened to Google?

Sheryl Sandberg:
So it’s not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice, you know. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.

Charlie Rose:
Because they acted a certain way, you’ve chosen not to go there. Fair enough.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg:
No, it’s — yeah, yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah. And then at some point I think there would be some discussion around what it would take to go there, and then we’d at that point have to figure out whether we were willing to do that.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg:
But honestly, the way that we look at it now is there’s so many other places in the world where we can connect more people more easily without having to face those hard questions that I think a simple rule in business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress. So then I assume, you know, we talk about running Facebook for the long term and over the decades in which we hope to run and build Facebook to be a great company, I would imagine that this will be a question that we have to answer. But, I mean, right now, there’s still so much room for growth in a lot of other countries that it’s just not — it’s not the top thing that we’re worried about right now.

Charlie Rose:
To achieve your objectives that you want to do, the expansion, the –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
– connections, the advertising revenue, how important and where do you put making sure that Facebook gets more of the best engineers than anybody else regardless of where you have to steal them?

Sheryl Sandberg:
First, second and third.

Charlie Rose:
That’s one, two, three, yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
But it’s really important.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Steal is not –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Attract. We attract them.

Charlie Rose:
If you go to Google and you ask about you, they say, “Steal.”

Sheryl Sandberg:
Attract. Attract.

Charlie Rose:
He brought you from Google, and you brought other people from Google.

Sheryl Sandberg:
He attracted me from Google. And I attracted — you know, I wanted to — but it’s — [unintelligible] hiring engineers, so Google –

Charlie Rose:
Do you think Larry would believe it was attraction or theft?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, we’re not proper in the United States. And I’m fairly certain he would say, but you’re getting at a really important question.

Charlie Rose:
I am.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Which is engineering talent in this country.

Charlie Rose:
Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Which there is not enough of.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Sheryl Sandberg:
So we would hire lots more people. Google would hire lots more people. Every company we know of has more desire for engineers –

Charlie Rose:
And more need for the talented engineers –

Sheryl Sandberg:
– than we have them.

Charlie Rose:
And you can’t find them.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Can’t find them.

Charlie Rose:
How much of that is because of the U.S. immigration policy?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Some.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I’m not sure. I think some of it is that. But a lot of it is just education. I mean, I think that there’s not enough supply of engineers to meet the demand. I mean, all of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school, I mean, my number one piece of advice is you should learn how to program. I mean, I think that in the future, all kinds of jobs, not even just straight engineering jobs, but all kinds of different jobs are going to involve some element of programming. And, I mean, I just look at, you know, when I was at school, and I remember the average salary that an engineer, one of my computer science classmates got. And it’s gone up at least 50 percent, maybe even doubled in the last seven years since I was at school. And I think the reason is that the economy is shifting, and there are more companies that are growing that are these technology and software focused companies. And the skill set of being able to write code is so highly in demand that — and the amount of engineers who are graduating isn’t growing at a fast enough rate that the people who are there are just in more demand, and they get paid more.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And we have both an education problem and an immigration problem.

Mark Zuckerberg:
That’s true.

Sheryl Sandberg:
So it’s an education problem. We do not train — we don’t graduate enough kids from high school. We don’t graduate enough kids from college in this country. And having these kind of skills, we’re just absolutely far off. And also, the immigration policy you talked about is very real. So, you know, someone made a joke. We give a huge percentage of the spots in our engineering undergrad and grad program to people from other countries, and then we kick them out. It’s like a company. We’d have Facebook training, and we train everyone, and then we’d say, but you can’t work here. Go work for our competitor. That’s what we’re doing as a country. People have talked about stapling.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We should be stapling a visa.

Charlie Rose:
Stapling a green card to every diploma.

Sheryl Sandberg:
To every high-tech diploma because those people, not only do they not take jobs from other Americans. They create jobs for other Americans if we could keep them here and have them work in our [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose:
I don’t understand why they that can’t be changed, other than it’s caught up in the overall immigration politics.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
Otherwise you would think it’s so obvious.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We’re not — we’re not experts on the political process.

Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s above my pay grade.

Charlie Rose:
But you’re having a different — you have to have, today, a company the size of Facebook, a presence in Washington. You have to have a sense of making sure that Washington knows who you are, and you know what they’re about. Do you know?

Sheryl Sandberg:
We do.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, no, we do.

Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s an important — it’s an important part, I mean, for these issues and a lot of others. But I think changing the stuff is just such a long process, right. If we were actually going to effect any change in terms of getting more folks, each one be visas so we could not kick some of the best engineers out to other countries, I don’t know, I mean, that’s years, right. I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg:
I mean, I think it’s a public education issue. I think, look, we have huge unemployment problem, and we have a growing crisis of people that not only want jobs and need jobs but deserve jobs. And it’s our job to — and so I think people don’t understand that these jobs do not take jobs from other Americans, but they create jobs around them. I mean, there are so many stories on this. We have one guy named Javier Oliveon who works here. He was one of the best engineering students in Spain, nationwide, came to Stanford to get his MBA.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Started here, works with us, and he created our internationalization tool. He runs our internationalization projects. We serve most of the world from the United States. It’s the opposite of what everyone thinks is happening. We’re not hiring out there to serve here. We’re serving — we entered the visa lottery for him, and we won. We had the jobs for him.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
If we had lost, we would have moved those jobs to wherever he could work. But because we got him a visa, those jobs stayed here.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
But let me ask this question, which is at the heart of the debate that’s going on in America.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose:
Which is, you know, the competition of America with the rest of the world.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose:
Facebook came out of America. Apple came out of America. Microsoft came out of America. Google came out of America. Are those things going to be coming — those kinds of companies, the kind of company you created –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose:
– more likely to come from China tomorrow?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, if you — I think that there’s actually two big ingredients, right. One of the big parts of the Facebook story was that — you know, I didn’t have to have some master plan at the beginning. I didn’t have to have a lot of money. I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the side.

Charlie Rose:
Right, right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And but literally just starting small and growing it. So I think you need two things. One is the ability to have engineers, right, and educate engineers who can just try out their own ideas.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And the second is the ability to try out their own ideas, right, and the freedom to do that. And the U.S., I think historically has been extremely good at both. We’ve led in education, and we’ve led in freedom and supporting people trying risky things.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Free market economics.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
And a sense of innovation and creativity and –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Public policy that supports entrepreneurship.

Charlie Rose:
Right, right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
In America, you can hire and fire.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
In America, you can start a company without going through endless bureaucratic red tape, even though it’s growing a bit.

Charlie Rose:
Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Right? I mean, in America, we’ve had a country of entrepreneurs.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We have set up our political system so you can start companies. You can close companies. I think people don’t always see the costs of increasing bureaucracy on entrepreneurship. The best people are going to go where they can get the best talent and where they have the best environment to hire.

Charlie Rose:
Speaking of environment, how is your culture, say, different from the culture that you saw at Google? What is the Facebook culture?

Sheryl Sandberg:
You know, when I think about this, if you compare Facebook and Google to, you know, most of the world, right, to other companies in other industries, they’re actually, in some ways, incredibly similar. They are founder led.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Silicon Valley based technology companies that have broad [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose:
Driven by engineering.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right. Driven by engineering. They’re very similar.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
In the little Silicon Valley bubble in which we live, they’re truly different, totally different.

Charlie Rose:
How so?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Couple things. One is that, you know, Google is fundamentally –

Charlie Rose:
You’re interested yourself.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, I’m interested in hearing [unintelligible].

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, but Google is fundamentally about, you know, algorithms and machine burning.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And that — and that has been very important and continues to be very important. They’re doing a great job. We start from a totally different place. We start from an individual. Who are you? You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to share? You know, for us, the vision of the world is that we are like a hacking culture, and we mean that in the best of ways. We do not mean scary people breaking into your home or anything.

Charlie Rose:
Or espionage.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Or espionage. What we mean is we build things quickly and ship them. So we are not aiming for, you know, perfection that comes over, you know, years, then we ship a product. We don’t work on things for years and then ship it. We work on things. We ship them. We get feedback from the people who use it. We get feedback from the world. We iterate, we iterate, we iterate. We have these great signs around, you know, “Done is better than perfect.” “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” we’re very much a culture.

Charlie Rose:
Because the notion of perfect is the enemy of good.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And a culture of very, very rapid, very rapid innovation.

Charlie Rose:
Okay. You set out — did you have a belief in a certain culture when you were building this company, that this is the kind of place I want to work? And this is how I want to –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, he’s never worked anywhere else.

Charlie Rose:
That’s true. So therefore how did you know what kind of culture you wanted?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, I think it sits [spelled phonetically] from the type of things that we want to build, right? So we’re trying to help people connect with all these different folks, right, and that map of all those different connections needs to get built from the ground up, right? So it is fundamentally about giving people the tools that they need to share the things that they want with the people that they want, make the connections that they want, and bootstrap from nothing to something that’s broader.

It is really different from a culture where you’re already taking the web and your primary mission is okay I want to organize something that’s out there, we have this culture where we place a really big premium on moving quickly right and one of the big theories that I had about that was that all technology companies and probably all companies just slow down dramatically as they grow, but if we can focus at every step along the way and moving quicker then maybe when we’re around 2,500 or 3,000 people now maybe we move as quickly as you know a company that only has 500 people, right, because we’ve invested so much in building up the infrastructure and tools and also the culture that tells people to take risks and try things out. And I just think that, that ability to build stuff quicker will be a big advantage for us and will help us build better products over the long term.

Charlie Rose:
I want to talk about the future and competition. There are many people who look to the Silicon Valley and they say there are four platforms out here. It’s Amazon, it’s Apple, it’s Google, it’s Facebook. And what we’re going to witness over the next 10 years is a flat-out war between the four of you for the future. How do you see that?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, people like to talk about war. You know, there are a lot of ways in which the companies actually work together. There are real competitions in there. But I don’t think that this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.

Charlie Rose:
But you’re already getting in each other’s businesses. You know that. They have something called Google+.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes, and no. I mean, I think, you know, Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook. But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple and I see companies who are extremely aligned with us, right. And we have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there. I mean, I can’t think of an Apple product or an Amazon product that I look at and it’s like, oh, that’s really –

Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but come on. Look at it. Apple just — Amazon just announced a new Kindle Fire, which is –

Mark Zuckerberg:
I know, and they’re tablet –

Charlie Rose:
– could deeply compete with the iPad.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And that’s cool. I mean, we don’t have tablets, though, so we could care less about that.

Charlie Rose:
There are no borders out here in terms of what you might want to do. Come on, Sheryl.

Sheryl Sandberg:
There are no borders for us, certainly, right, because we want everything to be social, and we want — prefer everything to be social with Facebook. And so, for us, our goal is really to work across. We want to work on every tablet.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Right, this is the important stuff.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And Apple and Amazon, you know, God bless them. They can compete and build lots of different tablets.

Charlie Rose:
You found a device, and we want to be seen on it.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah. So if you’re Amazon, and one of the big strategies is sell Kindles so you can sell more things, right. If you’re Apple, a big part of your strategy is sell devices because that’s how you make money. If you’re Google, they want to get Android as widely adopted as possible, and our goal –

Charlie Rose:
Therefore, they go out and they buy Motorola.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, but our goal, I mean –

[talking simultaneously]

Charlie Rose:
And there are rumors that Microsoft may buy Nokia or something like that.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Sure, but our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be across all of them. I mean, because our mission is to help people connect and stay connected with people no matter what devices they’re on, we want to be in all these places.

Charlie Rose:
You — go ahead — you — go ahead.

Sheryl Sandberg:
This is also really — sorry — but this is really important. It actually gets back to the differences before retirement with Google and Facebook. There’s one thing that I think is most important that’s to Facebook, which is that we are focused on doing one thing incredibly well. We only really want to do one thing.

Charlie Rose:
Social media.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Connect the world.

Charlie Rose:
Connect the world. Okay, fair enough.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And be the social technology people use. I think if you look at other companies, all of these companies are doing lots of different things, but we are still, as we grow, doing exactly one thing.

Charlie Rose:
But here’s the thing. There’s nothing you think you can’t do. I mean, you look at –

Mark Zuckerberg:
[unintelligible] were going to go in a different direction with this, because, I mean, it is true, there’s a corollary to what you just said, right. So, it is true we are focused on this one thing, but because there’s all this other stuff out there, that means that Facebook has evolved as a partnership company.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– which is very different from the way that Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of these folks are, right. I mean, if Apple or Google want to build a product, they typically go build it, right. Whereas if Facebook wants to make it so that, you know, we want to help rethink the way that people listen to music or watch movies. What do we do? We build a platform on top of which people connect, and we enable all these different companies, dozens of companies to plug in, companies that are big companies, companies that are small companies, things that don’t even exist. It’s a really different approach than what all these other companies have.

Charlie Rose:
But the end result is you want to provide a means for people to look at movies, to listen to music, to do all kinds of things.

Mark Zuckerberg:
But they’re all [unintelligible] other people’s services.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We don’t want to provide the means. This is the thing. Our one thing that is the basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach, we build the social technology. They provide the music.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, exactly.

Sheryl Sandberg:
They — we don’t — we don’t want people to use Facebook to watch movies or read newspaper articles.

Charlie Rose:
You want to do what? You want to –

Sheryl Sandberg:
We want to provide the social technology. So we want them to listen to music on the iPhone or through Apple or through Spotify, anything they want. We want them to watch movies anywhere.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We just want Facebook to be how they share wherever they are. And so we do this one thing which is — underlies this huge partnership strategy, and it does make us, I think, pretty different than many of the other companies you’re talking about.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Just take the movies thing as an example.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, the biggest movie company –

Sheryl Sandberg:
We don’t care where you watch.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– is that — our partners right now and are building on top of our platform are Netflix and Hulu.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Right? And I guess Hulu’s more on the TV side. But people can share all kinds of videos that they’re watching. You can see the top things that your friends are watching. So I go to your profile or your timeline and if you want, you can have a box up there that’s what are the TV shows that you watch the most? And I can go ahead and click on it, and it’ll take me right to the Hulu app, and I can start watching that. That, I think is really powerful. The piece that Facebook is doing is saying, okay, we’re friends, right, and allowing you to share that — I want to express to people what are the TV shows that I like. And now Facebook is giving me a place to go see what you want to watch if you want to share that. But then from there, you click on it, and it takes you to Hulu or takes you to Netflix. Or if you want to listen to music, it takes you to Spotify, or it takes you to one of these other companies.

Charlie Rose:
But is central your sense that the future belongs to social networking, that that’s the future?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I think that a big piece of it is –

Charlie Rose:
Finish that.

Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s not everything.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, if you think about it, in your own life, right, with all the things that you do, how much — how many of the things that you do are better when you’re doing them with other people or with your friends? Probably a lot. But not everything, but a big piece of that.

Charlie Rose:
Almost everything.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And I think that we can help power that. But for all of those things, then, you know, some of them we’re going to build ourselves, right, so the core experience where I can go learn stuff about you, right, based on what you’ve shared, we’re going to build that piece, right. The core piece where you can see all of the stuff that’s going on with all of your friends that they wanted to share. We’ll build that piece.

Charlie Rose:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
But the piece where, you know, you go to try to consume a specific type of content, right, I want to see what news my friends are reading. There will be newspapers.

Sheryl Sandberg:
This is why this matters, right, because we can win along with lots of other people winning.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And that is totally different, I think about the strategy of what we’re trying to build.

Charlie Rose:
What don’t you want — go ahead, finish.

Sheryl Sandberg:
So we can — if — if news becomes more social, that’s great for Facebook if it happens with our technology. But –

Charlie Rose:
Because you’re the great connector of the world.

Sheryl Sandberg:
– it is great for the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Huffington Post and anyone who chooses to use our technology which we make available to every news service out there. We’re not trying to replace everyone or do everything. We want to enable everyone — everything to be more social for everyone else.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, I think — it’s actually — it’s a lot more extreme even than you’re saying. I mean, take — and we’ve talking a lot here about –

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s always more extreme.

Mark Zuckerberg:
One thing that we haven’t talked about at all here are games, right. I mean, games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

Charlie Rose:
Yeah, well –

Mark Zuckerberg:
– which are going public soon and will be valued at most likely at multibillion dollar valuations. And basically all of their games are built on top of Facebook for the most part.

Charlie Rose:
Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And a huge number of other companies as well. So I mean, does Facebook build any games? No. We build no games.

Charlie Rose:
You say that today –

Mark Zuckerberg:
No, we –

Charlie Rose:
You say that today.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Actually –

Sheryl Sandberg:
I’m pretty sure we’re not going to –

Mark Zuckerberg:
No, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to build any games.

Sheryl Sandberg:
[unintelligible] we’re not going to build games.

Mark Zuckerberg:
We build –

Charlie Rose:
Well, why are you so sure?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Here’s why. Here’s why.

Charlie Rose:
I’m only saying this because people thought that Steve Jobs –

Mark Zuckerberg:
I’ll tell you why.

Charlie Rose:
– would never go into retail, and he did.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I’ll tell you why.

Charlie Rose:
All right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Because building games is really hard. And so that’s –

Charlie Rose:
So that’s the only reason.

Mark Zuckerberg:
And we’re doing — what we’re doing is really hard. And we think that we’re better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard. Building a great music service is really hard. Building a great movie service is really hard. And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company which is why we think that the strategy of these other companies trying to do everything themselves will inevitably be less successful than an ecosystem where you have someone like Facebook trying to build the core product to help people connect and then independent great companies that are only focused on one or two things doing those things really well.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And those companies can’t — don’t have the discipline to do it, right. They get big, and everyone wants to do everything, and they just say yes. And then they don’t do everything well.

Charlie Rose:
At this point, enter this name, Steve Jobs. I’ve had an experience with him once at TIME 100. And he walked over to say hello, and there was — I was talking to a young entrepreneur who was obviously in awe and in — you know, thrilled. It was the greatest moment of his life. There was Steve.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose:
And I said to Steve, “What should he do?” and Steve said to me, “He should focus on his knitting. Not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
Did you ever have that conversation with Steve Jobs?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t know.

Sheryl Sandberg:
[unintelligible] conversations with –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, you know, one of the funny things is when you agree with someone, you tend not to talk about it for too long because you just take it as an assumption. So I mean, I think in some of our conversations it might have been like, yeah, that thing, okay, now let’s go talk about something else.

Charlie Rose:
So what were the conversations like? I mean, here is someone who’s –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Oh, I don’t know. I mean, he — he’s amazing. He was amazing. I mean, he — I had a lot of questions for him on –

Charlie Rose:
Like what?

Mark Zuckerberg:
How to build a team around you, right, that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are. How to keep an organization focused, right, when I think the tendency for larger companies is to try to fray and go into all these different areas. Yeah, I mean a lot just on the aesthetics and kind of mission orientation of companies. I mean, Apple is a company that is so focused on just building products that — for their customers and their users. And — and that’s like — it’s such a deep part of their mission is build these beautiful products for their users. And I think we connected a lot on this level of, okay, Facebook has this mission that’s really more than just trying to build a company, right, that has a market cap or a value. It’s like we’re trying to do this thing in the world. And I don’t know, a lot of it I just think we connected on that level.

Charlie Rose:
Did he ever suggest that Apple might buy Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg:
No. I don’t think it ever really got there. I mean, nor would I have wanted to sell it. He — and I remember talking to him –

Sheryl Sandberg:
And I think he would have known that.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah. And I — I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg:
I talked to you about this and like I think –

Charlie Rose:
About what, about the buying –

Sheryl Sandberg:
I think he understood Mark enough to know that Mark didn’t want to sell his company because he didn’t want to sell –

Charlie Rose:
Did he raise the question with you?

Sheryl Sandberg:
No, but he — I think he –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
– having talked to him about Facebook and Apple, I — he didn’t raise it, but I don’t think he would have because he would have understood that about Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Actually, I mean, I think there was –

Sheryl Sandberg:
He’s just like him. He wouldn’t have wanted to sell his company.

[talking simultaneously]

Charlie Rose:
Go ahead.

Mark Zuckerberg:
There is this quote I think in the book that just came out about him where, I mean, it’s –

Charlie Rose:
The Walter Isaacson book.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah. I mean, it’s — and I took it as this amazing compliment. He said, I admire Facebook because you guys don’t want to sell out.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Right, so I actually think that –

Sheryl Sandberg:
And I don’t think he would have asked.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I know that’s one of the ways in which — in which we saw eye to eye on kind of what we were trying to do in the world. And I just think because of that, it probably –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– just wouldn’t have come up.

15:17:31

Charlie Rose:
You’ve had — I mean, Microsoft owns a piece of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose:
You’ve had an opportunity I’m sure to sell. You will never sell. Is that fair? Is that a fair –

Sheryl Sandberg:
No one even asks any more.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
It’s too big. Nobody can afford you anymore.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Exactly.

Charlie Rose:
Is that the essential idea?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
But — and you, I mean, can you imagine wanting to buy somebody?

Mark Zuckerberg:
We buy companies all the time.

Charlie Rose:
I know, but they’re small, small companies.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
And they’re companies driven by certain expertise.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, you know –

Charlie Rose:
– or certain software.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t think that buying a company or selling a company is necessarily a good or a bad thing. I just think that the key thing that you need to realize is that when you go through a transaction like that, what you are changes, right. And if you’re now owned by someone else, then your goals are going to either quickly or over time become their goals, right? So there are actually I think a lot of compelling reasons why someone would sell a company and why it would advance their mission. I mean, I think, for example, YouTube might have been a good version of this right where they had these huge expenses, and Google funded it and has grown it, and it’s grown into, I think, a really good product, maybe beyond what the founders had even hoped.

Charlie Rose:
And maybe if Microsoft were able to buy Yahoo!, it might have worked.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Maybe. It’s hard to tell. But I mean, a lot of the acquisitions that we make at Facebook are, you know, we look at great entrepreneurs out there who are building things. And often, the acquisitions aren’t even to really buy their company or what they’re doing. It’s to get the really talented people who are out there trying to build something cool and say, you know, if you joined Facebook, you could work on this completely different problem. Isn’t this a more important problem? And for the people who answer that question yes, they join. And that’s how we’ve had the most success so far.

Charlie Rose:
All right. Let me talk about what you know about all of us, it is this notion that constantly comes up, is there anything you do not want to know about –

Mark Zuckerberg:
I just don’t even think we think about it that way.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, it’s –

Charlie Rose:
Okay, well, help me think about it in the right way, how you think about it, because I mean, like the “like” button, you know, it’s a powerful tool.

Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s not for us though, right, I mean, it’s for –

Charlie Rose:
It’s for advertisers.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– people to express — no, not for advertisers.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Other people.

[talking simultaneously]

Mark Zuckerberg:
This is a core part of what makes Facebook, Facebook, is that we really are focused on users first and for the long term, right? And we believe that if we build a product where people can connect and can express all the things that they want about themselves, that over the very long term we’ll have a lot of people doing that because that’s a core human thing where people want to do that, and they’ll be very active, and we’ll have opportunities to sell advertising and do all these things and build a great business but none of that is the leading thing that we’re pushing for. What we’re pushing for is the mission, we think that if we succeed on that then we’re going to build a great business. Now, if — I just think that there’s this core part of people where they want to express things about themselves. So the question isn’t what do we want to know about people, it’s what do people want to tell about themselves. Right?

And we try to answer that question continuously, you know, what do people want to tell about themselves that they can’t tell now? Right, we think this year that one of the big things that people want to express that they haven’t had a way to are what are my favorite songs and different media that I consume. And you know there’s always — there’s been a way for you to type in, okay, my favorite band is Green Day or the Beatles or whatever, but there hasn’t been a way to say okay out of all the songs that I’ve listened to in the last month, here are the top ones, but in the month or so since we’ve launched that functionality on top of platform, people have already chosen to publish more than a billion songs that they’ve listened to into Facebook through partners. And it’s amazing so and it’s because they want to do that.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And it’s really important to understand that we don’t want people to express anything, we want them to have an opportunity to express what they want to express to the people they want to express it, so privacy has been very core to this service. I think it’s actually one of the big innovations Facebook had, if you think about online services before Facebook, they’re basically open or closed, you know, something you publish on a blog, the blog is open, you’re corporate email [spelled phonetically] closed. Facebook was the first place that one of the core innovations Mark had was actually around privacy. I can take this photo, I can take a photo of the three of us here, I can share it just with my parents, I can share it just with my little group of my high school girlfriends, or I can share it with all of Facebook or the whole world, and every single time you share something on Facebook you have an opportunity to choose who you’re sharing it with.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And that commitment to our users, that their trust is sacred, that privacy is the most important thing we do, is something that’s been here throughout, and it’s really important for people.

Charlie Rose:
But having said all of that, when you’ve gotten in trouble it’s bulk [spelled phonetically] on the issue of privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, I agree, and I mean it’s something that — I think that just speaks to how important and fundamental of an issue that is.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
All right, when I was talking a minute ago about what are the ways that people want to share that we can make happen this year, one of the core things that flows through all of this is that I’d say probably this point still the vast majority of people don’t want to share everything, or don’t want to share anything with everyone publicly. But if you give people tools so that they can share with just their friends, or just one group of friends, or just their family, then they’ll do that.

Charlie Rose:
Okay, but are they always the wisest people to know what they want to share and how sharing might be bound.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I believe that they are. I mean, I think that –

Charlie Rose:
You trust the judgment of most people to know who they want to share with.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, and I think that people go through a learning process too where I mean maybe when social networks were first ramping up on the web some people shared a few things too broadly but I think that, that’s part of the reason why I think Facebook has grown is I think Facebook largely existed after that the friends [spelled phonetically] during the MySpace phase of the social web and at a point where people were already sophisticated enough to realize hey, you know, I want to share different things with different people, I’m going to use these privacy control that Facebook has given me, that Facebook is really the first company that has built these controls so that you can share things with just your friends or I can share vacation photos from my family vacation with just my family if I want, or I can do all these different things, and I think that, that’s one of the big enablers on the service.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And it’s something we continue to evolve so control is what matters here. People want control. They want to share what they want with who they want and as long as, as we will allow [spelled phonetically] products, we continue on the control, so for example we are launching, we’ve already unveiled, Mark unveiled a number of weeks ago in the next bunch of weeks we’re making our timeline, our new profile available to everyone.

Charlie Rose:
What is that?

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s — so right now you have a profile, and the timeline is a more visual representation of who you are and includes further back in your life, not just when Facebook started, but further back. So I’ve actually spent the last week uploading childhood pictures. But here’s what matters. I can go back and change the privacy controls on something I’ve already — so if I go back now and build my timeline and I say, “Oh, I shared that with this group of people. I actually want to share that with more people or fewer,” we are giving that control. So it matters as people learn is that they have the controls they need to share with who they want. And that’s something we are continuing to work on.

Charlie Rose:
There are also these stories that you read about in terms of if somebody has something on their Facebook page that somebody got access to and therefore they didn’t get hired, something did not happen that might have happened because they were silly enough or somehow to put something on their Facebook page that rebounded to their detriment.

Sheryl Sandberg:
And people make cell phone calls that rebound to their detriment.

Charlie Rose:
Or e-mails as well. I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg:
E-mail as well, or they put something down on their resume. It’s not that people don’t make mistakes, but the information you put on Facebook is only available to employers if you’ve shared it to those people, if you’ve shared it openly.

Charlie Rose:
But once it’s there –

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, if you choose to –

Sheryl Sandberg:
And there’s a responsibility individuals have. Certainly we want to teach people, and people want to teach people to share the things they want to share. I think that if you look at the history of technology, what you always find is that every new technology brings unbelievable opportunities for advancement and living our lives differently, and it’s also scary. I mean, one of my favorite stories on this is caller ID. When caller ID was rolled out, and I’m actually old enough to remember this, unlike my friend over here –

Mark Zuckerberg:
No, I had caller ID.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Do you remember before caller ID?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Oh, oh, that’s good. Normally, normally –

Charlie Rose:
But you don’t remember before caller ID. That’s the point –

Sheryl Sandberg:
No, he says he does.

Charlie Rose:
Oh, you do?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I remember before everyone had it. And maybe it was –

Charlie Rose:
Oh.

Sheryl Sandberg:
All right, that kind of sort of counts, but when caller ID came out, there was a big privacy uproar. People thought it was a violation of the caller’s privacy that they’re number would show. There was talk of legislation. There was talk of states banning it.

Charlie Rose:
There was talk of a way you could avoid it being seen and all that.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Ways you could avoid it being seen because it was considered — I don’t know anyone who answers a call that doesn’t have caller ID now because it’s not considered a violation of that privacy. It’s considered my right to know who’s calling me. Otherwise, why would I answer? And so, yes, when you are an early leader like we are in technology, there is always concern, and you’re going to continue to hear concerns.

Charlie Rose:
You know why I have caller ID? Because when I’m calling people, I want them to know it’s me calling, other than “unknown” because I feel that they’re more likely to answer my call if they know it’s me.

Sheryl Sandberg:
But that is something that caller ID is widely accepted. It was a privacy uproar at its time. And so –

Charlie Rose:
Okay, so, but tell me where the boundaries are about privacy, that you think that we ought to take note of at this moment. Because the privacy question most frequently comes back to Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, here’s the way that I think about it. I think it’s really about control, right. People have things that they want to share with maybe a single person or a small group, and they have things that they’d want to share more broadly. And the real question for me is do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well. And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions, because the demographics of people who are using Facebook are changing as well, right. I mean, we started off with these people in college, right, who use computers every single day. And now, you know, we’re up to 800 million-plus users. We have people using the site who it’s one of the only things that they do on a computer, and maybe they’re not computer savvy, right, or they don’t have — they don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out privacy control. So what we’ve done in the last year is we’ve made it so that any time you to share anything, the privacy control is now right there, and it says exactly who you’re going to share with. If you’re going to be sharing publicly, there’s a little globe and it says the word “public.” And if you’re going to be sharing with friends, there’s this icon of a few people and it says the word “friends,” and you can just click and you can change that really easily every time you post anything.

And back where we were getting started seven years ago, I don’t know if that was necessary because the college students and early adopter-type folks just had this intuitive understanding of how the service worked. But now, I just think that the boundaries, it’s getting more and more important to be increasingly clear and give people those controls. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And I don’t think we’re at the end. I think we’re going to need to keep on making it easier and easier, but that’s our mission, right. I mean, we have to do that because now, if people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them. I mean, we’re making it so they can share a lot of the stuff that they want to.

Sheryl Sandberg:
I think it is the case that people talk about Facebook and privacy a lot, and I think it will continue to be the case, but it’s because we lead in this area, meaning that we are the most privacy-focused place for anyone to share anything.

Charlie Rose:
Well, no, it’s because you have more information about everybody than anybody else.

Mark Zuckerberg:
This is an important point though.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, Elliot Trig [spelled phonetically] has this great — Elliot Trig has this great story he tells. He works [unintelligible] company. He says there’s this old joke, where, you know, the man loses his keys and he’s looking for the keys under the lamppost, and someone says, “Well, why are you looking under the light? They’re clearly not here.” He’s like, “Well, this is the only reason I can — only place I can see. If I go over there.” We are focused on privacy. We care the most about privacy. Our business model is by far the most privacy friendly to consumers. And we talk about it the most. And I think we’re the light. We’re the light. We are the transparent place where people can understand and I think you will continue to see conversations about Facebook in privacy. But it’s because we lead and we care so much about it.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I think it’s worth explaining this a bit more, though.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, when you’re saying that we’re the light, it’s because, sure, people have a lot of information on Facebook. But that’s information that they’ve put into the service.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg:
If you look at companies, whether it’s Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft, right, that have search engines and ad networks, they also have a huge amount of information about you. It’s just that they’re collecting that about you behind your back, really. And it’s like you’re going — you’re going around the web, and they have cookies, and they’re collecting this huge amount of information about who you are. But you never know that. And I mean, some of these companies make an effort to give you a product where –

Charlie Rose:
But do you find that a bit scary?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, I just — I think it’s — it’s just less transparent –

Sheryl Sandberg:
There’s no light.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– than what’s happening on Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s the dark.

Mark Zuckerberg:
So on Facebook someone wants to –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Contact.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– target say, okay, I want to — I want to advertise — like I’m a band, and I’m coming to the Bay Area, I’m going to advertise to people who like a band, and they’re going to — those people only fit if they’ve put in that they like that band.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
On those other services, you can still do that kind of advertising, but you’re going to find people based on what they’ve browsed around on the web and the people have little or no control over the information that a company like Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft has about you. And, I don’t know, I think that some of those companies have made an effort to give people to give a payage that they can go see all the information that the company has about them. But, I mean, very few people are actually going to go do that. So in reality I think that these companies with those big ad networks are basically getting away with collecting huge amounts of information, likely way more information than people are sharing on Facebook about themselves. But I think because people can see how much information people are sharing about themselves on Facebook –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yes.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– it appears scarier. But in reality, you have control over every single thing that you’ve shared on Facebook. You can take it down and — [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose:
If you take it down, you say look, enough, gone.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
And what else? What happens if you die? What happens then?

Sheryl Sandberg:
If you let us know, we memorialize the page.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
If a family member lets us know that someone has deceased –

Charlie Rose:
And so anybody who wants to –

Mark Zuckerberg:
– we’ll memorialize the page.

Charlie Rose:
– take them down and erase forever.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, you can erase forever.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s not perfect in the sense of if I put something up, I can take it down, it’s gone.

Charlie Rose:
But –

Sheryl Sandberg:
If I’ve shared it and someone’s reshared it –

Charlie Rose:
Right. Exactly.

Sheryl Sandberg:
– won’t go down. It’s out there. And that’s one of the things. But it really is the point that the only thing Facebook knows about you are things you’ve done and told us. It is self-reported.

Charlie Rose:
But the genius of Facebook is that it has the possibility of sending it out like nothing else to more places.

Sheryl Sandberg:
We never — Facebook never sends any information out about anyone.

Charlie Rose:
I understand that. But it goes out because Facebook has a system that allows that.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, because Facebook –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yes.

Mark Zuckerberg:
– allows people –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Allows other people to share.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
Exactly right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right.

Charlie Rose:
Right, right.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

Charlie Rose:
Let me talk two things about, one you, the empowerment of women and then a sense of who you represent. This is a place that you are — you stand out because you and Marissa and a few others, you know, is — is technology a place that women can find the kind of opportunity that you want them to find? Does it need mentoring and all kinds of other things that people like Sheryl Sandberg can deliver?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Look, I think the issue of women in the economy and the country is a huge one. It’s something that I care passionately about and Mark cares passionately about and has helped me too. You know, we have basically a stalled revolution for women. You know, women became 50 percent of the college graduates in this country in 1981 and then made steady progress, more college degrees, more graduate degrees, more manager positions. Over — and we’re still making progress. Over the last ten years, women have stalled out at the top. Women in corporate America have 15 to 16 percent of the board seats and of the kind of CEO [spelled phonetically], the high-level jobs, and that has not moved in ten years.

Charlie Rose:
Why?

Sheryl Sandberg:
Oh, it’s probably longer than we have time for. A lot of reasons, but I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force. I think the achievement gap is caused by a lot of things. It’s caused by institutional barriers and all kinds of stuff. But there’s also a really big ambition gap. If you survey men and women in college today in this country, the men are more ambitious than the women. And until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men –

Charlie Rose:
And you know, there’s that famous [unintelligible] between, you know, they changed the name in one case it was Howard, in another case it was –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Howard and Heidi.

Charlie Rose:
– Howard and Heidi, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah. And the point of that study is that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. So as a man gets more powerful and more successful, everyone — men and women like him more. And as a woman gets more powerful and successful, everyone, including women like them less. Canaleta [spelled phonetically] called it self-doubt and self-defense.

Charlie Rose:
Now, what does it mean to be Mark Zuckerberg today, in terms of what — the revolution, in terms of the attention? I mean, a sense of how you adjust and how you assimilate and how you, in a sense, make sure that you are in command of it, and it’s not in command of you.

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t know. I think a big piece is just to try to stay grounded and, I don’t know, have a pretty simple life, right. I mean, I don’t — so people say that, you know, the company is so valuable, and there are all these people there and all that. But I think the number of people who I work with I stay focused on keeping them who I think are really good people, really smart, intellectually curious. I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that. We have a very open culture at the company where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It’s an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass so everyone can see into it and see what’s going on.

I don’t know. I just think that — actually, it’s really connected to the mission of the company. I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life. But I also think in terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives and when you’re more connected and have more of a flow from people. So I don’t know. I think that’s really it. I mean, I really try to live the mission of the company and embody that for the company and keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah. It’s interesting to watch as closely as I have. Like since I’ve known Mark over the last four years, in some ways, everything’s changed, in some ways, nothing has changed. So what’s changed is, you know, he was on his way to being Mark Zuckerberg four years ago. But now he’s like Mark Zuckerberg.

Charlie Rose:
He is Mark Zuckerberg.

Sheryl Sandberg:
He’s Mark Zuckerberg. Well, you know what I mean, right. Like we used to –

Charlie Rose:
Halloween, kids come to his house and knock on the door. It’s like –

Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, we used to walk around — right.

[talking simultaneously]

Sheryl Sandberg:
But we could walk around Palo Alto four years ago, and people didn’t like look. And now they do. But when you actually know him, like nothing’s changed. He wears actually exactly the same thing even though it’s a new T-shirt. But he wears the same thing. He has the same girlfriend.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Sheryl Sandberg:
He likes the same restaurants, not necessarily the restaurants I like, right. Like really nothing’s changed. He has the same group of friends. And I think the ability — I think we all focus on it here, but like stay grounded. Don’t change your social circles. You know, I have the same best friends I’ve had since I was in high school. Mark has the same friends he’s had since I was here. And that stuff really matters. Live your regular life and just try to build stuff that matters. It’s what we’re just trying to do.

Charlie Rose:
Thank you for this. Great to see you.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Thank you.

Sheryl Sandberg:
Thank you for visiting us.

Charlie Rose:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Conversation with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg at their place in California. Thank you for joining us. See you next time.

Coach's Eye for iPhone

The Story of Broke: Why There's Still Plenty of Money to Build a Better Future.

Why’s it important to pay taxes?

American taxpayers do it every day. It's like getting to be a superhero!


What’s so great about the EPA?


The EPA works hard to ensure that companies aren't spilling toxic waste into our groundwater, that our air is clean and breathable and our rivers are clean enough to have fish, rather than flames, in them. Visit thankyouepa.com for more about what the EPA does for us everyday.

What else could we buy with lower defense spending?


Curious about how many college scholarships, households with renewable energy or elementary school teachers we could be paying for with the money we spend on tanks and fighter jets? The National Priorities Project’s “Trade Offs” websiteallows you to make direct comparisons between military spending and other things on which we could be spending our federal money. While this site doesn’t include all the possible things we could choose to invest in as a society, it does give us a sense of the things we trade off to keep such a bloated military budget. It turns out we really do have a choice between War and Austerity or Peace and Prosperity. Where do you want your tax dollars going?


Does Walmart need a free road?

Hardly. Walmart recorded over $400 billion in sales in 2010, making it North America's largest retailer. And it's not just free roads that Wal-Mart gets from the public's pockets! According to Walmart SubsidyWatch: "A secret behind Wal-Mart's rapid expansion in the United States has been its extensive use of public money. This includes more than $1.2 billion in tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and outright grants from state and local governments around the country. In addition, taxpayers indirectly subsidize the company
by paying the healthcare costs of Walmart employees who don't receive coverage on the job and instead turn to public programs such as Medicaid."

Don't those tax breaks for Big Oil create jobs?


The hugely profitable oil and gas industry is set to receive nearly $100 billion in unnecessary taxpayer subsidies in the coming decades, says a September 2011 report by the Democratic staff of the US House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee. According to the same report, despite these massive profits, oil companies are not creating jobs in the United States or globally. Despite generating $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP
combined to reduce their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees over that time. In 2010 alone, the big 5 oil companies reduced their global workforce by a combined 4,400 employees, while making a combined $73 billion in profits. http://democrats.naturalresources.house.gov/content/files/2011-09-08_RPT_OilProfitsPinkSlips.pdf

Who are the biggest offenders?


The Big Banks for one. According to a September 2011 report by Public Campaign and National People’s Action, the 12 members of the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction (you know, the Congressional Supercommittee in the US charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures) have received $41 million from the financial sector during their time in Congress and at least 27 current or former aides for the committee members have lobbied on behalf of financial firms. Among the ideas on the table before the committee are tax reforms
that would close the so-called “Hedge Fund Loophole” and institute a Financial Speculation Tax, both opposed by the finance industry. As the report writers ask, “Will supercommittee members do what it takes to raise the revenue necessary or bow to the strong influence of their Wall Street backers?” We think that’s a great question, don’t you? showdowninamerica.org


Shouldn’t we just end all subsidies?

No way. Government has a key role to play in supporting healthy and fair economic activity. Subsidies – broadly defined – are an important set of tools to meet that purpose. We support subsidies and other government investment tools – from tax breaks to research support to purchasing agreements – that make our economy and environment more healthy and safe and meet real public needs. There are numerous examples of successful public-private partnerships that led to technological innovations we enjoy today,
from microchips and the internet to new drug treatments and energy technologies. The problem is, instead of investing in the future, we’re propping up last century’s dirty technologies.
UTILIZE MANUFACTURER TAKEBACK PROGRAMS - If there is no e-Steward near you, then you may want to use the manufacturer's takeback program, although many don't provide much

多功能三维微血管网络 (视频简介)

用的原料和常规的复合材料制备方法，合成出同时具有高强度、并且具备多重功能的三维微血管网络。


在生物系统中，血管网络用于承担机体最基本的职能，如：温度调节。热量通过这个网络传递到器官的表面并且快速耗散；营养输送同样也是通过这样一个网络来进行。在生物系统中，这些网络具有轻、强韧并且能够进行传热和传质(energy and mass transport)的特点。不过，制备具有类似性能的人造系统很具挑战性，因为这样的系统往往可以有很高的强度/重量比，但是缺乏天然生物系统所具有的动态功能。从实验角度来看，将血管和具有结构的组件整合在一起也是很困难的，而且现有的用于制备合成血管网络的技术都不适合快速大规模制备。

最近来自美国伊利诺伊大学香槟分校（Universityof Illinois at Urbana- Champaign）和阿贡国家实验室（Argonne National Laboratory）的研究人员报道了一种新方法，仅使用商用的原料和常规的复合材料制备方法，就可以合成出同时具有强度高和多重功能两大特点的三维微血管网络。在这个方法中，首先需要将牺牲纤维（sacrificial fibers）与玻璃纤维一起织成具有一定结构的预制体，然后在预制体中的空隙中填入树脂并且加热固化。牺牲纤维可以在高温下蒸发消失，这样原先填充牺牲纤维的地方会留下空的管道，即可得到三维的类似微血管的网络系统。最后得到的复合材料结构可以是由简单的管道结构组成，也可以是由电脑控制编织技术织成的精密复杂网络结构组成，这些仅仅取决于牺牲纤维的编织和排列方法。通过在这些微管道内填充不同的溶液，作者展示了这个复合机构具有的种种功能，包括热调控，电导率调节，动态机电信号以及化学反应性。这个三维微管网络合成系统具有可靠性以及很好的扩展性，并且可以应用于仿生输运功能（mimic biological transport functions）材料的合成制备。

A. P. Esser-Kahn et al., Adv. Mater. 2011 ; DOI: 10.1002/adma.201100933.

溶液法制备含有共轭聚合电解质的有机发光晶体管 （视频简介）

Seo教授和加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的Gui Bazan教授通过视频向大家介绍他们即将发表在Adv. Func. Mater.上的文章：Solution-Processed Organic Light-Emitting Transistors Incorporating Conjugated Polyelectrolytes。


他们通过引入共轭聚合电解质（Conjugated Polyelectrolytes – CPE）层、对称的具有高工函数的源极和金属漏极电极，提高了p型有机发光晶体管（Organic Light-Emitting Transistors – OLETs）的性能。该晶体管包含3层的结构：空穴传输层、发光层和作为电子注入层的CPE层。CPE层的厚度对器件的性能具有非常重要的影响。他们首次向大家展示了具有优良性能的溶液法制备的蓝光OLETs。这些研究成果既简化了器件的制备工艺，也通过引入CPE层提高了有机光电器件的性能。

(Cinderella Man)

Béatrice Coron: Stories cut from paper

ABOUT THIS TALK

With scissors and paper, artist Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds, cities and countries, heavens and hells. Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek, she describes her creative process and the way her stories develop from snips and slices.

(Applause)

(Applause)

I am a papercutter. (Laughter) I cut stories. So my process is very straightforward. I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't. And as my image is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not from that story. So I didn't come to papercutting in a straight line. In fact, I see it more as a spiral.

I was not born with a blade in my hand. And I don't remember papercutting as a child. As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist. But I was also a rebel. And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs. So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady. I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt. I moved for two years in Taiwan. And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide. And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia.

So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist. (Applause) I chose papercutting because paper is cheap, it's light, and you can use it in a lot of different ways. And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient. And it's also just getting to the essential of things. So the word "silhouette" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette. And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait "a la silhouette." (Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios. And people told me -- like these surrealistic views of the Empire State building -- they told me, "You're making artist books."

So artist books have a lot of definitions. They come in a lot of different shapes. But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story. They can be with words or without words. And I have a passion for images and for words. I love pun and a relation to the unconscious. I love oddities of languages. And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them. So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages.

So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French. And my daily language is English. So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English. So one of these works is the "Spelling Spider." So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee. (Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web. (Laughter) And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet. So you can read "architecture active" or "active architecture." So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives. So if you don't know one of these languages, it's instant learning.

And one ancient form of the book is scrolls. So scrolls are very convenient, because you can create a large image on a very small table. So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image, though it makes a very freestyle architecture. And I'm making all those kinds of windows. So it's to look beyond the surface. It's to have a look at different worlds. And very often I've been an outsider. So I want to see how things work and what's happening. So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit. And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions.

It's all if. So what if we were living in balloon houses? It would make a very uplifting world. And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. It would be so light. So sometimes I view from the inside, like egocentricity and the inner circles. Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams. And we can use them also as a safety net.

And my inspirations are very eclectic. I'm influenced by everything I read, everything I see. I have some stories that are humorous, like "Dead Beats." (Laughter) Other ones are historical. Here it's "Candy City." It's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar. It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between. And sometimes I have an emotional response to news, such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Other times, it's not even my stories. People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape. I channel their history [so that] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities. I call them Freudian cities.

I cannot speak for all my images, so I'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title. "Modicity." "Electricity." "Mad Growth on Columbus Circle." "Reef City." "A Web of Time." "Chaos City." "Daily Battles." "Felicity." "Floating Islands." And at one point, I had to do "The Whole Nine Yards." So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long. (Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected. One story leads to another. I was also interested in the physicality of this format, because you have to walk to see it.

And parallel to my cutting is my running. I started with small images, I started with a few miles. Larger images, I started to run marathons. Then I went to run 50K, then 60K. Then I ran 50 miles -- ultramarathons. And I still feel I'm running, it's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter.

(Laughter)

And running gives me a lot of energy. Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. The result is "Hells and Heavens." It's two panels 13 ft. high. They were installed in the museum on two floors, but in fact, it's a continuous image. And I call it "Hells and Heavens" because it's daily hells and daily heavens. There is no border in between. Some people are born in hells, and against all odds, they make it to heavens. Other people make the opposite trip. That's the border. You have sweatshops in hells. You have people renting their wings in the heavens. And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action, and the result puts you in hells or in heavens. So the whole "Hells and Heavens" is about free will and determinism.

And in papercutting, you have the drawing as the structure itself. So you can take it off the wall. Here it's an artist book installation called "Identity Project." It's not autobiographical identities. They are more our social identities. And then you can just walk behind them and try them on. So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity.

That's another artist book project. In fact, in the picture, you have two of them. It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City. Why do I call it a book? It's called "Fashion Statement," and there are quotes about fashion, so you can read it, and also, because the definition of artist book is very generous. So artist books, you take them off the wall. You take them for a walk. You can also install them as public art. Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called "Floating Memories." So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind.

I love public art. And I entered competitions for a long time. After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City. It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen. I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper. I called it "Working in the Same Direction." But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions. With public art, I could also make cut glass. Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx. And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed. So for the subway in New York, I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading. It is travel in time, travel on time. And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories.

Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California. So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose. So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization. Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers. And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today. And it's still growing. So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass. And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind. I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge. I also planted the bibliotree. So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages. And it's all about international writing systems. And on the branches you have library material growing. You can also have function and form with public art. So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench. But you have a bonus with this bench. Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs.

(Laughter)

Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station. And it's called "Seeds of the Future are Planted Today." It's a story about transformation and connections. So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails. To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic. And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing. So each building has its own personality. And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history. And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street. It's called Rue de Prairie -- Prairie Street. So I brought back the rabbit, the dragonfly, to stay in that street.

And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year. So that was a very captive audience. And I wanted to give them an escape. I created "All Around Town." It is a papercutting, and then after, I added color on the computer. So I can call it techno-crafted.

And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques. But the result is always to have stories. So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities. They have a lot of scenarios. I don't know the stories. I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history. And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell. But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world. And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic. And it's what story cutting is all about.

(Applause)

Video: Amazing Mini Humanoid Rides Bicycle

REMIX10: Design Venturing

Recording from REMIX10 in Belgium:

Design venturing Design techniques for identifying, developing and evaluating business opportunities.

This session will cover several case studies and best practices from the Microsoft Pioneer Studios, a design venture team that is chartered with developing new consumer businesses for Microsoft. Learn how to harvest insights, translate them into value propositions and build products around core brand ideas. Examples include ventures in emerging markets and mobile devices.

"Hot Air" - A Movie About the Sonoma County Hot Air Balloon Classic

"America Is Not Broke [HQ]" - Michael Moore - Madison, WI 03.05.2011

(Video by Joe Stadele) Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore took a last minute flight to Madison, WI in the early hours of March 5th, 2011 for a surprise appearance at Wisconsin Wave's "We Are Wisconsin Rally." After the speech, he gave his handwritten speech to a kid in the front.

"The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre."

"Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich." -- Michael Moore

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speech delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart -- because you -- yes, you, too! -- might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois -- whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job -- their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he's stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he's just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

"There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you...?"

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.

Cuts that threaten to starve European food aid