Meta Connect 2026, OpenAI’s Australia ‘Incident,’ Bentley’s New EV | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:02)

Meta Connect, yesterday. Zuck likes going late. He, 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern for the keynote.

Jordi Hays (0:09)

Well, because he wanted to roll straight from the keynote into some beer pong.

John Coogan (0:13)

Oh, that's true. We will get into that big, hot debate on the timeline over his beer pong strategy. But really, really tight keynote, very well organized, very clear, didn't overstay its welcome, did three live demos. Last year, there was a hiccup with a live demo. There was Wi-Fi, and I believe Boz triggered everyone's agents by using the wake word. So this time, he deliberately stayed away from using that wake word and used the name of his agent. So he didn't cause a lot of chaos in the dome or in the studio, wherever they were. But a bunch of great announcements, really good pacing, really tight one hour keynote. And it was fun watching Zuck sort of do the live demos and be like, one down, like it was high stakes. It was clearly high stakes for him, but he got through it all, no mistakes.

Jordi Hays (1:04)

Yeah, he had a funny line. He was like, and we love live demos here.

John Coogan (1:07)

Yeah. It's funny cause like he totally could just not do live demos, but he like wants to, so he pushes through it.

Jordi Hays (1:13)

I think you need to.

John Coogan (1:15)

Do you?

Jordi Hays (1:15)

I think you absolutely need to. People have bought so many random hardware devices that you haven't met expectations.

John Coogan (1:22)

Yeah, and I guess there was that-

Jordi Hays (1:23)

With hardware, if you want people to buy it, you have to do a live demo.

John Coogan (1:26)

Yeah, there was a demo of a Gemini model running two years ago that was sped up in post, and that faced a lot of criticism. And so I think, yeah, just demoing things as they are available in the real world is very valuable. And I think in general, the thesis for the products was meet people where they are, delivering tomorrow's technology with today's constraints. And that's just what I kept seeing as a theme was, what do people want? And of course, the best, it basically created a huge dichotomy between like the crazy super intelligence, RSI, ASI, PDOOM, XRISC crew, and then just like, Muse, it's a helpful agent. Niraj Agarwal summed it up well. Anthropic marketing, we build a god only we can control and gave it a wet lab. Muse marketing, hey girl, I know you have dozens of unpaid parking tickets. Let's get that cleaned up. And it's funny because it's actually working. I think that if you went back to a couple months ago, the consensus was like, popularity of AI is turning, it's deeply unpopular. You need to just be quiet or not lean in or just like apologize like what a lot of the lab leaders are doing, just being like, that is bad, I'm sorry. But Meta has taken a very different approach. They're not fear mongering, they're just like, it's cute, it's lovable.

And they actually are successful. I mean, The New York Times, yesterday, Jensen and Ezra are duking it out over like X-risk and acceleration. Do we need to slow down? Meanwhile, The New York Times published a really positive review of Muse. They love it and they're a tough cookie to win over basically. So success there. And it's interesting because there's been a few strikes for Meta over the past two years.

The vertical AI Slop app vibes quickly disappeared. I don't even know if it's available anymore. It might have been quietly shuttered or tucked behind a couple of different tabs. The core MetaChat app that was sort of just like a Gemini, a Chachi Petit clone, I don't think that ever really took off.

Jordi Hays (3:37)

Over the last year, you have massive spending, clearly massive focus for Meta, but the strategy was at most times completely incoherent.

John Coogan (3:46)

It was scattered.

Jordi Hays (3:46)

It was not legible to the markets. It was not legible to the tech industry.

John Coogan (3:51)

It was do everything.

Jordi Hays (3:52)

Yeah, you had Muse code. You had them buying and then having to undo the Manus acquisition.

John Coogan (4:00)

Oh yeah.

Jordi Hays (4:00)

The Meta vibe. The first thing, and again, this was an unforced error, the first thing that they did post the whole talent raid was release the short form Slop Video app, which wasn't even...

SPEAKER_3 (4:13)

It was mid-journey.

Jordi Hays (4:14)

Yeah, it was basically a mid-journey wrapper, and everyone was like, okay, this doesn't align to what you're putting out, which is this personal, super-intelligent narrative. So really, yesterday, everything felt like it came together really nicely, tying in all of the hardware investments, tying in personal, making personal super-intelligence feel a bit more real, AI that hustles for you. I think that's smart positioning. But it really felt like things came together for the first time. And I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to give them full credit.