00:06:59 路 John Coogan
[00:06:59] S1: OC Kendall. Kendall. Yeah. Because you're succession guy. So this is the sequel to The Social Network instead of chronicling the birth of Facebook. It's the story based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Francis Haugen. It's going to be dramatic. It's not going to make people like Facebook more and it's probably going to make Americans even more distrustful of tech. What's interesting here is that if you stop a random tech person on the street and ask them like what is the social reckoning about, they might say Cambridge Analytica because that was another drama moment and I I was sort of like, is it Cambridge Analytica? Is the it the Haugen thing? And a lot of people don't even remember what the whistleblower story was. Little refresher there. It was an internal document leak. The Facebook files showed that Facebook internal employees were aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. Now Nikita Beer chimed in, who now works at X, a rival platform to Threads, and said, Zuck makes a lot of mistakes, but this isn't one of them. Meta literally had multiple teams of $1,000,000 per year engineers working on teen mental health, and they had the agency to override big product decisions. They're probably a thorn in Nikita's side because he's trying to maximize click through rates, maximize attention, and he's getting pushback from, hey, there's guardrails here. And he says the story this movie is is about is actually a product manager who didn't get a promotion. And so that's the pushback
00:08:31 路 Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:08:31] S0: Yeah. Only from thing the only thing [00:08:34] S1: What's that? [00:08:35] S0: And and the only thing with that argument is like you could make the same argument is like the cigarette company has million dollar like doctors and researchers focused on making sure cigarettes are as healthy as possible. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:50] S1: Yeah. And and especially with the new fertility data, I think that there's there's a new cycle brewing of like exactly how bad is social media. I still don't really buy the addiction thing just because Yeah. I'm with like addiction defined in nicotine, which is like extremely addictive. It's chemical, and like you have cravings. Like if you forget your phone, like do you have the same cravings? It's sort of different. And but there is like a very serious discussion going on around social media and its effects and Yes. This fits The right [00:09:22] S0: thing is is like very real. Because I was at I was at an event last night they required everybody to put their phones in these sort of like locked bags, so you could go outside at any point And you felt sick. I didn't feel sick. But I noticed probably like 20 times throughout the night Yeah. I was thinking like I was thinking of going for my phone. Yeah. I didn't start having like physical withdrawal symptoms. [00:09:46] S1: Yeah. But the craving was there? [00:09:48] S0: Yeah. Just started thinking about it. Was like phone noise. Right? [00:09:52] S1: Phone noise. Yeah. This is real. This is real. [00:09:54] S0: I was having some phone noise.
00:09:55 路 John Coogan
[00:09:55] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. That's legitimate. So the question that I had really quickly is like, what is the impact on Meta? Like, we can pull up the stock chart. It's a 1 and a half trillion dollar company. They're trying to raise more equity for AI build out, hire people. Like, is this good, bad? What does it look like over the short, medium, long term? So short term, think this was amazing timing. They really got lucky because as we will talk about, like the fact that this trailer dropped the same time as Anthropics Fable five was incredibly fortuitous because Fable just took over the timeline and no one was really talking about this in tech. Tech insiders won't really see or talk about the social reckoning this week. Case in point, I put it second in the newsletter when I wrote it up. Medium term, I think Jeremy Strong is gonna drag Mark into, like, the bad group of AI leaders while he's on his Oscar tour. Like, there was a version of of of Facebook strategy or meta strategy that's just like, hey. We're like Amazon. We're like Microsoft. Like, yeah. We have bets in AI, but we're not like we're not deciding the frontier. Obviously, Mark has made the decision to hire some of the greatest researchers, invest very aggressively. And this puts him sort of at the center of the conversation around, well, what will the effect of AI be on our society, on kids? Should kids be talking to LLMs? Psychosis. All these different things will come up, just as we saw four O psychosis and then Claude Code psychosis a little bit pop up and people are talking about that. Like, you're you're you're priming the pumps for the next wave of, like, oh, bunch of people went into the meta app and, like, they'd had a bad time and now we gotta talk about that. So I wouldn't be surprised to
00:11:33 路 Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:11:33] S0: see that conclusion. What do you think is gonna be more annoyed about this week? The fact that SpaceX is gonna be valued meaningfully higher [00:11:42] S1: Yeah. [00:11:43] S0: Than Meta or this trailer? It's actually a tough one. I don't know. It's actually a tough one. [00:11:49] S1: I mean, I think the real one is the Fable five. Because, like, if if Meta was using a ton of anthropic models and the new model comes out and says you specifically can't use it in MSL, the most important initiative in the company. Like, that's like a pretty rough thing where you're like, oh, I've been working with this company to develop my models for my family of apps. [00:12:13] S0: And now I can't use they them do, you know, Meta is spending billions of dollars a year Yeah. With Anthropic. Yeah. They have been for a while. [00:12:22] S1: Oh, ARR, [00:12:23] S0: but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Will spend billions of dollars this And the question is, like, if Anthropic does allow Meta to use their models for Meta's AI research, what does it say about what Anthropic thinks about Meta's potential in AI? [00:12:39] S1: They'll secretly love ads this whole time. No. I don't know. [00:12:43] S0: No. To me to me, it it would it would be them not not feeling like they had a The AGI. Ability to get to the frontier.
00:12:51 路 John Coogan
[00:12:51] S1: Totally. And then and and that's an ace that's up their sleeve at any time. They can always just take the guardrails off and be like, hey, more more more AI, more intelligence on demand for everyone. So I think the fallout of the medium term, Jeremy Strong's gonna go on this press tour for the Oscar and he's gonna have a bunch of like really emotional pithy sound bites and then also be like just viral because it's funny to see him doing this impression. He's very good at, like, drawing. He's already gone viral for his Mark Zuckerberg impression in the past. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the next version of a Bernie Sanders press release about AI highlight Dario, Sam, and Zuck instead of what has historically been the order, which is Sam, Dario and Demis. So it's always based on like perceived industry power and negativity around personal brand. So they have to have a scary quote and then they also have to have a lot of power in the industry. Zuck's power in the industry is rising. And also with this movie, like, there's more ways to to to take shots at him. Like, oh, look at what he did with the Facebook files. Remind yourself of that because a lot of people don't really remember the details. They're going to after they see this movie. Then you can then you can say, well, this guy's also building crazy data centers and look at how he handled this. If he handles the AI thing like that, it's gonna be bad. Right? So that so that's like a little bit of a risk in the medium term. Long term, I don't think the social reckoning is gonna matter all that much for Meta. People will complain about Meta's data centers.
00:14:13 路 Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:14:13] S0: Why did [00:14:14] S1: they not get [00:14:16] S0: Jeremy Strong like a wig? [00:14:18] S1: They did. Or they they because also he is remember playing an older [00:14:23] S0: when he [00:14:23] S1: had the Caesar haircut? [00:14:24] S0: Yeah. So it's [00:14:25] S1: So a different people will complain about all this stuff, but they'll do it on Meta's family of apps. I don't think there'll be churn. And certainly, advertisers won't pull out. It's impossible to pull out of Meta because it just drives it just drives up the r the ROAS, the the return on ad spend for smaller companies. And a bunch of small businesses will just jump in and say, oh, great. Like, you know, some big company pulled out and is boycotting Meta. That's great. Ridge Wallet's gonna jump in or somebody else is gonna jump in. [00:14:53] S0: Yeah. People have advertisers have tried to boycott.