· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, you did a great job of like, okay, because I've heard the same thing. It's like, oh, you're so far behind in AI, it'll never catch up. He can't buy it. He doesn't get it. And then, okay, well, let's just like steel man the other side where for decades everybody says, "This guy's dead. He's going to fail." And he just keeps rising, keeps walking forward, and you cannot kill him. So, what is the AI equivalent of that? And I think in one part of the piece, would you want to bet against him not figuring this out? And they're like, "No, no, no." Suddenly, their confidence, like, "No, I'm not betting against him."
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, and I think that's probably reflected to some extent in the markets. But yeah, I think he never said this explicitly, but I think a big part of the bull case for Meta in AI would basically be that their potential install base for whatever model they have, regardless of how good it is, is approximately half of all human beings that live on planet Earth at any given time. That's how many people use WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Meta AI. So they have the distribution. He spent 20 years doing all of these really boring- You know, mind-numbing things like negotiating contracts for infrastructure projects with municipal and state governments and figuring out the tax incentives and how much of the revenue that the data center generates is going to be used to pay for other public works in that community, blah, blah, blah. All this really unsexy stuff that, again, like he and a fairly small team of people have spent the last quarter century negotiating. I think it's all resulted in they basically have the distribution, the infrastructure, and then of course, the attention that they dominate through the apps. They just have a lot of the things where probably a lot of the value that AI generates, it's going to accrue at the complements that Meta already dominates. When I spoke to those people and they said they would not be willing to bet that Zuckerberg or Meta loses the AI race, I think it's based on the fact that he's just built this business that's kind of possibly perfectly positioned to win the race in an important way, whereas the pure AI labs don't have anything like this and still have to pay to rent a lot of the infrastructure and the compute and all the stuff that he owns.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: So in the piece, there's several times where he says, like, "I'm addicted to building. I just like building things. I didn't even think I was starting a company. This is like a natural evolution of just the fact that I build. I'll never stop. I won't quit." Those are my favorite kind of founders. You and I have talked about this privately over and over again. I'm just super interested in the people that cannot be bought, that are just doing it for other reasons. They're not looking to be acquired. They're just like, "This is how I want to spend the short amount of time that I have on this planet, and there's nothing else. Like, you're not going to get me off the path that I'm on." Based on the time you spent with him and talking to all the people around him, including his family, what would it take for him to say, "Hey, I'm just going to step back from Meta"?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: I think that is the other interesting thing, right? So, we talked before about how he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. There's obviously one very big exception to that, which is Elon. But I think the thing that ties Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is that it's unimaginable that they would just step back and live the rest of their life on a yacht and engage in various forms of space exploration that have nothing to do with the original companies they built or philanthropic work that they do full-time with their spouse or something like that. I think those are the two people that you would imagine, like, they're just going to die as CEO. Like, something's going to happen, their heart's going to explode, and they're just going to die at their company. And I think they are pretty singular in that sense. And Zuckerberg does have the kind of canonical piece of evidence for that in Facebook's history, which is that in something like 2006, I think, Yahoo offers a billion dollars to buy it. The entire management team wants to say yes. The board, which I think just consisted of Don Graham and Peter Thiel at that time, really were encouraging him to say yes. He's 21, 22 years old. It's a billion dollars. He owns 70% of the company or whatever it is. It's not like a tortuous negotiation where he's considering both sides. He just says no immediately. That's the kind of thing I think you probably can't fake, right? When you're that young, it's that much money, you're under that much pressure, and the entire management team at Facebook at the time ends up walking away because he wouldn't take the money. And there's, I think, kind of periodically been episodes like that throughout the history of the company, where in the face of opposition, he decides he's not going to sell or he's not going to walk away. And I think that's probably just going to be the case possibly forever.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: The profiles that you write are some of my favorites. I still think the Zuck one was excellent, but I still think my favorite profile you've ever made was the one on Palmer Luckey, which you told me last time that was the first profile you ever wrote on a person, which is insane. I just want to go through a couple of the people that I'm most interested in, some of which I've been, like some of them are friends, some of them I've spent time with, and just go over what went into making them, because I do think I have a high respect for the amount of craft that you put into this. But also, what did you learn from not only the process of making these incredible profiles, but what did you learn from being around these people? So, let's start with Palmer. Why choose him as the first profile ever that you're going to write on a person?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. So up until that point, I'd been doing a lot of writing, but I'd never written a profile of a person. I'd never written anything that had anything remotely to do with technology or business. I was writing mostly on American politics and German politics and foreign policy and all this stuff that had to do with my previous life. Like I said before, I usually start with a thing that I'm interested in, and then I kind of go in search of the person who would be the best way to explore the thing. And in the case of Palmer, it was after October 7th in Israel. One of the interesting things about it was that the amount of technological overmatch that the Israeli military had over Hamas was basically infinite, right? And Israel, in a lot of ways, was thought to have had the most advanced fourth-generation hybrid warfare style military on the planet. Their drone fleets, the use of satellites, underground sensors, smart fences. They'd basically thought of themselves as having been able to obviate the need for more classical forms of military hardware like tanks and artillery and all this other stuff. And then when Hamas invades on October 7th, they do it with hang gliders and construction equipment and small arms. One of the interesting questions I thought came out of that was, is this whole defense tech thing basically bullshit? Like, does any of this stuff actually work? It didn't seem to work in this one case. Doesn't mean it doesn't work elsewhere. But we were at that point already a year and a half into the war in Ukraine, which was this really interesting mix of next-generation warfare that was being fought by drone swarms. And on the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands or millions of 18-year-olds with sticks fighting in trenches, right? Which is a form of warfare that's like at least 150 years old. So the question I started out with was, is defense tech real or is it bullshit? And if it's real, how far away are we from figuring it out? And Palmer, I think at that point, he was- Already a legend and an icon within tech, but he wasn't well-known outside of it yet, which is interesting because this is only a couple years ago, and now I think he's a pretty ubiquitous figure, and he's the kind of person my mom will tell me she saw him on "60 Minutes" or something like that. But that was not the case back then.