Is Mark Zuckerberg okay? The internet is certainly questioning his grip on reality over his comment on a new podcast, while he was hyping Facebook’s AI chatbots, when he said that the average American has “fewer than three friends.”
Facebook/Meta released its standalone Meta AI app this week, as founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to watch ChatGPT eat his lunch in ways Zuck is not used to seeing his lunch eaten. And to promote that Meta AI app, Zuckerberg turned to a friendly forum called the Dwarkesh podcast where he would be interviewed by another fawning AI evangelist who would not press him with a single difficult question.
And yet, he still managed to embarrass himself in a way that’s being mocked like mad across the internet, and is generating more news coverage than any of the tech-corporate-speak pablum he otherwise uttered.
Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.” pic.twitter.com/Y9ClAqsbOA
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) April 30, 2025
"There’s this stat that I always think is crazy,” Zuckerberg says in a clip that’s gone viral. “The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
How do you do, fellow people who have friends! Let’s put aside that Zuckerberg never mentions where he got this statistic, which indicates that he simply pulled it out of his ass. The level of being out-of-touch with reality is pretty mind-boggling to think that most people only have three friends (or “I think it’s fewer”!) .
Something that humanity will always regret is Mark Zuckerberg's inability to make friends at Harvard https://t.co/xsyrIJqXsF
— Hamish Morrison (@HMorrison97) May 1, 2025
You can watch the whole one-hour, 16-minute podcast interview below, though I don’t know if you would want to, because it’s just two guys engaging in self-congratulatory AI marketing bromides. And Zuckerberg’s pitch here is that he’s trying to normalize having additional AI friends, preferably those produced by his company, so that Meta has more of your data to sell, much of it likely more personal than your normal social media posts.
This is a good time to reflect on how Facebook changed its name to “Meta” in 2021, thinking some virtual reality “metaverse” was the future of our digital lives. Boy, was he wrong on that! The metaverse project incinerated $70 billion and never got even negligible consumer adoption, and it laid off much of that division last week. The Facebook product will probably continue printing money, but sometimes Zuckerberg does get boat-raced by his competition, or makes big bets on something absolutely no one will want.
Too bad he doesn’t have more than three friends to give him business advice sometimes.
Related: Meta Launches Standalone AI App, Hopes It Will Compete With ChatGPT [SFist]
Image: Dwarkesh Patel via Youtube
