Yeah, too long. Yeah, four days is way too much. I missed you.
Yeah, I missed the Ultra Dump, but I'm glad to be back.
We are back and yeah, it was a good weekend. I saw The Social Reckoning, big drop, big weekend because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty, but it's interesting. Do you think that the Meta team tried to time up Muse Wonder, all the good news, to like fight back like the Cheeky Pint appearance because they completely steamrolled the movie? They won.
I don't think they needed to because the movie got really bad.
The crazy thing is that I had zero desire to see the movie. I will not be going to the movie and in many ways it's my job to at least go.
I figured you were going to go so I felt like we were covered.
So I did go. It's crazy how excited I am to go see the Nathan Fielder film.
And how little I even care to know about it. I don't even care about your review.
Okay, well, you're about to care. Others might. My review is going to be riveting. Okay, so it's Saturday, it's a little rainy in LA, and so I'm like, I'll throw on this jacket, I'll get a little cozy, I'll go out. I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place and then I go to the movie. So I walk in and I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for a nice rainy day in LA. I walk into the theater, I sit down for The Social Reckoning and it stars, you know, it focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. And in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man who dressed up as Spider-Man going to see Avengers. And I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket, my exact... I had the same jeans and boots too. It was really, really striking. I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie, so it was very funny. And I was like, that is exactly my jacket. Like, it's not even just the same brand, I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway...
It was a very funny moment. It's not quite a sequel to The Social Network. Like, it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations at Meta, at Facebook. It's very much about the... so the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg and it's much more peripheral. The story follows data engineer Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era. The race towards superintelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. I'm not surprised that this movie is underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now. Worldwide opening was nine million on a budget of 40 million, so it's gearing up to be a flop, but the game's not over yet. And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting is fairly compelling, the lighting and it moves quickly. The story ebbs and flows nicely over the two-hour runtime, but it feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like I was like, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019, but since then it's like UFC, complete fashion makeover, changed the company's name, they have a fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements, and then AI obviously, personal assistant. You know, people often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about Meta. You could ask, you know, will Muse margins be comparable to Meta's core ad business? But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask like, does Muse Wonder jump in really good on the benchmarks? Does that change the underlying benchmarks?
That's a hard question. And even Cheeky Pint was pushing on that, right?
Exactly. But corporate media...
Sorkin completely drops the ball.
Yeah, doesn't address the fact that if Muse Wonder is competitive, does that change the underlying frontier model economic thesis? Like that's the question that people want to ask. That's the question that media has a responsibility to ask and to investigate and to interrogate, and yet Sorkin completely shirks his duty there. Will the retention curve for Muse smile? You know, right now there's a post by DD Dosh showing that Muse, you know, there's a lot of excitement on day one. After 14 days, a lot of people have stopped using the product. Sometimes these things come back. What's going on there? Completely ignored by the movie. It was very, very odd. And so instead he focuses on old stories that have been settled in the courts essentially. But there were a bunch of other funny things. I was taking notes and it's hard because... Michael, are you here to give your review? I have to be very careful because I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin. Okay, I think he's great. Okay. He has made a lot of great work. This did not feel like one of those great...
What specifically was lacking? Because I thought the acting was pretty good and I thought like if it had been three hours I would have been like, ah, that was a drag, but like two hours I thought it was okay. Was it just like too contrived? Because I feel like my critique of it was very different than yours.
Yeah, contrived feels like a good word. It just felt like all the character dynamics and the dialogue and everything just felt so forced.
And it felt like it was trying to be like an 80s journalistic thriller, like All the President's Men or something like that, but it just felt kind of out of place and it felt too polished to actually fit in that scope. I don't know.
It was a total glaze piece on the Wall Street Journal because Jeff Horwitz...
Maybe I want to watch it now.
Jeff Horwitz, I mean, sure, he's in shape, but let's be honest, Jeremy Allen White, the guy is diced. He's absolutely shredded. And they cast him as like the ultimate Chad. There were a bunch of other funny moments where Jeff Horwitz, the character, the journalist, shows up and he's like, I don't even have a Facebook. I don't know how to use the GPS stuff in my... He's like the extremely offline guy. And there's a whole bunch of funny moments where the benefits of social media are kind of revealed through this because part of it takes place during COVID and the Frances Haugen character is like, oh yeah, I set up a Facebook group for all these scientists and everyone really understands how serious COVID is going to be. And the journalist who's like offline and doesn't care about tech is like, that's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. And it's like, wait, you're kind of pitching me the whole idea of the internet. Like the biologists calling COVID so much earlier. Like there clearly are some benefits here. Oh, they have this funny moment where they're like Mark Zuckerberg has a bulletproof couch and they're framing it as like look at how weird this guy is. And it's the literal coolest thing ever. Like this thing sucks because I'm watching it. I'm like, bulletproof couch, that's amazing.
A couch that's always watching your back.
Yeah. So the idea is that you can hide under it and they kind of frame it as like he's being a coward by having it because like you should obviously charge straight into the hail of gunfire if you're being attacked. But and they're like he would be hiding behind his...
Did I not kind of call this like two months ago that no one would care at all about the whole premise of this movie anymore?
Like the whole narrative, like even the media itself has so far moved on.
Yeah. I would have liked to see this kind of production on the current AI race.
Yeah, right. And I think we're getting something like that with Artificial.
But it's interesting because like The Social Network...
I don't know. I don't know if I can say this. This is a cult classic.
Yeah. I mean it was a box office success as well, but...
Box office success, but within tech it's like it's a classic. It was so influential on the culture. Sort of had the opposite effect that the makers of the film maybe wanted it to have where everyone was like, I want to be like Zuck. I want to be that guy. At least on the inside of the industry it was like I'm sure hard to reinvent like Zuck or figure out who he was outside of... you know, at some point in the 2010s it felt like he was just becoming the character. He was looking more and more like the character in the movie in some ways, like almost like becoming...
Wait, when... this was like late...
Yeah. And then PT has that idea that it's funny and ironic that Mark Zuckerberg became the Justin Timberlake character from the movie.
Yeah. Or that was it. But it was so influential on the industry and especially the next generation of founders that it seemed like it had an influence on Zuck. I don't know.
Yeah, that's funny. I mean it definitely feels like the post-2020 UFC...
Yeah. That was like, wait, who am I? Who do I want to be? I have to figure out...
And it created a ton of distance because the Jeremy Strong character, it feels like it's a completely different person. And then Jeremy Strong reads as kind of older but he's playing a much younger character than what you see on Cheeky Pint who's like actually Jeremy Strong's age but has become something else. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting weird things. Yeah, there's also a bunch of things where you're like, oh, that's not how things work. Like there's this scene where Mark Zuckerberg is addressing the board and explaining how the algorithm will work and he's like, emoji reactions will be worth five points and retweets will be worth 50 points and it's seen as like, oh my god, he designed the algorithm for controversy. And it's like, you know the algorithm is like 12 levels deep. It's like he goes to Adami who goes to the chief technology officer who goes to VP of engineering who says like, okay, what are we doing? And he's like, well, we created this optimization pipeline for retention that balances all these things. It's a bunch of data and we have no idea what's going on in the black box, but we saw the retention went up. There's no one at Facebook who's like...
Add another three points to retweets or reposts or whatever, shares.
It's like more signal than can be humanly understood. For sure. Also it's just a hilarious view of Hollywood's perception of tech that the final shot of Mark Zuckerberg is him sitting in front of like a 42-inch TV in this war room and he's just sitting there like this and he's just watching code scroll by, really fast code scrolling by. And it's like, why would you be reviewing code at extreme speeds during... it happens during January 6th and it's like, that's not how you monitor a situation. Like, you open Instagram.
Yeah. And then also like they go through the Trump ban in this weird way where it's very much framed as like his decision. And it's like if you were paying attention on that day, it's very clear that all of the different tech CEOs were in a group chat together talking about like, hey, if we're going to do this, we all got to do it at once because otherwise we will be singled out as the one that did it. So there's a bunch of interesting things. And yeah, also very weird that Aaron Sorkin seems to be under the impression that Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz had a romance of some sort, which they deny. And Jeff Horwitz was like, Aaron Sorkin, please don't make it seem like it was romantic. She was my source and we just worked together on this but we weren't romantically involved. And there's like so many scenes where you're like, okay, they're kind of making it look like they're gonna date. And then they sail off into the sunset and you're like, oh, so did they get married? And you look it up and it's like, no, they were both married to other people. Anyway, funny movie. But the big news, of course, is Meta. Zuck says Meta has reached the frontier with its new Muse Wonder agent. What was the exact line? He said...
Let's get... we'll get into that. Let's...
Okay, he's going back and forth. So this is from the Financial Times. Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached the AI frontier. FT interview: tech billionaire touts release of new Muse Wonder model after vast spending to challenge rivals in AI race. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So yeah, speaking with the FT as Meta released its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, this is watermelon, right? Everyone's doing the fruit thing. There was strawberry and then there's banana and now there's watermelon. He said the new system was going to allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what's being done in the AI field. The Silicon Valley group claims Muse Wonder outperforms or performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic and OpenAI in some tasks according to technical benchmarks. The release marks a major milestone for Zuckerberg who since last year has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta's AI leadership, build vast data centers and hire star AI researchers on multi-million dollar salaries, all in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Quote, getting to this point required both a large amount of compute and investment and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time. So he's bullish. He's posting on X about it. What's your take, Jordi?
I was trying to understand how Mark and Alex really felt about the model by watching Cheeky Pint.
Yeah, on the drive to work today I was listening. It's great to have Cheeky Pint back.
I thought that they were all like... I mean this was the most candid I've ever seen Zuck. Like he felt like...
He was just hanging out having...
A beer, trying to have a couple beers.
And so I thought it was great.
He did. How many exactly, Tyler? I think that's it. It was 1.4 pints.
And I will just go out and say as somebody who's had a couple drinks while recording a podcast, as we would celebrate whenever we would double back in the day, I certainly... we always felt that the content just got worse.
Like it was like each sip it was getting a little bit worse. So we basically...
No, it's a funny idea. You'll be looser. It'll be better content. But that's just not what happens.
You're just not as sharp.
You're just not as sharp.
Like you're just period not as sharp. And yeah, it wasn't like suddenly it was like there's no reason we're here for three hours.
So if you're going to do it, you got to practice. You got to be drinking. If I'm Zuck and I have to launch this new model family and talk about you and all these things, you got to give him credit because either one, he was practicing having like 10 beers a day so that when he had 1.4 he was still feeling sharp.
Like tolerance, he built up his...
He built up his tolerance.
But either way, ballsy to come on and just start throwing them back. So yeah, I was trying to understand... you know, the benchmarks are all amazing. Muse is a great product.
People love it. They like... by being later movers, they managed to solve a bunch of problems.
And like created just a more compelling user experience. I thought it was cool. They're even talking about their experience with like OpenClaw.
Which was cool. But I was trying to... if you actually listen to the wording, Zuck's wording, the quote that stood out to me and I had to play it back. He said, this is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier.
At the 24-minute mark, Brother Collison then said, so you think this is Astra or Fable level?
And then Alex and Zuck kind of both fight over each other for a second, which you can't knock them for. We do the same thing.
But then they said by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that...
Which to me is like, yeah, we all see the benchmarks. They look amazing. But you've been accused of benchmaxing before, and so we all want to know.
No, no, I don't think they've been accused of benchmaxing before. Oh, maybe like early...
Spark, like everyone went through this with Spark. Spark had a bunch of... Spark's bench, you know.
But it's not like... so again, I don't think that they are actually... based on a few of these factors.
