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Episode 143—Blake J. Harris Talks Virtual Reality, Facebook, and His Unlikely Path to Nonfiction Writing
126 Plays6 years ago
"I want to do right by these people. I want to tell a story that honors the stuff they did," says Blake J. Harris.
Blake J. Harris, author of The History of the Future and Console Wars came by the show to talk about his latest book on virtual reality, Oculus, and Facebook.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for sponsoring today's show.
Keep the conversation going by joining me @BrendanOMeara and the show @CNFPod on Twitter.
Visit brendanomeara.com for show notes to this and many, many more shows!
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Transcript
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
ACNFers, ready to rock, I sure as hell am. Riff. Ah, yes. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. For episode 143, I have Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars,
00:00:28
Speaker
and most recently the history of the future oculus face book in the revolution that swept virtual reality all that feels good
Personal Anecdote and Podcast Sponsorships
00:00:44
Speaker
Basically, I was a salesman for a vineyard. I had never done beverage sales in my life. I was subsequently never trained. And then at the height of us being the O'Mara's, getting used to the paycheck, I got fired. Let go, as my wife says. It wasn't fired or let go because of cause. It was basically an experiment gone horribly wrong. And your weekly CNF and host, unfortunately, paid the price.
00:01:16
Speaker
Um... Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's masters of fine arts and nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors.
00:01:35
Speaker
who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
Financial Struggles and Future Outlook
00:02:05
Speaker
So naturally, things are a bit on edge around CNF Pod HQ. I've been ramping up the freelancing, getting inquiries out, getting inquiries crafted, but even if I land anything, I won't be paid for months. And the pay after taxes will cover like a happy meal.
00:02:22
Speaker
It's tough. It's tough. I mean, it's exciting. And I've actually been kind of in a good mood during my days this week, hustling like hell to get more podcasts, which is happening. There's just the calendars filling up, which is nice. I can fill the pipeline, trying to get more sponsorship and even more freelance work. But it's tough when you know, there's no money coming in. And it's my fault, you know, ultimately, it's my fault. It sucks.
00:02:50
Speaker
Well, be sure to subscribe to the show where you get your podcasts and share this across your platforms. It'll help your old buddy Brendan out. He could use a little help these days. Keep the conversation going on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod. Same for Instagram at CNF Pod and Facebook. Creative nonfiction podcast there. Like I always say, you are the social network. So rage against the algorithm, man. And hand this off to a friend.
00:03:20
Speaker
Hey, you want some options? Here's an option for ya. Creative Nonfiction Podcast is also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Discover your story. Bay Path University, founded in New England, where I grew up, in 1897, is the first and only university to offer a no-residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on Creative Nonfiction.
00:03:48
Speaker
attend the full or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays.
00:04:13
Speaker
Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long residency in Ireland, the Emerald Isle, with guest writers including Andre Debuse III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August, January, and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA.
Interview with Blake J. Harris Begins
00:04:43
Speaker
So Blake J. Harris is here, that's at Blake J. Harris NYC on Twitter, go follow him. Generous dude, smart dude, tells good stories, love that when you're interviewing someone, takes a lot of the, does a lot of the heavy lifting for ya. He wrote a hefty book on the history of virtual reality, it's a fast paced book and we dive into his unorthodox path, unorthodox,
00:05:09
Speaker
path to telling true tales and how we put this latest book together. So I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Blake. What kind of kid were you? I think I was a boring kid. Let's see.
00:05:32
Speaker
Man, I haven't thought about my childhood in so long. So it wasn't like I wanted to be a wrecker when I was a kid. I basically spent my childhood assuming that I would probably play center field for the New York Yankees, though I had no talent to back up to that opinion. But I did watch a lot of television.
00:05:53
Speaker
you know, I knew all the lines to all the syndicated shows like Saved by the Bell and Family Matters. I think my parents thought was a huge waste of time, which I personally think was probably a huge waste of time. But it did really get me interested in storytelling and doing so in like a, you know, a popular entertaining way. So if I was going to dissect my career, looking at it that way, I think that did inform my style a lot. You know, I guess I wanted to write the Saved by the Bell of VR books, but also have it be filled with historical information.
00:06:23
Speaker
But then, you know, I guess what what actually happened how I got into writing and fell in love with it was I read I did read a lot as a kid. I was I got good grades I I did all my homework and did all that stuff which I I don't know why I didn't retrospect but but you know because I feel like so much of life is is what follow your own passion being doing things you're interested in but anyway, I
00:06:49
Speaker
But I was a good kid, but I stopped reading along the way, watched a lot of Saved by the Bell, and then I was interested in dating this girl during my senior year of high school, and she was a big reader. So I asked her to recommend a book, and I read a book to impress her initially, and then I ended up reading a lot of books and realizing that I had missed out on all these great classics, and became obsessed with reading, and then wanted to write my own book, and then that led me to wanting to write the great American novel, and I took a few shots at that in college,
00:07:18
Speaker
And it was exactly what you would expect from a semi-arrogate 21-year-old kid who went abroad to write a book. But, you know, at least I finished these things. That was really good. And then by the time I graduated college, I was 22. I knew that I love writing more than anything else. That's what I wanted to do for a living. But I had no idea how to go about making money doing that.
00:07:41
Speaker
I ended up taking a job back in New York where I grew up. I grew up in Westchester, in the town of Chappaqua, where the Clintons now live. But I moved to the city. And for the next eight years, I had a day job trading commodities, buying and selling coffee and sugar and soybeans and other
00:08:01
Speaker
soft commodities. And that was not what I wanted to be doing with my time. But I did work with great Brazilians there who I really loved working with. And one of the upshots to that job was that the market closed at 215 so I could leave the office and then spend the rest of the day writing. And at that point, it was mostly screenwriting.
00:08:22
Speaker
I still had no idea how to make a living as a writer, but there seemed to be some semblance of a track when it came to screenwriting, or at least there was like, you know, you write a script, and then you submit it, and sometimes things happen, sometimes doesn't, it seemed a little more tenable than fiction, you know, than prose. And then I guess
00:08:43
Speaker
you know, I for a while considered film school or getting an MFA. I got rejected from a lot of programs. And then I got to some and decided, you know, I'm going to make my own movies and write my own stuff because I guess for me, though,
00:08:59
Speaker
While the talent was always questionable, I was always self-motivated, and at least I knew that if I set out to write a book, I could do it. It might not be a great book, but I felt like I could probably try to teach myself or that I was better off as an independent learner. Then one of the big turning points for me was a really disappointing one was that I'd spent all these years doing screenwriting, never found any success at all, but at least I had been successful enough to get good representation,
00:09:28
Speaker
To get a good manager. And so my, my three writing partner and I, my, my buddy Jonah to list who I still work with and his name will probably come up later on. But we wrote this script that was called the sorted tales of an evil tyrannical ex dictator.
00:09:41
Speaker
And it was about a Ricky Gervais-like dictator of a wealthy European country who gets overthrown and moves to New Jersey to work in the DMV as some sort of a witness relocation program. And as you can probably suspect, this was very much inspired by Coming to America and Trading Places and those kinds of movies from the 80s.
00:10:02
Speaker
And I mentioned this because, you know, this was the script that was going to break our careers that was going to make us millions of dollars or set up stuff on the path for that. And then about a week after we finished it, um, Sasha Baron Cohen announced that he was going to be doing a movie about a dictator and then our project instantly became worthless. Um, and, uh, and that was really, really depressing, but also, uh, you know, educational at the time that maybe I didn't really care that much about that component, but it, but it was good because like,
00:10:29
Speaker
I understood why him having not written a script yet, but saying he was going to do this, why that was way more valuable than what Jonah and I had done, whether it was good or not. And that's kind of a fair system. He had earned that credibility. It was unfortunate that people weren't going to read our script now. But then the big takeaway and the reason why I go into like telling the story was that by that point, I must have been 27 or 28.
Blake's Influences and Writing Style Evolution
00:10:56
Speaker
I think that always in the back of my mind, I had
00:10:58
Speaker
this sort of like, you know, sitcom-y idea of like, you know, if I don't make it by the time I'm 30, I'm gonna quit or 35 or 40 or whatever it is. And I sort of realized after that experience, after I spitefully said like, oh, I'm never gonna write again, that that was just silly, that I loved writing so much that I was never going to stop writing. So any ideas of like,
00:11:19
Speaker
you know, me trying to spite myself to say like, I don't, if this doesn't happen, I'm not going to do it. That was, that was silly. So I knew it was going to write. I assumed I was probably never going to make money doing it. Um, and, and for that reason, I sort of came to terms with that and decided that, you know, whatever I write, it should be something that I'm absolutely a thousand percent passionate about. Um, so that way if a Sasha Baron Cohen situation happens again, so be it, you know, I don't regret my time. Um, and then I think as, as often happens, as often seems to happen when I interview,
00:11:49
Speaker
successful people in film and other creative professions. The one time I set out to do a project without any expectation of making money off of it that was driven purely by passion was the one that really clicked for me. And then that was how I ended up, that was me writing console words, my first book, which we could talk more about if you want.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And as you were getting your repetitions from 215 on or even before then in college and high school, maybe, was there anybody in particular, maybe a mentor or maybe even your parents that encouraged you down that path and gave you the permission to keep going and to keep exercising this muscle? That's a really great question.
00:12:35
Speaker
Once I fell in love with writing, I did always hope to find that movie-like or sitcom-like mentor figure that would challenge me and see the hidden gem talent in me. I never did have an experience like that.
00:12:53
Speaker
flashing forward to now, I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily the nicest person or anything like that, but I am always very nice and always make time for young writers out there who are looking to write books about video games because I wish that I had someone to just talk to or to help me figure out how do you make a pitch or what's a proposal look like, so all those things. So I didn't have anyone like that, but what I did have and what is pretty obvious in retrospect
00:13:20
Speaker
I could not have done without and could not have been succeeded without was incredibly supportive parents. You know, I'll caveat that and say that these were, you know, my mom and dad who are
00:13:35
Speaker
two of my favorite people in my life. They, they are also, you know, protective Jewish parents who said I should be a lawyer and told me, you know, they, they, they, they always very much encouraged my writing. And one of the best ways they did that was by actually reading it and being one of the few people in the world who cared what I was writing. Um, you know, but, but at the same time they did, um, impress upon me the importance of getting a stable job. And, you know, like,
00:14:00
Speaker
you know, they weren't, I guess I just wanted to make the distinction, they weren't the sort of parents were like, go for it, quit your job, write all day, do that. And I think it was probably good to have that balance. Because, you know, I guess in the end, I was able to make it work by having a day job and also doing that on the side. And it also, you know, made me feel good that that
00:14:24
Speaker
when I was finally able to to quit my job and to go right full time but they, but they were incredibly supportive. And and I think that my parents are still bummed that I haven't dedicated either of my two books to them because my wife deserves all so much credit. But, but yeah, I definitely
00:14:41
Speaker
could not have done without them. And then also just they were always there to talk. So like when the Sasha Baron Cohen thing happened, you know, I could have just led that lead to bitterness internally. But my parents and my wife too were always there to talk it out with me to let me vent and yell and complain and whine and be a baby about it. And then that helped me get back in my feet and realize I love this thing. I just got to find a different story or a better story.
00:15:05
Speaker
And as you were, of course, going through these repetitions and finding your voice and practicing, what would you say that you struggled with early on, as Ira Glass says about the gap, the creative gap between
00:15:26
Speaker
what you're capable of doing and what you want to do there's a big gap but as you practice more and more of course that gap narrows so early on what would you say you were struggling with and worked your way through on your on your path to let's say relative mastery because no one really masters it so for me you know
00:15:47
Speaker
around the time when I was in college, when I was becoming more and more sure that I wanted to be a writer and that I really wanted to develop this talent and felt like I could if I put in enough time. You know, that was around, this was like 2004, 2005. This was around the time when Jonathan Saffron Fuller was at the height of his game and Dave Eggers. So those were like the two big authors in my opinion. Like I would read anything that McSweeney's did because of Dave Eggers.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so I think that, and I mentioned that not just because there are both incredible writers, who I recommend everyone read all their stuff, but as often seems to be the case, when there is success, and I see this all the time in sports or movies, it's like, you almost take away the wrong lessons. And so I think that what people talk about most with Dave Eggers or Jonathan Saffron-Fower is their, you know,
00:16:42
Speaker
their creative decisions, they're almost like the creative gimmicks that they use. And then, you know, I definitely went through a period of trying to copy them. And then that's just silly, because I'm actually just literally copying their gimmick, or then also trying to come up with my own. And all of this gets to what I think in retrospect was the biggest gap between
00:17:05
Speaker
what I was able to do or what I thought writing was and what I now think writing is. And I was telling this to a friend the other day that when I was a young writer, and I think this is true of a lot of young writers, you think that being a good writer means writing really awesome sentences. Sometimes that means using great words, big words, or sometimes it just means really packing a punch in those sentences and really painting a picture.
00:17:30
Speaker
and Eggers and particularly Jonathan Sevenfold are excellent to that, but that's so not why their books are good. Their books are good because they're great storytellers. And I was mentioning this in the context of the Da Vinci Code, which I don't think Dan Brown writes awesome, fancy, sexy sentences, but I think he's an incredible storyteller when it comes to writing an engaging story. And so
00:17:59
Speaker
That was actually probably that book, the Da Vinci Code, surprisingly enough, was probably a huge part of what influenced me to the rest of my career. I remember I started a book club, my junior year, I don't know, my sophomore year of college.
00:18:12
Speaker
And the first book that I selected for the book club was the Da Vinci Code, which, you know, everyone kind of thought was a weird lowbrow choice. But to me, I was just like amazed that he could write this book that was so engaging and packed so much research into it. And there was, you know, I had a lot of issues with the book, but I just thought to write basically popular fiction and have it be so research based was very impressive. And I think, you know, again,
00:18:36
Speaker
just looking through the principle of my own career. That's kind of how I go about writing things, trying to pack as much research into a sweet, tasty, easy to digest story.
Nonfiction Transition and Storytelling Perspective
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking to maybe those three authors, before when we asked if you had a mentor and you didn't really have one per se, but would you say that certain books, and maybe specifically those writers, or essentially you would consider them mentors?
00:19:07
Speaker
Absolutely. I think that I've always been like an introvert, like I love interviewing people, but I guess I like to be social on my own terms. And so for me, it probably works better to sort of not to have the independence to have a mentor, a passive mentor, like Jonathan Saff and Phil were Dave Eggers, who don't even know that I exist, and to, you know, to study their works and to aspire to be like them.
00:19:37
Speaker
But I think, you know, going ahead in my own career a bit, I hadn't really thought that much about your question or the Ira class quote, I had never heard that before, but you know, sort of that gap. And I think that maybe a good place to see that is that as I, you know, got older, I started reading a lot more nonfiction, and sort of the influence or the passive mentorship of
00:20:01
Speaker
Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers was replaced by a similar role by Michael Lewis and Ben Mezrich. And I think that the difference that I now see having this conversation with you is that when I tried, you know, when I was so inspired by Eggers and Safran Foer, I tried to write like them.
00:20:19
Speaker
You know because they did such a good job and I wanted to do such a good job too and be like them But then as I was older and when I ended up writing in console worse and this this this most recent book the history of the future You know Michael Lewis and Ben Metric definitely Influenced me but it was more like I read their work and I loved it But I I noticed where I would do things differently or where I would have loved for them to you know talk more about things like I remember I sort of clicked for me and
00:20:46
Speaker
when I was reading Ben Mezrich's wonderful book, The Accidental Billionaires, which was optioned and became the social network.
00:20:53
Speaker
And I really do, that is one of my all-time favorite books. But I remember thinking like, oh man, I wish that he had spent like two pages talking about, you know, around the time that Facebook was being invented by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Savaron and the Winklevoss twins. Like, I wish he had also talked about Myspace and Friendster and, you know, what else was going on in the social media industry so that I understand like why this was happening now or why this was important or how Facebook was different. And so that's something that, you know, I always try to bring to my work is to give a little more context. And so I think that,
00:21:24
Speaker
that takes like a lot of like confidence to even just say like is you know this book that is so successful and that I love that I think that there's ways to improve it or maybe not even ways to improve it but things that I would do differently and you know I think that that is a good sign of finding your voice when you're reading even your favorite works and seeing how you would do things.
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, that underscores a great point of why there are so many great biographies on, say, Abraham Lincoln. You read a bunch and you realize that there might be an unexplored corner, or the story could be, just because it's been told in this way, it hasn't been told your way, with your taste. So it's a matter, and that's the great power of artistic agency with this kind of work, right?
00:22:15
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think to extend beyond what you're saying, so I had written basically exclusively fiction, whether it was screenwriting, comedies, or my novels. And Council Wars was the first time that I wrote a nonfiction book. Actually, it was the first time I wrote nonfiction at all. I hadn't worked as a journalist reporter. I was trading commodities.
00:22:43
Speaker
And, um, and I remember thinking midway through writing that, that it would be hard, you know, that there was just such a level of realism. I mean, kind of duh, but there was like a level of realism to writing about real people that I hadn't achieved with fiction that I think the best, the best fiction writers do, you know, they created a whole world, they create a whole universe. I always felt like I was maybe like play acting, like I was writing a story. Um, and so that,
00:23:08
Speaker
that sort of forced me to raise my game a bit. And the reason I thought of that, getting back to what you were saying, was just about perspective and having it be my take. And as I've said before, and I kind of say at the front of this new book, I'm such a proponent of oral histories and documentary filmmaking.
00:23:34
Speaker
But 50 different people can make a documentary on the same thing, and they'd all be different. And it's largely because of which point of views are you going to tell the story through. And so for me, actually talking to people and actually seeing how so many different people who went through the same thing, experienced it differently, that really helped me cultivate my style and my attempt to try to capture a lot of those different perspectives and also figure out which ones I want to elevate.
00:24:02
Speaker
But yeah, like your point, that's why there's a lot of Lincoln books out there and there will continue to be a lot more.
00:24:10
Speaker
And given that you had little to no nonfiction experience, how were you able to get access and trust for console wars and get that off the ground, given that you didn't have that foundation of a lot of magazine writing or stuff of that nature? How did you get that going? That's a great question because I think that
00:24:38
Speaker
I ultimately, I didn't know what I was getting into. And I think that was a good thing. Had I known how hard that was going to be, that aspect of it, you know, gaining trust and just even being put in touch or finding the right people, I maybe would have given myself an excuse to not do it. But because I was just like, and then the other thing too was my own curiosity. And also I'll backtrack and just give you a little introduction of how that book happened.
Research and Writing 'Console Wars'
00:25:02
Speaker
was so I was kind of down on my luck after the screenwriting thing and then my brother bought me a Sega Genesis for my birthday maybe I think it was like my 28th birthday and so and then it was you know I was playing NHL 94 which is what you and I used to play when we were kids yeah that's the best game ever
00:25:25
Speaker
That's so good. That was the inaugural or the very first time like one-timers were put into hockey games, I think. Yes. I'll send you, after the show, my favorite thing that I've written besides my two books and besides my oral history of the TV show The League, which I love, is like an 8,000 word essay on NHL 94. Oh, yes. I'm learning why. How did one-timers come about? But it was kind of that same curiosity of like,
00:25:53
Speaker
How did one-timers get put into that game? And that was what happened. I was playing the Genesis and thinking to myself, like, like, like, I don't know that much about Sega. I also was realizing that my favorite books as an adult or as someone who was 28 at the time were behind the scenes business stories by Michael Lewis, Ben Mezrich, books like The Smartest Guys in the Room, where Disney were by James Stewart, like.
00:26:15
Speaker
And so before I ever set out to write Console Wars, I honestly just wanted to read a book like Console Wars. And I remember going to Barnes and Noble on 86th Street here in Manhattan. It's a gigantic store. I initially looked for a book like this in the, I was looking in the film history section and then the music history section, assuming that the video game history section couldn't be far away. There was no such section. I asked the woman at the information desk where the
00:26:40
Speaker
video game history section was, and she actually laughed at me. And then I asked her, you know, I said, Oh, can I just get one of the books about Sega and Nintendo or, you know, the business of video games, the history of video games, and they didn't have a single book in the entire store. And that was very weird to me, because I didn't, you know, I was not a gamer, I did not have that much experience with the gaming industry, but I knew enough to know that it was very successful.
00:27:04
Speaker
And they, you know, the only books that they actually had in the store related to gaming were walkthrough guides. So like, basically how to play games. There was nothing about the industry. And, um, then I went, you know, I left there and I should also mention that it wasn't even one of those situations where she said, uh, like, Oh, well, here's five books. We can order them for you, which was always weird because I can order them myself, but, but like, like they didn't, nothing even came up on her computer. So I thought that was odd. It wasn't like I left Barnes and Noble that day and thought like, aha, here's like a market demand that I'm going to fill.
00:27:33
Speaker
Um, but but I you know, it inspired me to see what was out there about the history of sega nintendo online Which was not that much and then also find a few books Find a few books about video games that had been written about the business side and there's a great book by david chef Um called game over which was like about the history of nintendo. Um, and his book is like largely it is the history of nintendo so it goes back to the late 1800s, but mostly it's about
00:27:59
Speaker
Nintendo resurrecting the video game market in the 1980s with the NES system and then towards the end of the book Sega releases their Genesis system as a competitor to Nintendo and the book sort of ends with this whole idea of like you know there's something called the World Wide Web that's coming and you know CD-ROMs might change everything and I felt like wow like the book's about to get exciting there's finally like a challenger and so in a lot of ways kind of use my book
00:28:25
Speaker
as a sequel to that and then so getting back to your question like once I decided okay I there is no sequel to this or there is no book about saying I tend to I want to write it how do I get the access and and the answer early on was through a website that I had made a lot of fun of in the past which was linked in
00:28:43
Speaker
Um, I literally just typed Sega and Nintendo and thousands of names came up. I made a list of like who was there during the times that would have been relevant to the story I was interested in telling. Um, and then it was just a numbers game. I think like, like 10% of people actually replied to me and that was okay. Cause that was, you know, even though 90% of the people said no, um, I now had 10%, you know, I now had 20 people or whoever many people.
00:29:05
Speaker
to talk to that I hadn't before. And then through those conversations, my initial goal was to just identify whether there was a story here, you know, like as a kid, you sort of imagine working at Sega or Nintendo, it's like working at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. But I did also prepare for the possibility that I would talk to people on that they would say, No, you know, I mean, it was a good job. But you know, it was just like punching the time card. You know, I made my money.
00:29:31
Speaker
in and out every day, you know, and maybe there was no passion to it. And I found out that that was the opposite, that almost everybody that I spoke with who worked at Sake and Nintendo during that time period of 1985 to 1996 or so, that it was often they described it as the greatest time of their life and almost like they were waiting for me to talk to them or they were ready for someone to tell their stories to, which made my job
00:29:54
Speaker
easier at first. Again, I was kind of fortunate that I wasn't, you know, trying to rip open oysters that wanted to stay shut. But the people were so happy to share with me at first helped, and then they also were enthusiastic enough to often put me in touch with other people and other people.
00:30:11
Speaker
And I definitely took it for granted at the time because now with this new book and some of the access issues and the difficulties there, that was much more of a journalistic experience of trying to extract information and dealing with deceptive people. But the Consul Wars was really great in that regard. It did take me three years to speak to everyone that I wanted to and then to write the book.
00:30:39
Speaker
or the, you know, I guess to sell the book proposal and then I quit my commodities job. My final day was on my 30th birthday. And then because it was my last time being in New York city for a while, and because I had always wanted to be a professional writer before I proposed to my girlfriend of at that point, I think like eight years, um, I went to go pick up the ring that day to have, and I was going to propose to her a few weeks later, but then I got home and there was a surprise party for my 30th birthday.
00:31:06
Speaker
And my uncle said, how does it feel to be the center of attention? And I said, it's okay, but I don't really like being the center of attention. And he said, well, sorry, it's your birthday. And then I said, well, maybe not. And then I proposed to my now wife. And so she became the center of attention. And then, like, I'd like the way that you've had me tell this story, because it is, you know, my own personal narrative. It is this crazy, wonderful story that I love telling a million times, because it's how I got to do what I love for
00:31:35
Speaker
living but it did feel like almost like like wow all that time and all that work and now I finally done it but really a couple weeks after that it was like all right now I have to write the book like I haven't actually done anything yet but like now now you have to do the thing and so that was uh daunting but amazing
00:31:55
Speaker
Did you run into feelings of the dreaded imposter syndrome, given that you didn't have that classic journalist background as you were plunging into this narrative history of this console war? Yeah, absolutely. I still feel imposter syndrome. I was actually, right before we spoke, I was doing a different interview and they asked about Palmer Lucky's imposter syndrome.
00:32:24
Speaker
said that he still felt it. I think almost all the successful people I know, the celebrities that I've had the opportunity to either befriend or to write about, they all feel it. And it's just surreal to get to do what you want for living and that other people care. And the point I made to the interviewer was that as I was on the call with them, and as I am on this call with you right now,
00:32:48
Speaker
I'm looking at the cover of my book, The History of the Future, and there is a really small but strong part of me that thinks like, wow, that book looks cool. I'd like to read that book. And then I'm thinking, no, I wrote that book. I know what's in there. It just feels crazy to go from writing for an audience of my parents and my girlfriend to an audience of hundreds of thousands.
00:33:16
Speaker
I would say, you know, I had over the years, I've grown less neurotic, but I was pretty neurotic. And I probably could have psyched myself out of writing console wars or really put myself into a weird place where like, Oh, do I deserve this? There was also going to be a movie based on it by Seth Rogen and like, you know, all that stuff. And I'm sure to some degree, I got a little nervous about like, am I going to be able to do this thing that now everyone's counting on and, and I think that
00:33:44
Speaker
what really made
Character-Driven Narratives and Popular Fiction Influence
00:33:47
Speaker
that a small concern of mine and helped me get past that pretty quickly is the thing that I love about nonfiction is that I'm spending so much time interviewing real people. And I always kind of imagine it like I'm like a bank and they're depositing their stories into me. And, and that creates a responsibility to it, you know, like, like these people are not just gonna give you their stories and give you their time and then
00:34:12
Speaker
Say like, all right, I'll never talk to you again. Like they, they're excited about it. They want to know like, how far along are you or have you spoken to this person? And that, that creates like a sense of, um, like obligation in a very good way. Like I want to do right by these people. I want to tell a story that properly honors all this awesome stuff that they did. And, and I think about that a lot because like I told you, you know, early in my career, I thought about fiction and I wrote fiction and,
00:34:40
Speaker
People ask me if I have an interest in writing fiction and I basically have an interest in writing anything, but I do feel like I probably would never finish my fiction book because I would just keep going and going or thinking about other things and tangent. But like, whereas when I'm writing these books about real people and dealing with them every day or every week or whatever, you know, I need to actually execute. I need to produce tangible results. And I think that that's a really good thing.
00:35:06
Speaker
What would you say you learned from the generation of, by generation, I mean the generative process of bringing console wars into being, and what did you take away from that that you were able to successfully apply to your next book? The biggest lesson that I learned is most simply condensed into
00:35:35
Speaker
the idea of who I write for when I write my books or when I write anything actually. And that is that I genuinely imagine my grandmother reading my work and what she'll think because whether I'm writing a high tech story about
00:35:48
Speaker
virtual reality in Oculus, or about video game battles with Sega Nintendo, or about the making of a terrible movie, like Kazam, for how did this get made? Like, I'm trying to think, maybe my grandma won't read these things. I mean, she will, because she's an awesome grandma. But like, maybe she wouldn't pick up a book like this. But if she did pick up a book like this, how could I keep her attention? How could I get her to be interested in the story of the making of Kazam, or, or, you know, the making of a virtual reality headset?
00:36:18
Speaker
And it is by, you know, to me, the solution is almost always by writing a character driven story and trying to find the universal ideas. And so so console wars, obviously, you know, corporate battle story, there's a money ball aspect to it. But but the book begins very intentionally with with a guy on a beach who's in between jobs in his career.
00:36:39
Speaker
thinks that his best years might be behind him. He thinks they probably are. And then he's approached with a job opportunity that seems mysterious, but interesting. And I think people can relate to that. There's something enticing about that. So for me, the biggest lesson was, like I said earlier, it's like storytelling. How can I make these stories interesting?
00:37:04
Speaker
I guess like big influence or something that I learned a lot from was, you know, was Game of Thrones, the books. Those books are, they're all written in a third person. But as people who've read the books know, like every chapter is from someone's perspective. And then I guess prior to that, I was kind of assumed perspective was like a first person thing, you know, like, like, it would have to be Jon Snow's perspective, like, I'm Jon Snow. But no, actually, you can have third person perspectives. And that's really just more about, like,
00:37:33
Speaker
someone's take on a story and then you start to see, oh wow, you know, like Sansa has a different perspective than Jon, even though it's the same scene. And then the other thing I really took away that I was getting at here with Demon Thrones was like, that book and even the first season of the show is like, it's really just like political drama and like a, like almost like a business battle, but it's told through interesting characters.
00:37:59
Speaker
and stylistically the book is basically just a bunch of scenes with dialogue and then in between the scenes you'll have like five pages of context about the history of these families or the history of
00:38:10
Speaker
Um, you know, Winterfell or something like that. And so seeing that I could do something similar, like that, that kind of gets to like the stuff I was talking about with Ben Mezrich earlier. Like I, I loved his work, but I would prefer sometimes in between these scenes, he, he gave us more context because that not only is that educational and interesting, but I think that as with Game of Thrones, like it gives more weight to the story that you're seeing. And now you actually understand, oh, that's why this is a big deal if this guy says this. Um, so.
00:38:37
Speaker
I guess seeing what worked was a big lesson for me, seeing that this style that I thought should exist more in non-fiction actually seemed to work, or at least the people reading it and my editors and my agents and all that were giving me really good feedback. I felt like I hadn't really seen too many non-fiction books like the one that I thought that I was writing.
00:39:02
Speaker
and to see that people were digging that was pretty awesome and educational for me.
00:39:08
Speaker
Yeah, in the course of any book of narrative non-affection,
Challenges of Authentic Dialogue in Nonfiction
00:39:12
Speaker
what's always a challenge, I think, for any reporter or researcher is generating white space on the page by dialogue. Dialogue is now your screenwriting background. It really comes up in this, given that it's so dialogue-driven. And that's very quick reading, that white space on the page. It's a big book.
00:39:33
Speaker
So seeing those pages filled with a lot of snappy dialogue between these integral characters really helps with the pacing and the reader experience. So given how challenging it can be to create dialogue that is as verifiably true as possible, how did you go about that as a strategy? And then how did you really nail down the verbiage as best you could through the course of your research?
00:40:00
Speaker
So I'm really glad that you asked about the dialogue, because I think that that, two things there. One, in 2014, I would say roughly that, you know, 75 to 80% of people really liked or loved the book, and about
00:40:18
Speaker
20 to 25 percent of people thought it was the worst nonfiction book ever written. And the ones who criticized it and hated it, they talked about the dialogue. There is a lot of dialogue in that book. It's conversations that happened 25 or so years ago. It's also recreated dialogue. It's recreated scenes. Sometimes I put together, you know, if there were several meetings that happened over a course of months, I condensed it into one meeting. So, you know, like,
00:40:45
Speaker
you know, a journalist would never do that. And so the, you know, I had mentioned that as the authors noted that book, so it wasn't like I was, you know, trying to get away with something there, but it was a stylistic choice and one that I, I'm, you know, I'm proud that I made, I think that was the right way to tell the story. I think that properly honored these people and captured the spirit of what happened. And, you know, I guess the one takeaway from that was, well, first, there was my
00:41:12
Speaker
first time I ever got criticism since first time anyone read my stuff. And so I really made me think like, did I did the right thing here? And when people are, you know, saying negative things about you, sometimes you think you don't just for that reason. But then after talking to the people that the book was about, and how much they said it captured and how authentic it was, I realized, okay, you know, they were the audience that I cared about most, they were the ones who actually know if I did my job well or not.
00:41:36
Speaker
Um, so I, so I don't regret it at all. Um, I do wish that I had shared in the author's note that I worked, um, in close collaboration with these people so that people didn't think that I was just like, you know, sitting on a beach somewhere and making up snappy dialogue. Um, but, but fortunately I think I was also given benefit of the doubt because it was a 550 page book that was so research driven. So people didn't assume that I was doing that to begin with, except for maybe 15% of people. But, but, but like, you know, I think.
00:42:06
Speaker
I think that was important because there was criticism around that, and it really did make me think a lot about why I had made certain choices, and it made me feel like I had made the right choices to tell that story. But then with this book, and then especially with how this most recent book, largely by the end of it, or one of the themes towards the end of it is failures in the media and failures of journalism.
00:42:32
Speaker
I felt like I needed to do a better job there and have much more hard and fast rules with this book to make sure that I felt as much like a journalist in this book as I felt like a storyteller. And so two rules that I made for myself with this book were
00:42:53
Speaker
one, whereas console wars would, you know, sometimes recreate scenes of like, you know, several meetings over several months could be condensed into one meeting. I in this book, I did not, I did not write anything that I couldn't provide an exact date for. So I had to make so I wanted to make sure that everything in there was a very specific date that I had the records for and could tell you this is exactly what happened on this day. And then the dialogue, I wanted to make sure
00:43:24
Speaker
that it really accurately represented these people. And so I wanted it to be like a documentary in the sense that every line of dialogue I wrote was a line of dialogue that I was told by somebody. So sometimes it would be secondhand of people remembering what someone else told them, you know, as in like a documentary, you would say, and then this guy said this, but, and then,
00:43:51
Speaker
But most of the time it was firsthand. And that way I was able to capture the verbal ticks of people. And I recorded every conversation I had for this book, which ended up becoming a very wise decision with the whole Facebook access aspect.
00:44:07
Speaker
you know, like I actually, in a very amateur way, because I didn't know what I was getting into with console wars, like I said earlier, and I think that was mostly a good thing, but like, I took notes on all my conversations. I didn't record any of my conversations. It was, I typed very fast, so I thought I think I captured most of it. But this time, if you would ask me to describe in an image what my experience of writing The History of the Future was like, the image that comes to mind for me
00:44:37
Speaker
is Gene Hackman in the conversation of him just listening to conversations. I feel like so much of my time was spent just transcribing these conversations and rewinding and getting a sense of how these people spoke and capturing all the likes and ums.
Exploring Facebook and Oculus
00:44:53
Speaker
And that's why with this book, the opening sentences from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the appearing at Oculus to tell the team that he's requiring them for $3 billion, there's a lot of likes and ums and commas in there, because I really wanted this to
00:45:08
Speaker
completely capture exactly how people describe it to me, or in that case, that was a video of him that I had.
00:45:15
Speaker
And part of that too was because I had the luxury, because this was a more recent story that people remembered more. And then part of it too was because of the stuff at the end of basically reporting on Mark Zuckerberg illegally asking an employee or forcing an employee to lie about his politics. And because Facebook's a publicly traded company, because I think there's a lot of concerns to be had about Facebook, I wanted to make sure that this book was really bulletproof when it came to the creative aspects of nonfiction, which I think were important to
00:45:45
Speaker
telling the story in an exciting way and a way that honored those who lived it. But I also didn't want anyone to ever think that like, oh, this is just a story. We can't trust the information because you should definitely trust the information here. Yeah. How has your relationship to Facebook changed over the course of this book? Significantly, night and day. So after console wars,
00:46:14
Speaker
Console Wars came out in May of 2014 by, within the next couple of months, by that summer, I knew that I was interested in writing a book about Oculus and about virtual reality. But as anyone could see from the two books I write or anything I write, like telling, getting access is so key for me. It would have been very hard to write an Oculus story in this kind of style without having close relationships with Palmer or Brendan or,
00:46:44
Speaker
the people in the book. So I was introduced to Palmer Lucky in July, I was introduced to Palmer in July of 2014. And Palmer, who was 19 years old when he founded Oculus, and at that point, I guess he was 21 years old, he said something very, that I thought was very mature. I told him basically, I'm interested in writing a book about you and Oculus. And he said that
00:47:12
Speaker
I was not the first journalist to reach out with such a request, but in his opinion, Oculus hadn't accomplished anything yet. They had just sold to Facebook for $3 billion and they had done a successful job of reigniting interest in virtual reality. But he said that they now needed to go from selling a gimmicky gaming toy to creating a mainstream device. And they had their work cut out for them. But at the same time, he really loved console wars.
00:47:39
Speaker
as did other people at the company. And so he was at least open to having the conversation. And we had that conversation over the course of the next, I guess, like 20 months, or, you know, basically in February of 2016, one month before they launched their first consumer product, the Oculus Rift, the CV1 headset.
00:47:59
Speaker
I was given access. I went out to Facebook in February 19th and 20th around that time of 2016. I found out that not only would I be given the interviews with the people that I wanted, but that Facebook was basically giving me exclusive access, at least amongst authors, that I was going to be the only author these people were speaking with.
00:48:23
Speaker
And, um, and then I ended up speaking to a lot of them every day for the next two or three years. And so at first, um, Facebook was incredibly supportive. Um, they, they set up that trip for me. They set up interviews with Brendan Reed, the CEO with, uh, Nate Mitchell, co-founder with Palmer Lucky, uh, the founder I'd mentioned. And, and, and then, you know, I made a list of like, here's other people that I'm interested in speaking with. And they, you know, the extent of their help was basically, or basically the, the arrangement was that,
00:48:54
Speaker
They would introduce me to anyone that I was interested in speaking with and basically say like, you know We're supportive of this project And then it was up to the person that they introduced me to whether they wanted to speak with me or not And then after that, you know at our discretion to speak as often as possible and have our own relationship So that was pretty respectable. That was good that Facebook, you know wasn't on every call and you know, really trying to Push the thing in a certain direction And that was great on my end. I didn't
00:49:22
Speaker
owe them, like I say, it was an arrangement, but the arrangement was really that they arranged it for me. Out of courtesy, I always actually share my work with the people that I write about, or at least I share the parts that I've written based on the information that they provided me and give them a chance to review, but I was very clear with them as I am with anyone that that doesn't give them the right
00:49:46
Speaker
I'm not going to necessarily take their feedback or change things if they ask me to. I just usually find that that is a great way to fact check. It's also a great way to bring up other memories. And then as we'll get to here, I did that for the first half of the book. And that was all fine because there was nothing illegal or scandalous in the first half of the book.
Palmer Lucky's Political Controversy
00:50:09
Speaker
But I never ended up doing it for the second half of the book because my relationship with them fell apart.
00:50:15
Speaker
And I guess to describe that, I should probably describe a little bit about what happened with Palmer and how he ended up being fired in the middle of my writing this book. Is that a thing for you to do? Yeah, please do. This is where the book definitely takes a turn, an unexpected turn that you don't see coming.
00:50:32
Speaker
Yeah, I certainly did not see it coming. Um, to me, what I thought was awesome about this book. So obviously I love first full reality. I'm also a little bit scared of it, you know, like, like other new technologies, but I really, um, I loved this story. To me, it was just an American dream story. A kid invented something in 2012. And what is it like in this day and age when you invent something? How do you make a business out of it? How do you make money? How do you get it to other people?
00:50:59
Speaker
and all those kinds of interesting questions. And, you know, can Palmer Lucky, a kid who starts the book living in a trailer, can he pull himself up from rags to riches by his bootstraps or whatever? And so it was very much just the ultimate entrepreneurial journey and all book about virtual reality. And then, like you said, the book takes a total twist. Starting in September of 2016, the book really becomes about something else.
00:51:27
Speaker
What happened was on September 22nd, 2016, this was like, I guess, six weeks before the presidential election in 2016, an article came out by the Daily Beast with the headline, Facebook billionaire secretly funding Trump's meme machine. And the insinuation was that every dirty meme that you had seen online over the past election season, every terrible gif of a concentration camp or, you know, misogynistic comment or, uh,
00:51:58
Speaker
transphobic, Islamophobic comment that basically this guy Palmer Lucky, the main character of the book, that he was somehow running a troll operation to disseminate this terrible, hateful stuff. And what almost all of that turned out not to be true, but what was true was that Palmer was a Trump supporter.
00:52:19
Speaker
And that was something that I had found out a couple months before he had told me. I very much was not and very much still am not a Trump supporter. I was really depressed when he won the presidency. I'm often really disappointed by him. So, you know, this was Palmer has Palmer and I have different political views. But I guess the difference between me and the difference between Facebook is that I'm OK with that.
00:52:44
Speaker
I kind of find that interesting, especially with such a thoughtful, good-natured person like him who doesn't just say because, you know, if Trump does something I don't like or says something I don't understand, I'll talk to him about it and he'll actually answer me and I'll learn something from it or he'll learn something from it. But at Facebook, which is very, very progressive and liberal oriented and also just a very mission oriented company, they, you know, what ended up happening was
00:53:13
Speaker
in the immediate aftermath of this PR fallout of this story that accused Palmer of running a troll factory. That led to dozens and dozens of articles and dozens and dozens and dozens of people on social media calling him the worst person ever. In fact, Wired had an article called Palmer Lucky is the Worst. So they literally called him the worst person ever, or the worst person in Silicon Valley.
00:53:37
Speaker
And well, one thing I'll say is I just remember reading all these articles and obviously I had more information about the situation than the average person, but I do remember trying to think how I agree this if I was just the average person and like, or someone who had no inside information. And my first thought was like, okay, if Palmer is somehow supporting this group that is making terrible memes, like, let me see the memes. Let me see how bad they are. Let me see. Like if Palmer was supporting something that was putting out concentration camp memes, then yeah, that's really messed up. And I would have a.
00:54:08
Speaker
a lot of questions for him. But no website presented any of the memes except for one billboard that this organization had put up in Pittsburgh, which was a very typical political advertisement. It was a picture, a character of Hillary Clinton that said too big to jail. There was nothing hateful about it. I guess it didn't like Hillary, but it was nothing unsavory. And so that was always kind of a red flag to me.
00:54:37
Speaker
Palmer wrote a statement explaining what was true and what was not true about the article that was out there, and explaining that most of it was untrue, but that what was true was that he was a Trump supporter, and here's why he was a Trump supporter. And that statement did not end up going out that evening, and still the next day it didn't end up going out because he was
00:55:01
Speaker
It rose to the higher levels at Facebook, and he was not allowed to put a statement out there saying he was a Trump supporter. And then, actually, the next day, he finally kept asking, when can I put up my statement?
00:55:21
Speaker
because the backlash just kept getting worse and worse. And the reason it took so long was because Mark Zuckerberg personally got involved and personally drafted a statement of his own that Palmer had to post if he wanted to keep his job. And in that statement, it says that I plan to vote for Gary Johnson, meaning that Palmer would have to post this and say that he was voting for Gary Johnson, which was obviously not true. But Palmer ended up doing so because he wanted to keep his job.
00:55:52
Speaker
For the next six months, he was kept out of the office and not allowed to communicate with his colleagues and not explain what had happened, not explain anything about this organization that he had donated to. And so what ended up happening was that Palmer came across as a liar for
00:56:08
Speaker
saying that he was supporting Gary Johnson when he seemed to be a Trump supporter. And so he was hated by Trump supporters for not supporting Trump publicly. And he was hated by liberals for being a troll and for seeming to support Trump or at least voted for even for Gary Johnson, which people would say is complicit in helping Trump win. And then six months after that, he was fired. And when I remember when he was fired, the original article came out, and it didn't say he was fired. It said, you know, Palmer Lucky has
00:56:38
Speaker
was exiting Facebook. It didn't say whether he resigned or he was fired, and then no details came out about what had happened. And then what I found most shocking, and this will take it back to my experience reporting on this, was that externally, Facebook just said he exited the company.
00:56:55
Speaker
But internally, Facebook, which is this company based on an ethos of openness and transparency, and has town halls every Friday that Mark Zuckerberg speaks at, and always encourages employees that they literally hang signs on campus that say,
00:57:12
Speaker
always assume positive intent in your colleagues and be your most authentic self, that they didn't provide any information to anybody about what was happening with Palmer. And then eventually they just told the team that he was leaving the company and they never gave their employees any information, which ended up helping me a lot because those employees turned to me and also ended up leaking some critical documents to me. But then taking this back to Facebook,
00:57:40
Speaker
I ended up, during what turned out to be my last trip out to Menlo Park, to their campus in February of 2018, I made it very clear to the high ups there that I needed to provide some explanation for what happened to Palmer, that Palmer was unwilling to talk to me about it. I assumed that he had signed some sort of legal document that prevented him from doing so because him and I still had a pretty positive relationship.
00:58:11
Speaker
I had heard that there might be a political component to it. And so they told me, no, that wasn't the case at all over the next few days and weeks.
Truth and Misinformation in Research
00:58:22
Speaker
I ended up speaking with a lot of high ranking people at Oculus and Facebook who all told me the same story about how Palmer chose to leave and how politics had nothing to do with it and how he had chosen to write that statement and all the stuff that I later found out was absolutely untrue. And then when I called them out on this, and I guess the way I called, the way that, first of all, the way that I knew it was not true was because I was able
00:58:51
Speaker
To get internal or internal documents that proved otherwise. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like it was like I he said she said where they have their version and Palmer or some other camp has their version. I ended up deferring to the actual email exchanges and text messages exchanges and all that. But then
00:59:10
Speaker
what I came to realize when I was suspecting that I was being fed misinformation was that my writing style, my creative nonfiction writing style, which by design does not attribute the information to specific sources. I'll only include things if I'm able to confirm it. But it really comes from a lot of different people. It doesn't say, this quote is from this person. And so I came to realize that they were laundering that misinformation through my writing style. Or that was my suspicion.
00:59:41
Speaker
And to confirm the suspicion, I decided that I would email Facebook my contacts there and say that, you know, hey, I decided to do six experimental chapters that are just going to be Q and A's. That way, you know, what happened to Palmer isn't coming from my words as Blake Harris, the author of Blake Harris, the liberal, but through your words and you guys will describe what happens. And so, like I said earlier, I fortunately recorded every conversation I had.
01:00:10
Speaker
And so I put out one of, I, you know, I transcribed one of those recorded conversations and shared that with them. And then almost immediately they stopped talking to me and they told all of the employees to stop talking to me, which is weird because if what they were telling me was true, they shouldn't really have that much of a problem. I mean, maybe they could have not liked the style or had suggestions, but the fact that they wanted me to kill that and the way that they reacted otherwise was pretty indicative of
01:00:35
Speaker
They just didn't want this traced back to them, or that was the tip of the iceberg. Geez. Have you sort of geared up for any kind of backlash from them, or how's that been received since the book's been out? Good question. Well, I think it's important to note, especially for other writers out there, that while that was kind of like a devastating... I guess not shocking, so I can't say it was devastating, because I suspected this.
01:01:03
Speaker
Well, that was an ordeal. Let's just say that it was an ordeal. I was able to sort of, you know, turn some lemons into lemonade out of it in the sense that I felt betrayed by Facebook. And then I thought, OK, well, I'm not the only one, because I also know that they are lying to their employees. And so I went to a lot of the sources that I had been speaking with and basically shared with them. Here's what I am being told by Facebook and here's what I'm being told by executives in Oculus.
01:01:31
Speaker
And if this doesn't seem correct to you, which they all agreed was not true. I mean, at the very least saying that Palmer chose to leave on his own was just ridiculous. But anyway, and I basically said, you know, ask them to help me. Like, you know, if I don't have other concrete information, this is the version I have to run with. And they all cared enough about Palmer or at least cared enough about getting the truth out there that they really stepped up and got me the information that I needed to present this in a way
01:02:00
Speaker
where I could report some of these explosive and illegal things and make sure that I had the confidence that I was doing so accurately. So that was just a good tip that I picked up along the way to find other people who are feeling as upset as I was. And then in terms of the backlash from Facebook, a couple of weeks before the book came out, I started emerging from hibernating these past four years and posting some things about the book.
01:02:31
Speaker
and people at Oculus were getting excited about it and sort of sharing it in internal chats. And then that was shut down or what management came into those chats and said, we made a few statements about me in the book to try to dampen the enthusiasm, basically saying,
01:02:52
Speaker
Oh, I guess, first of all, I should say that the fact that I know what they were saying is a pretty good sign that people at Oculus trusted me more than management, that they were leaking these things to me that would have probably cost them their job. But they were basically, you know, saying, we work with Blake early on, but then he broke our trust. And, you know, we haven't seen the book yet. But we believe it, you know, manufactures a lot of drama. And, you know, so I ended up writing a long email to everyone to a bunch of people at Oculus that
01:03:22
Speaker
would end up striking a leading saying that, you know, they worked with you for two years. So it wasn't like some little thing that happened early on, that they broke my trust, or at least here's the facts of why I believe that's the case. The idea that I would manufacture drama is ridiculous and like hurtful, because that's why, you know, I spent three and a half years on this book because
01:03:42
Speaker
I wanted to get it right. And there's so much drama here. There was no reason for me to need to manufacture it. And then I just thought it was a typical Facebook fashion that I knew that they had a copy of my book. So when they were telling people that they hadn't seen the book yet, they obviously had. So that was, you know, fortunately after that and after I sent this email to the people at Oculus to let them know that I knew what they were saying about me, it's
01:04:04
Speaker
nothing has really happened since then, which is good. I think that maybe, maybe from a marketing standpoint, it would be better if there were, it could be potentially better if there was some sort of flame war between Facebook saying, oh, I'm wrong, I lied, me saying no, here's the documents, but I don't, I don't really want that.
Public Reaction and Facebook Trust Issues
01:04:23
Speaker
I want, you know, my goal is, obviously I do want to sell a lot of books, but my goal is to tell the story. And that's just, you know, friction that prevents me from
01:04:32
Speaker
getting the story out there or continuing to follow up with other people. I don't like controversy, so I could avoid it. Again, the most important thing with this book to me was to make sure that people understood that this was the version of events that actually happened with so much information out there. I didn't really want that shrouded with any
01:04:52
Speaker
noise and people taking sides, though I don't know who would take Facebook side after this. So maybe, maybe it was a poor decision on my part. And I should have courted controversy. But but in terms of like backlash, I think the most interesting one is, I basically operated the past two years, assuming that when this book came out, it would be like, like, like, you know, liked or loved or accepted by like half of the people out there.
01:05:20
Speaker
And that the other half of the feedback I was getting was that I'm a terrible person for writing this book because they believe the things about Palmer Lucky that I was supporting a white supremacist or a misogynist or this terrible person. And I've been so, so happy to see that I think it's been 100% really positive of people
01:05:43
Speaker
you know, realizing that Facebook had treated him unfairly, that the media had treated him unfairly, and being incredibly supportive of that. So I haven't faced that backlash. And part of the reason I felt that way was because the only thing that I had published over the past year and a half, because I did really try to hibernate and sort of go undercover and do this, you know, do my thing reporting this book and stay out of
01:06:07
Speaker
news and not report it. Anyway, the only thing I had put out was a story called This Is How Fake News Happened that was used only publicly available information to show how the story about Palmer was wrong and that here's how it perpetuated a game of telephone getting worse and worse with each outlet.
01:06:27
Speaker
And the reaction to that was like the one I described, like the one I expected. You know, half the people thanked me for, you know, following the truth or whatever they thought, or maybe they were Palmer supporters and liked that I did something that seemed to support Palmer. And then half the people told me I was a terrible person or unfriended me or whatever. There was a lot of people in the media who unfriended me because it was pretty critical of them. So anyway, I've been so happy that that's not been the case here.
01:06:54
Speaker
Because as you know from reading the book, so much of the end of the book.
01:06:58
Speaker
is because of just bad information, of misunderstanding, of misreporting. And then also, I think, just a misunderstanding of people about those with different political views. And I hope that in whatever very, very, very small way, my book could help make our country less polarizing and realize that we are in this together, that
01:07:25
Speaker
that people who have different opinions are not having those opinions because they want to hurt you and that almost all those opinions wouldn't hurt you. It's just a different opinion.
01:07:37
Speaker
And so it's been an interesting past couple of years. Like you said, the book takes a big twist, and my life did as well. And has your enthusiasm towards VR and in certain aspects of, say, social media dampened as a result of you flying so close to this sun? Great question. I mean, with regards to social media, yes. But I think collectively, as a country, I think everyone's
01:08:05
Speaker
sort of feeling that, you know, I think the election, whether or not you like Donald Trump or not, I think the election and the coverage of it and the way social media played a role really opened people's eyes to a lot of the ways that could be amplified by bad actors and how they
01:08:25
Speaker
maybe sometimes those bad actors are members of the media or but that's not really fair to call them bad actors because I think I often think that people are trying to do the right thing I just think they're not doing it fairly or they're missing critical information but but in terms of the virtual reality one that's a really interesting and important question given that the book is about VR and and I'll say that like you know when Oculus was acquired by Facebook for
01:08:49
Speaker
$3 billion in 2014, a lot of early Oculus enthusiasts and VR enthusiasts were very disappointed and they all hated Facebook and they thought Facebook was going to ruin VR. And I thought that they were being a little dramatic about it because for me, the most interesting thing to me about VR was the social component, the communication aspect. So I thought that's a win to have Facebook involved who's focused on that. Then the other thing too was that
01:09:18
Speaker
Not only was Facebook paying $3 billion to acquire Oculus, they were also going to be investing billions of dollars over the next few years. So as a VR enthusiast myself, that was a win too that Facebook was going to help create this ecosystem.
01:09:30
Speaker
But now I think that I was naive in that perspective to some degree. And that sort of crystallized for me probably much later than it should have, but I was in a book signing a couple of weeks ago and somebody asked me about Oculus' upcoming headset. They had this headset called the Oculus Quest that Facebook and Oculus are putting out this spring. It's gonna cost $400. It's gonna be a standalone headset, meaning that it doesn't need to plug into a computer, meaning that for $400, you'll have the whole experience. And it's basically going to be
01:10:00
Speaker
the best technological, you know, technologically, it'll be the best VR headset ever, or at least ever at this sort of price point. And they said, I'm very interested in this. But I'm worried about buying it because I don't trust Facebook. And I believe in Facebook off my phone. Like, what do you recommend? And I did not have a good answer for them. And I still don't have a good answer two weeks later. Because I don't trust Facebook. A
01:10:26
Speaker
big part of the reason why I wanted to include all this stuff with Palmer and politics into the book. You know, well, there's the obvious reason that because Palmer was the main character and also because it's interesting. It's fascinating. Anytime Mark Zuckerberg is forcing applies employees to lie is fascinating. But but but more so like, you know, conceptually, my thought was that
01:10:52
Speaker
Facebook bought Oculus because they want to own virtual reality. They want to own this platform or they want to at least be as big of a player as possible.
Concerns About Facebook's Control and Transparency
01:11:03
Speaker
If Facebook wants to own virtual reality, then I think the way that they act in actual reality and how they treat employees and how they treat their users is incredibly important because history is going to repeat itself there.
01:11:17
Speaker
As we have conversations these days about censorship and free speech and as Facebook continues to expand beyond 2 billion users, I think that these are all really important concerns to have and I'm certainly not the first to bring them to mind.
01:11:33
Speaker
There are great journalists out there doing great work at the New York Times or Politico the other day reporting that Elizabeth Warren's advertisements suggesting that maybe technology companies should be broken up, that Facebook banned those advertisements. And so I hope that my book is just part of this mosaic of people thinking more about the role that Facebook and Google and these big tech companies play in our lives. And one other thing I'd like to mention on the subject is
01:12:04
Speaker
I hear people say, oh, Facebook is evil. Like, I definitely don't think they're evil. I think that they are a company with their own vision and motivations. And if you look at it through that lens, a lot of their actions make sense. It makes a lot of sense why they wouldn't want Palmer lucky there because he has different political views and different vision for the future than they do. That's illegal. And I would want a company, you know, big companies to have people with different views or at least be more talented to them. But but, you know, like, like, there's a line in one of the
01:12:34
Speaker
you know, I ended up getting.
01:12:36
Speaker
I think I mentioned in the book over 25,000 internal documents. And one of them was this great sort of manifesto vision statement by Mark Zuckerberg about the future of virtual reality and augmented reality. And he's talking about the business strategy. But he opens up the document by saying, towards the top of it, that in addition to the benefit that this technology will provide humanity, dot, dot, dot. And then he talks about the strategy. And I just thought, wow, that's such a supervillain way to think about things.
01:13:04
Speaker
And I do think Mark actually thinks he is doing what's best for the world. It's more what I've come to realize, or at least my barometer for harmful actions, is that I do think intentions matter. But I think that the fact that Facebook never gives people the option to opt out or do something different is really the problem. And I'll end this rant by mentioning something that seems tangential, but I think
01:13:34
Speaker
cuts it really what I'm talking about here, which is that I was having
01:13:39
Speaker
I met with Andrew Bosworth, who's the head of AR and VR for Facebook. Like I said, it turned out to be my last trip to Facebook. And we were just having small talk before getting into the interview and talking about this problem of fake news. And I said, hey, this is something I think about a lot, the state of journalism and how to improve it. And here's an idea that I had that might be stupid, but here's my idea. And I told him that I thought that Facebook should have a little clock
01:14:05
Speaker
that when you know when people share articles on facebook it should say how long they spent reading it that way you would know oh this is like an article they probably just read the title of and they're sharing it or this is an article that they spent 10 minutes reading you know probably something in depth there um and i think i like this idea i could totally understand if someone thinks it's a very stupid idea but i thought that the response that i got was interesting and and it doesn't matter whether they think it's a good idea or not which was that um andrew basworth told me that
01:14:35
Speaker
how much time you spent reading an article is already part of the algorithm, which really translates to, yes, that is important information. And that's how and we're using that to decide what to show you as opposed to giving you the option to decide what the criteria is of stuff that you want to be shown. And I think that is like how a lot of things work with Facebook, in that they think that they know what's best for you. And maybe they do, or maybe they do most of the time.
01:15:02
Speaker
But I think that you should always at least give people the option to decide what's best for them and to curate their own experiences. And then especially when you get into a place where you don't know whether the decisions, you don't know what incentives are guiding that algorithm. Maybe it's that they are trying to guide you towards a
01:15:19
Speaker
certain behavior that we might all agree is good. Or maybe they're trying to guide you towards a behavior that's incentivized by them getting advertising dollars. Maybe they want you to be thirstier to buy a Coca-Cola. The fact that you don't know is really the problem. And the fact that it's this black box is really this problem. And so if virtual reality is the next frontier, and Facebook really wants to control that frontier, I think these are all questions that we should be asking ourselves and asking them.
01:15:47
Speaker
Blake, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this so eloquently.
Where to Find Blake J. Harris and Episode Closure
01:15:52
Speaker
Thanks for the work, of course. Where can people find you online to get more familiar with you and your work if they're not already? Well, first off, I just want to say thanks to you and for doing this podcast because I've told my own origin story of how I got into the business and I love telling that one. But basically, everything we've talked about for the past 45 minutes, this is like
01:16:15
Speaker
These are the thoughts that I had every day for the past two years and had kind of no one to talk about them with. Obviously, I'm grateful for any marketing and press that I get with this book, but I'm not usually asked about the decisions that I make with the dialogue or what I think of this Facebook site.
01:16:34
Speaker
means to the future of ER and whether you know basically thanks for asking the questions that as a writer I would want to be asked and people can find me on Blake j Harris calm that's my website I have some extras up there and you know other work that I've done and
01:16:50
Speaker
And I think the best place to find me is on Twitter at BlakeJHarrisNYC because I really make an effort to answer every question that's asked of me, whether it's good or bad. So if you really have something you would like to know, I will almost definitely get back to you on Twitter at BlakeJHarrisNYC.
01:17:08
Speaker
Well, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for the kind words. And let's promise that this is the first of hopefully many times you'll be on the show to talk about your nonfiction writing as we go forward. So thanks again for the time. Deal.
01:17:28
Speaker
that was great right I think so my vote matters, doesn't it? I love it when guests come to play ball, CNFs thanks to the show's sponsor this week, Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction as well as Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction
01:17:45
Speaker
You know what? Be sure to head over to BrendanBorano.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. We're talking books, articles, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. A lot of cool recommendations, some neat articles. I'm always compiling things for the month, and then I put in a little digest. It's fun. A little growing list. I like it. It's probably one of the highlights of my month, putting it together. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
01:18:12
Speaker
I'm at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter and at cnfbot on Twitter you can email the show creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com Good luck with the typos You can say something nice you can ask a question. Maybe I'll even read it on the air
01:18:29
Speaker
Even consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Those help, I think. Or they don't. Or you don't have to. It's fine. Ah, I love you just the same, man. Alright. I got to try to get paid, my friend. Remember, if you can't do interview, see ya!