Mark Wants You to Have More Friends
What we learned from Zuck's spring tour. Influencer politicians. AI mergers!
POD 132: Group Chat
This week, we discuss why group chats are the new social network, Mark Zuckerberg’s latest podcast blitz, why AI is leading to a new ad tech boom and more. Out Friday AM. Listen
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: Mark Zuckerberg is doing the PR rounds this week, proudly sporting those Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
I’ve been wearing them all week too. I like them. More on this in a sec.
His outreach strategy reflects what we’ve come to understand about media right now. Podcast conversations are the low-risk forum for business leaders and politicians to litigate the present. They bridge niche and mass, audio and video. They’ve unexpectedly become the most potent force in the modern media landscape, inheriting TV’s legacy power position. Independents rule the podcast game.
Zuckerberg’s outlet choices show all the dimensions of the shape-shifting young mogul: Zuck the nerd (Dwarkesh pod), Zuck the bro (Theo Von pod), Zuck the innovator (Ben Thompson pod).
As expected, Dwarkesh offers deep reflections on AGI, LLaMA and the virtues of open source. A strangely nervous Theo Von gives us new-right bro Zuck: f-bombs, MMA talk, Harvard shenanigans, the unusual sculpture of his wife Priscilla made in collaboration with artist Daniel Arsham.
The Ben Thompson Stratechery interview was the only one I could get through. Ben is a subject matter expert and good interviewer. Mark has spent a lifetime in the product trenches and understands platform competition intimately. A few takeaways from that conversation:
He sees glasses replacing the phone—or at least materially impacting our time on it.
FWIW, I can see how this happens. The audio interface is impressive. Voice control with AI reduces interface friction in tons of use cases: “Hey Meta, what's the weather,” as I walk to the door. “Hey Meta, what is the gorgeous flowering bush,” on a stroll at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. “Hey Meta, play the Ben Thompson podcast,” as I walk the dog. I like these things. I feel more connected to the world than with AirPods. I pull out my phone less. Battery life is a problem. But smart glasses are gonna be a big business eventually. AI makes the form factor sensible.
Feeds are for discovery. Chat is for interaction. People don’t interact in public around the feed like they used to according to Mark. We manage our multiple personality dimensions across multiple chat environments.
Consequently, WhatsApp will become increasingly important to the Meta portfolio, particularly in the US where it is growing but still lags iMessage (he sees it overtaking iMessage in a few years). Mark wants to make WhatsApp a better tool for business messaging as WeChat is in China.
As an aside… we all intuitively understand this shift — except seemingly Ben Smith, whose “bombshell” gossip gotcha piece received unnecessary attention this week for the shocking revelation that tech elites circling outspoken alpha VC Marc Andreessen in private chats represent a kind of “dark matter of American politics and media,” where a “stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated.” There may have been a little more to it….Please. (We can discuss this on the pod wherein you will accuse me of Ben Derangement Syndrome.)AI will augment human companionship. According to Zuck, we are increasingly lonely people, citing a study that says we each only average three friends. Meta is a connections company. He wants you to have more companions, real or AI, and is betting big that Meta can help. His AI will become your robot friend and your robot therapist.
Mark believes AI is gonna free up a lot of work time and suggests we will have way more time to scroll through endless feeds of algorithmic junk and hang out with our new virtual friends, a future that seems utterly dystopian.Mark wants to complete his efforts to fully turn advertising into distribution. He see a future where his “black box” can automate everything for the advertiser - creative, targeting and reporting - and finally bring advertising to is logical conclusion. The customer ATM. Give us money. We give you customers.
Maybe we will start to appreciate government heat on the big four consumer titans—Meta, Apple, Google and Amazon. While Bezos bends the knee on transparent tariff pricing, Apple was just handed a stunning defeat in the case against Epic for bully tactics in the App Store.
In other unrelated news, Trump's social media show is metastasizing to his cabinet clown show. Now we can watch Pete Hegseth pumping iron with the troops. The Wall Street Journal does a nice job of covering Trump’s expanding cinematic universe of political influencers. Always winning! Good thing Newsom has a podcast and Pete Buttigieg is becoming a fearless (now bearded) talking-head welterweight. Go Pete.
Alex, Brian… I am sure you have observations. Lots to chew on this week.
Alex: On Apple… want to quickly reiterate how huge this is.
It fundamentally changes the opportunity to monetize products in the App Store while bypassing Apple’s 15-30% fee on all transactions.
On the Zuck stuff…He’s out there talking about how people aren’t engaging in feeds anymore and most interactions are happening in group chats. Once again, he’s been looking at the data and now tries to show up as insightful.
He’s super smart but mostly, he’s ruthless. It worries me that with AI he’ll push his platforms to become even more efficient at influencing people.
The ultimate goal is “the ultimate black box” as Ben Thompson called it. A company should just say what they want to sell, and that thing gets sold. The user is the crop here. They’re not people just surface area, fed stuff around the ad to make them more likely to buy. The perfect manipulation machine.
They’ve never really shown much care about the damage they cause to the global psyche, and that’s not changing. They might not be using the “move fast and break things” tag from their early days anymore but it’s still very much how they operate. And, to be clear, it’s why they’re so successful but I think that in this day and age we shouldn’t lose sight of people’s character and intentions. I trust neither.
He’s also obviously getting more and more media training but the newer, loser kind that’s compatible with the podcaster universe. He needs it because recent data still showed that “only 25% of Americans hold a favorable view of him”, that’s lower than Musk.
Brian: I was speaking to a media exec this week who worked at Meta for a while.
They told me they respected Zuckerberg’s executional prowess but didn’t approve of what they characterized as loose ethical standards. It’s possible to hold both thoughts. I agree with Alex that he’s simply reading the data and reacting with characteristic conviction and speed.
My take on his media strategy is it seems to fit him better. He was terrible at set piece media. His wooden solo speaking style would veer into robotic territory. His disastrous stage interview with Kara Swisher showed he was terrible at that mode too. Dropping some f-bombs on Theo Vonn is more his speed, as is nerding out, in different ways, with Ben Thompson and Dwarkesh Patel.
Yes, the Wall Street Journal had a smart story this week on how Trump’s cabinet is filled with modern media communicators. They’re crafting images on Instagram, and the vice president will take the time to dunk on someone on X. This is a new required skill set. Mayor Pete might be the frontrunner right now because he’s able to hold his own in unscripted environments. Executives need to be able to hold their own as well. This go-direct mantra is very liberating for the oppressed executive class, but it comes with the expectation that you will engage in unpredictable environments and be nimble. That was not a needed skill previously.
ANONYMOUS BANKER
Can AI Tip the Scales at the FTC & DOJ?
The pending Getty Images and Shutterstock merger illustrates how incumbents can frame generative-AI disruption as a shield against antitrust pushback. Regulators’ long-standing preference for keeping markets competitive has often blocked the most synergistic, opportunistic deals out of concern that they would grant outsized pricing power. Generative models invert that logic: when algorithms can create high-quality substitutes at near-zero cost, market share looks less like monopoly power and more like a melting ice cube. The looming competitive threat is no longer the long-term rival; it’s an LLM in the cloud.
Advertising is already in the blast radius. The Omnicom and IPG tie-up would have triggered antitrust alarms a decade ago; today, it feels almost defensive. Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery he wants advertisers to “show up with a credit card” while Meta’s AI builds the creative, finds the audience, and spends the budget. If that vision lands, agency billings, media-buying fees, and creative retainers collapse, and consolidation shifts from opportunistic to existential.
Expect the pattern to spread. As AI squeezes margins across media, SaaS, and other content-driven sectors, deal math starts to work, and regulators, confronted with an “AI or die” narrative, may conclude that allowing scale is the lesser evil.
Links from a secret group chat
The Group Chats That Changed America shows how encrypted group messaging is increasingly steering U.S. politics and public debate. LINK
Meta is rolling out new ad formats and partnerships to siphon retail-media budgets away from Amazon and Walmart. LINK
Slate’s $20k bare-bones electric pick-up aims to undercut mainstream EVs by stripping out paint, stereo and screens. LINK
“Chips Liberated” unpacks the U.S.-China semiconductor standoff and argues for smarter industrial policy. LINK
Brussels opens twin DMA probes into Apple and Meta, signalling Europe’s intent to police gatekeeper conduct. LINK
Motorola’s new “Moto AI” bakes on-device LLM features and Perplexity search into upcoming phones. LINK
Tweet-thread asks whether Perplexity’s conversational search could displace Siri-style assistants. LINK
Google’s cookie-deprecation delay reshuffles the ad-tech deck, publishers win time, privacy vendors lose momentum. LINK
Beijing half-marathon pits humanoid robots against humans, spotlighting progress (and limits) in bipedal mobility. LINK
Marc Andreessen on YouTube riffs on Trump, the coming “vibe shift” and post-woke culture wars. LINK
Andreessen tells Lex Fridman that unchecked power corrupts every level of government and how tech might respond. LINK
Microsoft WorkLab predicts 2025’s “Frontier Firms”—organisations that weaponise AI to widen productivity gaps. LINK
TechCrunch profiles Neo’s eight-year bet on coding-test talent that is now spawning unicorn founders. LINK
“AI Horseless Carriages” warns against bolting LLMs onto legacy workflows instead of re-architecting from scratch. LINK
Bloomberg uncovers Roblox communities recreating real-world mass shootings, raising fresh content-moderation alarms. LINK
Ziff Davis sues OpenAI over alleged content scraping—another test case for AI training and copyright law. LINK
WSJ notes Trump-era cabinet picks are back on social media, resurrecting 2016-style posting tactics. LINK
Mo News recaps Trump’s first 100 days: tariffs, the macro picture, and a Bezos phone call dominate the scorecard. LINK
The New York Times profiles Twitch powerhouse Hasan Piker as “a progressive mind in a MAGA body,” spotlighting how his gym-bro image turbo-charges his brand of left-populist commentary across Twitch and YouTube. LINK
Which podcast of the three is where Zuck talk about group chat please?