The following is a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg. CEO of Facebook, now called meta.
Please allow me to say a few words about this conversation with Mark Zuckerberg about social media and about what troubles me in the world today and what gives me hope if this is not interesting to you. I understand, please skip
I believe that edits best social media puts a mirror to humanity and reveals the full complexity of our world. Shining a light on the dark aspects of human nature and giving us hope a way out through compassionate. But tense chaos of conversation. That eventually can turn into understanding friendship and even love.
But this is not simple, our world is not simple. It is full of human suffering. I think about the hundreds of millions of people who are starving and who live in extreme poverty, the 1 million people who take their own life. Every year, the 20 million people that attempted and the many, many more Millions who suffer quietly in ways. That numbers can never know.
I'm troubled by the cruelty and pain of War today. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine. My grandfather spilled his blood on this land. Held the line is the machine gunner against the Nazi invasion. Surviving impossible odds. I am nothing without him. His blood runs in my blood.
My words are useless here. I said my love. It's all I have. I hope to travel to Russia and Ukraine soon. I will speak to Citizens and leaders including Vladimir Putin.
As I've said in the past, I don't care about access fame money or power and I'm afraid of nothing, but I am who I am. And my goal in conversation is to understand the human being before me, no matter who they are, no matter their position. And I do believe the line between good and evil. Runs to the heart of every man. So this is it.
This is our world. It is full of hate violence and destruction.
But it is also full of love beauty and the insatiable desire to help each other. The people who run the social networks that show this world. They show us to ourselves have the greatest of responsibilities in a time of War. Pandemic atrocity. We turn to social networks to share, real human, insights and experiences to organize protests, and celebrations to learn. And to challenge our understanding of the world.
Old of our history and of our future, and above all, to be reminded of our common Humanity.
When the social networks fail, they have the power to cause immense suffering. And when they succeed, they have the power to lessen that suffering. This is hard. It's a responsibility. Perhaps, almost unlike any other in history, this podcast, conversation attempts to understand the man and the company, who take this responsibility on where they fail, or they hope to succeed.
Mark Zuckerberg feet are often held to the fire as they should be. And this actually gives me hope the power of innovation and Engineering coupled. With the freedom of speech, in the form of its highest ideal. I believe can solve any problem in the world, but that's just it. Both are necessary. The engineer and the critic.
I believe that criticism is essential, but cynicism is not and I worry that in our public discourse cynicism to easily, masquerades as wisdom as truth becomes viral and takes over and worse suffocates. The dreams of young minds who want to build solutions to the problems of the world.
We need to inspire those
young minds. At least for me. They give me hope.
And one small way, I'm trying to contribute is to have honest conversations. Like these that don't just ride the viral wave of cynicism, but seek to understand the failures and successes of the past the problems before us and the possible solutions. In this very complicated world of ours. I'm sure I will fail often and I count on the critic to pointed out when I do. But I asked for one thing and that is to fuel the fire.
ISM, especially those who dream to build Solutions because without that, we don't have a chance on this too fragile. Tiny, planet of ours.
And now a quick, few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description is the best way to support this podcast. First. It's paper space, a platform. I used to train and deploy machine learning models, s, is coinbase a platform. I used to buy cryptocurrency. Third is inside tracker. A service that used to track. My biological data. Fourth is expressvpn DPN. I've been using for many years and fifth is blankest. The app. I used to read summaries of books. So the choices
Machine learning, cryptocurrency, Health, privacy or knowledge. Choose Wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads as always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting. But if you skip them, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by paper space gradient, which is a platform that lets you build train and deploy machine learning models of any size and complexity. I love how
Awful and intuitive it is. I should mention that fast dot AI. A course. I highly recommend a machine learning uses it. It's run by Jeremy Howard, who is pretty much as legit of an educator and technologists programmer developer. Just intellect in the space of machine learning is a gets, you can host notebooks on there. You can swap all the compute instance and you
time starting a small scale, GPU instance, or even CPU and swap out once your computer.
Needs increase. I'm excited by what they're calling workflows, which provides a way to automate a metal pipe lines on top of gradient computer infrastructure. It makes it really easy with simple configuration files. Llamo files
to give gradient to try. This is a
gradient dot, run /, Lex and use the sign up link there. You'll get 15 bucks and free credit, which you can use to power your next machine learning application. That's gradient run /. Lex.
This show is also brought to you by coinbase, which is a trusted and easy-to-use platform to buy sell and spend cryptocurrency. I use it and love it. You can buy Bitcoin, theorem. Cardano Dogecoin. I can keep going all the most popular digital currencies. In fact, I think all the currencies for the people who have been interviewed on this podcast and even the ones that are coming up on this podcast,
so it's a great way to
Try cryptocurrency and to learn about cryptocurrency. It's a great way to track the
prices of things. It's just the interface is so intuitive. I love it. They also have the coinbase wallet, which I just recently set up. It's as good as it gets in terms of Simplicity. Accessibility. If you're new to cryptocurrency, especially coin basis, where you should go, go to coinbase.com Lex for limited time, new users, get five dollars in free Bitcoin when you sign up today and coinbase.com Lex
That's coinbase.com Flex. This show is also brought to you by inside tracker service that used to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information. You can then make decisions based on that machine learning algorithms, that analyze the data blood data DNA data, Fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture what's going on inside you. And to give you signs back recommendations for positive diet and
Changes. So
using data from your
body, is a machine learning algorithms to tell you what you should change. We should improve all those kinds of things. This idea is what I love. It feels like the future because
you should be making decisions in your life Based on data that comes from your body. Not some generic population data,
for a limited time. You can get 25% off the entire inside track
or store. If you go to inside track it.com / Flex, that's inside tracker.com Flex.
The show was also brought to you by expressvpn. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. There's so much I can say about Express CP and I've been using them for many many, many years. Obviously as you probably know isps, want to track your data, even when you're using incognito mode on Chrome all the Shady sites, you visit your eyes bees know about them. You can also if you're like watching Netflix change your geographic location, which unlocks a bunch of
Of shows that are only available in certain localities.
Finally. My favorite reason to use
expressvpn is it's just damn fast and intuitive clean design of the app. It does the thing supposed to do and does it. Well, it doesn't do anything
extra, big button, turn it on,
pick location. It works. Any device any operating system? Including my favorite OS Linux. Anyway, go to express ups.com flexpod.
To get an extra three months
free, that's expressvpn.com flexpod. It shows also brought to you by blankest, my favorite app for learning new things, blankest takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes so you can read or listen to. There are so many not fiction books. I can recommend on there. I just actually really listened to meditations by Marcus, Aurelius beginning.
Of infinity by David Deutsch, is on there. Snowden book is on there. There's just countless ones. I use it. All kinds of ways. Help me, select which books. I'm going to read in full next review, books. I've already read and review books. I'm never going to get a chance to read because life is short and finite. And that's actually what makes life. Beautiful. Go to Blink. Is.com Lux to start your free 7-Day trial, get 25% off of a blink is premium membership as blinks.com.
Lex spelled bli and Ki St. Blankest.com, Lex. This is a less frequent podcast and here is my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg.
Is it possible that this conversation is happening inside to metaverse created by you by metal many years from now? And we're doing a memory replay
experience. I don't know the answer to that, then you're then I'd be some, some computer construct and not the person who created that meta company, but that would truly be meta,
right. This is this could be somebody else using them. The Mark Zuckerberg Avatar. You can do the mark and The Lex conversation replay from
For decades ago, when when metaphor it was first,
so I mean it's not going to be for decades, before we have photo, realistic avatars like this. So I think we're much closer to
that. Well, that's something you talk about is how passionate you are about. The idea of the Avatar representing who you are in the metaverse. So I do these podcasts in person.
You know, I'm a stickler for that because there's a magic, do the in-person conversation. How long do you think it'll be before you can have the same kind of magic in the metaverse? The same kind of intimacy in the chemistry. Whatever the heck is there, when we're talking about person, how how difficult is it? How long before we have it in the matter verse?
Well, I think that's this is like the key question, right? Because the thing that's different about virtual and hopefully augmented reality compared to all other forms of digital platforms before is this feeling of presence, whether the feeling that you're right there in an experience and that you're there with other people or in another place and that's just different from all of the other screens that we have today, right? Phones TV is all the stuff. It's either. They're trying to in some cases deliver experiences that feel
High Fidelity. But at no point, do you actually feel like you're in it right? At some level of your content is trying to sort of convince you that this is a realistic thing that's happening. But all of the kind of subtle signals are telling you. Now, you're looking at a screen. So, the question about how you develop these systems is, like, what are all of the things that make the physical world? All the different cues. So I think on visual presence.
And spatial audio we're making reasonable progress. Spatial audio mix a huge deal. I don't know. If you've tried this experience work rooms that we that we launched where you have meetings. And, you know, I basically made a rule for, you know, all of the, the top, you know, management, Folks at the company that they need to be doing standing meetings in in work rooms already, right? I feel like we got a dog food this, you know, it's this is how people are going to work in the future. So we have to adopt us now.
And there are already a lot of things that I think feel significantly better than then, like typical Zoom meetings. Even though the avatars are a lot lower Fidelity, you know, the idea that you have spatial audio, you're around a table in VR with people. If someone's talking from over there. It sounds like it's talking from over there. You can see, you know, the, the arm gestures and stuff. Feel more natural. You can have side conversations, which is something that you can't really do in Zoom. I mean, I guess you can text someone over like, out of band.
But if you're actually sitting around a table with people, you can lean over and Whisper to the person next to you and like, have a conversation that you can't, you know, that that you can't really do with in and just video communication. So I think it's interesting in what way is some of these things already feel more real than a lot of the technology that we have. Even when the visual Fidelity isn't quite there. But I think it'll get there over the next few years. Now. I mean you were asking about
Comparing that to the the true physical world not zoom or something like that. And there. I mean, I think you have feelings of like temperature, you know, olfactory obviously touch, right? We're working on haptic gloves, you know, the the sense that you want to be able to, you know, put your hands down and feel some pressure from the table, you know, all these things. I think we're going to be really critical to be able to keep up this illusion that you are in a world in that, you're fully present in this world.
But I don't know. I think we're going to have a lot of these building blocks within, you know, the next 10 years or so. And even before that. I think it's amazing how much you're just going to build with software that sort of masks, some of these things. I realize I'm going long, but I was told we have a few hours here. So it's here for five to six hours. Yes. I'm in. Its look. I mean, that's that's on the shorter end of the Congressional testimony is I've done, but it's but
You know, one of the things that we found with with hand presence, right? So the earliest VR you just have the headset and then that was cool. You can look around you feel like you're in a place but you don't feel like you're really able to interact with it until you have hands. And then there was this big question where once you got hands, what's the right way to represent them and initially, all of our assumptions was okay. When I look down and see my hands in the physical world. I see an arm and it's going to be super weird if you see, you know, just your hand.
But turned out to not be the case. Because there's this issue with your arms, which is like, what's your elbow angle? And if the elbow angle that we're kind of interpolating based on where your hand is, and where your headset is actually is an accurate. It creates this very uncomfortable feeling where it's like, oh, like my arm is actually out like this, but it's like showing it in here and that actually broke the, the feeling of presence, a lot more. Whereas, it turns out that if you just show the hands and you don't show the arms it actually.
It's fine for people. So I think that there's a bunch of these interesting psychological cues where it'll be more about getting the right details. Right? And I think a lot of that will be possible even over a few year period or five year period and we won't need like every single thing to be solved to deliver this like full sense of
presence as the best, any psychology question of what is the essence that makes in-person conversation special. It's like emojis.
These are able to convey emotion really well, even though they're obviously not photo realistic and so in that same way, just like you're saying just showing the hands is able to create a comfortable expression with your hands. So I wonder what that is, you know, people in the world wars used to write letters and you can fall in love with just writing letters. You don't need to see each other in person. You can convey emotion. You can be depth of experience with just words. So that's a I think a
sending place to explore psychology of. Like, how do you find that
intimacy? Yeah, and you know, the way that I come to all of this stuff is, you know, basically studied psychology and computer science. So, all of the work that I do is sort of at the intersection of those things. I think most of the other big tech companies are building technology for you to interact with what I care about is Building Technology to help people interact with each other. So it's, I think it's a somewhat different approach than most of the other Tech, entrepreneurs and big companies. Come at this, from
And a lot of the lessons in terms of how I think about designing products come from some just basic elements of psychology right. In terms of, you know, our brains, you can compare to the brains of other animals, you know, we're very wired to specific things facial expressions where I mean, we're we're very visual, right? So compared to other animals. I mean that's that's clearly the the main sense that most people have but there's a whole part of your brain.
That's just kind of focused on on reading facial cues. So, when we're designing the next version of quest, or the VR headset, a big Focus for us is face tracking and basically eye tracking. So you can make eye contact which again. Isn't really something that you can do over video conference. It's sort of amazing how much how far video conferencing has gotten without the ability to make eye contact, right? It's sort of a bizarre thing. If you think about it, you're like looking at someone's face, you know, sometimes for, you know, an hour when you're in a meeting.
And like you looking at their eyes to them, doesn't look like you're looking at their eyes. So it's a
you're always looking at me pass each other, I guess. Yeah, I guess you're right. You're not sending your son to right. You're trying to
glove times. I mean I or at least I find myself. I'm trying to look into the other person's
eyes. They don't feel like you're yeah, they're
so then the question is. All right. Am I supposed to look at the camera? So that way, you can, you know, have a sensation that I'm looking at you. I think that's an interesting question. And then, you know, with VR today even without
Cracking and knowing what your eyes are actually looking at. You can fake it reasonably. Well, right? So you can look at like, where the head poses and if it looks like I'm kind of looking in your general direction, then you can sort of assume that maybe there's some eye contact intended and and you can do it in a way where it's okay, maybe not. It's like a maybe it's not a fixated stare. But but it's somewhat natural, but once you have actual eye tracking, you can, you can do it for real. And I think that that's really important stuff. So, when I think about metas contribution to this field,
I'd say it's not clear to me that any of the other companies that are focused on on the metaverse, or on Virtual and augmented reality are going to prioritize putting these features in the hardware because, like, everything their trade-offs, right? I mean, they it, it adds it add some weight to the device. Maybe it had some thickness. You could totally see another company taking the approach of, but just make the lightest and thinnest thing possible. But, you know, I want us to design the most human thing possible that the creates the richest sense of presence and because so much of
Human emotion and expression comes from these like micro movements. If I like move my eyebrow, you know mm you will notice and it that like means something. So the fact that we're losing these signals in a lot of communication I think is a loss and it's not like, okay, there's one feature and you add this, then it all of a sudden is going to feel like we have real presence. You can sort of look at how the human brain works and how we express and kind of read emotions and you can just build a roadmap of that, you know, of just
What are the most important things to try to unlock over a 5 to 10 year, period, and just try to make the experience more and more human and
social? When do you think would be a moment, like a singularity moment for the metaverse? Where there's a lot of ways to ask this question, but, you know, people will have many or most of their meaningful experiences in the metaverse versus the real world. And actually it's interesting to think about the fact that a lot of people are having.
The most important moments of their life happened in the digital sphere, especially not during covid, you know, like even falling in love or meeting friends or getting excited about stuff that is happening on the 2D digital plane. When do you think that matter verse will provide those experiences for a large number? Like a yeah. I think it's really good.
Really good question. There was someone I read this piece that frame this as a lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place.
Lace, but one definition of this is it's about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we that we live our lives and spend our time. I think that that's a reasonable construct and from that perspective. You know, I think you also just want to look at this as a continuation because it's not like, okay, we are building digital worlds, but we don't have that today. I think, you know, you know, you and I probably already live a very large part of our life and digital worlds. They're just not
3D immersive virtual reality but you know, I do a lot of meetings over video or spend a lot of time writing things over email or Whatsapp or whatever. So what is it going to take to get there for kind of the immersive presence version of this, which I think is what you're asking and for that I think that there's just a bunch of different use cases where they and then I think when you're when you're Building Technology, I think you're a lot of. It is just you're managing this.
Duality where on the one hand you want to build these elegant, things that can scale and have billions of people use them and get value from them. And then on the other hand, you're fighting this kind of ground game where it's just, they're just a lot of different use cases and people do different things and like you want to be able to unlock them. So the first ones that we basically went after we're gaming with Quest and social experiences. And this is you know, it goes back to when we started work on virtual reality, my theory of the time.
Basically.
People thought about it as gaming, but if you look at all Computing platforms up to that point gaming is a huge part. It was a huge part of PCS was a huge part of Mobile, but it was also very decentralized right? There wasn't for the most part, you know, one or two gaming companies. There were a lot of gaming companies and gaming is somewhat hits paste. And we're getting some games that are that have more longevity, but but it but in general, you know, there were a lot of a lot of different games out there. But on,
C and A non-mobile. The companies that focused on communication and social interaction, there tended to be a smaller number of those. And that ended up being just as important to the thing is all of the games that you did combined. I think productivity is another area. That's obviously something that we've historically been less focused on but I think it's gonna be really
important was workroom or give me productivity in the collaborative aspect of it.
There's there's a there's a workrooms aspect of this like a meeting aspect and then I think that there's like a
You know, word excel in a productivity. You're like, you're working or coding or what knowledge work, right? It's as opposed to just just meetings. So you can kind of go through all these different use cases, you know, gaming, I think we're well on our way social. I think we're just at the kind of preeminent company that focuses on this. And I think that's already on Quest, becoming the, if you look at the list of what are the top apps, you know, social apps are already, you know, number one, two, three, so,
It's kind of becoming a critical thing, but I don't know. I would imagine for someone like you it'll be, you know, until we get, you know, a lot of the work things dialed in right when this is just like much more adopted and in clearly better than Zoom for VC when you know, if you're doing your coding or you're writing or whatever it is in VR, which it's not that far off to imagine that because it pretty soon, you're just going to have a screen that's bigger than, you know, it'll be your ideal setup and you can bring it with you and put
it on anywhere and have your your kind of Ideal workstation. So I think there are a few things to work out on that, but I don't think that that's more than, you know, five years off. And then you'll get a bunch of other things that like aren't even possible. Or you don't even think about using a phone or PC for today like Fitness, right? So, I mean, I know you're we're talking before about how you're you're into running and like I'm really into a lot of things around Fitness as well, different things in different places. I got really into Hydra foiling recently and nice.
As some
video. Yeah, and surfing. And I used to fence competitively. I like Ron. So
and you were saying that you were thinking about trying different, martial arts and I try to trick you and convince you into doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or you actually mentioned that that was one you're curious about and I does that a trick. Yeah. I don't know if we're in the metaverse
now. Yeah, I think that and I took that seriously, I thought that was a that was a real suggestion.
That would be an amazing chance if you ever step.
Up on the mat together and just like roll around, I'll show you some
moves. Well, give me a year to train. And, and then, and then we cuz like rock, you know you seen Rocky for with a
Russian faces off the America. I'm the Russian in this picture and then you're the rocky. The underdog that gets to it to
win in the idea of me as Rocky. And like fighting is.
If he dies, he dies
at this. I mean anyway, yeah, but I mean, a lot of aspects of fitness.
You know, if you've if you've tried Supernatural on Quest or was the first of all,
can I just comment on the ACT every time I played around with quest to I just I get giddy every time I step into virtual reality. So you mentioned productivity on those kinds of things. That's definitely something I'm excited about but really I just love the possibilities of stepping into that world. It's a maybe it's the introverted me but it's just feels like the most convenient way to travel.
In Two Worlds, in Two Worlds that are similar to the real world or totally different. It's like Alice in Wonderland. Just try out crazy stuff. The possibilities are endless and I just, I personally and just love get excited for uh, stepping those Virtual Worlds. I'm so I'm a huge fan in terms of the productivity as a program. I spend most of my day programming. That's, that's really interesting. Also, but then you have to develop the right IDs. You have to develop like the
There has to be a threshold where a large amount of the program Community moves there. But the collaborative aspects that are possible in terms of meetings in terms of the when to coders are working together. I mean that the possibility is that are super, super exciting.
I think that in building this we sort of need to balance.
They're going to be some new things that you just couldn't do before and those are going to be the amazing experiences. So teleporting to any place, right? Whether it's a real place or something that people made, I mean some of the experiences around how we can build stuff in new ways, where a lot of the stuff that, you know, I'm coding stuff sack, are you coded? And then you build it and then you see it afterwards, but increasingly, it's gonna be possible to, you know, you're in a world and you're building the world as you were in it and kind of manipulating it, you know, one of the things
We showed at are inside the lab for recent. Artificial intelligence progress, has this Builder bought program. Where now you are. You can just talk to it and say, hey, okay. I'm in this world like put some trees over there and it'll do that and like all right, put put some bottles of water on, you know on on our picnic blanket and it'll do that in your in the world and it's either going to be new paradigms for coding. So yeah, they're going to be some things that I think are just
Pretty amazing, especially the first few times that you do, then that you're like, whoa, like I've never had an experience like this. But most of your life I would imagine is not doing things that are amazing for the first time. A lot of this. In terms of just answering your question from before around. What is it going to take before your spending most of your time in this? Well, first of all, let me just say this in a side, the goal isn't to have people spend a lot more time in Computing and that's to make myself. Yes, male I spend
All my time, it's to make the ads to make Computing more more natural. But is, but I think it will. You will, you will spend more most of your Computing time in this. When it does, the things that you use Computing for somewhat better. So, you know, maybe having your perfect workstation is a 5% Improvement on your coding productivity. It maybe it's not like a completely new new thing. But I mean, look, if I could increase the productivity of every engineer and meta by 5%,
Sent, you know, we'd buy those devices for everyone and I imagine a lot of other companies would too. And that's how you start getting to the scale that that I think makes this rival. Some of the bigger Computing platforms that exist today.
Let me ask you about identity. We talked about the Avatar. How do you see identity in the metaverse? Should the Avatar be tied to your identity? Or can it be? Can I be anything in the Maneuvers? Like can I be whatever the heck I want. Can I even be a troll?
so there's there's there's a exciting freeing possibilities and there's the darker possibilities to
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's going to be a range, right. So, we're working on for expression and avatars on one end of the spectrum, are kind of expressive and cartoonish avatars. And then on the other end of the spectrum are photo-realistic avatars, and I just think the reality is that they're going to be different. Use cases for different things and I guess there's another axis. So if you're going from photo-realistic to expressive there's also like representing you
Chloe versus like some fantasy identity and I think that there are going to be things on on all ends of that Spectrum to write. So you'll want photo. Like, in some experience. You might want to be like a photo realistic Dragon, right? Or, or, you know, if I'm playing on word or which is this military Simulator game, you know, it's, you know, I think getting to be more photo realistic as a soldier and that could enhance the experience. There are times when I'm hanging out with friends where I want them to
To, you know, it's me. So kind of cartoon or ashore expressive version of me is good, but they're also experiences like VR chat. Does this well today where a lot of the experiences kind of dressing up and wearing a Fantastical Avatar? That's almost like a meme or is humorous. You, you come into an experience and it's almost like you have like a built-in ice breaker because like you see people and you're just like, all right. I like I'm cracking up at what you're wearing because that
Money and it just like where'd you get that or you made that? That's you know, it's awesome. We're as you know, okay, if you're going into a into a work meeting, maybe a photo realistic version of your real self is going to be the most appropriate thing for that. So I think the reality is there aren't going to be there. It's not just going to be one thing. My own sense of kind of how you want to express identity online has sort of evolved over time and that early days in Facebook. I thought okay, people were going to have one identity.
Now, I think that's clearly not going to be the case. I think you're going to have all these different things and there's utility and being able to do different things. So, some of the technical challenges that I'm really interested in around. It are, how do you build the software to allow people to seamlessly go between them? So, say, so you could view them as just completely discrete points on a spectrum, but let's talk about the metaverse economy for a second. Let's say I buy a digital. Sure.
It for my photo realistic Avatar. Which by the way, I think at the time where we're spending a lot of time in the metaverse, doing a lot of our work meetings in the metaverse and Etc. I would imagine that the economy around virtual clothing as an example is going to be quite as big. Why wouldn't I spend almost as much money and investing in my my appearance or expression for my photo realistic avatar for meeting. This is I would for the whatever I'm going to wear in my video chat, but the question is, okay. So you lets you buy some shirt for your photo realistic Avatar.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to basically translate that into a more expressive thing for your kind of cartoonish or expressive Avatar? And there are multiple ways to do that. You can view them as two discrete points and okay, maybe you know, if a designer sells one thing then it actually comes in a pack and there's two and you can use either one on that. But but I actually think the stuff might exist more as a spectrum in the future and that's what I do. Think the direction.
some of the
AI advances that is happening to be able to especially stuff around like style transfer being able to take, you know, a piece of art or Express something and say, okay paint me, you know this photo in the style of Gogan or you know, whoever it is that you're interested in, you know, take this shirt and put it in the style of what I've designed for my expressive Avatar. I'm that's going to be pretty compelling
and the so the fashion you you might be buying like a generator like a closet.
That generates a style and then let like with a gowns, will be able to infinitely generate outfits. Thereby making it. So, the reason I wear the same thing all the time, as it don't like Choice. You've talking about, you've talked about the same thing, but now you don't even have to choose to your closet. Generates your outfit for you every time. And so you have to live without
degenerates. I mean, you could do that. Although I know I think that that's, I think some people will but I think like
I believe there's going to be a huge aspect of
Of just people doing creative Commerce here. So I think there is going to be a big market around people designing digital clothing. But the question is, if you're designing digital clothing, do you need to design if you're the designer, do you need to make it for each? Kind of specific discrete point along a spectrum or you design, or you just designing it for kind of a photo realistic case, or an expressive case, or can you design one and have it translated across these things? You know, if I did, if I buy a style from a designer who I care about and now I'm
I'm a dragon, you know, is there a way to more fat so it like goes on the dragon in a way that makes sense. And that I think is an interesting AI problem because you're probably not going to make it so that like that designers have to go designed for all those things. But the more useful the digital content is that you buy in a lot of uses and a lot of use cases the more that economy will just explode and that that's a lot of what you know, all of the you know, we were joking about nft is before but I think a lot of the promised here is that
If the digital Goods that you buy or not, just tied to one platform or one use case, they end up being more valuable. Which means that people are more willing and more likely to invest in them and that that just Spurs the whole economy.
But the question is, that's a fascinating positive aspect, but the potential negative aspect is that you can have people concealing their identity in order to troll or even not people bots. So, how do you know in the metaverse that you're talking to a real human or an AI?
Or a well-intentioned human. That's something you think about something you're concerned about. Well,
let's break that down into a few different cases. I mean, because knowing that, you're talking to someone who has good intentions is something that I think is not even solved and right, and pretty much anywhere. But I mean if you're talking to someone who's a dragon think it's pretty clear that they're not representing themselves as a person, having probably the most pernicious thing that you want to solve for is I think probably one of the scariest ones.
How do you make sure that someone isn't impersonating you, right? So like, okay, you're in a future version of this conversation. Yeah, and we have photo realistic avatars, and we're doing this in work rooms or whatever the future version of that is and someone walks in who like looks like me. How do you know that? That's me and one of the things that where the were thinking about is, you know, it's this, it's still a pretty big AI project to filter generate photo-realistic avatars that basically can like they work like these
Codex of you, right? So you kind of have a map from your headset, whatever sensors, what your body is actually doing and it takes the model in it and it kind of displays it in VR, but there's a question, which is, should there be some sort of biometric security so that like, when I put on my VR headset or I'm going to go use that Avatar. I need to First prove that I am that and I think you probably are going to want something like that. So so that's, you know, as we're developing these Technologies were also thinking about the
Security for things like that because people are going to want to be impersonated. That's that's a huge security issue.
Then you just get the question of people hiding behind fake accounts to do malicious things, which is not going to be unique to the metaverse. Although, you know, certainly in a environment where it's more immersive and you have more of a sense of presence. It could be more painful, put more painful, but this is obviously something that we've just dealt with for years and social media and the internet, more broadly. And there, I think
There have been a bunch of tactics that that I think we've just evolved to we've built up these different AI systems to basically get a sense of is this account behaving in the way that a person would. And it turns out, you know, so in all of the work that we've done around, we call it Community integrity and it's basically like policing harmful content and trying to figure out where to draw the line and there were all these like really hard and philosophical questions around like
Where do you draw the line on some of the stuff? And the thing that I've kind of found the most effective is as much as possible trying to figure out who are the init inauthentic accounts or where the accounts that are behaving in an overall harmful way of the account level rather than trying to get into like policing what they're saying, right? Which I think is the matter versus going to even harder because that the metaverse, I think we'll have more properties of. It's almost more like a phone call, right? Or like or your you know, it's not like I
Two
piece of content and is that piece of content? Good or bad? So I think more of the stuff will have to be done at the level of of the account. But this is the area where, you know, between the kind of counterintelligence teams that we built up inside the company and, like years of building just different AI systems to basically detect what is a real account and what isn't? I'm not saying we're perfect. But like, this is an area where I just think we are, like, you
Years ahead of basically anyone else in the in the industry in terms of having built those capabilities. And I think that that just is going to be incredibly important for this next wave of
things. And like you said, on the technical level on a philosophical level, is that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve. By the way. I would probably like to open source my avatar. So that could be like, millions of Lex's walking, La, just like an army
like agent Smith
agent Smith. Yeah, exactly. So the
The unity ml folks built a copy of me and they sent it to me. So there's a there's a person running around and I just been doing reinforcement learning on it. I was going to release it now because, you know, just to have sort of like thousands of Lex's doing reinforcement with. So they fall over naturally, they have to learn how to like walk around and stuff. So I love that idea. This tension between biometric security, you want to have one identity, but then certain,
Ours, you might have to have many. I don't know, which is better. Security sort of flooding the world would Lexus and thereby achieving security, or really being protective of your identity. I have to ask a security question.
Actually, how does flooding the world with Lex has helped me know in our conversation that I'm talking to? The real
Lex. I completely destroy the trust in all my relationships, then right? If I flood because then it's yeah, that
I think that one's not going to work that well for you. It's not going to work that.
I mean for the original.
It probably fits some things like if you're a public figure and you're trying to have, you know, a bunch of if you're trying to show up in a bunch of different places in the future, you'll be able to do that in the meta verse. So that kind of replication, I think will be useful, but I do think you're going to want a notion of like I am talking to the real
one. Yeah. Yeah, especially if the, if the fake ones, start out performing you and all your private relationships and then you're left behind. I mean, that's that's a serious concern. I have with clones.
Then the things I think about. Okay, so I recently got I use qnap mass storage such as storage for video stuff and everything got hacked. It's the first time for me with all the ransomware. It's not me personally. It's all connected devices. So, the question that people have about is about Security in general because I was doing a lot of the right things in terms of security and nevertheless ransomware basically disabled my device. Yeah, is that
Do you think about what are the different steps you can take to protect people's data on the security front.
I think that there's different solutions for in strategies where it makes sense to have stuff, kind of put behind a fortress, right? So the centralized model versus decentralizing, then I think both have strengths and weaknesses. So I think anyone who says, okay just decentralize everything, that'll make it more secure. I think that's tough because you know, I mean, the advantage of something like, you know,
no encryption is that when we run the largest encrypted service in the world with WhatsApp and in one of the first to roll out a multi-platform, encryption service, and that's something that I think was a big advance for the industry. And one of the promises that we can basically make because of that, our company doesn't see when you're sending an encrypted message and to an encrypted message, what the content is of what you're what you're sharing. So that way if someone hacks metas servers,
They're not going to be able to access, you know, the WhatsApp message that you're sending to your friend and that I think matters a lot to people because obviously if someone is able to compromise a company's servers and that company has hundreds of millions or billions of people then that's that ends up being a very big deal. The flip side of that is, okay. All the content is on your phone, you know, are you following security? Best practices on your phone? If you lose your phone, all your content is gone. So that's an issue. You know, maybe you go back up your content.
Went from WhatsApp or some other service in an iCloud or something, but then you're just at Apple's winds about, are they going to go turn over the governor, the, the data to be, you know, some government door, or they going to get hacked. So a lot of the time it is useful to have data in a centralized place, too. Because then you can try and systems that they can just do much better personalization. I think that in a lot of cases, you know, centralized systems can can offer, you know, especially if you're
If you're a serious company, you're running the state-of-the-art stuff and and you have red team's attacking your own stuff and, and you're putting out Bounty programs and trying to attract some of the best hackers in the world to go break into your stuff all the time. So any system is going to have security issues. But but I think the best way forward is to basically try to be as aggressive and open about hardening the systems as possible. Not trying to kind of hide and pretend that there aren't going to be issues, which I think is
overtime. Why a lot of Open Source systems have gotten relatively more secure? As because they're, they're open and, you know, it's not rather than pretending that there are going to be issues. Just people surface them quicker. So if you want to adopt that approach as a company and and just constantly be hardening, your yourself,
trying to stay one. Step ahead of the attackers.
It's an inherently adversarial space. Yeah. Well, I think it's an interesting security is
Interesting because of the different kind of threats that we've managed over the last five years. There were ones were basically adversaries, keep on getting better and better. So trying to kind of interfere with security is certainly one area of this. If you have like nation states, that are trying to interfere in elections or something, like their kind of evolving their tactics. Whereas on the other hand. I don't want to be too simplistic about it. But like if you know, someone is saying something.
A hateful people usually aren't getting smarter and smarter about how they say hateful things. Right? So maybe there's some element of that, but it's a very small Dynamic compared to, you know, how advanced attackers and some of these other places, get overtime.
I believe most people are good. So they actually get better over time and not being less hateful because they realize it's not fun being hateful. It's at least the belief I have, but first bathroom break. Sure. Okay.
So we'll come back to AI, but let me ask some difficult questions. Now, social dilemma is a popular documentary that raised concerns about the effects of social media. And Society, you responded with a point-by-point rebuttal titled, what the social dilemma gets wrong. People should read that. I would say, the key point they make is because social media is funded by ads. Algorithms want to maximize attention and engagement and an effective way to do, so.
It's get people angry at each other increase Division and so on. Can you steal man, their criticisms and arguments that they make in the documentary as a way to understand the concern and as a way to respond to
it.
Well,
yeah, I think I think that's a good conversation to have. I don't happen to agree with the conclusions. And I think that they make a few assumptions that are just very big jumps that. I don't think a reasonable to make but I understand overall, why people would be concerned that our business model and adds in general. We do make more money as people use the
This more in general, right? So as a kind of basic assumption, okay, do we have an incentive for people to build a service that people use more? Yes, on a lot of levels. I mean, we think what we're doing is good. So we think that if people are finding it useful to use it more or if you just look at it, is this sort of? If the only thing we care about is money, which I is not for anyone. Who knows me? But okay, we're a company. So let's say you just kind of simplify the down to that, then would we
people who use the services more, yes, but then you get to the second question, which is
Does kind of getting people agitated make them more likely to use the services more and I think from looking at other media in the world, especially TV and you know, there's the old news adage if it bleeds it leads like I think this is, there are and there are a bunch of reasons why someone might think that that kind of provocative.
It would be the most engaging. Now. What I've always found is two things, one is that will grab someone's attention in the near term is not necessarily something that they're going to appreciate having seen or going to be the best over the long term. So I think what would a lot of people get wrong is that we're not I'm not building this company to like make the most money or get people to spend the most time on this in the next quarter or the next year, right? I'm not been doing this for 17 years at this point, and I'm
Still relatively young and have a lot more that I want to do over the coming decade. So like I think that it's too simplistic to say. Hey this might increase time in the near term. Therefore. It's what's you're going to do? Because I actually think a deeper look at it. Kind of what my incentives are the incentives of a company that are focused on the long-term is to basically do what people are going to find, valuable over time, not what is going to draw people's attention today. The other thing that I'd say is that
I think a
lot of times people look at this, from the perspective of media or or kind of information or Civic discourse, but one other way of looking at this is just that, okay. I'm a product designer. Right, our company, we build products and a big part of building a product, is not just the function and utility of what you're delivering, but the feeling of how it feels, when we spend a lot of time talking about virtual reality and how the, the kind of key aspect of that experiences, the
Feeling of presence which it's a visceral thing. It's not just about the utility that you're delivering. It's about like the sensation. And similarly. I care a lot about how people feel when they use our products. And I don't want to build products that make people angry. I mean, that's like, not I think what we're here on this Earth to do is to, you know, build something that, you know, people spend a bunch of time doing and it just kind of makes them angrier at other people. I mean, I'm not--that's that's not good. That's, you know, that's, that's not what I think would be.
Sort of a good use of our time or a good contribution to the world. So okay, you know, it's like people they tell us on a per content basis, you know, does this thing? Do I like it too? I love it. Does it make me angry? Doesn't make me sad. And, you know, based on that. I own we choose to basically show content that makes people angry less because, you know, of course, right. If you're, if you're designing a product and you want people to be able to, to connect and feel good over over a long period of time than that.
Naturally, what you're going to do. So, I don't know. I think overall I am, I understand at a high level if you're not thinking too deeply about it, why that argument might be appealing, but I just think if you actually look at what our real incentives are, not just like, you know, if we were trying to optimize for the next week, but like as people working on this, like why are we?
A here. And I think it's pretty clear that that's not actually how you would want to design the system. I guess. One other thing that I'd say is that you know, while we're focused on the the ads business model. I do think it's important to note that a lot of these issues are not unique to ads. I mean so take like a subscription news business model. For example, I think that has you know, just as many potential pitfalls, you know, maybe if someone's paying for a subscription you don't get paid per piece of content that they look at. But you know, say for example
Apple. I think like a bunch of the partisanship that we see, could, potentially be made worse by you have these, these kind of partisan news organizations that basically sell subscriptions and they're only going to get people on one side to basically subscribe to them. So their incentive is not to print content, or, or produce content. That's kind of Centrist, or down the line. Either. I bet that would a lot of them find
is that if they produce stuff that's, that's kind of more polarizing or more partisan than that, that is what gets them more subscribers. So, I think that this stuff is all. There's no perfect business model. Everything has pitfalls. The thing that I think is great about advertising is it makes its the consumer services free, which if you believe that everyone should have a voice and everyone should be able to connect and that's a great thing. It was opposed to building the luxury service that not everyone can afford but look, I mean every business model, you know, you have to be
Careful about how you're implementing, what you're doing.
You responded to a few things there. You spoke to the fact that, you know, there is a narrative of malevolence like, you know, you're leaning into the making people angry just because it makes more money in the short term that kind of thing. So your responded to that but there's also kind of reality of human nature just like you spoke about there. Is fights arguments we get in and we don't like ourselves afterwards, but we got into them.
Anyway, so our long-term growth is I believe for most of us has to do with learning challenging yourself, improving being kind to each other. Finding a community of people that you know, you connect with on a real human level, all that kind of stuff but it does seem when you look at social media that a lot of fights break out. A lot of arguments break out a lot of
Viral content ends up being sort of outrage in One Direction or the other. And so it's easy from that to infer. The Narrative that social media companies are letting this outrage become viral and so they're increasing the division in the world, and perhaps you can comment on that or further. How can you be? How can you push back on this narrative? How can you be transparent about this battle? Because I think it's not
Just motivation or financials. It's a technical problem to, which is how do you improve long-term well-being of human beings? I think that going through
some of the design decisions would be a good conversation. But first I actually think, you know, I think you acknowledge that, you know that narrative is somewhat anecdotal and I think it's worth grounding this conversation.
And the actual research that has been done on this which by and large fines that social media is not a large driver of polarization, right? And you know, I mean, there's been a number of iconic economists and social scientists and folks who have studied this in a lot of polarization it varies around the world. If social media is basically in every country Facebook's in pretty much every country, except for China and maybe North Korea and
And you see different Trends in different places where, you know, in a lot of countries polarization is declining in some, it's flat in the u.s., It's risen sharply. So the question is, what are the unique phenomenon? The different places and I think for the people who are trying to say, hey, social media is the thing that's doing this. I think that that clearly doesn't hold up because social media is a phenomenon, that is pretty much equivalent in all of these different countries and you have researchers like this economy.
At Stanford Matthew against Cal who's just written at length about this and it's a bunch of books by political scientists that as recline in folks, why we're polarized basically goes through this decades-long analysis, in the US. Before I was born, basically talking about some of the forces and kind of partisan politics and Fox News and different things that predate the internet in a lot of ways that I think are likely larger.
Reuters. So to the contrary on this, not only is it pretty clear that social media is not a major contributor, but most of the academic studies that I've seen actually show that social media use is correlated with lower polarization against God. The same person who just did the study that I cited about longitudinal polarization across different countries, you know, also did a study that basically showed that if you looked after
In the 2016 election in the US, the voters who are the most polarized were, actually the ones who are not on the internet. So in there have been recent other studies, I think in Europe and around the world basically showing that as people stopped using social media. They tend to get more polarized. Then there's a deeper analysis around. Okay. Well, what polarization actually isn't even one thing because, you know, having different opinions on something isn't I don't think that that's by itself, bad. What would people say?
Study this say is most problematic as with the call effective polarization, which is basically, are you do you have negative feelings towards people of another group and the way that a lot of scholars study. This is, they basically asked a group. Would you let your kids marry someone of group X, whatever the groups are that, you're that you're worried that someone might have negative feelings towards. And in general, use of social media, has corresponded to decrease.
And that kind of effect of polarization. So I just want to I think we should talk to the design decisions and how we handle the kind of specific pieces of content, but overall, I think it's just worth grounding that discussion in the research. That's existed that I think overwhelmingly shows that the mainstream narrative around. This is just not right.
But the narrative does take cold and it's compiling to a lot of people. There's another question. I'd like to
ask you on this. I was looking at various polls and saw that your
One of the most disliked tech leaders today, 54 percent unfavorable rating. Elon Musk is 23%, is basically everybody has a very high unfavorable rating that are Tech leaders. Maybe you can help me understand that. Why do you think so many people dislike you?
Some even hate you and how do you regain their trust and support given everything you just said?
Why are you losing the battle in explaining to people what actual impact social media has on society?
Well, I'm curious if that's a u.s. Survey or world. It is US. Yeah, so I think that there's a few Dynamics. One is that
Our brand has been somewhat uniquely challenged in the u.s. Compared to other places. It's not that there are, I mean, other countries, we have issues too. But I think in the u.s. There was this Dynamic where if you look at like the next sentiment of kind of coverage or or attitude towards us before, 2016. I think there were probably very few months. If anywhere it was - and since 2016, I think they're probably very few months if
Than it's been positive in politics. So, but I think it's a specific thing in this is very different from other places. I think in a lot of other countries in the world, the sentiment towards meta and and our services is extremely positive in the u.s., We have more challenges and I think compared to other companies. You can look at certain industries. I think if you look at it from like a partisan perspective, not from like a political perspective, but just kind of culturally, it's like there are people who are probably more
Of Center in there. People in more right of Center and there's kind of blue America and right. America, there are certain industries that I think maybe one half of the country as a more positive view towards than another. And I think we are in a one of the positions that were in that I think is really challenging, is that because of a lot of the content decisions that we're that we've basically had to arbitrate, and because we're not a partisan company, right? We're not, we're not.
Not a Democrat company or a republican company. We're trying to make the best decisions we can to help people connect and, and help people have as much voices. They can while, you know, having some rules because it we're running a community, the net effect of that is that we are kind of constantly making decisions that piss off people in both camps. And the effect that I've sort of seen is that when we make a decision that is
That's a controversial one, that's going to upset say about half the country, those decisions are all - some from a brand perspective because it's not like like if we make that decision in one way and say half the country is happy about that particular decision that we make. They tend to not say. Oh sweet meta, got that one right there. Just like I didn't miss that one up, right? But their opinion doesn't tend to go up by that much. Whereas the people who
Kind of on the other side of it like God, how could you mess that up? Like, how could you possibly think that like that piece of content is okay and should be up and should not be censored or and so I think the whereas if you leave it up and you know, it's or if you take it down, the people who thought it should be taken down or, you know, it's like all right, fine. Great. You didn't mess that one up. So our internal assessment of the kind of analytics on our brand or basically any time, one of these big controversial thing.
Comes up and Society our brand goes down with half of the country. And then like, if you in, then if you just kind of extrapolate that out, it's just been very challenging for us to try to navigate. What is a polarizing country in a principled way. We're not trying to kind of hue to one side or the other we're trying to do what we think are there is the right thing, but then that's what I think is the right thing for us to do though. So, I mean, that's that's what we'll try to keep doing.
Just as a human being. How does it feel though when
You're giving so much of your day-to-day life, to try to heal division, to try to do good in the world, as we've talked about that. So many people in the US, the place you call home. I have a negative view of you as a leader, as a human being and the company you love.
Well, I mean it's not great. But but I I mean, look if I wanted people to think positively about me as a person. I don't know. I'm not sure if you go build a company. I mean, it's like like our social media confidence. I just
suddenly difficult to do with the social media.
Yeah. So I mean, I don't know. There is a dynamic where a lot of the other people running these companies. Internet companies have
Sort of stepped back and they just do things that are sort of I don't know less controversial and in some of it may be that they just get tired over time. But you know, it's so I don't know. I think that, you know, running a company is hard, building some good scale as hard. You only really do it for a long period of time if you really care about what you're doing. And yeah, so, I mean it's not great but like, but look, I think that it's some level.
Whether 25% of people dislike you or 75% of people, just like you, your experience is a public figure is going to be that. There's a lot of people who dislike you, right? So, yeah, so I actually am not sure how different it is, you know, certainly, you know, we've the country has gotten more polarized and we in particular have gotten more controversial over the last five or years or so, but
But I don't know. I kind of think like as a public figure and leader of one of these Enterprises comes with the job party yet. Part of what you do is like and look you can't just the answer can't just be ignore it, right? Because like a huge part of the job is like you need to be getting feedback and internalizing feedback on how you can do better. But I think increasingly what you need to do is be able to figure out you know, who are the kind of good faith critics who are criticizing you because
They're trying to help you do a better job rather than tear you down and those are the people. I just think you have to cherish and like and and, and listen, very closely to the things that they're saying. Because, you know, I think it's just as dangerous to tune out. Everyone who says anything negative and just listen to the people who are kind of positive and support you, you know, as it would be psychologically to pay attention, trying to make people who are never going to like you like you. So I'm glad that that's that's just kind of a dance that that people have to do but
But I mean, I you know, you kind of develop more of a feel for like who actually is trying to accomplish the same types of things in the world. And who has different ideas about how to do that and how can I learn from those people? And like, yeah, we get stuff wrong and when the people whose opinions, I respect, call me out on getting stuff, wrong that, that hurts and makes me want to do better. But I think at this point I'm pretty tune to just. Alright, if someone if I know they're they're kind of like operating in bad faith, and they're not really trying to help.
Then, you know, I don't know. It's it doesn't. And I think over time it just doesn't bother you that much.
But you are surrounded by people that believe in the mission that love, you are their friends or colleagues. In your inner circle. You trust that, call you out on your bullshit whenever you're thinking maybe misguided as it is for leaders at
times. I think we have a famously open company culture where we sort of encourage that kind of descent internally, which is why
There's so much material internally that can leak out with people sort of disagreeing is because that's sort of the culture, you know, our management team. I think it's a lot of people. There are some newer folks who come in. There are some folks who have kind of been there for a while, but there's a very high level of trust. And I would say it is a relatively confrontational group of people and my, my friends and family. I think we'll push me on this, but, but look, it's not just but but I think you need some diversity, right? It can't just be
Um, people who are your friends and family, it's also, you know, I mean, there are there are journalists or analysts or, you know, peer Executives at other companies or, you know, other people who sort of are insightful about think about the world in a certain politicians or people kind of in that sphere, who I just think have like, very insightful perspectives. Who, even if they would, they come at the
From a different perspective, which is sort of what makes the perspective so valuable, but, you know, I think fundamentally we're trying to get to the same place in terms of, you know, helping people connect more helping the whole world function better. Not just, you know, one place to another. And I don't know if I mean, those are the people whose opinions really matter to me and I just it's, you know, that's how I learn on a day-to-day basis. People are constantly sending me comments on stuff for links to things. They found interesting and
And I don't know, it's kind of constantly evolving this model of the world and kind of what we should be aspiring to be,
you talked about. You have a famous, the open culture, which comes with the criticism and the painful experiences. So let me ask you another difficult question, Francis Hagen the Facebook whistleblower League, the internal Instagram Research into teenagers and well-being, her claim. Is that instagrammers?
Choosing profit over well-being of teenage girls. Instagram is quote toxic for them your response titled, what our research really says about Teen well-being. And Instagram says, no Instagram research shows that 11 of 12, well-being issues, teenage girls, who said they struggle with those difficult issues. Also said that Instagram made them better rather than worse. Again, Can you steal, man? And defend the point?
And Francis hoggins characterization of the study and then help me understand the positive and negative effects of Instagram and Facebook on young people. So
there are certainly questions around Teen Mental Health that are really important. It's hard to you know, as a parent. It's like hard to imagine any set of questions that are sort of more important. I mean, I guess maybe other aspects of physical health or well-being or probably come to that level but like these are really important questions.
Right, which is why we dedicate teams to studying them. You know, I don't think the internet or social media are unique and having these questions. I mean, I think people there have been sort of magazines with promoting certain body types for women and kids for decades, but, you know, we really care about this stuff. So we wanted to study it and and of course, you know, we didn't expect that everything was going to be positive all the time. So, I mean, the reason why you study this stuff is to try to improve and get better.
Better. So I mean, look, the police where I disagree with the characterization. First, I thought, you know, some of the reporting and coverage of it just took the whole thing out of proportion and that it focused on as you said, I think there were like 20 metrics in there and on 18 or 19. The effect of using Instagram was neutral or positive on the teens well-being and there was one area where I think it showed that we needed to improve and we took some steps to try to do that after doing the research, but but I think having the coverage
Just focus on that one without focusing on the. And I think an accurate characterization would have been that kids using Instagram or not kids. Teens is generally positive for their mental health. But of course, that was not the narrative that came out. So I think it's hard to, that's not a kind of logical thing to straw, man, but I sort of disagree or steel man, but I sort of disagree with that overall characterization. I think anyone sort of looking at this.
Objectively would. But then, you know, I mean the there is this sort of intent critique that I think you were getting out before which says it would assume some sort of malevolence, right? It's like which it's really hard for me to really wrap my head around this. Because as far as I know, it's not clear that any of the other tech companies are doing this kind of research. So why the narrative should form that we did recently.
Research and because we were studying an issue because we want to understand it to improve and took steps after that to try to improve it. That your interpretation of that would be that that we did the research and tried to sweep it under the rug. It just, it's sort of is like, I know it's beyond credibility to me that like that's the accurate description of the actions that we've taken compared to the others in the industry. So I know that that's that's kind of that's my view on it. These are really important issues in theirs.
A lot of stuff that I think we're going to be working on related to Teen Mental Health for a long time, including trying to understand this better. And I would encourage everyone else in the industry to do this, too.
Yeah, I would love there to be open conversations and a lot of great research being released internally. And then also externally it, it doesn't make me feel good to see press obviously get way more clicks when they say negative things about social media. Let's objectively speaking, I can just tell
That there's hunger to say negative things about social media. And I don't understand how that's supposed to lead to an open conversation about the positives and the negatives, the concerns about social media, especially when you're doing those kind of that kind of research. I mean, I don't know what to do with that. But let me ask you as a father.
There's a way heavy. I knew that people get bullied on social networks. So people get bullied in their private life, but now because so much of our life is in the digital world, The Bullying moves from the physical world, to the digital world. So, you're now creating a platform on which Bullying happens and some of that bullying can lead to damage to mental health and some of that bullying can lead to depression.
And suicide.
Does the weigh heavy on you, that people?
Have committed suicide or will commit suicide based on the bullying that happens on social media.
Yeah. I mean, this is, there's a set of Harm's that we basically track and build systems to fight against and bullying and self-harm are, you know, I mean these are these are some of the biggest things that we that we are most focused on.
For bullying.
Like you say, it's going to be
While this predates the internet and it's probably impossible to get rid of all of it. You want to give people tools to fight it and you in you want to fight it yourself. And you also want to make sure that people have the tools to get help when they need it. So I think it's this isn't like a question of, can you get rid of all bullying? I mean, it's like, all right. I mean, I have two daughters and, you know, they they fight and, you know, push each other around and stuff too. And the question is, just how do you
You handle that situation and there's a handful of things that I think you can. You can do. We talked a little bit before around some of the AI tools that you can build to identify when something harmful is happening. It's actually it's very hard in bullying because a lot of bullying is very context-specific. It's not like you're trying to fit a formula of like, you know, if like looking at the different harms, someone promoting a terrorist group is like, probably one of the simpler things to generally.
And because things promoting that group are going to look a certain way or feel a certain way bullying. Could just be someone making some subtle comment about someone's appearance. That's idiosyncratic to
them and it could look at just like humor. So here to one person's ugly, destructive to another young being. Yeah. So with
bullying, I think there are there are certain things that you can find through AI systems, but I think it is increasingly important to just give people more agency themselves. So we've done,
Things like making it so people can turn off comments or take a break from hearing from a specific person without having to signal at all. That they're going to stop following them or or or kind of make some stand that okay. I'm not friends with you anymore or not following you. I just like I just don't want to hear about this, but I also don't want to signal at all publicly that or to them that there's been an issue.
And then you get to some of the more extreme cases. Like, you're talking about where someone is thinking about, self-harm or suicide. And in there, we found that that is a place where a I can can identify a lot as well as people flagging things. You know, people are expressing something that is, you know, potentially there thinking of hurting themselves. Those are cues that you can build systems and hundreds of languages around the world to be able to identify that.
then one of the things that I'm actually quite proud of is we've built the system is that I think are clearly leading at this point, that not only identify that, but then connect with local First Responders and have been able to save, I think at this point, it's, you know, in thousands of cases, be able to get First Responders to people through these systems who really need them because of specific Plumbing that we've done between the a, i
Work and being able to communicate with local first responder organizations. We're rolling that out in more places around the world and and I think the team that worked on that just did awesome stuff. So I think that that's a long way of saying. Yeah, I mean this is this is a this is a heavy topic and there's you want to attack it in a bunch of different ways and also kind of understand that some of nature is for people too.
To do this to each other, which is unfortunate. But but you can give people tools and build things that help. It's
still one hell of a burden. Now, a platform that allows people to fall in love with each other is also by Nature. Going to be a platform that allows people to hurt each other and when you're managing such a platform it's difficult and I think you spoke to a but the psychology of that of being a leader in that space of creating technology that's playing in this space.
Like you mentioned psychology is really damn difficult. And I mean, the the burden of that is just it's just great. I just wanted to hear you speak to that point. I have to ask about the thing. You've brought up a few times, which is making controversial decisions.
Let's talk about free speech and censorship. So there are two groups of people.
Pressuring meta on this one group is upset that Facebook, The Social Network allows misinformation in quotes to be spread on the platform. The other group are concerned that Facebook censor speech by calling it misinformation. So you're getting it from both sides. You are in 2019 October at Georgetown, University eloquently defended the importance of Free Speech, but then covid game and the 2010.
20/20 election came. Do you worry that outside pressures from advertisers politicians, the public have forced meta to damage the ideal of free speech that you spoke highly
of just to say. Some obvious things up front. I don't think pressure from advertisers or politicians directly in any way affect how we think about this. I think these are just hard topics. So, let me just take you through our Evolution, from kind of the beginning of the company to where we are. Now, you don't build a company like this.
Less you believe that people expressing themselves as a good thing, right? So, that's sort of the, the foundational thing. You can kind of think about our company as a formula, where we think giving people a voice and helping people connect creates opportunity, right? So, it's, those are the two things that were always focused on our sort of helping people connect. We talked about that a lot. But also giving people a voice and ability to express themselves. Then, by the way, most of the time when people Express themselves, that's not like politically controversial content. It's like
Expressing something about their identity, that's more related to the Avatar conversation. We had earlier in terms of expressing some facet, but that's what's important to people on a day-to-day basis. And sometimes when people feel strongly enough about something, it kind of becomes a political topic that's sort of, always been a thing that we focused on. There's always been the question of safety in this, which, you know, if you're building a community, I think you have to focus on safety. We've had these Community standards from early on and there are about 20 different kinds of
Harm that we track and try to fight actively. We've talked about some of them already. So it is so it includes things like bullying and harassment and includes things like like terrorism or promoting terrorism inciting violence. Intellectual property theft in in general. I think called about 18 out of 20 of those. There's not really a particularly polarized definition of that. You know, I don't, I think you're not really going to find many people in the country.
You're in the world who are trying to say we should be fighting terrorists, content less. I think the content where there are a couple of areas where I think this has gotten more controversial recently, which I will talk about your right. The misinformation is basically is is up there and I think sometimes the definition of hate speech is up there too. But I think in general most of the content that that that I think we're working on for safety is not actually, you know,
Well, don't kind of have these questions. So it's sort of this this subset. But if you go back to the beginning of a company, this was sort of pre deep learning days and therefore, and, you know, I was, it was me and my roommate Dustin join me and, and like, if someone posted something bad, you know, it was the AI technology did not exist yet to be able to go basically, look at all the content.
And we were a small enough outfit, that no one would expect that. We could review it. All. Even if like someone reported at us. We basically did our best, right? It's like someone would report it and we try to look at stuff and and and deal with stuff and for call it the first, I don't know, seven or eight years of the company, you know, we weren't that big of a company, you know, for a lot of the period, we weren't even really profitable. The a I didn't really exist to be able to do the kind of moderation that we do.
Today. And then it's some
point and
kind of the middle of the last decade that started to flip. And we we became got to the point where we were sort of a larger and more profitable company and the a I was starting to come online to be able to proactively detect some of the simpler forms of this. So thinks things like pornography, you could train an image classifier to, you know, identify what a nipple was or you can fight against terrorist content. You still can
Papers on this is great. Oh, of
course, the technical papers. Of course, there are, you know, those are relatively easier things to train, a, i to do then, for example, understand the nuances of what is inciting violence and 100 languages around the world and not have the false positives of like, okay. Are you posting about this thing that might be inciting violence because you're actually trying to denounce it in which case we probably shouldn't take that down where if you're trying to denounce something that's inciting violence.
In some kind of dialect in a corner of India as opposed to okay, actually you're posting this thing because you're trying to incite violence. Okay, get building an AI that can basically get to that level of nuance and all the languages that we serve is something that I think is only really becoming possible. Now, not at not towards the middle of the last decade, but there's been this Evolution. And I think what happened, you know, people sort of woke up after 2016 and
You know, a lot of people like, okay, this the country is a lot more polarized. There's a lot more stuff here than we realized. Why weren't these internet companies on top of this? And
I think at that point,
It was reasonable feedback that, you know, some of this technology had started becoming possible. And at that point, I really did feel like we needed to make a substantially larger investment. We already worked on this stuff a lot on AI and on these Integrity problems, but that we should basically invest, you know, have 1,000 or more Engineers basically work on building these AI systems to be able to go and proactively identify the stuff across all these different areas. Okay, so we went into that now,
Built the tools to be able to do that. And now I think it's actually much more complicated set of philosophical rather than technical questions, which is the exact policies which are okay. Now, we the way that we basically hold ourselves accountable, as we issues, transparency reports every quarter. And the metric that we track is for each of, those, 20 types of harmful content. How much of that content are we taking down before someone even has to report it to us, right? So, how effective is RA?
A i at doing this but that basically creates this big question, which is okay. Now, we need to really be careful about how proactive we set the AI and where the exact policy lines are around what we're taking down. It's certainly at a point now where, you know, I felt like at the beginning of that journey of building, those AI systems.
There's a lot of push. There's think I hear you've got to do more. There's clearly a lot more bad content that that people aren't reporting or that you're not getting too and you need to get more effective at that. And I was pretty sympathetic to that. But I think it's some point along the way. There started to be almost equal issues on both sides of, okay, actually, you're kind of taken down too much stuff, right? Or or some of the stuff is is borderline and it wasn't really bothering anyone and didn't report it. So is that, is that really an issue?
Issue that you need to take down. Whereas we still, we still have the critique on the other side to where a lot of people think we're not doing enough. So it's become as we built the technical capacity. I think it becomes more philosophically interesting, almost where you want to be on the line and I just think like, you don't want one person making those decisions. So we've also tried to innovate in terms of building out this independent oversight board, which has people who are dedicated to free expression, but from
Round the world who people can appeal cases to. So, a lot of the most controversial cases basically go to them. And they make the final binding decision on how we should handle that. And then, of course, their decisions, we then try to figure out what the principles are behind those. In encode them, into the, the
algorithms, and how are those people chosen, which, you know, you're Outsourcing a difficult decision.
Yeah, the initial people, we chose a handful of chairs for the, for the group and we
I basically chose the people for a commitment to free expression and like a broad understanding of Human Rights and the trade-offs around free expression. So they fundamentally people who are going to lean towards free expressions towards
freedom of speech. Yeah. So there's also this idea of fact, Checker, so jumping around to the misinformation questions. Actually, during covid, which is an exceptionally. Speaking of
pornography. Can I speak to the covid thing? And this, I mean, I think one of the hardest set of
Around free expression because you asked about Georgetown is my stance fundamentally changed. And the answer to that is no. My stance has not changed. It is fundamentally the same as when we were. When I, when I was talking about George talking to Georgetown, from a philosophical perspective. The challenge with free speech is that everyone agree, is that there is a lion where, if you're actually about to do physical harm to people, that there should be restrictions.
I mean, there's the famous Supreme Court historical example of like, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. The thing that everyone agrees. It disagrees on is, what is the definition of real harm? Where I think some people think? Okay. This should only be a very literal. I mean, take it back to the bullying, conversation. We were just happen. Where is it? Is it just harm if the person is about to hurt themselves because they've been bullied so hard or is it actually harm? Be like as they're being bullied and kind of it? What?
To the Spectrum is that, and that's the part that there's not agreement done. But I think what people agree on pretty broadly is that when there is an acute threat that it does make sense from a societal perspective to tolerate less less speech that could be potentially harmful in that acute situation. So I think we're covid got very difficult is, you know, I don't think anyone expected this to be going on for years. But if in, if you'd kind of asked now a priori wood,
And a global pandemic where, you know, a lot of people are dying and catching. This is that an emergency that where where you'd kind of consider it that you know, it's problematic to to basically yell fire in a crowded theater. I think that that probably passes that test. So like that. That's it's a very tricky situation. But I think the fundamental commitment to free expression is there and that's, that's that's what I believe in again. I don't think you.
Art this company unless you care about people being able to express themselves as much as possible. But but I think that that's, that's the question, right? Is like, how do you define what the harm is and how and how a cute that is?
And what are the institutions that Define that harm? A lot of the criticism is that the CDC, the who the institutions we've come to trust as a civilization to give the line of what is and isn't harm in terms of health policy have failed.
In many ways and small ways in a big ways depending on who you ask. And then the perspective of meta and Facebook is like, well, where the hell do I get the information of what is, and isn't misinformation. So it's a really difficult place to be in but it's great to hear that you're leaning towards freedom of speech on this aspect. And again, I think this actually calls to the fact that we need to reform institutions that help. Keep an open mind of what is and isn't it misinformation and misinformation?
Been used to bully.
On the internet. I mean, I just have you know, I'm friends with Joe Rogan and he is called as a remember, hanging out with him in Vegas and somebody yelled stop spreading misinformation. I mean the and there's a lot of people that follow him that believe he's not spreading misinformation. Like you can't just not acknowledge the fact that there's a large. Number of people that have a different definition of misinformation. That's such a tough place to be. Like, who do you listen to? Do you listen to
Called experts, who gets as a person who has a Ph.D. I gotta say. I mean, I'm not sure I know what defines an expert, especially in a new
In a totally new pandemic, or a new catastrophic event, especially when politics is involved and it. And especially when the Newser the, the media involved, that can propagate sort of outrageous narratives and thereby, make a lot of money like what the hell who, where is the source of Truth? And then everybody turns to Facebook, like, please tell me what the source of Truth
for me. Well, how would, how would you handle this? If you're in my position
is very, very, very
Very, very difficult. I would say, I would more speak about how difficult the choices are and be transparent about like what the hell do you do with this? Like here? You got exactly ask the exact question. You just asked me but to the broader public like okay. Yeah, you guys tell me what to do. So like crowdsource it and then the other, the other aspect is when you spoke really eloquently about the fact that the with this, there's this going back and forth and now
Oh, there's a feeling like you're censoring a little bit too much. So I would lean. I would try to be ahead of that feeling. I would not lean towards freedom of speech and say, you know, we're not the ones that are going to Define misinformation. Let it be a public debate. Let the idea stand and I actually place, you know, this idea misinformation. I placed the responsibility on the poor communication, skills of scientists. They should be in the battlefield of ideas and everybody.
Who is spreading information against the vaccine? They should not be censored. They should be talked with and you should show the data. You should have open discussion as opposed to rolling your eyes and saying I'm the expert. I know what I'm talking about. No, you need to convince people. It's a battle of ideas. So that's the whole point of freedom of speech is the way to defeat bad ideas is with good ideas with speech. So like the responsibility here falls on the poor.
Communication skills of scientist. Thanks. Tim. Social media, scientists are not communicators. They have the power to communicate some of the best stuff I've seen about, covalent from doctors is on social media. It's a way to learn to respond really quickly to go faster than the peer review process. And so there's you need to get way better at communication and also by better. I don't mean just convincing Elsa mean speak with humility. Don't talk down to people all those kinds of things.
And as a platform, I would say I would step back a little bit, not all the way, of course because there's a lot of stuff that can cause real harm as we talked about. But you lean more towards freedom of speech because then people from a brand perspective wouldn't be blaming you for the other ills of society, which there are many, the institutions have flaws. The political divide obviously politicians have flaws. That's news the
The media has has flaws that they're all trying to work with and because of the central place of Facebook in the world, all of those flaws somehow kind of propagate to Facebook and you're sitting there as Plato, the philosopher have to answer to some of the most difficult questions asking being asked of human civilization. So, I don't know. Maybe this is an American answer though to lean towards freedom of speech. I don't know if that applies globally. So yeah, I don't I don't know but transparency.
And saying, I think as a technologist, one of the things I sense about Facebook and matter when people talk about this company is they don't necessarily understand fully how difficult the problem is. You talked about AI, has to catch a bunch of harmful stuff. Really quickly. Just the Sea of data you have to deal with. It's a really difficult problem. So like any of the critics if you just hand them, the helm for a week.
Let's see how well you can do.
Like that to me that that's definitely something that would wake people up to how difficult this problem is. If there's more transparency saying how difficult this problem is. Let me ask you about on the iPhone just because you mentioned language and my eloquence translation something I wanted to ask you about and first, just to give a shout-out to the supercomputer. You've recently announced the AI research supercluster RSC. Obviously, I'm somebody who loves the gpus it currently.
Has 6000 gpus and VD G XA 100's is the systems that have in total six thousand gpus and it will eventually maybe this year maybe soon. We'll have 16,000 gpus. So can do a bunch of different kinds of machine learning applications. There's a cool thing on the distributed storage aspect and all that kind of stuff. So one of the applications that I think is super exciting is translation real.
I'm translation. I mentioned to you that, you know having a conversation I speak Russian fluently speak English, somewhat fluently and I'm having a conversation with Vladimir Putin. Say as a use case me as a user coming to you use case we both speak.
Each other's language. I speak Russian. He speaks English. How can we have that communication? Go? Well, with the help of AI. I think it's such a beautiful and a powerful application of AI to connect the world that bridged. The Gap not necessary to me and Putin, but people that don't have that shared language. Can you just speak about your vision with translation? Because I think that's a really exciting application.
If you're trying to help people connect all around the world and a lot of content is produced.
One language and people and all these other places are interested in it. So being able to translate that just unlocks, a lot of value on a day-to-day basis. And so the the kind of AI around translation is interesting because it's gone through a bunch of a bunch of iterations, but the basic state of the art is that you don't want to go through, you know, different kind of intermediate symbolic, representations of
Language or something like that. It's you basically want to be able to map the the concepts and basically go directly from one language to another and you just can't rain bigger and bigger models in order to be able to do that. And that's where the the the research supercluster comes in is basically a lot of the trend and in machine learning, is just your building bigger and bigger models, and you just need a lot of computation to train them. So it's not that like, the translation would run on the supercomputer the training of the
All of which could have billions or trillions of examples of just basic that your training models on this supercluster in days or weeks that might take a much longer period of time on a smaller cluster. So just wouldn't be practical for most teams to do but the translation work.
We're basically getting from be able to go between about 100 languages seamlessly today to be able to go to about 300 languages in the near term and so for many language to another language. Yeah, and that's and and part of the issue when you get closer to you know, more languages is some of these get to be pretty and not very popular languages, right? Where there isn't that much content in them.
So so you end up having less data and you need to kind of use a model that you've built up around other examples. And this is one of the big questions around AI is, like how generalizable can things be. And, and that's that, I think is one of the things that just kind of exciting here from a technical perspective.
But capturing we talked about this with the metaverse capturing the magic of human-to-human interaction. So me and Putin. Okay, I'm again. This is I mean, it's a tough example
because you actually both speak Russian and English, but that's what I do.
Future. I see it as a touring test of a
kind because we would both like to have an AI that improves because I don't speak Russian that well, he doesn't speak English that well, it would be nice to outperform our abilities and nurse. It sets a really nice bar because I think a, I can really help in translation for people that don't speak the language at all. But to actually capture the magic of the chemistry, so translation, which would make the metaverse super.
That's exciting. You remove the barrier of language. Period.
Yeah, so when people think about translation, I think a lot of that is the thing about text to text but speech-to-speech I think as a whole nother thing and I've been one of the big lessons on that which I was referring to before is like early models. It's like all right, the take speech, they translate it to text translate the text to another language and then and then kind of output that is speech in that language. You don't want to do that. You just wanna be able to go directly from speech in one language to speech in another language.
And build up the models to do that. And I mean, I think, one of the there have been, when you look at the progress in machine learning, there have been big advances in the techniques. Some of the, the advances in self, supervised learning, which I know you talked to Ian about and he's like one of the leading thinkers in this area. I just think that, that stuff is really exciting. But then you couple that with the ability to just throw larger and larger amounts of compute a training, these models.
And you can just do a lot of things that that were harder to do before, but we're asking more of of our systems to write. So if you think about the applications that were going to need for the metaverse or think about it. Okay. So let's talk about a are here for a second. You're gonna have these glasses. They're going to look and hopefully like a normal fish looking pair of glasses, but they're gonna be able to put Holograms in the world and intermix, virtual and physical objects.
Sand in your, in your scene and one of the things that's going to be unique about this compared to every other Computing device that you've had before is that this is going to be the first Computing device that has all the same signals about what's going on around you that you have rights your phone. You can when you can you can have it take a photo or a video. But I mean these glasses are going to whenever you activate them. They're going to be able to see what you see from your perspective. They're going to hear what you hear because they're the microphones and all that are going to be right.
Around where your ears are. So you're going to want an AI assistant. That's a new kind of AI assistant, that can basically help you process the world from this first-person perspective. Or from the perspective that you have and the utility of that is going to be huge. But the kinds of AI models that we're going to need are going to be just I know there's a there's a lot that we're going to need to basically make advances in, but I mean, but that's why I think these concepts of the metal.
Verse and in the advances in AI or so fundamentally interlinked that I mean, they're they're kind of enabling each other.
Yeah, like the World Builder is a really cool idea. Like you can be like a Bob Ross. I'm going to put a little tree right here. Yeah, I need a little treats missing willow tree and then but at scale like enriching your experience in all kinds of ways. You mentioned the assistant to that's really interesting how you can have a, i assistance helping you out on different levels of sort of intimacy of communication.
Be just like scheduling or could be like almost like therapy. Clearly. I need some. So let me ask you. You're one of the most successful people ever. You built an incredible company, that has a lot of impact. What advice do you have for young people today?
How to live a life that can be proud of how, to how to build something that can have a big positive impact on the
world?
Well.
Let's break that down because I think you proud of have a big positive impact while you're actually listening and how to live your life are actually three different things that that I think I'm they could line up. But and also like what age if people are you talking to? Because I mean I can like
high school and college so you don't really know what you're doing, but your dream big and you really have a chance to do something
unprecedented. Yeah.
So I guess people, my age. Okay, so let's maybe, maybe start with the kind of most philosophical and Abstract version of this every night when I put my daughter's to bed, we go through this thing. And like, let's say that they called The Goodnight things, because we're basically what we talked about at night and and I just I gonna go through them sounds like good show. That's have a good night. Things that Priscilla's.
Asking she said, can I get good night? Things got a bit too early, but it's
it's
but I basically go through with Max and and an Auggie, you know, what are the things that are most important in life, right? That I just it's like, what do I want them to remember? And just have like really ingrained in them as they grow up and it's Health, right? Making sure that you take care of yourself and keep yourself in good shape, loving friends and family, right? Because
As, you know, having the relationships, the, the family and making time for for friends, I think is is perhaps one of the most important things, and then the third is maybe a little more amorphous, but it is something that you're excited about for the future and what I'm talking to a four-year-old off, and I'll ask her what she's excited about for tomorrow, or the week ahead. But I think, for, for most people, it's really hard. I mean, the, the world is a heavy place, and I think like, the, the way
We navigate it is that we have things that we're looking forward to, so whether it is building a, our glasses for the future or being able to celebrate my 10-year wedding anniversary with, with my wife, that's coming up. It's like, I think people, you know, you have things that you're looking forward to, or for the girls. It's often. I want to see Mom in the morning, right? It's like, just but it's like that. That's a really critical thing. And then the last thing is, I ask them every day. What did you do today to help someone?
Because I just think that that's, that's a really critical thing is like like it's easy to kind of get caught up in yourself and, and kind of stuff, that's really far down the road. But did you do something just concrete today to help someone? And, you know, can just be as simple as okay. Yeah. I helped set the table for lunch, right? Or you know this other kid and our school was having a hard time with something and I like helped explain it to him, but bring that those are that's sort of like if you
To boil down my overall life philosophy into what I tried to impart to my kids. Those are the things that I think are really important. So, okay. So let's say a college. So if you're graduating college, probably more practical advice.
so, I'm always very focused on people and
I think the most important decision you're probably going to make. If you're in college, is who you surround yourself with because you become like the people, you surround yourself with and
I sort of have.
This hiring heuristic at meta, which is that I will only hire someone to work for me, if I could see myself working for them. Not necessarily that I want them to run the company because I like my job, but like, but but in an alternate universe if it was their company and I was looking to go work somewhere, would I be happy to work for them? And I think that that's a helpful heuristic to help balance when you're building something like this. There's a lot of pressure to you want to.
Your team's because there's a lot of stuff that you need to get done. And then everyone always says don't compromise on quality, but there's this question of. Ok, how do you know that someone is good enough? And I think my answer is I would want someone to be to be on my team if I would work for them, but I think it's actually a priest similar answer to like, if you were going to go, if you were choosing friends or a partner or something like that. So when you're kind of in college trying to figure out what your circle is going to be trying to figure out, you're evaluating different job opportunities.
Who are the people even if they're going to be peers and what you're doing? Who are the people who in an alternate universe that you would want to work for them? Because you think you're going to learn a lot from them because they know because they are kind of values aligned on the things that you care about and they're going to like and they're going to push you. But also they know different things and have different experiences that that are kind of more of what you want to become like over time. So, I don't know. I think probably people are too.
In general objective focused and maybe not focused enough on the connections and the people who they're who they're basically building relationships
with. I don't know what it says about me. But my place in Austin has seven leg of robots. I'm surrounding myself by robots, which is probably something I should look into. What kind of world. Would you like to see your daughter's grow up and even after you're gone.
Well, I think one of the
promises of all the stuff that is getting built now, is that it can be a world where more people have can just live out their imagination or inside. When one of my favorite quotes. It's, I think it was a tribute to Picasso. It's that all children are artists. And the challenge is, how do you remain one? When you grow up, and then it's like, if you have kids you this pretty clear. I mean, they're just like, have a wonderful imaginations and part of what I think is going to be great.
Out the Creator economy in the metaverse and all this stuff is like this notion around that. A lot more people in the future are going to get to work doing creative stuff. Then what I think today, we would just consider traditional labor or service and I think that's awesome. And like, and that's like what a lot of what people are here to do is like collaborate together, work together, think of things that you want to build and go do it. And I don't know, one of the things I was thinking.
Is striking. Sorry. Like, I teach my daughter's like some basic coding with scratch. I mean, they're still obviously really young but you know, I think of coding is building right? It's like when I'm when I'm coding I'm like building something that I want to exist. But in my youngest daughter, she's very Musical and, and, and pretty artistic. And she thinks about coding as art. She calls it. Code art, not the code, but the output of what she is making. It's like, she's just very interesting.
Julie, and what she can kind of output and how it can move around, and do we need to fix that or we good will happen to have to clap? Yeah, Alexa. Yes. I was just talking about, you know, Auggie and her Code art. But I mean to me, this is like a beautiful thing, right? The, the notion that like for me coding was this functional thing and I enjoyed it and it like helped build something utilitarian. But that for the next generation of people, it will be even more.
Or a, an expression of their kind of imagination and artistic sense for what they want to exist. So I don't know if that happens if we can help bring about this world where, you know, a lot more people can that that's like their existence going forward is being able to basically create and and live out all these different kinds of art. I just think that that's like a beautiful and wonderful thing and we'll be very freeing for Humanity to spend more of our time.
The things that matter to us. Yeah, I
allow more and more people to express their art in the full. Meaning of that word. Yeah. That's a beautiful Vision. We mentioned that you are mortal. Are You Afraid Of Death? Do you think about your mortality?
And are you afraid of it?
You didn't sign up for this on a podcast. You know, I mean, that's it's an interesting
question. I, I mean, I'm definitely aware of it. I, I do a fair amount of, like, extreme sport type stuff. So, so like. So I'm definitely aware of it. Yeah, and I
and you're flirting with it a bit. I like
extreme. I train hard. I mean, so it's like if I'm gonna go out and like, yeah, a 15-foot wave glider, big.
And well, then it's like all right. I'll make sure we have the right safety gear and like, make sure that I'm like you said that spot and and all that stuff. But like, but yeah, I mean you the risk is still there. You take some head blows along the way? Yes, but definitely aware of it.
Definitely would like to stay safe. I have a lot of stuff that I
want to build and want to. There's a freak you out. That is finite though
that there's a deadline when it's all over.
And there will be a time when your daughters are around and you're gone.
I don't know. That doesn't freak me out. I think.
Constraints are
helpful. Yeah. Yeah, the finiteness is makes makes ice cream taste more delicious. Mm. All the fact that it's going to be over. There's something about that with the metaverse to you want. We talked about this identity earlier like having just one. Well, I kind of tease. There's something powerful about the constraint of finiteness, our uniqueness that this moment is singular in history,
but I'm in a lot of, you know, as you go through different waves of technology. I think a lot of what is
Your
Stingers? What becomes in practice infinite or kind of there can be many, many of a thing. And then, what ends up still being constrained? So, the metaverse should hopefully allow a very large number or maybe, you know, in practice hopefully close to an infinite amount of expression and worlds. And but will still only have a finite amount of time. Yes, I think.
Living longer I think is good. And obviously, all of my our philanthropic work is it's not focused on longevity, but it is focused on trying to achieve what I think is a possible goal in this Century, which is to be able to cure prevent or manage all diseases. So, I certainly think people kind of getting sick and dying as a bad thing because and I'm dedicating almost all of my Capital towards advancing, research in that area to push on that witch. And we can do a whole
Other one of these podcasts about that because that's so people should now sitting
topic. I mean, this is what with your wife Priscilla, Chan, you formed the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Give away 99% or pledge to give away 99% of Facebook not matter. Shares. I mean, like you said we could talk forever about all the exciting things you're working on there including the sort of moonshot of eradicating disease by the mid century
mark Or I don't actually know if you're going to ever eradicate it.
But I think you can get to a point where you can either cure things that happen. Right? So people get diseases, but you can cure them, prevent is probably closest to eradication or just be able to manage is sort of like ongoing things that are not going to ruin your life. And I'm gonna that's possible. I think saying that there's going to be no disease at all. Probably is not possible within the next several decades.
Basic thing is increase the quality of life. Yeah, and maybe
Keep the finiteness because it tastes it makes everything taste more delicious. Yeah, maybe that's just being romantic 20th century human
maybe but I mean, but it was an intentional decision to not focus on our philanthropy on like explicitly on longevity or living forever.
Yes.
If at the moment of your death, and by the way, I like that the lights went out. When we start talking about death. You
get to meet, don't I get a lot more
dramatic, it does she get closer to the mic at the moment of your death. You get to meet God and you get to ask one question. What question would you like to ask?
Or maybe a whole conversation. I don't know. It's up to you. It's more dramatic when it's just one
question.
Well, if it's only one question and I died, I would just want to know that Priscilla and my family. Like if they were going to be okay.
That might depend on the circumstances of my death, but I think that in most circumstances that I can think of, that's probably the main thing that I would care about
it. I think God will hear that question back. All right, fine. You get in that's, that's the right. That's the
right question asked, is it is
humility and selflessness it? All right. You're right. I
mean,
but
well maybe gonna be fine. Don't worry again. But I mean one of the things that I think you started, I struggle with at least is
On the one hand, that's probably the most, the thing that's closest to me, and maybe the most common human experience. But I do know. One of the things that I just struggle with, in terms of running, this large Enterprises like
Should the thing that I care more about be?
That responsibility. And
I think it's shifted over time. I mean, like, before I really had a family that was like the only thing I cared about and this point it's I mean, I'm I mean I care deeply about it but like
Yeah, I think that that's that's not as obvious. If a question. We humans are
weird. You get you get you get this ability to impact millions of lives and is definitely something. Billions of lives is something you care about. But the, the weird humans that are closest to us. Those are the ones that mean the most. And I suppose that's the dream of the meta versus to connect form, small groups like that, where you can have those Intimate Relationships. Let me ask you this.
Big ridiculous. Want to be able to be
close.
Not just based on who you happen to be next to. I think that's what the internet is already. Doing is allowing you to spend more of your time. Not physically proximate. I mean, I always think when you think about the metaverse people ask this question of the real world, it's I could do the virtual world versus the real world. That's like now the real world is a combination of the virtual world in the physical world, but I think over time as we get more technology.
The physical world is becoming less of a percent of the real world. And I think that that opens up a lot of opportunities for people because, you know, you can't, you can work in different places. You can stay more close to who stay closer to people who are in different places. Yeah, everything's good. Removing barriers of geography
and then barriers of language. Yeah. That's that's a beautiful Vision. Big ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of life?
I think that well, there are probably a couple of different ways that.
That I would go with this but I think it gets back to this. Last question that we talked about about The Duality between. You have the people around you who you care the most about. And then there's like this bigger thing that maybe you're building. And I think that in my own life, I mean, I sort of think about this tension, but when it's look, I, when I started this whole company in my life's work is around human connection, so,
I think it's intellectually probably.
the thing that I go to First is just
That human connection is the meaning. And I mean, I think that it's a thing that our society probably systematically undervalue is. I mean, I just remember, you know, when I was growing up and in in school, it's like, do your homework and then go play with your friends after and it's like not. Well, what if what if playing with your friends is the point? Like it sounds like an argument your daughter's make. Well, I mean, I don't know. I just, I just think it's almost doesn't
even matter man.
and well, I think it's interesting because it's, you know, people
I think people tend to think about that stuff is wasting time or that's like what you do in the free time that you have. But like, what if that's actually the point. Yeah, so that's one, but here's a, here's maybe a different way of counting out this, which is maybe more like religious in nature and I always liked
There's a rabbi who I've studied with who kind of gave me this were talking through Genesis, in the Bible and the Torah and and they're basically walking through. It's like okay you go through the seven days of creation and and it's basically it's like, why does the bible start there?
Birds could have started anywhere right in terms of like how to live but basically it starts with talking about how God created people in his Her Image, but the Bible starts by talking about how God created everything. So I actually think that there's like a
A compelling argument that. I think I've always just found meaningful and inspiring that a lot of the point.
Of what sort of religion.
Has been telling us that we should do is to create.
And build things.
So these things are not necessarily at odds. I mean, I think like, I mean, that's and I think probably to some degree. You'd expect me to say something like this, because I've dedicated my life to creating things that help people connect something that's sort of the fusion, of of, I'm getting back to what we talked about earlier. It's seven, what I studied in school or psychology and computer science, right? So it's, I mean, these are, these are like the two themes that that I care about. But I don't know for me. That's what that's kind of what I think about. That's what matters to
create and to
To love, which is the ultimate form of connection. I think this is one hell of an amazing replay experience in the metaverse. So, whoever is using our avatars years from now. I hope you had fun and thank you for talking today. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Zuckerberg to support this podcast. Please. Check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with the end of the poem If by Roger Kipling.
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds worth of distance, run yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, and which is more. You'll be a man. My son.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
