Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Truth About Zuck's 6,500 Word AI Manifesto w/ Mike Isaac

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Zuckerberg Wants AI to Know Everything About You SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co         Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenzMark Zuckerberg just published a massive 6,500-word manifesto laying out an aggressive vision for the future of AI. But is this really about democratizing technology, or is it a desperate PR move to catch up with OpenAI and Anthropic? I sat down with New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac, who has covered Zuckerberg and Meta for more than a decade, to unpack what Zuckerberg is really proposing and why Meta is making such an aggressive push into AI right now.We discuss Meta's battle with OpenAI and Anthropic, Zuckerberg's renewed embrace of open models, the company's massive data center buildout, the backlash against AI infrastructure, and why Meta may be trying to position itself as the alternative to the AI safety movement.We also get into the biggest problem with Zuckerberg's vision, and Mike explains why Zuckerberg is suddenly talking to the media again, how far behind Meta really is in the AI race, what the company's next generation of AI agents could look like, and what to watch for at Meta Connect.  To get access to ad-free listening and my weekly newsletter, subscribe to my Patreon or Substack 👇🏻Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at ⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠         Support my work on Patreon: ⁠http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz⁠ 

They just have a credibility issue and you're not going to instantly believe Mark Zuckerberg has your best interest in mind. But if you get the like publishers clearinghouse check at your doorstep, then you might start thinking differently. Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past two decades building technology that is radically reshaped how billions of people communicate, consume information and understand the world. Now he says the next transformation will be even bigger. Last week, he published a massive 6,500 word manifesto titled The Future is for Everyone, the path to a positive AI future. He predicts how AI will transform jobs, education, science, and even our interpersonal relationships. In addition to being a futuristic prediction, the manifesto also makes a bunch of political arguments

and it's partially a sales pitch for Meta's version of the AI future. Mike Isaac is a tech reporter at the New York Times, and he has been covering Meta and Zuckerberg for over a decade. And today we are going to dive deep into Zuckerberg's manifesto, talk about what it says, what it reveals, and how Meta's version of superintelligence will ultimately affect all of us. Mike, welcome to Power User. Thank you for having me.

So to start off, I kind of want to explain to people what happened here. Mark Zuckerberg publishes this manifesto. I feel like tech people just love a manifesto. What is this post that he wrote on Super Intelligence? Well, it's funny because at this point, I feel like he's written like a bunch of manifestos and it's hard to keep track. And if I were on his team, I'd be like, maybe don't do one of these every so often because then it lacks like the punch of like, okay, I dropped a huge thing. But for a long time, he's been saying like, you know, we need to democratize technology and people have the tools to build tech and do things that they want. And now this is like very much in the context of everyone should have their own personal superintelligence.

By that, he means sort of a very sophisticated AI robot that can do a lot of things that are tailored to you, you know, whether it's like sorting through your calendar, booking dinners, like creating a podcast to have your kids listen to in the car. And a lot of this would be based on like the amount of information they already have about you through your usage of Instagram or Facebook over the years or Messenger. But like really the idea that it shouldn't necessarily be others controlling how this stuff works and your AI should be tailored to you and people will ultimately want that in the future. I think really just like a why Facebook, why meta here? Why would I use this product and him staking a claim as to here's why it's actually important? And when they say super intelligence, it's like AGI is artificial general intelligence is like something that rivals. our brains and super intelligence would be something surpassing that of ours, basically. I'm kind of interested in this vision of where like everyone has the personal super intelligence.

I mean, he talks about it a lot in like economic terms. And I thought it was interesting, like sort of his version of the jobs future or the business landscape because we hear so much about like mass unemployment. We had Dario, you know, being doom and gloom saying you're going to be stuck in the permanent underclass soon, right? And Zuckerberg was sort of making this argument of like, actually everyone's going to be a small business owner. which I thought was kind of interesting.

So I'm curious kind of like, how does his version of the future compare or contrast to Sam Altman or Dario's version of the future? Yeah. One of his big things was criticizing other folks and the doomy, gloomy stuff and exactly what you said. Like, everyone's an entrepreneur. He's been the everyone should be an entrepreneur thing for a long time. You know, he's been saying it at Y Combinator, the startup incubator here, or like, you know, one of his close advice. is Mark Andresen, and like, this is all straight from Mark Andreessen's brain. But, like, yeah, his idea is, well, if you have superpowered AI, you can build your own company.

Everyone should build a company. It's very much supercharged capitalism, sort of like this will enable businesses in a good way, rather than, like, the predominantly anthropic view of entire swathes of the economy are going to be gone and replaced by this type of intelligence. And so we as humans need to re-architect how we look at work and how we look at what we find fulfillment in from our lives. Some of this is like positioning, but I do think,

in general, this is something that Zuckerberg has been fairly consistent on in talking about past products over the years, you know? And there's probably some subconscious level of rationalization and writing things in after the fact, but I do think He said, like, everyone should be using X, Y, or Z thing as long as I'm the one providing those things. He really does want everyone to be an entrepreneur. I think it, like, bothers me so much because I guess I'm kind of running a small business

just being an independent freelancer and content creator. And it is so hard. And not everyone wants to actually start a business. I got a Meta Press release about Seller, their new app for Facebook Marketplace. And it was literally like very similar messaging. And it was like, and now with the AI integration with seller any, but you can mass list your products. You can run this out of your house.

And I'm like, God, I don't want to run a store out of my house. I don't want to run a business. But aside from sort of painting this picture where I guess everyone's a small business owner and we're all using that AI to kind of supercharge our lives, there's some policy proposals baked into this. He talks about the need to accelerate the process for building data centers, maintaining export controls on chips, which would give meta an advantage over sort of these Chinese open weight models, reduce training data restrictions, legal protections for distillation, which means allowing AIs to train on other AIs output. So what did you make of sort of like the policy suggestions in this piece?

How is Meta sort of positioning itself? I mean, look, all of this is incredibly self-serving in ways that it's very funny because I find Zuckerberg willing to shift a lot of his positions when the environment and the landscape changes. There's some things like I said before that are pretty consistent, but some of these things are totally different. Like Chinese open source models are something that Meta has. done some distillation on in the past.

I basically use those to train their own stuff. And this idea, a lot of this is reacting against Anthropic and to some extent open AI, which are companies that rely heavily on not having AI models be open source and having what's called closed models, not having that all kind of out there for anyone to pick apart and use, in particular because it's a very big advantage to their business. they want theirs to be the best and most powerful. I think in Anthropics case, there are, like, a lot of real true believers that think this stuff is going to end the world.

And, like, that's another part of that stuff baked into their philosophy. And so Zuckerberg is very intentionally making a play against that and saying, actually, and ties it into his, like, you know, entrepreneurial vision. This is great for everyone. And we should have these open source models everywhere that anyone can use and benefit from. And then also, by the way, we're building huge. amounts of data centers, like, very quickly. And, and, you know, like, they recognize the tide is turning in terms of some public sentiment

around AI specifically data centers. So they're trying to figure out how to thread that needle and not like piss off the average person. But all of the policies, recommendations that he has are very, as usual, self-serving to meta and then also like fighting back against the biggest winners in the space right now. Anthropic and Open AI for sure. Yeah. Well, I feel like, you know, it's interesting because Meta was this heavyweight for years, crushing competition, putting regulatory sort of frameworks in their favor to destroy Snapchat

and sort of other competitive apps. And now it seems like they're kind of on the back foot. You know, they're not really a frontier lab, the way that like anthropic and open AI are. So is this sort of like open source play just like a cynical way to kind of seem like they're competing because their models aren't as good? And how are they sort of trying to get back into that like top? three spot. Yeah, I mean, look, I think your read is totally right. And I don't think Mark ever does anything that's not at least somewhat self-serving for sure. And so here's the benefit of

the doubt case. They have open source some things in the past. There's a, or they built this software tool called Pi Torch and gave that away for free. And they've sort of done this open compute project sharing information on how to build like some hardware. So like there is precedent that exists. That said, like, they were behind three years ago and did open source and then they pivoted like a year ago when they were behind again to close models and now they're pivoting again. So like a lot of this really does include things that where is the landscape at the time and what can we do to catch up? And you're 100% right. I think they know that they're behind in developing these models. And so like flooding the zone with how do we get free stuff out there? How do we develop

goodwill with developers, how do we get people to use these lesser models? I think the other thing that's really important, too, is that we're in this moment where frontier models, the very tip of the spear can be very expensive to use. And companies are realizing you don't need to use a Porsche when you could use like a Pinto or something or like a cheaper what I drive, a Honda Fit to get the job done. And so that's where META may have an advantage. where they're like, okay, we're going to use some of these lower-end models, put them out there for open weight models, which is kind of like there's nuance between that and open source,

but like let people use those. And that could chip away at some of the advantages these frontier labs have. So that's, I think, the other dynamic they're kind of entering into, if that makes sense. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively

demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A

live streams, and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Yeah, I mean, aside from this sort of like

corporate positioning and policy proposals, I feel like this is also trying to make this case to the public. Obviously, AR has a bit of a reputation problem right now among the public. And I'm curious, kind of, who do you think this is trying to persuade, basically? What communities do you think he's trying to reach with this message? From just the folks that I talk to out here, or certainly in Open AI and Anthropic, but also at Meta, like, I think a lot of the industry and at Google were caught off guard by the anti-AI backlash in the public.

Because a lot of the data center buildouts were going fairly smoothly with regulators initially, like all the red tape was gone. They were getting these huge tax breaks, but also like making the case to the regulators. Like, hey, look, we're bringing all this stuff to the community. This like fallow farmland that no one's been using is now going to be the locus of like a bunch of jobs, blah, blah, blah. They were like, okay, cool. And then AI people and tech people get excited and they're like, of course everyone should love this,

you know? So like, when someone comes in is like, no, I hate this. You're warping my like pets brains having the data center in the backyard. I think that caught them off guard. And exactly what you said, like if I'm inhabiting their mind, it's like, we need to stop talking to ourselves and saying how cool this is because look what we can do and tell the average person how this is a good thing. And I still think they're wrestling through that.

You tell me, but I feel like not every message resonates, you know. They're so, my favorite, and this was not Zuckerberg, but Sam Altman, the tweet about, I can't remember the details. It was something about like using AI to talk to your kid in the car. What was it? I think Katie Natopoulos had a really good take on this, which was like, I'm not a parent, so I don't know. But she was like, look, one of the most fun things you could do in your car is listen to the weird stuff your kids say to you rather than like put a robot on and have that going, you know. Yeah, he was like, make an AI podcast for your kids to listen to about their interests or something.

And so you don't have to talk to them in the car. I mean, look, I'm not a parent, but that's probably not what I would do. I feel like a lot of them just have a really difficult time. I mean, Zuckerberg's talking about even his own daughter. early. And he's like, oh, and I have her training to do this and this. And I'm like, well, this girl has a completely different childhood than 99.9% of America. And these stories really don't land. So I think trying to make a positive case right now is weird. Trying to say, do it through sort of this entrepreneurial democratization of tech seems weird. At the same time, like, Meta has a PR crisis and

is not known for privacy or security. Like, this is a company that built its business around advertising. We saw the backlash to Open AI when they sort of talked about putting ads. in, do you think that there's any world in which this company that is so brazenly built on this like sort of commercialized business model could even dominate a world where super intelligence is something that we all have. Like if I had to have a super intelligence bot, I think meta is the last company that I would go to for that. It's a really good point.

And I think it really also gets back to the credibility issue for Zuckerberg in particular, where a lot of the time has positions shift based on the moment, you know. And it's just people, exactly what you said. Like people have a really hard time trusting this company. and with fair reason, like, they've done shifty stuff in the past or like, they did this really boneheaded thing that I think even people internally over there admitted was stupid, which was like opting people in automatically on the AI sort of training stuff. I believe it was in Instagram, maybe it was Facebook.

And then they quickly switch back on that, you know, and stuff like that makes me wonder if they appreciate the gravity of like when meta says something or when it's trying to get people to trust them. That just also seems kind of in their DNA to push it forward to just be like, okay, we need this much info to make our systems better. So we're going to push the line. But like, if you just reaffirm the existing biases that people have about your company all the time, that's never going to change, you know, especially on something as personal as like the idea of giving your AI. First of all, you have to convince people that's even useful, much less give them like your most intimate parts of your life to, to interact with, you know.

Well, right. I mean, people, I covered the social media. media addiction trial, which was such a ridiculous sort of show trial thing and the New Mexico case, which is also nonsense. And there's a lot of sort of nonsense moral panic claims against meta. But at the same time, meta is not responsible with users data. I don't think they really prioritize users in a lot of these decisions. It seems like they're prioritizing corporate profits and just some of the ways they've run their companies over the years.

And so I think if you have this personal AI agent, right, it knows everything about your finances, your relationships, right? Like your health, your everything. And I mean, there's so many mental health concerns, justified or not about their social media products that I feel like giving somebody access to a superintelligence all day that's meta with concerns around AI psychosis, no matter how real that is or not, seems kind of doomed. So I agree. Like if you want to convince people that you're being responsible and also have these cases with jury is finding you guilty of X, Y, or Z thing, whether you agree with where that's coming from or not. The position that you're in is like, okay, now people think we are doing this to people's brains or whatever. So how do we earn back that trust?

You know, can we, do we want to outside of just a business sense? And one of the things that actually disappoints me, maybe naively, is when they just sort of stop doing a lot of the internal research on this stuff. If they believe that their product is fine for people and there's a fundamental mistrust of the company, what are the ways you can get people to meet you there, you know? And so does that mean outside researchers coming in? Does that mean like doing some sort of like real good faith version of working with science or like established publications? That would be great. You know, I think they probably went through an era of that.

And they tried some of that, but then saw that they weren't getting any credit from the press and then just recoiled, which is also a bummer. But like, it doesn't mean you pack your ball and go home. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I was at TrustCon reporting from this sort of annual trust and safety conference that that takes place every year where all the trust and safety professionals come a month or so ago. And actually, a lot of them talked about that they are so hesitant to engage in any research that could be framed negatively in the media. And actually, this TrustCon too was like very close to press. They only let like six reporters in. It was a whole thing.

It was an interesting landscape because, again, I think there is so much heightened scrutiny and people that are even in these companies trying to ask these have questions. feel like even asking the question will be a headline meta questions, whether it's chatbot is destroying young people's mental health. And it's like, well, they should be questioning those things. We kind of want them to get to those answers. And ideally design the products to not do that. But it's just, I think it's like a tough, interesting sort of dynamic. And to your point, if you can get to a place where the public, the press or whatever can be like,

yes, the fact that they're questioning that is not necessarily a scandal. It's more like these are things that we should be reckoning with. and we can do that with a company that's, I mean, look, there are people that just believe that that will never be the case or that they're never going to be like open to it or whatever. And I just like, from an academic perspective or a data science perspective, there are a lot of folks who would love to play with and understand one of the largest data sets in the world, right? And if you could do that from a productive place, but I think that's like, to your point, really risky if you're inside the company and scarred from going through this over and over,

or maybe you do find things that are dangerous or unwelcome, you know, there is risk there, too. So there's a lot of conflicting incentives. I would hope we get to a place where we could still do this sort of research, but I don't know. And I don't blame the press at all, obviously I'm a journalist. But I mean, to me, like, especially talking to these people, I'm like, the press isn't the problem. The problem is this sort of like reactionary industrial complex built on sort of manufacturing panic around these things often for profit themselves. So that is frustrating. I think it's a tough landscape for tech.

But just to get back to kind of like the manifesto and like Zuckerberg's latest thing, I mean, in addition to this 6,500 word piece, which I listened to, I was glad they had the audio version. I put it on double speed. I know. I should have just listened. God, I just read the whole thing. And then I was like, oh, God, I'm over it. And I wish it could have even gone faster. It was reading quite slow.

But Zuckerberg also wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal. Zuckerberg's also on Twitter now, I think, hilariously. So what is this pivot? And is this like a desperation type thing? What is the sort of goal of this broader PR effort? I do think it's really fascinating how Twitter is very relevant in tech land, particularly because it's where all the AI people and CEOs talk to one another, you know? I think Elon has really shredded functionality in a lot of ways and just like a lot of

BOW stuff bubbles up or copyright basically doesn't exist anymore. But CEOs, including Zuckerberg, know that they kind of need to be in the game because it's where all the talent and tech people are talking to each other all the time. And he went from like not doing a tweet in like seven years to tweeting pretty regularly, you know. And surprisingly, you know, he placed that op-ed in the journal. Then later that day he called me to sort of deliver points. He then called the FT. He called the journal again, one of the reporters over there that I think.

was probably like, hey, can you call me and not just write in the op-ed, which I empathize with. And like, he doesn't do that, right? Like, he does not like the mainstream media and there's no more mainstream than the Times, the Journal, and the FT. So, like, I think he recognizes how to engage strategically. And I know, like, I'm fully aware he was trying to use the media when he was planting this to lob grenades at Anthropic and Open AI. And what our responsibility is, is to sort of couch it in the context of he's not just being nice because he wants to talk to me. It's like he is like on the offenses. Who is wondering how you were doing, Mike?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's not exactly a small talk guy is what I would say. Well, what did you learn from that conversation? And what sort of like information were you able to glean? Yeah, I mean, look, like he's the most competitive person I've ever met just in terms of like wanting to win at whatever the game is on the field. And today it's AI. A few years ago, he thought it was crypto.

Metaverse, you know, like, whatever it is, he's like, I mean, and to your point earlier about Snapchat, it was when Evan Spiegel brought Snap in, he's like, well, this is mine now, I'm going to crush you. So now it's AI. He knows, he's very aware that they are on the back foot, that anthropic, their revenue curves are insane or have been insane. Their coding robot just beat everyone just in terms of advancements. It's why I open AI is scrambling to get their business together.

So he knows when to be opportunistic into truck grenades. And I think they see, we're in a moment now where Anthropic is really on their back foot, at least in terms of public sentiment and I think industry sentiment. Not in terms of their business, but in terms of people, there was a moment where the open source conversation came out and they were just like, no one should have this and we need to like cut things off. And that bothered a lot of people in tech land and the industry specifically because once you talk about open source software and the idea of closing this information sharing, almost

like fundamental tenant of Silicon Valley off to two other technologists, that really angers people. And I think, NVIDIA, meta, a bunch of like voices came out and were like, no, everyone should have information should be free, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was 100% one of those moments. And, you know, he did this thing where he's not naming Anthropic or Dario, but it's very clear who he's talking about just to say, I don't believe the Dumer's in this conversation, blah, blah, blah. He's just very aware of what he's doing.

Yeah. Well, Dario has really leaned into this, like, safetyist rhetoric and I don't know who's the Wario and who's the Mario, but they kind of feel like opposite sides of both of them. There's like something spiritually similar about them. I'm thinking Zuckerberg is more Wai Luigi in my brain. Waluigi and Luigi, yeah. Or one's Mario was, I don't know, we can't, we got to get it all sorted out in the universe. It's also, it's funny to hear that about the technologists feeling this way because, I mean, I wrote a little bit about the backlash to the Open AI influencer trip that happened recently.

Oh, yeah, totally. That did not go well, right? They wanted to crucify these people. No, it went so poorly. And I was kind of talking to people and I talked to some creators. Literally just this morning again, I heard from another creator that went on the trip that was like really surprised by, you know, in part because some of these creators have also been an anthropic event. Anthropic has been doing such aggressive influencer marketing for the past. year hosting these elaborate lavish dinners, taking out all these West Village girlie influencers, lifestyle influencers. Do you think that's been effective for them? Well, it hasn't gotten any backlash. It seems to have only been affected. And Claude seems like this elevated product that smart, cool people use. And you go to the Claude Cafe and Open AI, they're like, you know, die. So I think

part of it is a branding issue. And I do think Anthropica has like nailed the messaging, the branding, the color, the serif font. I mean, even people on Capitol Hill, they're, They're like, oh, I would never chat GPT, you know, that's trash, but like, claw. It's like the Winnie the Pooh where he puts on the like top hat. No, like, sophisticated. No, I totally agree, which is why I make the distinction from super techies. Like, I think from a marketing PR battle perspective, in consumer land, I would say Anthropic is definitely, but like, that's why I think Zuckerberg and Open AI to some degree really leapt on this brief

moment where Anthropic was on the wrong side of sentiment, at least in Silicon Valley, just because like open source, it's such a funny thing. It's one of those like really wonky topics, but technologists really care about it. You know, like they really, and I understand why. Like it's kind of a fundamental tenant of the internet, you know, the idea that, and this is controversial, but the idea that information should be free and shared by everyone. And like AI people certainly don't seem to mind taking information on the internet. And so to sort of peg Anthropic as the folks who want to close that off and they are the only appropriate stewards of this technology, I think was where Zuckerberg certainly saw his moment to kind of chuck a few rocks.

Yeah, twist the knife a little bit, which is I actually don't think something people agree with. I rewatched iconic 90s movie. I think he came out like 2000, 2001 of the Ryan Felipe movie Antitrust about Windows. It's basically supposed to be like Bill Gates and stuff. and that's the evil, like the evil tech company of the day is Microsoft. It's such a good movie. I got to watch that. I can't believe it.

I don't think I've watched it in years. Usually the one I revisit is a social network, which is like a great movie because of David Fincher. You have to rewatch it. Okay. So here's the other thing I'll say. Facebook is definitely probably nervous around this new one coming out on Zuckerberg. And like I would imagine some of this him being a little more outspoken thing is like girding for that, you know?

after the social network was such like, I mean, it was a great movie. I don't think everything in that movie was true, but it was such a well-crafted movie that it had a lasting cultural impact on his legacy. And so I think they probably have that in mind, even though Sorkin, it's not going to be David Fincher's going to be Aaron Sorkin. Yeah, I feel like this new movie from what I've heard in the Hollywood circles here in LA, I've heard that it's sloth. I've heard that it's really bad.

And that it's just feeding the fires of this sort of like, think of the children, whatever. But it kind of goes back to this idea of like, I think actually a lot of people today, I mean, I read a lot about open, open source stuff related to age verification and you're trying to sort of mandate the operating system, you know, needs to verify your identity and open source developers are like, okay, so that's not how Linux works. But there's this idea that like, actually technology needs to be controlled. And you know, these tech CEOs talk all day about how powerful and big and dangerous and this is going to do this. And even in this manifesto, he's like talking about like a lot of things that I think people will read and think that sounds

scary. And so to simultaneously be like, and that's why we need to democratize it, it feels like a very 2005 kind of like, I don't know, it doesn't seem like that would be a winning message. It seems like anthropic with their safety as narrative actually has a much more winning sort of message with the public. It's such a weird moment now where there's a lot of conflicting ideas that I think people are trying to sort out. Like just a few years ago, we were in a place where the popular knowledge was all this stuff was fake, right? And then we moved to, and I think I still kind of believe this, which is, I don't think all this stuff is fake. I think some of this stuff is real. I think a lot of this stuff works poorly, but I do think even things that work poorly can still

have profound effects on how the world works, right? And so, I mean, look, you're seeing like preemptive layoffs by companies that want to do this stuff, even if the replacement isn't that good, but it's good enough. Now we're trying to wrestle with, do we believe this stuff is really dangerous, is it not dangerous? Should a few people control it? Should a lot of people? I don't know where everyone has netted out there. I think, like, in general, the public has moved more from this is all fake to it's real enough that we should be concerned, you know, or we don't like these parts of it. So I'm very curious where we are a year from now and whether the companies have to like slow their role on some of these projects. But part of the letter, too, was like, and we're creating

this $1 billion fund for data center communities to like basically giving people money to like be cool. So I'm curious. Was it meta that gave $50,000 bonuses to the teachers in Louisiana? Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. Yep. Yep. So what better way to like win, I mean, who knows if it works, but to win people over by saying, we're paying the teachers. So who knows, you know? I was talking to another sort of media person that sort of works in the AI industry, I guess a little bit or is certainly like in these circles. And I guess some leader at one of these tech companies was like, what do you think we should do? And she was suggesting that like, basically these companies start doing Mr. B style

giveaways where they just start giving money. Wow, that would be fascinating. I mean, maybe, you know? Yeah, like you two could win. Like, that's funny. But honestly, like sometimes money really is, it is kind of like a creator centric thing too, right? Like you're the expert on this.

But like courting the communities has often been about like giving or at least beginning to court creator land has been a. about, like, seeding it with money over time. We did that story years ago about, like, meta, then known as Facebook, maybe, trying to, like, win them over after being way behind YouTube or whatever. So, I don't know, it might be the way to do it. They just throw lots of money. I know.

And, I mean, I do think if they start throwing lots of money at these communities, that's going to materially make a difference. I think these manifestos, and I think, like, telling people, you can tell people a million things, but if they get a $50,000 bonus, they're going to think differently about your company. It's just a reality. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I think you're right. Because like to what we were talking about earlier, like they just have a credibility issue and you're not going to instantly believe Mark Zuckerberg has your best interest in mind. But if you get the like publishers clearinghouse check at your doorstep, then you might start thinking differently.

Yeah. Or and I think it's about also like giving people the opportunity to think that they can get that money. Like one thing I think about with Creator World is it's not just about the money that you give to the creators. It is creating this idea that you also could get that money. and that does kind of silence dissent. So it's not about like meta giving money to like a charity here and there. Like I think what this person was saying about like the Mr. B style thing is like, everybody thinks they can get it. And Mr. Beast avoided criticism for years as well because people are like, well, but I might

be the one to get it. So I don't want to come out against him. And I think it's like, well, meta could come. I don't want to alienate them, which is also like bad and controlling and stuff. But might work. Yeah. If I'm a PR person, I'm just like, just pay everyone off, I guess. You know, that's kind of the only.

That's the American way, I guess. Well, is there anything else that you think people should know about this manifesto, what Zuckerberg's up to? And that we should sort of like keep our eye on as the company kind of continues to make moves in the AI space. I think this September Meta Connect will be a big moment. That's their annualish developer conference that they do. My guess is we're probably going to see their latest models, like whatever new product that people actually can use. I'm guessing they're going to have different flavors of what their agents may look like. I know that they're testing one internally right now.

It's called like Hatch or the code name is called Hatch. It's basically like an open claw knockoff, like a personal agent, basically. So my guess is they'll probably debut at Connect and be like, hey, we too can have a personal agent. And here are the benefits because it's hooked into your meta stuff or whatever. So I would, I'm gonna, I'll be there, but I would, I would just tune into that and see what they're doing.

If that is something you care about. And if you don't or you want to wait, that is also fine too, because they do have to win back your comments. confidence in them. I know. I don't think we should subject anybody to the Metacconnect live stream. I know. Just wait for me to deal with it and then I'll tell you what's up. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Mike will filter it out. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a pleasure having you. And I can't wait for people to continue to, yeah, see what you have next. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me. All right. That's it for this week's episode of Power User. User.

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