also referred to as: meta
includes Facebook (app), Facebook Live
41 statements across 23 episodes · 7 bullish · 18 bearish · 22 people on the record · first statement Jan 23, 2018 by Michael Mauboussin · said 353 times in 80 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Shane Parrish (118), Nir Eyal (26), Benedict Evans (17), Balaji Srinivasan (16), Jeff Annello (14), Garry Tan (9), Gabriel Weinberg (9), Daniel Gross (9)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 30 mentions in 5 episodes 6 per episode
- You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful | FarmVille Creator
- Speed, Stress, and Better Decisions | Winston Weinberg
- Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley
- The $2 Trillion Mind | Nicolai Tangen
- How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones | James Clear
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 79 mentions in 10 episodes 8 per episode
- Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans
- Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier
- Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders
- Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World
- Josh Wolfe: Human Advantage in the World of AI
- How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash
- Logan Ury: The Dating Myths You Need to Stop Believing
- Be Your Best in 2026: The Most Important Lessons from The Knowledge Project (2025)
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 10 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
2023 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
2022 21 mentions in 6 episodes 4 per episode
2021 43 mentions in 10 episodes 4 per episode
- #104 Nir Eyal: Mastering Indistraction
- #127 Best of 2021: Conversations of the Year
- #102 Sendhil Mullainathan: The Chaos Inside Us
- #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics
- #114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness
- #113 Sarah Tavel: The Value of Intellectual Rigor
- #100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key
- #124 Douglas Rushkoff: The Perils of Modern Media
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 15 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- #94 Chamath Palihapitiya: Understanding Yourself
- #78 Balaji Srinivasan: Exploring COVID-19
- #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future
- #81 Jason Calacanis: Intelligent Risk
- #98 Sahil Lavingia: Observing the Present
- #97 Roger Martin: Forward Thinking
- #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 37 mentions in 7 episodes 5 per episode
- Gabriel Weinberg: Practical Steps to Safeguard Your Data and Identity Online
- #56 Daniel Gross: Catalyzing Success
- #54 Jason Fried: Doing the Enough Thing
- #61 Jonathan Haidt: When Good Intentions Go Bad
- #71 Esther Perel: Cultivating Desire
- #59 Following Intellectual Curiosity with Thomas Tull
- #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 75 mentions in 14 episodes 5 per episode
- #40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
- #48 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 2)
- #47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)
- #39 Tyler Cowen: Thinking About Thinking
- #32 Patrick Collison: Earning Your Stripes
- #31 Barbara Oakley: Learning How to Learn
- #44 Barbara Coloroso: The Kids Are Worth It
- #38 Ali Almossawi: Thinking in Algorithms
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2016 22 mentions in 4 episodes 6 per episode
2015 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Facebook, oldest first
Jan 23, 2018 bullish
Mauboussin: Tech giants leverage capital into insurmountable data capture flywheels
“The amount of data that they can capture, and because all those companies have substantial resources, they can put a lot of resources against not only capturing, but analyzing data. It's an interesting flywheel, right?”
Feb 21, 2018 neutral
Shifting Historical Contexts Cause Valid Psychological Replication Failures
“By definition, we believe that phenomena change as a function of the social context. That's the heart of social psychology. If I'm in one situation, I behave differently than in another situation or one context. And I think that what we should start to make su…”
Aug 21, 2018 negative
Cowen: Simple, boring digital habits beat ambitious tech as killer apps
“I think my intuition is people like simple, boring things, ah, much more than you might imagine. I mean, people just love spending time on Facebook and sending back and forth short, silly, or not very informative messages. And that's been the killer app for so…”
Aug 21, 2018
Tyler Cowen: Capturing attention is hardest among high-income earners
“Of course, it's much harder to get everyone's attention. Most of all, people who have high incomes because there are so many demands on their time, but there's your email flow, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's being texted.”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Publishers must distribute on Facebook's terms because the platform owns demand
“The fundamental difference between, let's say, a newspaper previously that controlled the printing presses and Facebook. Is that Facebook has the users such that suppliers, and this being content organizations, new organizations, have no choice but to go to us…”
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Building a new mass-market digital advertising business is no longer viable
“The real sort of problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser back end such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominan…”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Platform incentives forced media to cover Trump by replacing editorial gatekeeping
“The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted, they, and so the news in media organizations were responding To the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers, they were sort of serfs in Google and Fa…”
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Privacy regulations like GDPR disproportionately entrench monopolies like Google and Facebook
“If you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising,
The alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more.
Like is, is every site with advertising on it going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks t…”
Sep 5, 2018 bearish
Tech giants will be disrupted by paradigm shifts, not direct competitors
“Their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for, you know, the powers that be to compete.”
Sep 5, 2018 bullish
Dec 26, 2018 neutral
Mar 19, 2019 negative
Apr 16, 2019
Gross: Enduring corporate culture is built through scarcity, not early abundance
“It's in many ways in, in scarcity where, where you build culture. It's not in an era of plenty. And one of the most challenging things I think for Google and Facebook's culture is, you know, they really stuck a toothpick into the sand and had a massive oil wel…”
Apr 16, 2019 neutral
Gross: Corporate cultures emerge directly from underlying tech business models
“So in, in many ways, I think the cultural differences between Google and Apple or Facebook and Apple are just emerging properties of an ads driven business model versus we sell you shrink wrapped, you know, pieces of hardware business model.”
May 14, 2019 negative
May 14, 2019 negative
Google Tracks 80% of the Top Million Websites; Facebook Tracks 25%
“Google's on about 80% of the top million sites and a lot of that's Google Analytics, but also, like the Google Ads and stuff like that. Facebook's on 25% and that's this Facebook pixel where it could be the Facebook login, or just sites run Facebook ads, or th…”
Jun 9, 2020 bearish
McLean: Google and Facebook's models will be impaired if journalism dies
“Google and Facebook, right? They're siphoning up most of the advertising dollars that used to go to journalism, and yet Google and Facebook, it will deeply impair their business models if journalism ceases to function, right?”
Oct 13, 2020 negative
Dec 8, 2020
Lavingia: Startups Need Billion-Dollar Upside to Attract Big-Tech Talent
“The early employees might only have half a percent of the company, one percent of the company, two percent of the company. And so they also are looking for it. I mean, they're turning down offers for, you know, from Facebook and Google and Uber at like, you kn…”
Jan 5, 2021 negative
Feb 16, 2021 neutral
Feb 16, 2021 positive
Eyal: Tech distraction is not users' fault, but it is their responsibility
“You didn't invent Facebook. You didn't invent Twitter or Slack or any of these tech companies. You didn't invent that stuff. It's not your fault. But lots of things in life are not your fault, but they are still your responsibility. And so the price of progres…”
Jun 29, 2021 negative
Hertz: Stanford study showed deactivating Facebook reduces loneliness and increases socializing
“And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants, 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case…”
Dec 21, 2021 positive
Nir Eyal: Science does not support claims that digital media damages brains
“So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain. Ridiculous. The science doesn't support that at all, right?”
Dec 21, 2021 negative
Norena Hertz: Quitting Facebook for two months significantly reduces loneliness
“And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case,…”
Apr 5, 2022 bullish
Meta is extremely underrated because Mark Zuckerberg remains founder and CEO
“Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing. Like Zuck will take the hits of pushing them into new territory, even with the five hundred billion dollar markdown or whatever that they just had. Like I'm still more bullish on them …”
Sep 3, 2024 neutral
Dicks: Early Facebook retention hinged on acquiring seven friends in ten days
“At Facebook early on when they were failing to gain traction, they looked at their data and they realized that if a user accumulated seven friends, made seven friends or seven connections on Facebook in 10 days, they were likely to stay on the platform. And if…”
Jan 21, 2025 negative
Startups building incremental AI refinements will become roadkill for Big Tech
“Other things that, you know, I'd say we try to avoid is things that are roadkill along the way of a company like OpenAI or Google or Amazon or Meta. So, small refinements into what the model doesn't do well today. That's just gonna be real cool along the way.”
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
Wolfe: AI Agents Interacting on Frontends Portend the Death of APIs
“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”
Apr 15, 2025 bearish
Taylor: Pre-training a fourth-best foundation model offers highly questionable ROI
“If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best that's gonna cost you a lot of money, and the return on that investment is, is probably fairly questionable, because why use your fourth best large language model versus a frontier model or an op…”
Apr 29, 2025 bullish
Tan: Meta Is an AI Dark Horse Accelerating Progress Cheaply vs AR
“I mean, I think Meta's sort of the dark horse, because, like, they are amassing talent, and then they have crazy distribution. And I think you know, I just would never count Zuck out. I think that he, you know, that it's so crazy that it's super smart that he …”
Apr 29, 2025 positive
Sep 2, 2025 negative
Evans: Google and Meta's proprietary data provides no LLM training moat
“So I'd actually, I think it's actually the opposite, which is that everyone's kind of using the same data. Which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that Meta has is not actually enough to move, to be a ki…”
Sep 2, 2025 neutral
Evans: Meta and Amazon want LLMs to become commoditized infrastructure
“What Meta and Amazon want to do is to make LLM's commodity info that sold at cost. This is why Meta made it open source, because they want to make it commodity info that sold at cost, and they differentiate on top with Meta stuff, with Facebook, social, Instag…”
Sep 2, 2025 neutral
Jun 2, 2026
Pincus: Roughly 20% of Facebook users played FarmVille at its peak
“And Farmville was the first time that we hit this, like, mass market consumer tipping point where lots of people knew about Mafia Wars, but with Farmville, we hit this density on the social network and the feed with Facebook that something I think, like, 20% o…”
Jun 2, 2026 negative
Pincus: Only Zynga and Spotify survived Facebook's app ecosystem
“The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience, and not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented, and many companies did die in it. Most. There's only two companies that…”
Jun 2, 2026 neutral
Pincus: Zynga drove 20% of Facebook page views and 10% of revenue at IPO
“They gave it on Friday, and they said, you have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're gonna take down your apps, which was their right and that could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because, you know, at this…”